Beloved : some reflections

What is it that you love?

What is it that you give thanks for?

Do you look at what you have or at what you lack?

Both inwardly and outwardly?

How do you relate to your longing, desire and pain?

Some of us seek the beloved externally. We long to be loved, but can we be loving in our core and can we be grateful and even when we are sad and things hurt or we suffer. Can we take the sadness in and transform it to something of use?

Some of us seek the beloved internally. I know it may seem a bit narcissistic at times to focus too much on self love but on Sunday night after the terrible ordeal of sleeplessness and ongoing nosebleeds from 10 am to 12 pm the following day I actually crawled into bed and hugged and kissed my own body. I thought of how much I took flight in my body from troubling circumstances through my addictions. I thought of how much my body hurt after that accident in 1979 being so smashed up. At a time I needed to stop and turn inward to the pain I was running from following the opening up of all the feelings I had buried through years of active addiction I was seeking someone to validate it since my husband and family seemed determined not to and did not understand my suffering. I was seeking my container and the mirroring eyes of someone who would understand.

In the book the Velveteen Rabbit there is a beautiful passage that says we only become real when someone loves us, when they look deep into our soul and reality and accept it shinning the light of love on us, while offering us encouragement to grow like a special flower.

My own journey drove me eventually into complete retreat and an encounter with my angels and my ghosts. As it does for many of us on this path of healing. Over those 2 years at the coast I was visited my so much including Goddess figures, they held me, they mirrored me, theu told me I was loved. I had many dreams at that pivotal time that showed I was on an inner journey. That said I was all alone with my ‘ghosts’ and in time a relationship manifested within which they could become known.

I watched the final episode of Patrick Melrose last night right to the end. I revelled in the scenes where he is tempted to follow an angry woman in recovery away from rehab and turns back instead towards meetings. He faces his pain and the agony of his abuse, he faces the rage he feels towards his mother for not being protected from sexual abuse and rape at the hands of his father, he confronts those memories. And he faces his ‘ghosts’. In one poignant scene as a child he tells his father it is wrong what is being done.

After the wake where he has to contend with all kinds of ‘madness’ in the people around him his wife, from whom he is separated due to his alcoholism, asks him home for a meal. He says he needs to be alone. He has got the number of the waitress serving drinks at the wake and you think back in his room he is going to phone her. Instead he phones his wife and says he will join her and his two sons for dinner. “I am sick of ghosts,” he says, “Its time to spend time with real people.” Patrick loved himself enough to face his pain. He faced the continuation of a family pattern of abandonment and at the end of the series we see him turning back towards his wife, sons and love beginning to turn around that pattern.

We may seek the beloved in a substance, we may seek the beloved in music, we may seek the beloved through poetry or art, we may seek te beloved through recovery groups and therapy, through active imagination or meditation. The later sources all give us containers of a kind and for the purpose of what Keats called ‘soul making’ or inner ‘soul work’.

However as Rumi recognised, the beloved we seek lives deep in our own soul as well as in all of life. The Beloved, it seems to me, is very, very close. We just have to open the eyes of our heart to see where he or she lives and then celebrate her or his presence. Open the locked doors of our mind and let her the force of love deep inside, allowing it to work miracles (changes of perception). We just have to wake up to the truth that at any moment our Beloved is never very far away.