Love is experienced
differently by each of us, but for most of us five aspects of love stand
out. We feel loved when we receive
attention, acceptance, appreciation, and affection, and when we are allowed the
freedom to live in accord with our own deepest needs and wishes.
Compassion happens
in and through us as we become more mindfully present in the world.
We can do it through
mindfulness, an alert witnessing of reality without judgment, attachment, fear,
expectation, defensiveness, bias, or control.
We achieve
mindfulness when reality takes precedence over our ego.
Mindfulness is being
an adult. It is unattainable for someone who lacks inner cohesion, personal
continuity, and integration.
We do not outgrow
our early needs. Rather they become less
overwhelming, and we find less primitive ways to fulfil them.
We fear grief
because we know we will not be able to control its intensity, its duration, or
its range, and so we look for ways around it.
But engaging with our grief is a form of self-nurturance and liberation
from neediness.
To enter our wounded
feelings, fully places us on the path to healthy intimacy.
Fear can be mined
for wise caution.
Healthy control
means ordering our lives in responsible ways -- for example, by maintaining
control of a car or our health. Neurotic
control means acting on the compulsive need to make everything and everyone
comply with our wishes.
Control is what we
decided to seek when we noticed the implacable givens of our existence and felt
helpless in the face of them. We were
not yet able to say, "I will stay with this predicament and see what it has
to offer me. I notice I seem to get
stronger this way".
If you find that
your ego cannot tolerate being called to task or shown to be inadequate or
wrong, then the work begins here.
To listen with the
heart is to listen for what someone needs without fear, judgment, criticism,
moralism, contradiction, or projection.
Shaming is a kind of
abandonment, and holding on to our own shame is self-abandonment.
Our unconscious is
therefore not just a sea of repressed memories or unacceptable drives…. It
contains a host of feelings that failed to attract validating attunement and so
had to be scuttled or submerged.
"My parents did
the best they could" is what our denial of deprivation may sound
like. But our bodies cannot be
fooled. We know viscerally and
instinctively that what we needed was not there or was being withheld.
If we woke up every
morning in childhood thinking, "Someone here hates me, and I can't
leave. Someone here will hurt me today,
and I have to stay. Someone does not
want me here, and I have nowhere else to go", how can we go easily now?
Mindfully loving
partners never consciously engage in hurtful behaviors toward one another. They police themselves and place under arrest
all the pilferers from the ever so pregnable hope chest of intimacy: vendetta,
violence, ridicule, sarcasm, teasing, insult, lying, competition, punishment,
and shaming.
In healthy families
there is a struggle and assistance when necessary, not frustration and shame
about failure.
Mindfulness provides
the technology for transforming our gaps into soulful potential.
Mindfulness shows
that a hole is a tunnel and not a cave.
When a child becomes
able to hold the apparent opposites, that appear in a parent, he is maturing….
When, as adults, we look back into our childhood and see only the abuse -- or
only the good times -- we know we face the challenge of becoming adults who can
hold opposites with equanimity.
Sustained, empathic
self-staying, which we accomplish by granting ourselves the five A's
[attention, acceptance, allowing, appreciation, affection], mobilizes powers
once buried in pain.
When the desperados
of the neurotic ego -- fear, grasping, expectation, judgment, control,
attachment, and so forth -- threaten our psychic domain, it is time for
mindfulness.
The commitment to
work through problems as they arise is the only sign that we truly want full
intimacy.
Processing
experience means that we bring consciousness to it. Without it, life becomes a series of
episodes, one after the next with no movement through them toward new insights
and growth. Episodic living is the
opposite of cohesive living.
The whole point of
mindful spirituality is to acclaim affiliation and defy division. Then we see differences as more adornments to
similarities, and the fear of differences fades away.
When we do the work,
we find fewer childhood forces working on us and more adult choices are
available. We also notice more
flexibility in our handling of changes and transitions. And we no longer insist on perfection in our
world, our partners, or ourselves.
Approximations become acceptable, and preferences take the place of
demands. Questioning of and arguments
with reality turn to acknowledgement and consent. We take things that happen to us or people's
reactions toward us as information rather than as unalterable verdicts.
Jealousy is a
combination of three feelings: hurt, anger, and fear.
Ego driven jealousy
exposes our possessiveness, our dependency, our resentment of another's
freedom, our refusal to be vulnerable.
Jealousy challenges
our power to stay open and centered, without blame or withdrawal, in the midst
of rejection.
Infidelity is a
state-of-the-union address, forcing us to see the truth about our relationship.
Infidelity is always
a couple's issue, not an individual issue.
One partner is not the victim, nor is the other the persecution. The affair is not the disturbance but a
symptom of disturbance. The "other
[person]" does not cause distance but is being used to achieve distance.
Brokenhearted leads
to openhearted.
Regret as a reaction
to disappointment further disempowers us.
Only if we tolerate
the discomfort of fear can we master it.
Our destiny is to
bring more and more consciousness to what has remained unconscious.
Ego appears in
statements like "I'm right", "My way is the right way; I'm
perfect", "There is no need for me to change".
Our ways of behaving
can be observed in the mindful space of bare attention. That space is who we are, not the strategies
that attempt to fill it.
To trust ourselves
means that we have surrendered to being just exactly who we are in each moment
and that a mindful awareness will kick in to show us an alternative to our ego
habits. This is the spiritual paradox of
accepting ourselves as we are while simultaneously becoming more than we ever
were.
The next time you
see someone acting arrogantly, realize what pain and fear he carries in that
mask of omnipotence and have compassion.
The habits of ego--
fear, grasping, censure, control, attachment to outcome, preference, complaint,
biases, defenses -- are interferences.
Forgiveness is a
power, a grace that lets us exceed our own normal ego limits.
Forgiveness is
mindfulness applied to our hurt.
