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This is the center of the universe at this moment unless you’re looking in another direction, or are thinking about something from a long time ago, in which case it will wait quietly right here until you return.
~StoryPeople
I’ve been thinking a lot lately on something someone rather wise told me. He said that where there was complete understanding there would be no need for forgiveness. I’ve been mulling this one over and this is what I’ve found, so far….
In every instance in which I’ve had a hard time forgiving, or in which I am still currently stuck on not being able to forgive (or being able to forgive completely), I realize that I do not completely understand: the situation; the other persons motives; my own motives; or the past history of any of the parties (including myself) in which something hurtful/harmful has occured or in which a mistake was made. And furthermore, within the constructs of my most personal relationship [my marriage], as my understanding of my partner and his history has grown, I have found forgiveness and compassion where I thought there was no chance of finding it.
This does not mean that I am suddenly able to trust.
No, forgiveness does not mean that we suddenly embrace the person who hurt us. It could very well be that this person is going to continue their hurtful behavior. They could be abusive even. Just because you forgive someone does not mean that you’re a doormat or going to stay with them. That’s not a healthy way to live. But forgiveness allows us to heal. It allows us to see clearly again, past our hurt and brings us into the present and from here we can make choices based on what our particular set of circumstances presents us with.
In my world I am paying close attention to both myself and the other, whomever that may be in any situation. If I am angry, I check in to see just what it is that I am angry about. It’s usually quite justifiable and can often be rectified by simply setting boundaries for myself and others. If someone does something that is hurtful, I try my best to figure out just where they were coming from. Sometimes that can be a very challenging thing to do. Sometimes I find that where they are coming from looks nothing like my universe at all. Often times I find that even though they may be totally wrong about something, if I saw the world through the same glasses as they did I’d probably be doing the same thing that they’re doing. It’s quite amazing really…and when I can understand where they’re at I suddenly no longer even feel the need to forgive. I understand, and it really is as simple as that.
That doesn’t mean I’ll continue to subject myself to “xyz” but it has, every time, made a noteable shift in how I feel about whatever happened.
What about those times when we can’t find understanding though? When there’s not enough history or the person has shut the door and there’s no more dialog, no way to find out where they were coming from and all you can do is guess…but not ever really know?
I don’t have a quick and easy answer to that. All I’ve been able to do in those situations is just dig down deep inside myself to fully understand my own hurt…and then take the steps to find closure and healing for myself. After all, our best chance at fully understanding anyone is in understanding our own selves first, the good, the bad and the not so pretty.
P.S. This sorta leads me into a ramble about compassion but I’ll save that for another time…
This is Flower Oval Ice Cream. She is the newest addition to Emma’s family of not-real-but-getting-there animals. She came in from a dear friend of my husband’s and she is much loved already. If she gets dirty she’ll likely take a spin through the washer and perhaps an airfluff or two in the dryer.
This is Hooter. She came with the husband. She is not as cuddly as Flower Oval Ice Cream but she has a much louder purr (when she feels like purring that is). Hooter is NOT washable or dryable.
Hooter will be 14 years old this summer and though I admit to often fantasizing about a life without Hooter (she can be totally psychotic and miserable) I’m glad she survived her near fatal encounter with the clothes dryer. Seems my lectures about staying away from the dryer went totally unheeded by her (surprise-surprise). The door wasn’t open but five minutes and she had climbed in with a load of not-quite-yet-dry towels (Ooooh, facial anyone?). I had intended to come back and pull all the towels out to fold them but before I could do so my husband had gotten to them. Feeling that some of them were still damp he closed up the door and hit the button. I heard a “thump-thump” and then a “HOOTER!” I hobbled out to the kitchen as quickly as I could with a sinking feeling in my stomach. Somehow, she was miraculously okay but a bit shaken up (as were we all).
I lost a kitten years ago to a dryer incident. A gorgeous five-toed loud-coloured calico called Screaming Meme (because she was always talking). She had to be one of the coolest kittens we’d ever had. I’ve been a bit fanatical about the dryer door ever since then.
Darn cat…she’s going to start my OCD over the laundry all over again. ;)
“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”
~Anna Freud
Survive - I’m a survivor and I’m surviving once again.
Confession – It’s been almost a year already since I crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed.
Rephrased - It’s only been a year since a line was crossed that shouldn’t have been crossed.
To clarify - It’s only been a year since I had a sexual encounter with my therapist/spiritual teacher.
It still hurts in this really deep-deep-down-heart-aching way.
For the longest time I thought that the whole affair really only affected me. Lately I can see how it’s had a profound effect on nearly everyone in my life, in one way or another; my husband and daughter being the most noteable.
I’ve withdrawn from my family and many of my friends. I’ve been mindful of keeping and recruiting a support network and I know I am not alone, but somedays I’m much better at reaching out than others and lately I’ve been holing up again.
I still have a lot of anger and grief. I don’t subscribe to “everything happens for a reason” so please don’t go quoting some idealistic “you’ll be stronger for it” peptalk. I learned a valuable lesson for certain…but that doesn’t mean ‘I asked for it’. I didn’t ask for this and had boundaries been created and proper therapy/teaching been in place I could have learned what I needed without so much pain.
It’s got me to thinking a lot about what can be done to help prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. The man I had been seeing isn’t actually a licensed therapist, though he led us to believe he was, telling us to have him added to our provider list but then never calling my husband back after repeated requests (the insurance company couldn’t find any record of ”Michael Dean Goodman” being licensed in the State of Florida). Such was the state of our marriage (and hence my seeking out couples counseling) that I believed the therapist rather than my own husband. I thought my husband was just being difficult and was not open to therapy. When I asked the therapist about it I was told to “stay out of it”.
I had sought out this man because he was said to be alternative lifestyle/kink friendly. I was (and still am in certain ways) attracted to a very strong polarity dynamic in a relationship (also known as Dominance/submission) and was also seeking out ways to have pain inflicted upon my body. I wanted to better understand the reasons for these urges and I wanted help for my marriage which was nearly shattered at that time. It wasn’t long before I was placing my therapist in that empty masculine position in my life. It’s completely natural…they even have a name for it called “transference”. And yes, I became quite infatuated with him.
I read back over our corresondence and I remember bits of conversations that we had. I told him how I felt. He lives several states away and the counseling sessions were done via phone. Perhaps he felt safe because of the distance…
It escalated. He would tell me what to do during therapy and I would turn into a gooey mess. He knew. I told him. I wrote hundreds of emails. He knew. Perhaps he thought he was doing some great thing by using his dominant nature to get me to open up…
I started to feel like I belonged to him.
I started to believe that he could show me the white light.
I started to believe that only he could show me the white light…
Forgetting…forgetting….
We started talking of spiritual things - experiences that I was having; levels of consciousness; meditation; ayurvedic living. I started thinking of him as “Guru”. I was so hungry for Guru that I didn’t listen to my Self.
It is no good to see the light if you can’t see the dark – no good to embrace the brilliance if you can’t dance with the shadow.
Now, there are medical boards and state licensure requirements for all who practice medicine; people you can call if there is a malpractice; consequences for crossing ethical boundaries. There are no such measures in place for those who practice spiritual teaching as their trade. Who do you call? Outside of having the money to hire an attorney (because you’re unlikely to get one to take the case without a big retainer unless your teacher is effluent) you’re on your own.
Yet, so many teachings urge us to find a guru and follow them implicitly. How is it that this tradition has been handed down for so many lifetimes? It works of course, when all goes well but the risk is so high.
Well, one must have good powers of discernment (which is something I think is sorely lacking here in the western world and is something that I’m still working on myself) but also and perhaps more so I think it comes down to community. We are so isolated, even in our big cities with millions of people. We are so alone and transplanted and lacking the safety of community. Community knows. You can’t get away with much in Community without being found out.
They aren’t kidding with that whole Six Degrees of Separation thing. It’s often even less than that.
And then of course, we need to speak up for ourselves. The only thing worse than crossing those ethical boundaries is keeping quiet about it so that they can be crossed again.
I’m not quite sure what my voice is going to sound like or the ripple effect it may or may not have, but I know the answer for me and the future is community. If we can make the time to build and maintain supportive spiritual communities then there won’t be so many that will suffer harm at the feet of an unethical guru and likewise, such a teacher would have the opportunity to correct his or her behavior (possibly even before great harm was done) and they could look into their dark side more completely to work on their own attachments.
After all, we’re all human…
And that’s not something I’m likely to go forgetting ever again…
I wonder if…
…it takes more trust than courage to lay bare your ugly secrets.
Perhaps it depends on just what those secrets are…
And perhaps who you’ve been hiding them from…
And what the cost is of being found out…
Of course, one could just not do things that one has to hide…
But when you’re looking backward it’s always so much clearer isn’t it?
Here’s hoping that my ugly isn’t ‘over the limit’…
And here’s to not hiding anymore…
…it’s too warm up there and the chocolate gets all soft and squishy.
I got me some butterfly wings so I can fly, fly, fly…
And catch myself some dreams.
I got me some butterfly dreams…
That I can hold onto when things seem but not seem.
He huffs and puffs and makes a lot of noise…
But the walls fall down of their own accord.
“Watch out for the bees…
Sometimes they sting.”
“Blah, blah, blah, Humpty-Dumpty,” she sings.
I got me some butterfly wings so I can fly, fly, fly…
And catch the stars that she weaves.
And she learned the hard way to not play with the bumbles…
“It’s a noble thing… to try to improve yourself but my view of you is that you’re quite remarkable already. So, while I think trying to improve yourself is just fine, thinking you’re not okay isn’t,” he said.
At this point my head started to spin. It finally made sense and it’s not like I haven’t been told this sort of thing before…I’d just never thought of it quite like that. I’ve always thought that if I was working on changing (a/k/a improving) that it must be because something was wrong.with.me. I’ve been trying to fix something that was “broken”, not just trying to improve on something that’s existing.
Talk about a tough place to start – broken person trying to fix the broken person. If only I could find the right button, lever, etc., I could fix everything. But I’ve been looking for years. 10 years to be exact.
Perhaps, just perhaps….there’s nothing broken.
This doesn’t mean that I can’t work on myself…
But it does mean that I’m okay.
That really feels like a novel idea.
I’m okay.
“Remarkable” even.
Imagine that.
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”
~M. Oliver
On this last day at home I again realize just how much I hate saying goodbye. Not that I didn’t know this fact before but today there were more goodbyes than I could hardly handle. I chickened out on a few of them even, letting a phone call be sufficient (even though it wasn’t really) because I simply needed more distance. Too many goodbyes in too short a time span. This is the part of my vacations back home that I dread.
There’s one side of my family that doesn’t say goodbye at all. They say, “We’ll see ya’ when we see ya’.” Not a bad way to go really…but it doesn’t make it easier to leave, it just makes it easier to say the words.
One thing about saying all these goodbyes though…it really puts “goodbyes” into perspective.
It makes me think about how long some people have been in my life, many for my entire nearly 31 years.
Everyone leaves at some point…
But the people who really matter never really leave…
“Who was that lady Mommy?”
“What lady babes?”
“That lady standing at the end of the shed…”
“I don’t remember seeing her sweetie…what did she look like?”
“She’s got a red shirt and brown, no, red hair and she’s talkin’ about sumpthin’ to somebody.”
There was no lady at Grandpa’s house…and she didn’t ask me about anyone when we were outside, only after she’d seen a picture of my grandparents, the black and white portrait from when they were first married…
“Who’s that Mommy?”
“That’s my Grandpa and Grandma.”
“Where’s Grandma?”
“She’s not with us anymore.”
“Is she dead?”
“Yeah sweets, she died.”
My little girl often sees things that I can’t see.
“Here, let me move this,” my aunt said as she went to pick up Grandma’s ashes to move them out of the room we were going to be sleeping in.
“No, that’s okay,” I told her.
“Really?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “I really like sleeping with Grandma.”
And I do. It’s comforting to me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get so bothered when we were sorting out her old jewelry…it was like I could feel her smiling at us all as we handled the bits and pieces.
This trip has given me a lot of insights and perspective on my life and my family. It’s going to take a bit of time to process it all but it’s been good stuff, even the hard and uncomfortable bits. And it’s been really good for me to be able to step outside of my own life and just be with my family. Being busy enough to just ‘be’, if that makes sense. The clarity comes on it’s own, when it’s time…
I’ve had some big hurts of late, stuff I have to get back to processing and sorting and putting away and letting go of once I get back to my everyday life…but it doesn’t seem quite so big a task now. I’m back to knowing what and who is really important to me. Anything and anyone else will have to fit in with that, let alone want to be there as much as I want them to be there. I’ve been neglectful of the truly important ‘things’ for far too long.
Tomorrow I have two more goodbyes. My grandmother on my mother’s side (who’s getting pretty up there in years now) and my mother.
Two more goodbyes…and then a new hello.
And not just to my husband, but also to the girl in the mirror.
“Being in love is likely to tear you into bits; but this has its creative possibilities also. If you maintain the strength and courage, out of this dismemberment may come a new consciousness of uniqueness and worth. That is a very difficult way to go, but perhaps there is no other way for some temperaments. It seems to be our chief western way of reconnecting with the archetypal energies that we call gods or goddesses.
The best way to solve this dilemma is to stand absolutely still, and that is what Psyche finally does. Once she gets past her suicidal feeling, she sits very quietly. If you have been dazzled out of your wits, if you have been knocked totally out of orbit, it is best to keep very still. This is the moment in the Christian liturgy of the Eucharist when, “Here we offer and present unto Thee ourselves…a living sacrifice.”
A woman has a profound capacity to be still, perhaps the most powerful act any human being can make. She is required to go back to a very still inner center every time something profound happens to her. This is a highly creative act but must be done correctly. She is to be receptive, not passive.”
~Passage from “She” by Robert A. Johnson.
Just something I’m chewing over, not just as it applies towards love but the loss of love and any major catalyst-type event.
Sitting still…but not being passive or fatalist.
From the center
All I see is love
From the center
Love is all I am
From the center…
But the hurt at the edges keeps distracting me and I find myself at the bottom of the well, wondering what I did ‘wrong’.
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