Remembering………………..

Empathy

In the last week I have been writing and trying to make sense of the thoughts running through my head and the experiences that I have had. Each one of them I have tried to place nicely on a shelf in the right pile to make sense of all the things that have led me to this place. I have felt angry at some of the cultural things that I see that leave people feeling powerless and unimportant. I have pondered the feelings of never having done enough and always coming from a place of feeling as though no matter what I do, it will still not be enough and no matter how tired I can never stop to rest regardless of what I may want or need. I am tired. I have no more strength to fight beliefs that are taking life instead of giving it. As I was driving to work yesterday my thoughts went back to my son's illness, leukemia, and the heart wrenching experiences contained in those four years. I realized through all of the cultural beliefs that I had held about how to respond in a faith promoting way and how to accept the Lord's will, that I had rarely, during that time, stopped and wept openly, acknowledged to myself, to him, to my family my fears, my pain at watching him and the whole family suffer. I thought of the day he died, I wanted to go back to that day again and sit on the bed with him and just hold him and cry with him and say goodbye. I wanted to stay with him after everyone else had gone and weep over his lifeless body. I wanted to go home and curl up alone and honor the experience that is every mother's worst nightmare, but instead as was dictated by the belief system, I responded to each of those things as a pillar of strength and faith, leaving everyone so impressed by my faith in God, and leaving me weeping inside like a child wishing that I could be real. And to this day, I struggle to walk into a hospital or a doctor's office. And asking for help, something you just don't do in this culture, becomes a sense of shame, showing that you don't have enough faith, but what I have was told is the remedy to asking for help when you need it, the remedy for needing to rest when you are burned out from care taking is to do it some more. And if you don't you are being selfish and faithless. When you want to cry, you should laugh instead. I want to clarify here, that the things I just wrote are my perceptions of the beliefs that I was raised with, the family and church culture that I belonged to. So what I learned was when you need help really need help, you need to be alone. It is the best and only way to handle the voices that cause me to put my own needs aside and be selfless, an incredibly dysfunctional thing to do. When you look at books on grieving, or on caretaker burnout, they are careful to invite you to be gentle with yourself in this process and know that each part of the recovery is a step and will not last forever, but you cannot pretend them away, unless you happen to belong to this church and family culture, they call it our legacy of faithfulness. Again dark words, they steal the life from your eyes and your heart. The love, light, life and empathy that you need starts when you hear your own cries………… When you don't you just become the beautiful walking dead, beautiful and faithful looking on the outside and dead from not hearing, or giving life to your own life. It is interesting how uncomfortable sharing your pain can make people. The little RSA shorts that I posted I love. I have listened to it a number of times before I really heard one of the things they said in there. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy drives connection. I rallied that sympathy is like a black hole of aloneness. I realized this because the other night a friend came to visit me. I have had so few experiences with empathy that I didn't realize how much I was needing it. SO, my friend came to visit me. Unlike many people right now in my life she came without an agenda, came without any judgments as to why I wasn't sitting in the same pew as she. She just came. So we sat down to visit and honestly I am guarded right now. My hurt has run very deep and more sympathy or pity driving the emptiness of disconnection I cannot handle. I would rather be alone. She brought herself. We talked and she shared some of her heartache and cried and then I cried because it was some of mine too. We listened to each other and for the first time in a long time I heard myself saying how much it all still hurt. She listened and then thanked me for she had needed to talk about that pain too. I had needed to as well. For a brief moment, I realized the power of empathy, the power of honesty the power of being real in your own life. She didn't come to save the day, or fix something. After she left, I thought about how much it hurts people to be treated as though because you have pain or need to rest and heal that you are not enough, or that you need to be fixed or helped. Healing is beautiful and it is what life is all about on a day to day basis. Hearing the pain, crying when you need to cry, hugging someone, or yourself when you need to so that you can step back into life at some point. Does rushing the grieving make it go faster? I remember someone telling me about someone whose son had been killed, they were from an African culture and in this culture someone comes and stays with the mother for 30 days so that she will not have to be alone. I thought the beautiful thing about that was that emotions, and mourning was so a part of what was normal that they could open up and share it with someone. See, I had too much shame, too much conditioning about how I was supposed to handle it and mostly sympathy around ,driving loneliness. How I would have loved someone like my friend coming to be with me and with my family, to cry with us and laugh with us and just be with us, so we could have cried. In all fairness, some of my family who came were amazing and beautiful at that moment holding us gently and I wished they could sty for a month, but the visits were brief and everyone quickly moves on. This event is not the only point of grief that I am holding, the only one that I will talk about here. The first step for me today is the realization that I need to shed the pretense of faith, to experience the honesty of healing, the beauty of empathy. Today it will start with my realization that I am enough, I have nothing to prove and the emotions and the heart break that I experience are meant to be experienced and not pretended away. I am where I am not to prove myself enough but because I am enough and now I love the feeling of nothing coming between me and finding healing in Christ. The first step, recognizing the lies, the life sucking beliefs that have kept me from connection with myself and with others. Amazing feeling, the freedom of love, of truth and of being alive,I am starting today by honoring what ever my journey is without fear. What a beautiful day it is without the fear…………….

RSA Shorts - The Power of Empathy

Fear Is Just A Lie - Mike Donehey - Video Journal

The clash of truths? How can that be?

So, I was really wondering based on some experiences in my life why there are things that I am sure are true and I find others believing exactly the opposite. In a moment in my life when someone shared their thoughts on something I felt the opposite about I was scratching my head. It got me to thinking about the foundation of truth. So, truth is built like a building. There is a foundation, but here is where I think I have sometimes misunderstood. When a baby is born, they are born knowing the foundation of truth- they look for it (love) and recognize it without needing to think about it at all. The foundation of truth, is truth, it is love, life and light, defined in the experiencing, and in the fruit of being in truth. For a baby, at that point in their life they have no ability to intellectually think about it, nor could they explain the truth that they understand, they simply know and by intuitive experience, they participate in their own knowing. How often have you looked to a child because of how they live their truth? As you grow you develop your ability to think and you take in the "truths" of others. Sometimes their "truth" , especially one that is taught by intellect, grows . You are so excited about all of that intellectual learning and begin to separate yourself from the truths that were innate and that just are, life love and light, in favor of those you can aptly and outwardly define and make intellectual sense of. The challenge of the separation is that it holds doubt, insecurity, and fear, all the antithesis of truth. As you feel these things, you want to cling tighter to control, to knowing…….., whether that is by another "truth" that you may have learned from a source that was doing exactly as you are, struggling with their own separation from truth. Sometimes the most powerful "truths" are those that you are taught by someone very afraid. Leaving you hovering in a feeling of being kind of lost in our own world, but holding such a feeling of power that you don't know how to find your way back to what you once knew. But then neither is it designed for you to find our way back, but the hope is that you will find our way forward. So here you are lost in your intellect, control and "truths" that define your world, not necessarily the ones that bring life, love and light, though there may be some of those in the package you are holding but, you may be hard pressed to separate them out and truly embrace them. You continue on in this way until the load of "truths" that are not, become greater than the "truths" that really hold life. So you take the pack off and start sorting. At first you are like young children, reacting to emotion, or reacting to an intellectual argument or clumsily trying to put the two together and maybe forgetting the experiential aspect of seeing and you may start throwing things away. Sometimes you may just get mad and we don't know why and at what, but it is really about the lies that are there somewhere, When watching someone else do this it can be alarming if they start touching "truths" that you are holding. I know for it frightened me terribly. and I did want to intervene and hold it all up for them to see, so they could see as clearly as I thought that I did, But the missing piece to that is the lies that you may be holding, for they are also coloring your perception, and the clarity that you think you have, and until you have the courage to take off that pack and start sorting you will not understand the clumsiness of the effort, the anger at being lied to, without even knowing what the lie is, you feel indignant and want justice and to make it right, but the sorting is a process, of time and experience. And requires the most gentleness from ourselves and from those who love you, if you are ever to see truth, it will be through love…….., not love or, truth offered from another to purpose your journey, but an offering you make to yourself that will change the journey. At first we don't know how to use our intellect, our emotions or our experience to see, but as time passes the real experiential holding of the truth is the fruit, the aha moments happen more often and You begin to see life, light and the love, they start returning along with hope and your future. And we begin to get the hang of it, how emotion plays into your knowing, and how your intellectual speaks and finally, it all comes together - the final piece, the fruit, the experience ties all that you have learned and felt into the unveiling of the truth. We feel it through our being, just like as a child, only with different eyes this time. We don't know instantly. In fact the whole of life is about uncovering truth, and it takes that life. So we can hold both ourselves and others gently, without fear, in trust that the truth will rise through it all and while, they are sorting through their tears and their anger, their clumsiness and lack of understanding, you can hold them without fear, in the love that has filled your own experience of painful sorting, and remembering that when, and it will happen, another's process is making us uncomfortable, then perhaps there is a "truth" aching to be heard in our own package of life. And the sorting begins all over again……………..

Understanding Truth……………...

When you look at the word truth you must begin by making connections to all other words that can connect us with truth or are synonymous with truth. Love. Life. Light. If you look at the opposites you have Fear, Darkness, and Death. When you talk about love it is the underlying breathe you are trying to take, when you cannot breathe, and if it threatens to extinguish the light and the life in your eyes, hearts and hope, you can be assured that what you are leaning upon is not truth. Truth is not know by our feelings alone, nor can it be declared solely by our intellect, but it becomes known by how those two come together and create a living experience for us. Where there is life, there is truth. Life expressed not only as a being that is physically alive, but also the one who has the place and space for continued growth, expectancy and love in their life. That sounds like when you are in truth you have no challenges in life. Ha you say impossible. What is really impossible is to think that you have ever completely arrived at truth and can rest. For the moment you begin the perception of a new truth, the paradox of the lies you have been living begin to unfold themselves before your eyes, demanding for you to look, and to look lovingly, filled with truth and the hope for new life within ourselves. You can then begin the process of leaving behind the darkness, the fear and the death, for new life. But assuredly as you take that step, you must be prepared for the understanding that you do not know, the places of fear that you have been living. This is perhaps the first step to truth, personal love, or personal honesty which will allows you to see without fear who you are.The brilliant thing about this truth does not need to be held up by a lie, and therefore who you are can stand on its own without pretense, without the opinion of others and without fear. That is always beautiful, but the lies that we cover our selves with are not. In this place of complete honesty there is no shame…….. shame is based on fear,or in other words a lie. If you find yourself there……….. you have not yet uncovered the truth, keep looking. It is a process of stripping away our ego and the defenses it has created. So, then you see yourself without shame, but also how you have lied to yourself, and then ultimately to others. When your life feels more like death, lies have become more than truth. The way out, begins with one step of love, one step of truth, the recognition that comes on an emotional intuitive level, on an intellectual level and on an experiential level meeting of those two aspects of minds here, for with that no one can deceive you, for if truth does not permeate throughout your mind, heart and process, you are left free to continue your seeking. And when it does, through the brilliance of an insight that has come to fruition,the first step has been taken and your lifetime study of love and truth has begun. And so the fruition of our experiential participation will declare the truth and it will always be love and will always lead to life and life more abundantly. That is where we are going……………..