Flow is my Father; Love is my Mother

As I move through this strange bewildering journey called life, I deal continuously with the cards dealt me in my family of origin. Looking at the shadow tendencies in my life, I see echos of my parents still affecting my decisions and attitudes. My father spent much of my childhood in depression, and my mother in bitterness that he was not what she had wanted or expected.

Often I have looked for the redeeming qualities in them; and there are some for which I am grateful. But lately, I have asked, what are the qualities I have learned from life that gave me birth as a spiritual being, that fathered and mothered this new phase of my life where I live so much richer than before?

Flow has been a critical lesson for me. Instead of demanding the universe be a certain way to meet my expectations, and becoming passive when it does not, I have slowly let go of my insistence, and have learned to flow with the stream of life. It is a dance - I desire certain things, and the universe likewise has its tendencies; together, if we dance and flow, we affect each other, and an ease develops where there is a sense of fitting together, a sense of companionship. Flow is what allows me to take action in the world without cursing the failures nor insisting on impossibilities.

Likewise, love, in the form of acceptance, has been equally critical. I am learning day by day to take everything I find inside me - every nasty thought, egotistical desire, grumpy stinginess, and fearful withdrawal - and look at it with gentleness, like an unruly child whom I love no matter what he does. Once that unruly part of me starts to feel loved and accepted, there is a melting and a sharing of the secrets that has been keeping him fighting me. There is that sense of safety, of home, where you truly cannot do anything wrong.

So, flow and love are my true parents - the reaching out and the reaching in, the masculine and feminine, the creativity and the vulnerability - they are replacing the very imperfect forms that introduced me to life. Maybe the purpose of my original parents was simply to hand me over to better parents when the right time came.


Comment posted by
at 12/26/2006 8:31:30 PM
This post has a very nice poetic flow. Rather than focus on concrete actions or specific examples, the post gives me a more visceral feel for how you are integrating the legacy of your parents. You are healing their emotional impact from one level up; from a level that is more symbolic and embracing rather than specific and linear. Kind of like the healing we may experience in dreams where the impact can bypass the logical mind and be felt on a deeper, more somatic level. The poetic/symbolic/transpersonal and rational minds work together to create integrated healing.


Comment posted by
at 12/26/2006 6:39:51 PM
It is less about redefining my birth parents, and more about seeing flow and love as my parents, guiding me towards a life that is richer and more satisfying than what I had before. I have often approached life from the attitudes that my parents unwittingly taught me, but am slowly learning to adopt these new attitudes as guiding wisdom.

I find it hard to reject my parents’ attitudes, despite their obvious harm - it feels as if I am rejecting my parents themselves. And in a way, I am - I am leaving the familiar attitudes of home and choosing a new way with no memories to guide me. Part of growing up, I guess.


Comment posted by
at 12/26/2006 6:21:10 PM
I had a chance to read your Christmas post about flow and love. It sounds like your journey towards self acceptance is finding a self definition,

I got a little bit lost in the theory, though. Which part is something you are experiencing in yourself? which part is what you are experiencing from others, if any? It seems like you are redefining the roles you have learned about your birth parents, your mother’s bitterness and your father’s victim mode of resentment. Like maybe you believed, at some time, that this was the way the world was. And maybe you are looking at them differently? Or are you finding substitutes for what you really wanted? Or are you finding the love and flow from an internal source to nurture your own child? I am confused about what you might be saying here.

I hope you don’t mind sharing more - this is a bigger picture than you usually write about your own inner world, I think.

Humility

Humility - an old-fashion word, and not very popular today. For me, it brings up images of self-degredation, or lack of pride in onesself. “Humble yourselves”, in the religion of my childhood, was synonymous with denying what you knew was right in favor of someone who had authority to tell you what the truth was.
Yet we also lose something without this word in our vocabulary. What do we do when we fail at our own values? There are things we believe in, ways we want to live, values we want to measure up to - and as humans, there will be times we fail, when we act in ways we are not proud of, when we do not act like the person we want to be. What is our attitude towards ourselves when we fail?

Well, we can get out our affirmations and psych ourselves up, memorizing statements about how worthy we are, reminding ourselves of the good things we’ve done, and how we will do better next time. Or we can beat ourselves up, repeating critical voices of the past that would have us believe we barely deserve life for the atrocity we’ve committed.

But humility can provide an attitude that is both realistic as well as loving, by acknowledging our weaknesses. We don’t always have the strength of will or presence of mind to live the way we want to live. We can recognize that we are people who cannot always do it alone, that we need the strength and support of others who believe in us. In short, to have humility is the recognition of who we are - not who we want to be, nor who we fear we might be - but simply who we are, with our strengths and weaknesses, successes and failings.

Humility is next to compassion - if we cannot see our weaknesses clearly and without distortion, without shame and without excuses, we cannot have compassion for ourselves. Nor can we truly have compassion for others’ weaknesses if we harbor shame of our own.

We are unfathomably glorious yet terribly fragile creatures, living in a world that, despite the risk, we have to trust.

Remembering Home

At birth, we wake up to find ourselves incarnate - we discover we are in a new body, surrounded by a new world of strange sensations. All of childhood, we are pushing away the cobwebs of sleep, trying to be fully present and understand this strange place which for a few decades will be our home. Flashes of what came before this life quickly fade, and we are swept away in the drama of being human.

But occassionally, our previous life laughs at us from behind a shadow, or sparkles at us in a glint of sunlight. We ponder who we are apart from the perspective of a body walking on a planet. We get glimpses of ourselves, and others, from some more universal perspective, that we can occassionally reach out of the whirlpool of feelings, desires, pleasures, and sufferings of this life.

Sometimes we become vaguely aware of the dream - the illusions we live in, that we are the center of the world, or the victim, or the lost child, or the one who can solve everyone’s problems. Sometimes we start to notice the props off the side of the stage, or get a glimpse of the audience behind the footlights. Sometimes we have the sudden feeling that everything is set up, and everyone is following some role. Sometimes we notice that a director is prompting our next lines, rather than us choosing what to say and do.

And that is the moment we can ask, if our life is a drama, who is it who got the role? What motivates the actor to take on this life? What is the actor’s true nature outside of this 80-year drama? Who was he before, and who will he be after? And who is he now, in between the moments when he says his lines with such passion that we think it is real?

How many times have these same lines been said in show after show? How many times have the same crucial emotions run their course through endless shows? This cannot be who we are. Can we wake up before the play ends? Can we wake up to the fact that our lines were written by someone else, and we have yet to speak what is true for us?

Somewhere, deep within, is the memory of what came before all this began. Somewhere, there is a place where we will laugh gaily at how we could have forgotten so completely for so long. Somewhere, our true home awaits.


Comment posted by
at 12/4/2006 9:49:44 PM
JUST A DAY AGO I FIND MYSELF POSTING TO A FRIEND HOW TO EXPERIENCE DIRECT REALITY. AND AS YOU HAVE ALLUDED TO YOUR DRAMA ANALOGY, I HAVE TO SAY THAT TRUTH LIES IN THE KNOWING THAT WE CAN SEE OURSELVES PARTICIPATING IN THIS PLAY IN A WAY THAT MIGHT SEEM FIT. WE WILL PLAY DREAM THE OUTCOME. AND IN THE END IF THIS OUTCOME DOES NOT FIT, WE JUST WALK AWAY DISAPPOINTED BUT HOPEFULLY STILL WITH OURSELVES INTACT. AND WE PROCEED TO THE NEXT PLAY UNTIL WE CAN FIND THAT WHICH TRULY FEELS LIKE WE HAVE COME TO A PLACE WHERE WE CAN FEEL WARM AND COZZY. LIKE BEING IN THE MOTHER’S WOMB. BEFORE THE DRAMA BEGAN. I WONDER IF THIS IS WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT.

Changes

Well, a new look for my blog, and a new software package behind it.  Also, a new feeling of growth and change springing up from within, and a new desire to share it with others.

I ponder my fate as someone with deep mood shifts - these past few months have been hard ones for me.  I think I experience life more acutely than some - both the ups and the downs.  And if I believe that life is ultimately more about joy than pain, then there is a net gain from being a moody person (although, don’t ask me to verify that when I am down!)

Pathwork says our choice is not whether to feel pain or pleasure - our choice is whether or not to feel.  We can either live life numb, or we can scream from both the agony and the ecstasy.  What a choice!  But it seems I really don’t have much of a choice, as I seem to have been born this way.

So, I am alive, some healing and new lessons have come my way, and I look forward to sharing more with all of you in the upcoming weeks.

Comment posted by
at 12/4/2006 1:09:22 AM

Also I like the changes and improvements to your blog, Gene. Now I can reply without being called “Anonymous”. Andy

Comment posted by
at 12/4/2006 1:06:11 AM

It’s good to hear what you both have to say, Gene and Heidi. I look forward to our next get-together at Gene’s, whenever that may be. Andy

Comment posted by
at 12/3/2006 5:39:18 AM

Gene,

What you are saying sounds so familiar to me. I sometimes read what I wrote a few days or months or even a year ago, and it is like I was a different person with different feelings - my mood shifts and ultimately my perspective had shifted. I’m glad I have my own words to validate my own patters. Because I forget how good something felt when I’m down and I forget how badly I felt before when I am feeling really happy.

And at other times, when I feel fresh and excited about a new inner break-through, I go back to see the same pattern in old writings. I’d written all these “new” discoveries in myself before. I see the same struggling passion voiced long ago when I think it is all brand new today.

I feel, today, that I have made real progress. I feel like I am a different person from it - I truly believe in it, deeply. Yet, I read the same passages I wrote a few years ago - the same feeling; like new discoveries and new changes in my patterns made me new — I am puzzled and sometimes discouraged by this counter-discovery in myself.

Is it illusion that I find myself a new person today? Am I fooling myself? Had I forgotten those lessons I learned so long ago and am I re-learning them all over again today?

Or is there yet another new (if only subtle) shift within me that is truly new again?

I don’t have answers to what is really going on inside of myself.

But I’ve been aware that I have a strange pattern seeking and finding wonderful insights. I think, re-reading my own writings and learning how my patterns work is enlightening in itself - perhaps that is part of the change, part of the new person I become. Just knowing that I probably have been here before at a different time and space in my life.

Maybe that’s what you are saying here, too, when you talk about pondering your fate.

Maybe some of us build a life of unique patterns. Maybe knowing ourselves is to know our own patterns without fixing them, just knowing them and living them for the way we are designed to be. (And that “knowing” in itself, is a huge shift in and of itself, maybe?)

I was only going to make a short comment, but your blog got me thinking, so I’ll go ahead and post this part, if it’s ok with you?