Connectedness

Greetings Dear Friend & Foe,

It has been a while since I posted here - I confess I have been as taken by the woes of the world as a lot of you, and have also - as some of you have shared with me you do as well - felt silenced in many ways.  I do not think remaining silent is good for anyone when noise bubbles up, and I do think that expressing - with no intent to harm - is a well-being-making process.  Here are some thoughts of mine; may you find yours.

People regularly ask when we meet - even facebook asks - what is on our minds. . .

How often do we REALLY answer this - even for ourselves, let alone to share this with our "friends" or the greater world? Today, this task grows ever more difficult, as it becomes a rare thing to trust that even our loved ones will still hold us if we share our views or trials.  We find, rather, that that holding is no longer there simply because we are humans. . . it has become conditional; we must see eye to eye, we must agree on "right" and "wrong", we must vote the same, protest the same, remain silent the same etc etc. in order to be "worthy" of compassion from our fellows.

This, to me, is not life. It is not even the relief of death. Rather it is a no-person's land, a hellish Bardo that somehow all the world has embraced as "normal". But it is not.

And so most of us do not speak what is on our minds (unless in opposition to something some "other" has espoused). Not even to our close friends or family members, as we know/assume/guess that their differences of opinion on some word usage, or global happening will render them unable to see, hear and hold us. We have lost our tribes, and thus desperately seek tribal acceptance by whatever group validates our views.  This is, of course, what is needed to create our acceptance of (and potential participation in) wars.

And yet. And yet it is this very act – the act of trusting another to be there for us – that heals the very fractured and frazzled well-being we all so desperately seek. It is the ability to trust, and be trusted to love and hold sacred one another’s whole being that puts the heart at rest enough (even inf only for a moment around some broken corner where we shield ourselves from harm) that it may send the brain a signal:  “All is well - We are not alone. Whatever the trials, we are not alone.”  This message, and the belief that we can reach an “other” who is truly there, an unconditional love or friendship or kind-strangership, is (at least one aspect of) what sustains our humanity. Without it, without a mirror of hope to remind us we are indeed human, and that others of our ilk exist, we begin to lose that humanity.  It is a rare soul (and yes, they/we DO exist, in the form of hermits of so many sorts, but percentage-wise, they/we are rare) who can maintain a fully open heart WITHOUT the presence of other two-legged beings reciprocating in some authentic form.
 
And so here we are, a society of the walking dying. .. maybe you are not dying physically just yet, but if you are like many people I know, and certainly clients I see, and definitely folks out in the public eye, you, too, are experiencing a sort of inner death on a daily basis.  This is evidenced by a deep sense of “battle fatigue”, by the need to sleep or cry more than you ever had before, by a waning of creative urge, by a sense of distance from places, activities, and people one once felt excited by.  People share with me their feelings of isolation, even among friends and family. They share anger they cannot name the roots of. They share not just sadness or even grief, but a true sense of despair, hopelessness, or maybe the opposite – an unrelenting sense of rage and hyper-activated nervous system that keeps them up at night, causes them to seek ways to “fight back”, to engage anyone who ruffles their feathers, to feel rabidly driven to act. (I am not talking about healthy resistance, but about the inability to lie down, even when ill or physically draining oneself to the point of incapacitation - I am talking about the inability to choose.)
 
And to highlight the illness, many of us feel that it is right and righteous to hate others – as long as we are on “the correct side”. . . (Yes, of course I, too, have my idea of what the “right” side of a given issue is. I, too, have my need to live in alignment with my own integrity. But so far, my experience has been that it is when I am able to hold my deeply felt understanding of the truth – and even with my full dis-agreement with the other person’s experience of the truth – but still not dumping the whole human – that there may be a shift possible.  And this possibility of a shift has never been true when I hold superiority over another.)
 
Whether named as ongoing panic, aching alone-ness, incessant rage, debilitating despair or simply, as one client put it so well, “a sense of 1000 pounds on my chest, that never leaves, no matter what I do or don’t do”, the one thing that we, as human beings have had through the centuries to mitigate such stresses was EACH OTHER.
 
And THAT is exactly what we have, slowly worsening over the past decade or so, deleted from our pantry of well-being supplies.
 
E A C H   O T H E R.
 
We have taken our presence from one another. 
By some odd new sense of righteousness, we have destroyed the threads of trust that we once had at least a hope of; the knowingness that that one friend, or lover, or family member or teacher from 8th grade would listen to and keep us even if we disagreed – that somewhere there was a someone that we could share our true selves with.  When all was lost, maybe I could at least pay a therapist to listen to me.  But now?  Now I am afraid even that therapist may be “on the wrong side” (of whatever I hold so pivotal that I cannot listen to a human who believes “THAT”). . .
 
Yes, we can blame social media or various political standings, or some other agent of decline with whom we have a beef.  But the bottom line is: We chose THE DIVIDE.  (And as I see it, BLAME itself is a major culprit.  Blame makes us victims, not righteous.  But that may be for another conversation in and of itself. . .)
 
. . . And this means, if we dare and if we can step beyond the current conditioned response, that we CAN choose something bigger than the divide.
 
I will not extrapolate on what The Bigger Thing might be – that is for each to discover for themselves – for YOU to discover for YOURSELF.  The only thing I will say is that if whatever you are seeing as The Bigger Thing does not offer room to rise above ANY human foible, it still has room to grow, and necessarily must, if we are to mend.
 
This path is – obviously – not for everyone.  And this idea will,  I am fairly certain, be in itself a divide that may not be bridgeable for all. But it is most surely open to all. And this is an invitation. Not from me – no – I am just, as they say, “another Bozo on the bus”.  But, fellow humans, it is a bus with no fare, other than the ability to stretch beyond judgement, to stretch beyond our amygdala/fight-flight-fawn-freeze brain's rule. it is a bus that invites us not to  make-exceptions-for, but rather to do-the-work-of-healing the traumas that put us in boxes.  This bus ride invites all of us to find our way out of whatever labels we have put upon ourselves (whether we like or dislike those labels), as we can never dislodge our need to label OTHERS if we do not dislodge our self-labeling addiction). 
I am aware that this concept will likely trigger a lot of my beloved fellow humans.  You need not agree, but I share that in my view, triggers are beautiful opportunities to self-investigate and heal, so we may become agents of transformation of those things that we see as disturbing, rather than victims of them.
 
PS: I am not advocating for supporting those who do harm. However, one thing I do know is that no one ever sees more light while being dissed, dumped, dehumanized.  If you are in a situation you cannot handle, yes, you must take care of yourself in whatever way you are able. But our common default of “unfriending” is much overused. And in the bigger picture, is causing us all – both the unfriended AND the unfriend-er – harm.

SIDE NOTE: My work in hospice, and ongoingly with the grieving, requires of me that I be present with people of every walk of life.  A thing some people may not know, is that in the end, many, if not most, people become angels of a sort.  Often, they cannot express this to those closest to them - perhaps we as people trapped in our sense of personhood feel obligated to maintain our views and "stances" with those we care about, to keep fighting back against those we love so as - perhaps - to maintain our "who-ness" with them . . . but that same "belligerent old auntie", when sitting with someone who is present only with them in the current moment, holding no ideas, judgements, history upon them, may open like a book of Light; expressing things their family never heard, releasing old stories or even deeply held beliefs from life.

One family member declared, after a visit I had with her father (known to her, and those around him, his entire, life as an abusive, atheistic, hateful human being) the day before his death, "Who IS he? I have never heard him say such words in my life! He was neither loving nor spiritual - is he the same person?" 
This man had shared that day that that his description of "spirituality" was "unconditional love", that his wish was to be forgiven, and that he would like an appropriate  "spiritual" song to be sung to him. As I sang (and I am no singer, so it was not myself who precipitated his reaction, but rather, I believe, the fact that no one was judging him in that moment - we were all just making space for him to BE, free from preconceived ideas of who he had been - and open to who was at this, his deepest and most vulnerable moment) - as I sang, he closed his eyes, drifted off, with tears rolling down his cheeks and a slight smile on his face.  There was healing there, in his heart and his whole family - his sons, who had never met without a fist-fight, expressed that perhaps they had never really known their father, and that his "change" inspired them to see if they, too, might find another way of being - maybe even before they each faced their own ends-of-life.  We may each be stuck were we seem to be stuck - but often we cannot know of another's potential to change, discover or reveal an unexpected aspect of  self as long as our own behavior continues to support the friction between us.
One of the fastest ways to heal lack of trust is to Be Trustworthy. Find someone who needs assistance with something you can be present with – with anything at all – but the bigger the issue the better – and help them.  Even and especially if they believe different things than you.
 
Hearts, minds, bodies and souls heal from connection. (yes, sometimes disconnecting is an important part of healing - but once we are well, that need to disconnect becomes a smaller part of a larger overview. . . What is true for you? 
(Side hint: I love you whatever it may be. Must I LIKE your path to love your greater soul and potential for healing? Nope.)
 
People - and even facebook - ask “what’s on your mind”.
There you have it, for today, at least.
I shared it: Our daily-dying-through-lack-of-compassion-and-connection. That’s what.
 
All Blessings of Well-Being 
& Much Love
to All (and a special dose to ye who may still choose to enemize myself or others),

Rev. Maya

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I discovered this lovely image that to me expresses a form of CONNECTION  - joining in an activity - from the blog of Cara Lumen.  (I do not necessarily agree with all of this blogger's content, but certainly appreciate much of it! ) You might want to take a look - it is not far from the topic of my post!