Without the inherent belief that my father
was the be all and end all of my life, without the crashing of this pattern,
without the void that was left in its place, there was no space for more. The
cup must be partly empty to pour more into it. I needed to believe and to
suffer the breaking of my illusion and to recover and discover what was really
there, before the belief.
Conscious and unconscious awakening… the
difference
These Losses were giant foundation stones
deeply embedded in the building of me. Their excavation left me capable of
seeing clearer than I had before. And yet, at the same time, there were little
subtle and invasive beliefs that surfaced through the years under different
experiences. Some of them were quite painful to let go of, and some of them
could be released by purely being aware of their existence.
One of the hardest sensations I had to let
go of was the subtle feeling that my value of truth, holding truth as a beacon
of light and assuming it was the highest goal of all, was only that- a value.
That blindly holding onto Truth as the sword of light was not necessarily kind,
considerate or of value to others. It was not a golden rule set in stone written
down by God. It was indeed, after careful searching, only a value. A value that
I didn’t even know I possessed until I suddenly saw the effects my insensitive
insistence of truth was having around me.
I remember lying on the green banks of lake
Mjosa and facing my truth and my path and realizing one had to go. I could not
continue to live honestly if I held so tightly onto truth. And I allowed the
value to drop from my body, and I cried again. I had thought it was me. I felt
a part of my personality, what I had identified as myself, fall away into the
earth. It was a death, again. A deep loss. And a great space. And freedom in
that death.
It’s not what you look like…. Levels of
awareness .. the need to express physically what you know in your mind…
Ever since I was a little girl, I, along
with countless others, was trained to believe that there would be a ‘one’. If you asked me straight to my face, I would
have to say no, it’s not sane, I don’t believe that, and yet, in actual fact,
when the situation arose, I have to say, I finally thought ‘ahh, now, here is
the end of my search.’
Please remember at this point in time, that
I am someone who at a relatively young age lost what she thought was her belief
system, only to find that there were still beliefs to be lost. The angst of
knowing better and yet being pulled along by a force so much stronger than I
could bear mingled with every stage of grief.
It was love at first sight. I have never
experienced it before and have never experienced it again. A certain knowing
that he was ‘the one’. A figure so unlike what I might be attracted to, and yet
a face known and recorded deep in my mind from a time past that I have no
recollection of it. Yes, it felt like destiny.
After countless misunderstandings and a
myriad of disappointments, I let him go to a barrage of tears and sudden
aging. Lines appeared where there had
been none before. Skin sagged and for the first time in my life, I looked my
age. But I prayed. I trusted the will of the Universe. I waited.
A year passed until I heard from him again.
And this time, I felt the strong urge in my body that said we were destined to
be together and at the same moment, it didn’t command me. I was not swayed by
it. I was patient, watchful, and part of me was healthily indifferent. Non
attached. It felt different than ever before. I was not a victim to the
overpowering flow of feeling. I experienced it, but I was not it. It was a
significant moment that I remember clearly. Being rooted in the observer.
And even after the words ‘I think I have
misjudged you’ I did not flutter in hope. I saw clearly into the fear and
confusion in his own mind and I knew that it was not to be. He called later
with suspicion and his own delusion fully intact and I let my ‘the one’ go. I
shed no tears. And indeed, it was a relief. It was another illusion that I had
passed through, and this time I was getting the hang of it, understanding the
feel of emotion in the body and its influence on the mind. I’d had time to
absorb it all and learn from it, and to repeat the experience from a different
foundation.
It seems that I didn’t truly die. The old
ideas, the old me slowly came back and reformed about the body I was in. I
became a ‘me’ again. I never truly
believed the stories, as I did before this grand awakening experience, but I
have been blinded at times by the power of my patterns.
After the first initial break I started the
long slow work of digging up the foundation stones of what I believed I was. I
worked arduously, vigilantly and with continual dedication. I faced loss after
loss. I held moments of clarity so bright it felt as though there was no going
back, and then finding myself
suddenly tripping on another layer of
stone work a little deeper than the one before. Very well then. The sun does
not rise all at once. It takes it’s time.
(And even this, ‘it takes time’ is a belief
that needs careful scrutiny and is addressed accordingly in Myss’s Defy
Gravity.)
I was 14 when I was left with my
grandparents. I saw children as a burden. I saw them as annoying, cloying
creatures that ate into your ‘real’ time. I certainly was not bought up to
think of myself as a mother and I was not a female who was interested in
children in any way shape or form.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was
pregnant! At 28 I looked at the plastic stick with the blue markings and
straight into the eyes of Responsibility and said I do. From that moment
forward, I found myself wrapped in duty towards my unborn child, regardless of
what those responsibilities meant to myself. I turned to my partner of three
years and committed myself to a ‘family’ with all that it meant to me.
You know what is coming. The loss of my
ideals. The second great crash of my belief system, after the loss of my father,
was the loss of the ‘ideal family’. I
promised myself that no child of mine would grow up like I did. There wouldn’t
be lies, secrets, strange rules, drugs, instability or confusion. There would
be love, support, two stable parents, honesty, hugs and more ‘I love you’s’
than a child could count.
Before my son’s second birthday I was a
single working mother in a foreign country. My son was handed between the
kindergarten, a baby sitter and the Japanese family I lived beside. I came home
one day to my son speaking Japanese better than I could and calling the woman
of the house grandmother and I realized, perhaps erroneously, that I needed to
get the hell out of there. I didn’t know the smallest thing about my son. I was
too busy feeling depressed, alone, victimised and confused. I was suffering the
death blow to my family values. The ideal family was pure fiction inside of my
head. What I had was exactly what I didn’t want. And I was still alive and
thriving and in retrospect, better off than I had been before. I had support,
money and care for my child. But I couldn’t see it at all. I was only feeling
the death toll of another belief system.
The father did not exist.
The family did not exist.
And I was soon to find out, ‘the one’ did
not exist.
This is part of a novella. You can go straight to the beginning here, or go back to the previous post here.
Loss of the belief that there was no God
Journey of the Magi ts eliot
One of the first thoughts that entered my
head was but, how am I going to tell my mother?
We were brought up atheists. My family
laughed at God and made bad Jesus jokes. People who ‘believed’, people who went
to Church, people who changed their behaviour to comply with religious beliefs
were all subject to ridicule for their blatant stupidity.
And here I was, suddenly, with no rational
means to explain what had happened to me, what I felt and saw, what shifted
inside of me, and what it meant to my life. I lost all connection to people
around me who thought in the old way. I lost connection to the old ideas I had.
There was no way to follow back along the tracks when the storm had utterly
destroyed them in its wake.
I lost interest in the things I used to be
interested in. I didn’t care for the music I used to like. I stopped what
little interest in fashion I had. I cared nothing for my hair or face. I was
only interested in discovering a way to fit back into society with the
experience that I had had. I lost
contact points with everyone around me. I was anchor-less and felt I had no
guidance. I was not mature or knowledgeable or confident enough dwell with all
that I had. My mind had already taken over and I was reborn.
I was 21, my life wiped away in a flash,
and I had no purpose whatsoever. But
there was God and the existence of the All in all things and that was that. And
for a very short time, that was enough.
Slowly, I started to reform myself. I
started the inevitable building of myself around this body. I reviewed the past
through washed eyes and I wrote letters of forgiveness and apology. And I knew, in the depth of my being, that
God existed.
God being within and part of all things.
God being All. No thing exists without God. God as alive, awake and Life
itself. A no thing and yet, a some thing that lies within the core of every
thing. One is not different from another.
I realized that because of the enclosed
shell of hate, fear and unhappiness I had built around myself I had cut myself off from the human
experience. I was judgmental, critical and arrogant. I couldn’t find a point of
connection with humanity. Humanity was, for
me, a great mistake. I had believed that humans were basically evil.
They lied, betrayed, killed, stole, cheated and were selfish to the core. I had
watched the news as a teenager and felt that the world was about to explode
with human stupidity at any moment. To maintain any level of sanity, I had to
dissassoiate myself from being human.
At 21 I lived for almost a year as a
caretaker of a farm. I wrote, gardened, took care of dogs, inquired into life
and forgot about the world out there. I needed to get away from people. I
needed to escape from the noise in my own head.
One day, walking the dogs, the dried up
grass gold on the ground, Light struck the top of my head, changing my vision
for ever.
For three days and three nights I was only
light. My vision was clear, my body was nonexistent and I saw beneath the
surface. The top of my head was aglow, burning bright and beyond. And I
experienced, without doubt, down into the cells of my body, out into the
apparent differences in shape and form that we were indeed, all One.
I saw underneath the apparent surface, everything was made up of similar ‘stuff’. This stuff infused all things,
including air, and the space between things. There was no here, there was just
everywhere that existed in one moment. Up close and far away were the same.
Just ever increasing expression of shapes and colours. But we were all the same
stuff. Glowing alive magical stuff.
Loss
I lost my centre. I lost who I thought I
was. Everything was washed away with a light so bright it penetrated every
aspect of my previous self. There was no
me. There was only light.
Loss of identity.
Loss of ideas.
Loss of beliefs.
Loss of ambition.
Loss of purpose.
Loss of all the things that came together
to make me ‘me’. It was gone. There was nothing, at least for those three days.
How many of you value the ability to think
independently? … to feel like you’ve taken the lead…
Archetypically '… gods say to you.. pursue a` reality… that is
independent…’ Jesus’s contract… by getting you strong enough to see, you need
to be born into a family that doesn’t want you.’ - Caroline Myss
‘Sometimes it feels painful, but I promise
you,
the effort of feeling and
allowing feeling,
is
like discovering gold.’ - Tiffany Jones
Of course I cried. I cried bitterly. I was
angry and confused. I felt abandoned and set adrift. I was left where I was not
wanted and I felt defiant to the last.
‘Let everyone suffer.’ I couldn’t
go beyond that.
It was my 14th summer. Some weeks earlier I had been dropped off at my
grandmother’s house with the promise that my father and step-mother would come
pick me up in a week.
It is a phone call I remember etched with
detail; the beige telephone in my left hand, looking into the brightness of the
old fashioned kitchen, my right fingers entangled in the spiralling telephone
cord, the cold bench I leaned upon, the noise from the small TV behind me, the
greasy scalp of my grandfather near my elbow. I was conscious of his withdrawal
and active internal world and knew he wasn’t listening to my responses.
My step mother told me, over the telephone,
that she and my father hadn’t had enough alone time. They had been together for
seven years and they had been surrounded by children; children from their
previous relationships. They had decided
I was to live with my grandparents, and they weren’t coming back.
My father, for the first and last time said
‘I love you’, over the telephone.
All I could feel was a rush of fury towards
my step-mother, coldness quickly followed and then raging disbelief. I remember
saying ‘OK’. I remember being obedient. I remember hanging up the phone and
living through those hours in front my grandparents as if everything was
alright. When I went to the fold out bed set up in the ‘best’ lounge room where
nobody ever sat, I turned my face to the pillow and screamed with rage and
frustration and hate. And I cried bitterly.
And I promised myself not to be hurt again. And to do that, I needed to
hate. And that’s what I did.
On the Subject of Loss
On that day, over 25 years ago, I lost my
father. I lost everything he meant to me. I lost trust, faith and protection. I
lost my idealisation. I lost one of the foundation stones of my belief
system. I lost a story.
I had been a daddy’s girl. He had special
rules. He was a thief and a conman. He stole for a living and he was paranoid
and difficult to live with. He was also charming, personable and he was the
only rule in my life. There were rules
for the inside of the house. There was another set of rules for outside of the house. There were
things we didn’t mention. There were things we didn’t talk about. Intuition was
important and valued. Reading people was important.
Life drained out of me. Everything that had
sustained me thus far in my life, my belief in my father, was taken away from
me. I felt as though I didn’t have anything left. It was certainly death for
me.
Between 14 and 18 I had the most stable
environment I had experienced in my life. I slept in the same bed for four
years. I ate at regular hours. I had a grandmother who cared for me and asked
me how school was. I had a grandfather
who drove me places. I made friends. And I was festering with self-loathing,
bitterness, rage and despair. By 17 I was suffering severe migraines and was on
daily medication to cope with the pain.
At 20, for no apparent reason, I suffered
sciatica so severely I was sometimes unable to walk. Doctors couldn’t find a
reason. Massage and osteopaths didn’t help.
I had cut off my relationships with my high
school friends. I felt like my life was a huge lie. I had never spoken about my
father’s lifestyle to anyone.
Once outside of the structure of high
school and the assumption of University for a bright girl like myself, I was
lost. I didn’t know what to do. I was continually suffering rage, hatred, fear
and confusion.
I decided to move to the country. And I
did. I needed to get away from the maddening crowd. I needed to find answers.
Here I am holding my big sisters' hands in the early 70's.
This is part of a novella. Here is the first exert of The Day My Buddha Burned Ideas like Building Blocks
We are like small children with coloured
building blocks. We sit there totally
absorbed in placing one block on top of another and either because we haven’t
placed our blocks well, or because we get fed up, the blocks fall and quite
happily, and without questioning what we are doing at all, we rebuild. We often
rebuild without seeming to learn anything from the last structure we built. We
build without any view to an end point. We build until it collapses.
And then we start again.
The coloured building blocks are ideas and
belief systems we individually construct within the walls of our minds.
We are all born with the building blocks
before us. Some of the ideas we build are based on the blueprints handed down
to us by our family, friends, society, culture and country, and others are drawn
up in direct consequence of what we have perceived as positive/protective
responses to life’s events.
Deconstruction and re-planning occur in the
teenage years when our hormones coupled with an expansion of perception create
some of the biggest conscious changes we have thus far been aware of. Many
people don’t change their mental landscape again until their retirement.
However, for others, we have been forced by
personality or circumstance, to abandon ideas housed within our minds and
perhaps to put up temporary structures to aid us in different moments in life.
Perhaps some of us can even be called nomads, resting in easily constructed
rooms for comfort and being able to adapt according to the changing seasons.
I’ve written down some of the changes to my
thinking in the past 40 years.
I've been writing this short novel for several years. This is the first instalment. You're welcome to leave comments.
Here I am writing in my journal on a train in India, 2007
This sacred journey through life hits upon
moments of intensity that we know are special, different, as if they’ve been
dabbed with a fluorescent marker, to stand out as important. I’ve written down
a few.
I do believe we’re here to take another
step or two further along the pilgrimage of our soul’s journey. The sacred centers are
those moments that stand out high and above the normal every day scenery and
represent moments of clarity, of learning, of wisdom, choice, power. They are the
sacred centers of our life and sometimes we are so obviously shaken out of the
normal, we know we are in vibrant times, though sometimes we only recognise them
in the hindsight.
