Bathed in a sea of energies

I awoke very slowly today, there was a sense of deep relaxation, that my body had drifted deep, deep down into sleep but there was still a part of my consciousness awake on some level, tethered to the waking world, conscious of the fluid shifting energies and pulls within my body and spine that is the cerebral spinal current but also the pull of feeling, memories, attachments, connections.

I sat quietly with my Jasper on the couch and let consciousness flow, I let the impressions and feelings simmering below float to the surface of my mind and at times the feelings rose up too like a wave.   I was thinking of my father, of the things I had been considering over the past days since his birthday, of how I said he was not really present in a blog I wrote a day or so ago.  Then these words came to me.  ‘But you were bathed in the sea of his energy.’

It occurred to me that I wasn’t only bathed in the sea of his energy but that of my mother too, but since my Dad was the quiet intensely serious one who didn’t speak much or really express much emotion I guess there was a lot frozen beneath the surface and I did feel a kind of connection to him, but it was very silent.  It didn’t involve words.

Dad was a smoker and he tried in later years to give it up.  He became like bear with a sore head when he did.  I think the smoking (he was taught to smoke from the age of 8, in Holland where he lived until he was 20 that wasn’t uncommon) suppressed so much for him.  There is a rather brutal story told around the time he and my mother were living in Indonesia while Dad was stationed there with the Dutch Indonesia Airforce.  My father forced my older brother to smoke a whole packet of cigarettes when Mum came across my brother and his best friend sucking on the butts left by the Indonesian palopas or freedom fighters.  My brother couldn’t have been more than 6 0r 7 and he was violently ill.

This story shows to me the disconnection in my Dad.  It was that kind of disconnection that affected me so many times.

It was an undemonstrative family.  And for a child that needed connections and demonstrations of affection and time like me, it was very lonely and painful.  There were several injuries from the carelessness of my parents, leaving a fishhook lying around in the sea grass matting I was skewered between the toes and it was nearly impossible to get the fish h00k out.  My arm was pulled out of my socket from being swung around and then there were the 3rd degree burns on a caravanning holiday which came from Mum leaving and boiling bucket of water lying around near where I was drawing.

No wonder life started to feel dangerous for me.

I still feel love for my father.  But I also feel a great sadness too.  In many ways his life was not much about me, though I am sure on some level he loved me.  It was about him.  And far too many other things were going on in my family that put the focus elsewhere and I was the young one bathed in all those energies, tossed about like a little cork on the ocean swung this way and that with the pulls, that to this day, I can still feel in my body when others make demands and as I struggle to find the way through and back to myself.

I have been thinking today about the ego that we form as children, the inner skin that enables us to know what is ours from what is not ours, how we feel, as opposed to what we are told to feel or not feel.  I have been thinking today of those of us who form a very porous ego that is open to energies entering us.  How do we find our filter?  It seems to me that a lot of the work I have been doing in therapy recently concerns this issue.  I am plugging up the holes where things bleed in and out and learning that what others try to put into me is not necessarily mine but tells me more about them and their state of mind.

As children we lack this capacity to see that how others treat us has little to do with us.  We are often blamed for the way other’s react and may come to feel there is something wrong with us and that we are at fault when really we are not.  We then may fail to take responsibility for our own power to feel our true feelings and blame others for making us feel a certain way.  We may develop a false sense of our responsibility for others and limit our own life as a consequence of taking responsibility for what is not really ours to fix.

I guess part of maturing and evolving is reaching the understanding that what our parents did to us in the course of growing up, the wounds and injuries and blessings they bestowed had so much more to do with them, than with us.  That at times we missed out on so much due to their incapacity to give to us in the ways we needed.  But do we stay stuck in blame?

It is so essential to own the hurts we have felt and their consequences.  We need to feel all of this through to get a real relationship with ourselves back on the inside.  Pain and suffering is often the price of growing a sense of True Self and soul in this way.

And it pays to remember that as young ones and as sensitives we can and do absorb the energies of our parents and some of us may be gifted with the burden of their unlived lives and complexes.

On mornings like today when so many feelings and memories floated up in my consciousness I was so aware of what a huge task this is.  I realised that the words of Kahil Gibrain are so very true.  Our pain IS the kernel that encloses our understanding.   When that kernel shell breaks open our minds and bodies are flooded with insights and realisations.  We often experience too a profound healing, a deep acceptance of the Isness of things.  Ah this is what it was!  How much I wished it could be different.  The gap between those two .. well there in that space lies our deepest pain and spiritual work.