In speaking with a friend, I was reminded of the deeply embedded bias in our modern world to the solar, happy, and upward, where the lunar, earthy, and descending current is split and fragmented.
When we meet with someone who is feeling melancholic, empty, or down, we can quickly become convinced that something is wrong, and that we must act urgently to fix them.
Before we know it, we’re scrambling to put them back together again as we impart our favorite spiritual techniques and processes, hurling at them our favorite metaphysical beliefs,” laws,” and “secrets.” All the while falling out of attunement to the holiness of the Other, to their own psychic integrity, and to the raging authenticity of their internal world.
Even as we wish them relief, we may be called into deeper territory. There may be a profound wisdom in the images and somatic data, important communication from the soul which is serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive.
Even as we wish them relief, we may be called into deeper territory. There may be a profound wisdom in the images and somatic data, important communication from the soul which is serving an initiatory function beyond what we can perceive.
As we slow down, we might discover how much of our “fixing” activity arises not from true compassion but from an unresolved relationship with the darkness within… and from the ghosts of our own unlived life that spin in the relational field.
Perhaps the kindest thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, empathically attuning to their immediate, embodied experience, and stay close… and remove the burden that they come out of their pain, feel better, transform, or heal in order for us to stay near.
Perhaps the kindest thing we can offer our friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, empathically attuning to their immediate, embodied experience, and stay close… and remove the burden that they come out of their pain, feel better, transform, or heal in order for us to stay near.
Perhaps they do not need to be healed in this moment, but to be held, to be heard, and to feel felt and understood, for someone to companion them as the hidden wisdom unfolds… a safe home where the shards of a broken world can reassemble.
As we turn to embrace our own unmet disappointment, grief, and despair, we remove the burden from others to tend to this material on our behalf, providing that safety which allows us to come closer to one another.
And then what is left is love, that mystery-substance which seeds the interactional field when two or more gather by way of empathic circuitry, bursting forth into the four directions.
As we turn to embrace our own unmet disappointment, grief, and despair, we remove the burden from others to tend to this material on our behalf, providing that safety which allows us to come closer to one another.
And then what is left is love, that mystery-substance which seeds the interactional field when two or more gather by way of empathic circuitry, bursting forth into the four directions.
Photo by Patrick Hendry
Learn more about my new book - A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times - and read Editorial Reviews here. For a full list of online retailers, see the book's page at my website here.
To learn more about and purchase my previous book - The Path is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You - please visit the book's page here.
