The holiday period can be confronting. Obligated to ‘enjoy’ ourselves, we can find ourselves in a raw state of exactly the opposite. Family time can confront us with loneliness; revelry can bring forward the dark spaces beyond the reach of merriment; the spirit of gratitude can shed light on all those areas inside ourselves where we might feel disappointed in life.
In the midst of entanglement and the intertwined social fields of projection, there is a simple trick that can bring great insight. The voice inside our heads loves to structure feelings and emotions with statements and beliefs. In this, it divides us, again and again, from our environment. For example, it might be repeating: “Nobody wants me”; or, (seeming to come from the outside), “I’m going to kill you.” These negative mantras can be intoxicating and perhaps even annoying, so try this out, to deepen through the film of mind into some insight into the heart.
When we are able to remove the pronouns: “I, You, They, We, She, He, Everybody, Nobody” from the voice in the head, we are left with the energetic soul of the thought – the fuel that lights the flame. For example, “She hates me”, becomes just: “hate”. Naming hate as hate has the effect of opening compassion. There is nothing that needs to be defended anymore, it’s just a stinging kind of suffering in the system. The thought: “You’re killing me.” becomes just “killing” – an unanchored phenomena of suffering. Violence – as a resonance between us as one humanity. The thought “Nobody Loves me”, robbed of pronouns, leaves just love. Let the love be alive where it can only live, in the heart of all you are.
The ability to hold space for areas of suffering is a tremendous gift to ourselves and others. Beyond identification, and the arbitrary, mental allocation of suffering as “yours” and “mine”, there is energy in contraction, awaiting release. It is the very dispossession that robs it of mercy. Awareness is a tremendous healer, but she can only do her work when we disarm the thinking processes that launch the language of violence into the gap of separation between one person and the next.
Pain is pain. Hatred is hatred. Killing is killing. Love is love. It never needed to be allocated or shared out – especially not by a wounded set of neural networks running old problems of survival that are no longer relevant to the miraculous, pulsating present moment.
