A times I am run by fear. I do not realise that is it running me, nor the grief that underlies it. Reminded by a person liking an old post of mine on fear which had insights from Kyle Grey
today while sitting in the nursery garden having coffee, and exploring some deeper practices from Tara Brach’s book I decided to initiate a dialogue with my fear this morning.
When I investigate it I realise it has layers of regret and a deep sadness underneath. When I enquired into the fear it told me that it is scared that I will die before I have fully really lived. This morning I had this thought that I am in some ways waking up from death. I look back to the forces that drove my marriage breakdown, my second aborted therapy attempt and see it could not have been another way.. by that stage I had used alcohol as a coping strategy from about the age of 14 and I was just under 7 years sober (I entered sobriety in 1993 at the age of 31).
I was beginning to touch on enormous forces, but the underground river of my tangled attachment history was also calling me home. I was in the United Kingdom which I really loved, and in a place I felt at home though a long way from home but I was not yet ‘at home’ in my true self. My Mum had fallen my older sister was in crisis and I felt like a rat who had deserted a sinking ship. And so I went back but quickly rebounded.
I listened to a man who is about to give a lecture series in Australia on the pit falls of empathy this week and I must say I concur with some of what he was arguing. That often we can over empathise to the point that we lose ourselves and even project our own wounded insides onto outer situations making them different to what they really are. We lose our rational focus. As I look back in a way I see why I crashed and burned the third time I tried to go away in 2005. I see that really I was at the point in my sobriety where I needed to be back to face the scene of the trauma rather than running away. And perhaps that is why my ex husband didn’t help me then.
In my dark moments I still have deep regrets and fantasies about how it would have been had I stuck it out then in the UK, instead of coming back to give emotional support and explore my attachment wounds… The only way through this now is to accept that what occurred did and it cannot be changed. I am 57 now and I have lost about 14 years but maybe I not looking deeply enough. My encounter with our family and ancestral karma has taken all of the past 8 years or so to come to terms with and I am very much still deep within a process of emergence.
Never the less today I was shedding tears over the way my anger and frustration often landed on my Mum in later years, a woman who was trying her very best to support and encourage my psychological separation especially following my Dad’s death to cancer in 1985. There were times I really lashed out at her because I was not willing to own my own deeper need nor recognise the grief I have carried all through my life for my parent’s inability to really see and mirror me due to their own issues. I blamed myself, I became addicted as a way to cope and self soothe, when those strategies stopped working I got sober and tried to turn it around but I thought I was ‘bad’ and the problem, I did not realise the depth of my wounds nor my developmental arrests.
Anyway I guess it is never too late to grow up, or rather grown into the person we were always meant to be. I read a quote by Alain de Botton yesterday in his book Essays on Love in which he said that ‘overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others. ‘
In order to become ourselves we have to find our truth from within. We have to face the fear of separation from others that may for us feel a bit like death, we have to be willing to step out into the void and trust the power of our own true self can hold us. Even as I write these words I feel a lot of fear. I see that I had a fear that if I broke from my family on some level, I may die or all love would be cut off. I know its not rational but I actually did end up sustaining a very serious head injury the last time I tried to make a separation move from them and then I fell into a collapse.
I guess my psyche now is confronting me with this fear but it also lies to me when it says I am not progressing and will always be stuck!. Kyle Grey says in the except from his book Light Warrior #which I shared from in the post liked by someone last night that where we have fear it is due to the fact that something we love or long for is being triggered. From one perspective our fear looks ‘bad’ but its really just telling us that something very important to us is at stake. What could be more important than our true self and heart, our desire to live fully engaged and alive from deep within our real centre?
Some of us achieve this without much struggle, but for others of it, the process entails a much longer journey of spiritual and emotional incubation, a throwing off of conditions and conditionings that keep us trapped. Does the butterfly feel great fear as it emerges from its chrysalis?
In one of her books on this process therapist Marion Woodman reminds us of the drop of blood that is shed as this emergence occurs. For me this blood symbolises desire, need, want, grief, anger, frustration, longing all merging together. Facing our fear may mean facing feelings of grief, anger or powerlessness which may feel too much for our bodies to contain without help. Such is the process described in the life of Amy a patient of Tara Brach’s whose story is told in Chapter 11 of her book True Refuge : Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, a woman who had to transform the great rage she felt over her own emotional neglect at the hands of a similarly damaged mother.
It was only when Amy’s fear of her own rage enabled her to feel and break through it to the deeper grief for her own lost little girl who was so sorely in need of Amy’s own love and concern that Amy really began to emerge from her own pain. It occurs for all of us when we can look deep into the eyes or hearts of parents who failed to give us what we needed due to the fact they were never fully or sufficiently held themselves in love and true mirroring that real healing of our fractures and misplaced emotions becomes possible. It is when we can see that it was no one’s fault and the healing really needs to come from us and be given to us and the world that the powerful transformation of our deepest fear can take place. Only then can we finally find a place to call home, deep within our formerly neglected or unawakened hearts and souls. Facing and feeling our fear and understanding its roots takes us so much farther than run, run, running all the time seeking false distractions and refuges that only end up making us feel more lost, emotionally insecure and reactive or unfree.
Emerging From The Dark Night 