When love breaks through

When love breaks through

Something so deep inside my soul just opens

The defences in me that held me safe

Give way as I fall into the most profound ocean

Of understanding and peace

There is a part of us that is the heart

And that part is the deepest source of us

It shows our soul the way to truth

And provides all the proof that our mind can

Sometimes deny

Sometimes belie

With thinking

When you are kind enough

To extend your love to me

That is how I am freed

From suffering

And when you withhold your love from me

I can never be

Completely at peace

Until I dig so deep

To find the longing for love

That underlies the pain

And answer that with kindness

Again

Opening to

The deepest source of healing and love

Again

And again

And again

Free to feel sorrow

I am a big fan of embracing and accepting my emotions these days.  I consider them tides now that rise and fall and are like waves that would like us to ride them into what every shore they are breaking.  And even though it can feel exhausting to be hollowed our or broken open by grief like I was yesterday, I am so grateful now for my body’s ability to surrender to that tide rather than resist it’s natural flow.

I was thinking today of how braced my body became over years.  One of the consequences of not opening up to our feelings is that we hold our breath. We may have been taught to do this by a parent or other social conditioning, we may have been threatened if we were angry or felt sad with a punishment and so we had to freeze, or suck it up, or we may have tried to fight or fly away and been stopped, like when my Mum pulled my arm out of my socket when I was only three as I was trying to get away from her.

Yesterday at the crematorium as they played the song You’ll Never Walk Alone I really felt my abandonment wound triggered.   Gerry was far from alone in his cancer journey, Carmel listed in her eulogy all the things done for them.   I thought of my own breast cancer surgery where I had little in the way of support, a mere skeleton, but that is far from the only time I walked alone in my own life, especially after my father’s death in 1985.  This is not meant to be a post about self pity, only an attempt to say I had it really tough for so many years and validating that and feeling it is painful.  It is admitting to a truth.  I was not part of a close knit loving family like Carmel and Jerry and it’s been very hard.

Anyway surrendering to my feelings felt good yesterday even if quite uncomfortable at times.  It is not easy for many of us if we were never validated in the past.  But I truly do believe the fastest way to freedom is to feel our feelings and make sense of them, emotions are nothing less than energy in motion and energy wants to move out and through, having to bury it all inside has terrible consequences for us.  Embracing and feeling our grief is not automatic and complicated grief that is buried can be left undealt with for years with the result losses pile upon losses.  This is what I experienced as my sobriety unfolded with each funeral of a male friend or father of a friend, which would tap into all the pain over the loss of my Dad and his hurtful treatment of me over years as well as his stumbling attempts at kindness.  All these feelings were was buried for so many years in my addiction and probably my fear around males generated difficult reactions too the threatened intimacy between us.  These feelings can be a a potent cocktail when associated losses are being triggered in us from the unconscious.

When we grieve I believe we have to deal with feelings of powerlessness.  When someone we love dies or something is taken it shows we are not in control.  If we fight against the process we can end up blocked in my experience, far better to let ourselves surrender to what needs to move through us, reshape and change us.

The dark encounter with the soul

I believe the soul is the most authentic part of us connected to our authentic self, and for many of us it is a journey to find the way towards it, a way which often leads through a lot of undoing of conventions and conditioning for those of us who arrive on this earth looking and feeling deeper and hearing the beating of a very different drum that we may have tried to dance to but been judged for.

And then if just happened to lose our way, the path of return may lie through the gates of hell, torture, ‘insanity’ or suicide or attempted suicide, for it seems that if the psyche can set up a protector inside of us that would rather us die than live an inauthentic life that is not true to our soul, isn’t it in some way better that we go back to the spiritual realms and try for a new incarnation?

I have also been thinking about how someone’s suicide may benefit learning and growth in the world and the lives of others.  I was listening to a brief interview with the parents of teenager Dolly Everette who committed suicide due to bullying abuse.  I posted a post earlier in the year about her calling attention to the issue.

https://wordpress.com/posts/emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com?s=bullying

What her parents said was they were not taking things seriously enough.  Dolly had done a drawing of a girl doing a backward bend that said this “Speak Even if Your Voice Shakes.”  At this stage the bullying had been going on for some time.

The soul has to find it’s voice, it must sound out its authentic note, but what if killing voices in culture and society and bullies act to try to destroy this voice or light?  Is it not then a case of a bright light being rejected from the world?  The soul then chose to retreat and the aftermath had lessons for many and would promote more awareness and clarity and determination to see this kind of thing ie bullying nipped in the bud or would be a very intense ‘wake up call’ for certain people!

We should be mindful that often a breakdown is really a breakthrough, it is a breaking down of a false self that hides the kernel of the true self or soul, the dark night of the soul acts on us similarly.  In it what the darkest part is, is a grieving for what was lost or never found a way to express in this world that may not be consciously known (yet!) but is trying to make itself known.  Medication can only help us so far to find the way back to authentic self hood.  Many die along the way.  And it takes enormous strength to keep going sometimes in a culture ruled by illusions and shame, illusions and shame we must pierce through on the dramatic path of soul retrieval.

The seed of love

You thought love was the wave

That came crashing around you

A deluge

In which you might find oblivion or drown

But, no Love what remained

After that wave finally washed you

Up upon the shore of broken dreams

Within whose wrecking and breaking

You discovered a force far deeper than desire

Yes Love is the seed that

Is then planted

Growing with a power

That can never be obliterated

Once it has taken root

And begun to sprout and bloom

Within your soul