I just went to my first OA meeting on the recommendation of a friend and I cried through many of the shares. I could relate to the emptiness and pain so many expressed and how they also at times look to food or things to fill that hole instead of just being present with themselves in love. I resonated so much and at the end of that meeting I felt the sadness as most people there turned to someone and connected and hugged, I waited around a little then before heading to the lift and I was met on the way by someone who had high level attachment trauma but then a sign had dropped on the elevator floor so she went to take it back. The hopeful part of me kept the doors open hoping we would connect but another guy joined us and of course they knew each other so the chance to connect was lost. That said it is my first meeting and connections take time to build especially when no one knows you very well at first.
Itwas all okay but I noticed then I desired a cup of coffee, and the person who invited me to the meeting turned up late and then disappeared only to call me while I was driving home. I realised she had her own stuff going down something must have happened because she mentioned something about hostility real or imagined at the meeting that made her feel she had to rush off, she had her assistance dog with her too and seemed very preoccupied when she arrived and never acknowledged my presence.
This morning’s experiences showed me how much I Long for connection and how often that experience of being a young child in a far older family with faces and thoughts turned away to private personal concerns feels for me. It retriggers that experience of being unseen, unfelt or unknown. The good thing was today that I could see those feelings from the past and how they transfer onto the present. But I also felt how it is when others shares of pain trigger similar experiences of our own and how so often on this healing pathway we draw towards us or attract mirrors or resonators, this is the value of group meetings, we get to see we are not alone in our struggles.
There was a little I read out of the OA Twelve Step book on the third step (turning our will and lives over to a higher power) that spoke of the need for attention and control, how these desires often lie under other behaviours and make us self absorbed at times. I see how hungry my own inner child is for connection and how my heart feels like sandpaper when it doesn’t come and then I reach for sugar or something. It was so nice to come home to Jasper and take him for a short windy walk around our neighbourhood block. I was thinking how the loving gaze of a puppy can be a healing balm for many of us who were never seen or mirrored in childhood. At times his intense stare annoys me too when he is trying to ‘magic’ some food off my plate to give to him. Puppies know what to do to turn on the charm at such moments, and sometimes I wonder if we glamorise their love for us, would they care as much if we didn’t feed them? This thought occurs in my more cynical or ‘realistic’ moments.
Emotional nutrition was very much on my mind today after the meeting. I was thinking of the absent loving mother that was exiled even from the holy trinity of the Church. That loving mother’s absence seems to lie at the heart of humanity’s voracious appetite for matter at this point in time. People were speaking about shopping for handbags or gladrags but how these things do not really fill up the emotional hole or spiritual hole deep inside of us. We need to be aware of what spiritual and emotional nutrition we are taking in.
It is something Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh addresses in many of his books. How many of us reach for sugar or sweets when its the sweet nourishment of a loving hug we crave? What do we substitute for love in our modern dilemma and how connected are we to the true sources of our hunger? These are just some things I am addressing right now as the planetary energy in Cancer moves into triplicacy. I believe we have a New Moon in Cancer soon so going to OA and connecting with these kind of issues is probably very timely for me right now.
Emerging From The Dark Night 