January 2121 - Compassion Group Notes
“Each trial, every loss, is an opportunity for you to meet suffering with love, and make it an offering, a prayer. The minute you lift your pain like a candle the darkness vanishes, and mercy comes rushing in to heal you.”
~Mirabai Starr, The Showings of Julian of Norwich
Which is it?
Self-Absorbed or Self-Reflective?
Very often therapy is seen and judged as an exercise in self-indulgence and self-absorption. And truly, this can be the case and we must know the difference. If others perceive no change in you, they are quite right to see therapy as an exercise in self-absorption. On the other hand, they might not like the changes in you. And if they are true changes rooted in wisdom and self-love, then this is a mark of success. Wanting your therapist to collude with your defenses and feed your ego by using the suffering of your childhood to make the surface you feel better is simply not therapy. Therapy means you are open to seeing every aspect of self and the dynamics within with humility, compassion and devotion to your Highest Self. It means being able to see how you transfer old patterns, feelings, needs and defenses on to the therapist. It means accepting challenge and confrontation on the self-destructive aspects of defense you were programmed to do. It means devotion to the process and seeing it as sacred. It means hanging in there when you would rather flee, hanging in there when you feel angry and belligerent and hostile to the process.
Lost in Thought?
This means YOU are not present to the though, YOU have become identified with the thought. Lost in emotion means YOU are not present to the emotion, the emotion has grabbed you into itself. Lost in need means YOU are not present to the need, you have become the all consuming need. You are indeed lost… collapsed into function instead of knowing YOURSELF, which is presence itself.
What are you reflecting to the external world in your thoughts, words and deeds?
Judgment or Discernment?
“The self-righteous scream judgments against others to hide the noise of skeletons dancing in their own closets.” ~John Mark Green
Judgment is the projection of self-hatred and shame on to another so as not to recognize it in self for being or doing the same thing the other is perceived to be doing
Discernment is a projection of the ability to set internal limits with self in Love
Judge or Join?
Judgment stops all enquiry dead in it’s tracks. It is the foregone conclusion and answer before anything is actually known. When you do something you are judging, notice the judgement and ask the question WHY? The answer will help you join with the underlying suffering and unmet need that leads to the behavior. Join first, discern well, connect in love and then correct. Judgment is superficial, cold and arrogant. Questions awaken warmth and depth, understanding and compassion.
Weak or Strong?
“As you age, all the shame of being weak and dependent as a child will surface as your body becomes weak and dependent again. It is time to connect to this with love instead of judgment.” ~Lyndall Johnson
Our childhood is the time when we are encouraged to be big, brave and strong. What is valued is more strength, more size, more striving with courage. As we learn, our striving is always measured against the degree of shame we feel if we act little, scared and weak.
“This is my prayer to thee, my lord - strike, strike at the root of penury in my heart.
Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows.
Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service.
Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might.
Give me the strength to raise my mind high above daily trifles.
And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will with love.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
Emotions then Thinking
Connect before Correct
In your own inner work, it is so important that, as you learn to transform past suffering, you learn to recognize and acknowledge your feelings first. Feelings as a child are the first response to outside threat (needs not being met). There is not thought about it - there is just the raw physiological and emotiona response of shame and fear. As more advanced and more recent parts of the brain are activated in child development, the feelings are interpreted to mean something - namely, “I caused it and therefore I am bad.” And so the template for the false self is created. It was body, then emotion, then belief…. This is the order in which you created a false identity.
Pride in Killing?
Hunting - Part II
I remember a time I was working in the garden and my garden fork went right through a toad. I stood there paralyzed watching this beautiful little creature stabbed through, pinned to the ground. If I had had a quick and clean way to kill it, like shooting it with a BB gun, I probably would have been able to do it. But, I didn’t and this would have required I get a spade and chop off it’s head. Or pull the fork out of it’s body and stab it to death. I couldn’t do it. I failed to be merciful. I left it to die alone, slowly. I ran away from the demand of love. Guns and bows and arrows distance one from killing. They make it seem remote … is as if you didn’t really do it. I never had a way to distance myself from the immediacy of taking life - even that of a toad.
“Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth,
and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat,
and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to quench your thirst,
let it then be an act of worship.” ~Kahlil Gibran
