Living and being in the present moment

I started to write this post a few days ago.  I think its not very cohesive but in the interest of just expressing my self I am going to post it today.

Old hurt and pain will pull us back to the past.    Trauma has a gravitational force field that often seems it does not want to let go, if a wound or hurt is very very deep it can have a powerful affect.   I felt a little uncomfortable after posting my post the other day We’ll never be ‘over it’.  I do believe there is a life of peace and love outside of abuse and trauma and its one that we have to be very proactive and disciplined about choosing for ourselves, for there are moments when we can pull ourselves back from the brink of recycling and replaying the hurts and pains over and over and over again.

I am in the middle of reading a book on presence and emotional healing at the moment and in it the author Michael Brown talks of ‘imprint driven intepretations and reactions’, these are those wound scar traces/places/spaces we get pulled into.  They come about because as children and adults our truest need and desire is unconditional love.  When this unconditional love fails to be forthcoming we try all kinds of ways to find it.  Staying angry at our abusers has underlying its drive that longing for the love we needed then and did not get.  Arguing about how it could, of should of been different isn’t going to help at this point to either change anything nor bring us the love we wanted.  We can only find that love in the now by seeking love inside and being love.

I agree with Michael when he writes

Unconditional love isn’t something we pursued others to channel in our direction through drama.  Attention we attract via drama is by its very nature conditional.  We fail in each attempt to obtain the unconditional attention we seek as unconditional love isn’t like money – it isn’t something we earn.  Love isn’t something achieved through merit.  We don’t qualify for love.  Love just is.  Love is our birthright.  Love is what we already are.

I think we forget this so much.  In my last emotional abusive relationships love was very conditional, it was conditional on me doing what pleased that person.  He even told me he had no belief in unconditional love.   This was a guy who saw everything in terms of winning and loosing.   I am not going to get nasty about it and I was so glad this week to finally find myself laughing over a mean thing he did, not because it was funny – it was heartless – but because I finally saw how insane it was to expect a kind or emotionally aware response from someone who couldn’t give it.

If love is what we are, then that is also what we have to give and love is what trauma can so often rob from us, it seems to me.   Having this latest really bad sickness has shown me how little love I have shown to myself on many days.  I haven’t allowed myself to rest when I was tired.  I pushed myself to walk the dog on the days it was too much and then I had that cup of coffee to get an energy boost when it was really just depleting me.  Then last week just before getting sick I pushed myself over yet another boundary and instead of saying to someone “I am sorry, today I would rather not do that thing we agreed to do” I went ahead and did it, this was just one of a few incidents where I overran myself and its no surprise to me that I ended up with flu.

When I saw in the astrology when I finally checked it last night that Mars and Mercury were both opposing Neptune (which rules infections) it all made sense.   I thought here we go, here’s a time of intense learning for you.

Mars was on my Pluton in the week before and this is the offended part of me that holds all the trauma in my soul.   I was not aware how deep the old pain was that was resurfacing.  I found myself remembering some happy times with my father in the few years before he died and then was crying so deeply with my longing for him and it seems the shadow imprint of that loss is very strong around with my accident anniversary also close.  I don’t want to keep the pain alive but it is there, the wound of not really having close father daughter love will always be with me and it has dogged a lot my past relations, this is the wound I need to keep giving love to.  My father and I never got to fully bond before he died as he was taken on the day after I had an injection to go overseas to India and in the end the person I was to meet there (my first ex) asked me not to come after my father died.  Those things hurt me so much but I now know he did not love me.  I could not find the love I needed there.   I really believe I have to find it inside.