While there is a part of us that very genuinely wishes to
heal, awaken, and transform conditioned ways of seeing, there is often a lesser
known part that has an unconscious investment in maintaining things the way
they are. We wonder why after years and even decades of working on ourselves,
meditating, praying, surrendering, doing yoga, and going to therapy it can seem
like nothing is changing.
Our avoidant strategies – those historically configured
ways of organizing our experience and disconnecting from feeling,
vulnerability, and the creative (at times disturbing) aliveness of pure
immediacy – arose to serve a very specific function, to protect us from
overwhelming anxiety that threatened the survival of a ripening little brain
and nervous system.
This dissociative activity was not neurotic, but was
intelligent, creative, and skillful given the capacities we had at the time.
The ability to split-off from unbearable experience saved our lives. But many
are discovering that these same strategies are no longer serving a life of
aliveness, intimacy, and connection.
Before attempting to dismantle the protective strategies
(which is often a re-enactment of earlier self-aggression), we must face the
actual implications of what it would really mean to transform and heal. To slow
down and really allow these in.
The implications are revolutionary and will change
everything as we will no longer be able to take refuge in the often subtle and
unconscious trances of inflation and unworthiness. While the prospect of this
may seem thrilling, this sort of essence-reorganization opens the doorway to
reunion with the lost abandoned ones of the psyche and soma, with that
survival-level anxiety that our defensive organization has successful kept us
away from for so long. Hmmmm.
While this doesn’t sound all that fun, we sense that true
healing is not possible without embodiment to our vulnerability, without
offering a sanctuary for all that we have disowned and disavowed at an earlier
time. There is no awakening without a compassionate and provocative
confrontation with the activity of dissociation in all its forms, including the
ways we use spiritual practices and beliefs to re-enact early strategies of
self-abandonment.
It really is a conundrum, this being human: we want to heal
but we don’t want to be too vulnerable, to take too much risk, to turn back
into that anxiety, shakiness, tenderness, and raw unguarded life that is our
true nature.
As you become more and more aware of how all of this plays
out in specific ways in your own life and relationships, the invitation is to
honor the sacredness and intelligence of the conundrum. It is not some mistake
or cosmic error, but the activity of love itself, taking form as paradox,
contradiction, and a fiery sort of wisdom, placed inside you as a gift and
benediction, the prima materia you have to work with on the path of the heart.
My new book – The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You – is now available
The next event, The Magic of Being Fully Human, to be held in Ojai, CA on October 14-15.
