Healing Within the Blur

“A night full of talking that hurts,
my worst held-back secrets. Everything
has to do with loving and not loving.
This night will pass.
Then we have work to do.”  Rumi poem translated by Coleman Barks

Thinking about “a night full of talking that hurts,” and the difficulty in knowing how best to proceed with the work by day, I continue to try to find the words and images that can guide us to the discovery of the disconnect and the return of felt relationship with the lost others within. This level of recovery, evidenced in one’s increasing capacity to re-member painful relational failures, with their depth of emotion, is necessary to being seen. As long as one is hiding something from one’s self, others will be suspicious about what is really going on behind the mask, wall, protesting, denial.

Getting back into the boat consciously is about choosing to prepare one’s self for dropping into original scenes of overwhelm, with enough support to enable us to tell the story with the full range of emotion. This can occur spontaneously with the help of our inner guide, who holds us and helps us bare witness of the episode; more often, it can occur in unusual openings, as in “a night full of talking that hurts.” Therapy is one place to practice finding these openings and dropping into the emotional connection and flow of water that seems to come with healing the split.

In terms of practical applications, paying attention to the dream time is a great way to explore the possibility the guiding Self within is real and at the ready to help us integrate the entire life trajectory. Compiling an inventory of known episodes of upset is a simple way to catalogue specific scenes of relational failings which, averaged and generalized over time, comprise the Experiential State. In her work with Skeleton Woman I believe Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls these archaic wounds to loving stories.

This entry was posted on March 3, 2016 at 11:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.