"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austrian poet and novelist
How reliably do you receive care from other human beings?
This question might seem silly. We are surrounded by humans all the time. We are born into a human family, we choose human companions and birth human children. We plant ourselves in human communities, choose to work with other humans and surround ourselves with human friends. Seems that we should experience no shortage of love based on the sheer number of human beings we come in contact with every day, and yet something is telling me it is more complicated.
Let me ask you another question: How often, in time of need, do you go to another human being and say things like, help me or hold me or walk with me or be with me? And if they respond, how often what you receive is the kind of care that directly answers your need?
And if love that you want is hard to find with another human, where else do you look for it? How often do you seek love outside of a direct human interaction? How often do you go to stuff to receive comfort, pleasure, inspiration or guidance? And finally, how often, when you are starved for connection or companionship, do you turn to something or someone who has no actual love to offer?
Many folks do not feel safe or confident going to other human beings with direct requests of care. The need for care often evokes strong emotions, leading many to prefer self-reliance even if it doesn't fully meet their needs, to avoid vulnerability elsewhere.
The truth is vulnerability necessitates care. Met with carelessness, vulnerability feels like a wound (it is a wound!), reinforcing for many the need to shore up their defenses even more.
When complex (relational) trauma is being healed, two new behaviors start to emerge consistently and strongly: The openness to receive care from others and an improved ability to discern true care from its proxy.
At the root of these behaviors is another behavior, which appears to be the basis of all healing work: The willingness to give care to parts of ourselves that are love-deprived.
Over the past few years, a growing portion of my work has focused on helping individuals navigate various types of relationships. Many people desire connection, intimacy, and love, yet often unknowingly find themselves in relationships where, as one of my clients put it, they are content with being left alone to pursue their own interests, or where they settle for a diluted version of love they truly desire and are capable of.
Emotional maturity, as I see it, is the maturation of our capacity to love. Which is an arc, a developmental task and a life-long trajectory. None of us arrive to any of our relationships "fully cooked" and all of us have a chance to keep cultivating the ability to love and be loved in ways that feel truly authentic and nourishing.
The embodiment journey: A life well-lived is a life well-loved
Many of us have experienced a complex relationship with receiving love from other humans during our formative years. While I believe that a life well-loved is foundational for a life well-lived, I also believe that to be relational is to be vulnerable, which means that even in the most loving and conscious relationships, we hurt one another, we fail one another, and we disappoint one another.
We know that being love-deprived early on creates emotional insecurity later in life. Fortunately, it's never too late to offer those parts of us that have not been loved the kind of love and care they truly need.
The reward that follows the work of cultivating a more robust capacity to love is psychological and emotional security. In fact, the very notion of a secure base- a hallmark of secure attachment- is a relationship where love and connection are both ample and easily accessible.
Put simply, a secure relationship is one where our needs are consistently met with caring response. This is true for every single relationship thoughout our lifetime. On the other hand, if we have to make significant efforts, sacrifice what is important to us, or exhaust ourselves to earn love, the foundation of the relationship will feel weak, unreliable, and untrustworthy.
When we begin to offer deliberate and thoughful care to parts of ourselves that haven't been loved, our bodies become safer for us to inhabit. This is the process of embodiment in the nutshell.
Is it safe to be here?
I believe there are many ways to heal. Many ways to honor what has been devalued, robbed of its honor, or desecrated. For me, healing came via two distinct channels - the body and relationships - and both necessitated the maturation of my capaity to love.
Feeling secure in the body allows for a unique sense of presence, enabling one to be equally connected to both their spiritual and their human essence.
So many of us have been residing in the realm of spirit in order to survive our human experience. I work with many folks who have consistently been called out for procrastinating or being easily distractible. Many have gotten an official diagnosis of attention deficit disorder. There are many labels that attempt to describe a phenomenon of a spirit not quite landed in the human body. The roaming wandering spirit, reluctant to call the body home, hesitant to accept the form it is given.
Although, residing in the realm of the spirit is not the same as residing in the realm of the mind, many have also retreated into the lives of their minds in order to prtotect themselves from the harshness or the dangers of human experience. To heal the mind/body disconnect, one has to enter the realm of the heart, expanding the heart's capacity to hold all aspects of human experience.
Many of us have acquired the skill of disconnecting from our physical body in order to endure our environment. This feeling of being detached - where we are physically present but mentally absent - is how many live their entire lives.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Mary Oliver, To begin with, The Sweet Grass
You may have heard it said that we can never love another more than we love ourselves. I would change this statement to say that our capacity to love others will always be limited by the depth of our capacity to love. I do not want to make a difference between loving ourselves and loving others. It's all one and the same love. Because of that, how we love ourselves will very much reflect how we love others (and vice versa!). And yet, it is our capacity for love in general (i.e. how developed/mature it is) that dictates how we love anything or anyone.
With that in mind, we have to acknowledge that while love itself is limitless, the human being is not. As much as we may want unconditional love, this kind of love is more of an ideal. If it does happen, it comes in occasional bursts of remarkable generosity, heart openness, and the willingness to transcend the self (ego/personality). Cultivating the capacity for unconditional love is a practice. Most of the time, love in a human form is bound by the limits of ego/personality structure. Because of that, being triggered and/or hurting ourselves and others is an inevitable part of what it means to be in relationship.
A big message in the field of psychotherapy is that those of us who have experienced relational injury and survived conditions devoid of love, must learn to love themselves. I agree with that statement. But only partially. In my experience, every time we choose quality care, regardless of whether it came from us or someone else, we heal.
That said, it is up to us to get to know those parts of ourselves that have not been shown love. It is up to us to discern what kind of care those parts of us need. It is up to us to learn to love parts of us that have gone without love for far too long.
Moving outside of ourselves, it is important that we be mindful that there are countless others who are doing the same work of learning to love their unloved parts alongside us. It is important that we support them and, if appropriate, be there for their journey as they cultivate more love internally. It is also important that we be mindful of how much we lean on them for love and how much they lean on us for love. Tending to the unloved parts is a labor of love, and it is laborious indeed. Learning to support others on their path without losing sight of our own work is how we heal together.
"Hugging myself is not as good as being hugged."
Self-love does not mean you have got to become the sole provider of love for yourself. But it does mean that you are the sole guardian of life within you. You are the caretaker and a steward of your own life. This means you decide what proper care looks like for you. You decide best sources of that care for you. You do you best to stay on top of what's needed.
We don't need to place value on love and care. In order to heal together we need to learn that making one type of love more "healthy" than the other is dangerous and highly problematic. Instead, how can we continue discerning true love from all its proxies? How can we continue discerning different flavors of love, like compassion, kindness, truth-telling, and presence?
Healing occurs not when all our needs are met, but when we cultivate the kind of presence that allows us to stay awake to our own needs. Healing (i.e. loving the unloved parts of ourselves into life and into being) helps us cultivate a larger capacity for embodying love while simultaneously helping us hold our own human limits as well as the limits of others with greater compassion.
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