Feeling less alienated

I awoke feeling less alienated today.  I realised the feelings I expressed in the prose piece Alien were stronger after I spoke to my sister yesterday.  I know my family are not strongly spiritually or emotionally connected to themselves at all.  It’s hard to have a relationship with them because my relationship with them is spiritual in one sense, I relate to the exiled parts of them more than to their conscious ego personalities.  And it’s kinda sad to see how hard I have tried to fit into their world and how as a child I naturally felt alien as no one was really relating to me from the inside out.  The people all around me were not emotionally connected, not emotionally present for me, but still I see it as my primary task to become connected to myself, intimate with myself so that I can then try to understand others, even those and a world that often I feel so alienated in.

Its interesting to me that emotional recovery and AA meetings people shared all the time how alien they felt to earth and amongst others. They searched for another way to relate to the spiritual side through alcohol and drugs and it wasn’t until I read a powerful book by Edward Whitmont called Return to the Goddess that I began to understand deeper how alcoholism was really a reaction to the exile of the feminine and ecstasy and the body and all kinds of things as humanity moved towards the industrial and techological ages where God was exiled to the sky and matter was seen as split from spirit… And feelings and vulnerability and spiritual sensitivity became pathologies.   It’s hard to fully articulate here but what I am trying to get at is its those alienated people I still relate to.. the outsiders, the one who hear the beat of a different drum, the ones who search deeply, who have endured pain and exile and found their way back home to their deeper spiritual selves.  The ones who don’t shy away from or fear their feelings, the ones that know who we are in our deepest souls go far beyond any superficial appearances.   These are my tribe but I also do not want to split away from those others souls, perhaps the sleepwalking who are lost when they lose the connection to that ineffable something that sustains a soul in touch with its beingness, even if through feelings of the darkest despair, deepest exile and loneliness.

And it occurs to me after listening to Teal Swan’s lecture on the epidemic of loneliness that so many of us feel lonely in our technological culture but that there are also deep wells we can touch within which the lonely feelings can at times disappear and that there are also those moments of connection however brief when we do touch another’s heart and soul which although so rare, are also so very bittersweet and profoundly precious.

And what I also realised today is what triggers me to feel more alien and alone and then when I write about it and so many others connect and comment, I know most surely that I AM NOT REALLY ALL ALONE  others do feel the same and relate to me and I to them.  Isn’t that a blessing?  It does not take that deep lonely pain and sting of exile away that I touched into so deeply yesterday (which is a profound soul state) but it is a state also that can come and go, as all feelings do.  For everything is dual, all part of a rich and complex tapestry of textures and colours and shades, at times light, at times dark, at times fearful and contracted, at others open, loving, joyous and expansive.  

This morning I was also working with strong sensations in my body and when I experienced all that pain in my gut I just breathed into it.  I told myself, pain is just a very strong sensation and you can survive it and by breathing into it and not contacting or tensing against it in time the pain dissipated.  

I am not feeling as anxious about the party tonight, I am actually feeling really peaceful about going.  This morning I opened to the possibility that it might actually be a really positive experience.  I also thought about all the pain between my sister in law and my Mum and I felt it was sad for me to be carrying that on into the present.  I actually have had to stick up for sister and brother in laws with my Mum and other living sister who I felt were both a bit low on empathy in the past, only seeing things from their point of view, but then again I know I am guilty of this too sometimes.  I want people to be a certain way or react in a certain way without always realising the conditions of their pasts that led them to be the way they are.  When their actions have been hurtful to me I personalise it, when really it often has so little to do with me.  Knowing what hurts me is important as it helps me to make better relationship choices and maybe struggle less hard with those who do not make life much fun without having to break connections completely.  It also makes me less judgemental but more able to be discriminating in my life and relationships. 

I was also thinking today of one of the most profound concepts I learned about in AA, that of self centred fear.   I think of how in a mental illness we get so caught up in our own pain that at times we don’t see others and its important as Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn says to take care of our own pain and treat it tenderly.  However we can also do that for others, even those whose only choice is to narcissistically barricade themselves behind powerful defences, protections and projections.  So when as an empath I start to feel floods of emotions around other’s barricades I can remove myself for a time and ask as an old therapist of mine would remind me “whose feelings or stuff is it that I am really carrying or feeling here?”

I also have thought a lot this week about how one family member in a grieving or addicted family (or family affected my multigenerational trauma of addiction) may be the identified patient.  At this stage its my sister in the psyche unit, her feelings of deep loss are being medicated but she is also getting time out from the complex family system around the anniversary of my Mum’s death.  She will not be at the party tonight and that is only right, but its also sad feelings cannot be shared, my brother is choosing to fly out for America on the first anniversary of my Mum’s death and I cried when I found, out but maybe its for the best.  My living sister is understandably no fan of my sister in law.  But I see they both have their own reasons for being the way they are.  Luckily tonight I can turn up as an observer, I can be ‘in the family, thought not OF the family’ (even though I am!!)  I never really felt like I belonged and was always looking to reconnect so desperately and often lost my own way, but I now accept this has been my path, it could not be any other way.  And this morning I am even back to feeling grateful for all that I do have.  I have my sobriety, I have my blog and the amazing connections here,  I have my beautiful home and my precious dog but most of all I have my even more precious inner world and my inner life : a deepening connection to the spiritual and to what one blogger friend spoke of yesterday as the ‘well’ that place I can go to draw spiritual sustenance and power and strength from my  Higher Self or Higher Power, even on those days when I feel most sad, most frustrated and most, most lonely or alienated. Isn’t that a miracle and a gift?