Time Out

I have been taking time away from blogging and electronic media, time to get closer to being, to the present, to feel my soul and to what arises in that space.  I am seeing with great clarity how I hammer myself with criticism and how much that comes out of old pain.

I experienced depths of rage yesterday I thought may blow me apart.  It didn’t but today I have a dull headache, feeling all that anger had a big impact on my body so this morning I sat quietly with Jasper stretched out beside me, listening to my soul, listening to my old pain, feeling the enormity of it, seeing judgements the critic was trying to rain down then hearing the strong uprising of love, self forgiveness and compassion from deep within, feeling myself float in an ocean of peace way beyond the agony of the deep twisting pain I was in yesterday.

As I was contemplating there it occurred to me how shallow the critic is in its judgements and observations.  It doesn’t see the full deep complex humanity of things, it thrives on absolutes and black/white categories, wrong/right, bad/good polarities.  In no way does it embrace the mysterious totality, it narrows our heart’s space, confining us and others in that toxic prison.

In contrast the open expansiveness of self love and forgiveness frees our souls from breathless confinement.  Pain eclipses our view of all rational reference points while forcing us to travel much deeper below the surface of things.  We penetrate mysteries and feel restored to depths difficult to communicate, we feel the release of peace, a wide open vista, often only after those terrible days on which the intensity of our sadness, fear or anger felt completely overpowering.   On these awful days, difficult as they are we are recognising, feeling and releasing something.

Yesterday showed me how much resentment I have towards my mother over things from the past.  There is always a trigger and on Tuesday it was finding out that I have to wait 3 months to have the infected tooth removed and that there was no way they would move anything to accommodate me earlier despite the fact that the infection is painful and having a negative impact on my system, despite the fact I was crying in pain, despite the fact I was led to believe the tooth would be coming out next month.

This put me back in that old powerless painful place where there is nothing I can do get the help at the time I needed the help, and yet despite this and the fact my therapist offered me an extra session to make up for the one we will miss today,  I didn’t take it, which made me see that sometimes I don’t reach for the things I want or need because I feel I shouldn’t or should put my needs on hold and I see now how the two are related for in childhood I was indeed deeply powerless over things my mother did, ways she held us hostage in fear, ways in which our bodies drenched in fear had to lock down into anxious hyper alert while waiting with anxious trepidation to see what may be flung at us or fly through the air possibly to hit us!!!!  Powerless, powerless, powerless and then my father DID NOTHING.  HE JUST LAUGHED!!!!

After writing that sentence on one level I can laugh too, but I also see how for a child these things are not funny, they are deadly serious, they are full body/soul experiences which engage every molecule and cell with in us and lock the effects in tissue deep inside until a later time when old cell, trigger, imprints are once again engaged.  And then we blame our selves or others blame us because we have frozen, gone mute, collapsed, rationalised or got paralysed.  WTF!!!  Inner, outer critic you see nothing, you know nothing!

Re sent ment.  Anger we resend over and over and over again, replaying it in our systems, replaying it in our relationships, both in the partners we attract as well as the way we react or fail to react and yet this anger is our vital life’s energy and blood, it is the part of us that makes us know something is happening to us that isn’t right, the pain of the splinter we swallow and that continues to roam around inside of us shows the place where we most need to bestow on our own soul and process awareness, consciousness, present attention and love.

Today I am going easy on myself.  Today I am not going to replay that old pain over and over and over again.  Yesterday I finally got to scream it out over the phone with my Mum but not ‘at’ her.  Yesterday I finally got my body and soul to say HOW MUCH IT ‘F’ING HURT!!!  Today I have maybe on some level ingested the anger to such a degree that body spasm is letting me go and the concertina of pull in/push out symptoms working out are abating as my body has shown me how much of the pain it carried had so little to do with me and was about a far larger and longer generational history playing out.  The anger coming at me wasn’t mine but being powerless and on the receiving end of it meant I then got that upload or down load of anger and fear like a shot of adrenaline into my system.

And today I got to forgive myself for all the pain that caused so many ill effects, for in the end I was never to blame.  I was never a bad person.  I was only a person who was struggling with the impact of so much,so often alone.   And I was the one who said, when I got sober, something deeper is going on here and I am going to break the cycle and turn back within to find out what it is.

It’s going to be some time until I can totally forgive others, but I know I am on the way.   Forgiveness is starting with myself and its what I must live, if I ever really want to be free.  It seems so clear to me that forgiveness can only come AFTER we have lived through and fully acknowledged the painful consequences of what hurt and damaged us and found the deeper reality, painful as that is.   I may never be able to forget all that I was powerless over but allowing the opening of a peaceful place of self forgiveness and unconditional acceptance inside reveals to me an expansive space within which everything can be met with love even hate, resentment and anger, if these two are, as I suspect, just darker forms of soul expression.   Such an opening shows me that peace is possible, does exist,  out in an open field where the sun shines on a new day free of the strangle hold of pain and is found when pain is accepted and entered deeply rather than resisted, only then can it perform its alchemy on our soul.