I’m editing a fascinating book about judgment. I can’t quote from it because, hi, it’s unpublished and also not my writing, but I can talk about the general ideas and also quote from others.
My client makes the case that when we judge other people, it’s often because we aren’t tending to the vulnerable parts of ourselves. The parts that need to be met with love and care. For instance, if I say, “He’s so lazy,” it’s likely there’s a part of me that’s sad because I long to rest. But instead of holding that grief – that I desire to rest and feel unable to do so – I’m projecting and calling that man lazy. And judgment of any kind, toward others or the self, breaks connection with our own heart, to paraphrase Tara Brach.
Why does that matter? The older I get and the deeper I go into spirituality, the more I understand that enlightenment is not only living in the light. It’s going into the shadows. It’s descending into the metaphorical underworld to rescue the parts of ourselves that we’ve exiled. The ones who are scared. The ones who are ashamed. The ones who feel unlovable. Writer and spiritual teacher Jeff Foster Brown says: “Real spirituality is all about ‘enrealment’ – it includes everything human in the equation. The real now is the one that includes everything we left behind on the path. We must work through our story before the unresolved elements of our story kill us.”
Meeting the Self is one the hardest and most healing things we can do. Photo by Михаил Секацкий on Unsplash
The unresolved elements of our story remain unresolved until we face them. It’s the low hum of anxiety in the background, even though on paper everything looks fine. It’s the vaguely dissatisfying nature of our relationships. It’s the knowledge that we could be doing so much more but we’re not. You could live your whole life like that, and many people do. But regardless, these feelings are symptoms; they are an invitation to meet your Self.
Psychotherapist Matt Licata wrote:
“The invitation is into intimate communion: to move closer, and even closer still, into the feelings, the emotions, and the sensations as they surge. To surround the surging material with curiosity, warmth, and most importantly with kindness, as an inner explorer of the galaxy of your own body, of which there is no temple more sacred.”
So many people try to escape themselves – into the arms of another person, via the bottom of a bottle, through the excitement of a video game – but it doesn’t work long term. Speaking as an addict in recovery, I know from experience. I have the receipts. But my whole life got so much better – richer, fuller, more joyful – when I stopped running and met my Self. You might be saying, “That’s so vague. What does it even mean?”
I can’t condense nearly two decades of personal development into a single blogpost but if you’re interested in meeting your Self, and I recognize you may not be, a good place to start is with a timer.
When I was early in recovery, feeling my feelings was like being flayed alive. It was excruciating. Deeply painful. Scary. Feeling my feelings was the last thing I wanted to do! What if they never ended? What if I was sad/scared/angry forever?!? What helped was setting a timer. For five minutes, I let myself feel whatever I was feeling and after the five minutes (that usually turned into 10), I would stop. The feelings had a beginning and an end. When the timer rang, I could go on with my day. That was the beginning of meeting myself.
As my client emphasizes, healing happens with presence – not trying to fix, change, or solve anything. Just presence. Just being with. And we don’t need to wait for someone else to do that, we can give presence to ourselves. And the more we are present with ourselves, the more we are present with others. The more we meet ourselves, the more we can meet our true selves as divine beings of light. And that’s something I wish for everyone.
I dream of a world where we understand judgment is a protection mechanism. A way of not tending to the ones inside. A world where we see these judgments as invitations to turn inward. A world where we commune with the entirety of who we are because we understand enlightenment is about enrealment. A world where we are brave enough to meet ourselves.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
Last week, I wrote about the death of a colleague. In addition to grieving, I’m learning a lot about intimacy.
So often when I think about intimacy, it’s in the context of a romantic relationship, but the truth is, intimacy is not confined to a romantic partner. Real intimacy is like unzipping yourself and displaying your insides, and that can be done with anyone, something I’ve witnessed in this process.
As I share the news about my co-worker’s death, people react in different ways. Some people allow me to cry without offering a diversion or attempting to fix it. Other people become discomfited and say a quick, “I’m sorry,” before moving on to another topic. I’m not deriding people for their reactions – people are where they’re at and will respond how they do. What I notice though is in order to share my feelings with someone else, to be intimate with them, I have to acknowledge my feelings first. If I’m uncomfortable feeling sad, there’s no way I can share that with someone else because I’m shutting the feelings down internally. Someone else may be more than willing to share and connect with me, but if I’m not connected to myself, no one else can connect with me either.
As with most things, intimacy is an inside job.
We hear often, “You can’t give what you don’t have,” but I’m a concrete gal and I like examples. As an example, if someone asked me for oranges right now, I’d have to shake my head and say, “Sorry, I don’t have any.” Similarly, I can’t give intimacy if I don’t have it internally.
We think of intimacy and love as “out there,” something to find or force. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve complained about certain men in my life, lamenting that they’re not opening up, as if they were clams I could pry open. I’ve craved intimacy, but it’s only been within recent years I’ve created it internally by embracing all of my emotions. By giving myself space to feel.
Love and intimacy get presented as if we could walk into a store and buy them. We don’t realize intimacy is something we create, something we work on internally. I could be in relationship with the most amazing person, someone who loves intimacy, but if I’m not in touch with my own feelings, if I’m not allowing myself to feel them, we won’t have intimacy. It will be like talking to a brick wall. I say this because that’s also been my experience in grieving. When I share my insides with people who are discomfited, it’s like I threw an egg against a brick wall – my insides are smeared, on display. There’s no reciprocity, only impact. When I share my insides with people who are comfortable with emotion, it’s like I threw an egg at a cloud of cotton – I feel held, comforted, and supported.
Matt Licata, a psychotherapist I follow, synthesizes this concept well:
When all is said and done, perhaps there is no secret to co-creating a fulfilling, supportive, mutually beneficial intimate relationship, as it is always in the end a movement of the unknown. Healthy intimacy is not something you will figure out one day by way of some checklist or magical formula, but something you are asked to live in each moment, in all its chaotic glory. By learning to take care of yourself, you are creating a foundation upon which the mysteries of intimacy can come alive within and around you, providing a crucible like no other for the great work of aliveness that you have come here to embody.
I dream of a world where we embody our emotions. A world where we understand intimacy is not something “out there,” but rather “in here.” A world where we recognize intimacy is not something we find, but rather something we create. A world where we realize intimacy beings with us.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
Lately I find myself wading deeper and deeper into the realm of emotion. That may sound funny because people often describe me as “emotional,” but what I mean is instead of flirting with an emotion, I’m embracing it. The despair, the anger, the disappointment. All of it. Not only am I embracing my feelings, I’m also no longer trying to fix them.
For me, whenever I felt really down, or lonely, for instance, I turned to something to make myself feel better: I called a friend, turned on the TV, picked up a book. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those activities, but they became compulsions, ways for me to avoid diving deep. To avoid the emotional pain of fully embodying my emotions. These days I’m learning to sit with my feelings, no matter what they are.
These days I’m embracing everything, even the prickly bits.
Matt Licata, a psychotherapist, has a blog I read every couple of weeks. In one blogpost he wrote:
[T]he question during these times is: Are you going to use these reorganizing and shattering experiences as vehicles though which to befriend yourself, to attune to the unprecedented flow of feeling with you, and to weave a sanctuary for the wisdom-pieces of the broken world to be held and illuminated? Or, will you fall back into your habitual, conditioned history, attack yourself, your tenderness, and your sacred vulnerability, spinning into the habitual fight-flight urgency of shame, blame, resentment, and self-aggression?
In another he wrote:
The invitation is into intimate communion: to move closer, and even closer still, into the feelings, the emotions, and the sensations as they surge. To surround the surging material with curiosity, warmth, and most importantly with kindness, as an inner explorer of the galaxy of your own body, of which there is no temple more sacred.
Communion. Yes, that’s what I long for. And communion means befriending my pain, befriending my sorrow, befriending my disappointment. Every cell of my being longs for love, and that means the pain, the sorrow, and the disappointment too. In my journey toward wholeness, toward the divine, I must embrace everything within me.
In my spiritual practices, we view everything as an expression of an infinite loving consciousness, and that means me too. Not only the me in this physical form, but the internal me as well. The one that feels pain, the one that feels lonely, the one that feels disappointment.
These days I’m practicing loving those parts too and I have that wish for others as well.
I dream of a world where we embrace all parts of ourselves. A world where we feel every emotion as it arises. A world where we sit with our pain because we recognize it, too, is divine.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.