Asides

How do we get ourselves to actually receive Love?

Pick A Love!

Pick A Love! (Photo credit: theotherway)

Despite the distance he had come, he still controlled much in his acts of intimacy.  The timing, the moves, the style, Bernard was not always aware even of how or when he called the how and when, but he did, still, on occasion, like someone with a clipboard and whistle.

He was sincere in his love-making.  It was not false.  He was even in love.  At odd moments of the day, the wonder of it would come over him.  Without forethought, he would respond to the magic and he would call her, needing her voice to reassure him.  He was in love with her and she loved him back.  The backside of where he came from reflected in his rearview mirror like inky, murky swamp-mass and his sense of salvation swelled around him.  He knew he wanted to be connected.  This was right.

Then, Bernard would be working in his shop, pressed under a cabinet, where he could reach the corner spot and she would be there.  Home from work, she would sidle up and want to …What did she want?  He was dirty.  He was involved.  He was not prepared for that.

How do we receive Love?  It is not the wanting.  It is not the need.  It is not even the availability of Love that opens us up to receive it.  Receiving Love is a quandary.

So often I hear patients complain, “I shouldn’t feel this way.  Everything is really good in my life.  I have so much.  I should be happy.  I should be grateful.”  And then they list some of these happy-life-qualifiers, and peter out into a shrug or cry before they are done.  Before either of us are convinced about how great their life is.  This list of why they apparently should receive Love is not enough to actually bring it in.

Bernard wondered how this was happening to him.  “No!” he would scream to unknown forces.  ”I want Love.  Don’t leave me!”  Bernard hated being an island.  The Bernard Island.  It had its own name.  It was landscape.

How do we receive Love?

And the dichotomy of wanting Love, of needing Love, of Love being available, yet while not receiving Love would acidly crawl up Bernard’s esophagus.  It burned.

How do we receive Love?

Love loved us first.

Love, Love everywhere and nothing to drink.  Is that the way it goes?

I propose that receiving Love is more than the perception of receiving it.

It flows across all of the paradigms and dimensions known and unknown.  Love is.  Receiving it therefore does not depend on its availability.

Our need is constant, integral of course to life’s breath.  In deep.  Out.  Love is.  Receiving Love is not dependent on our need.

Wanting Love, now that depends on our perceptions.  Knowing this, we can return to our earlier discussions on where perceptions come from – the brain and magic.  To know our want, we need both.  To receive Love, however, doesn’t depend on our wanting it.  Love comes because Love is.

Question:  How do you increase your Love quotient?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Grow your Love intake.

Conditional Love With Me

frayed rope

We have a tenuous relationship with ourselves.  Very conditional, as if we were in a constant state of probation. Have you noticed?  Conditional love: part of the human condition.

I was reading the The Golem and the Jinni: A Novel, by Helene Wecker, and found myself getting into her golem-philosophy, that went something like this,

Since so many of us have it, can’t you just say it is the way things are, and not about freedom or fairness?

Wecker in such eloquence ironically describes the human condition from the story of two inhuman beings.

The New York Times, , describes it as,

When they are later confronted by the evil power who controls their fates, they discover that the ultimate expression of free will may lie in the embrace of limitations.

In considering our limitations in loving our own self, this idea can be useful to come to terms with the day in and out internal conflict of loving what is imperfect and distasteful, with what we would otherwise rather not identify with, and with the acts of friendship toward this seemingly inhuman part of our selves.  In embracing our limitations, we may find less conflict in loving Me, less conditioning, or perhaps a shorter probation each day.  We may experience the probation differently, Chava, The Golem, when we say, “It just is this way with all of us.  I have the community of humanity.”

Getting into the space of where our “tenuous bond” between what we love and would otherwise not love about ME, in fact diminishes the frailty and increases the strength in our personal journey.  Rather than putting us into further danger of internal conflict and self-loathing, it allows us to experience what will happen from and in the company of the tension.

More specifically, in brain health, getting into the space of our conditional love for our self, allows us to do things like seek medical treatment when needed, ally with help, with medical treatments that once repulsed us, with something as formulated as putting a pill in our mouth seven days a week indefinitely.  Or another treatment, such as ECT.

We are conditional with ourselves.  It is part of our human condition.  That is pretty close to, “Normal.”

Question: How often are you aware of your own difficulty loving yourself, your Me?  What improves this?  Why does difficulty with loving Me recur and recur without end?  Please tell us your story.

Self-Care Tip:  Get into the tenuous space between the “good and bad” of Me where you are normal.

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Anticipate Rejections – Normal And Part of Our Human Condition

Self-Care Tip:  Anticipate rejections and some in-between times, you will be chosen.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.

-Thomas A. Edison

Foto einer Glühbirne (an),

In today’s economic climate, we are given more opportunities to seek employment elsewhere.  Of course, “opportunity” is loosely used here and it might sound like I was playing Mad-Libs, a super game in fact so I’m okay with that.

But whether we are applying for employment or asking to be someone’s friend, or like Edison, playing – these various arenas of rejections are normal. They may feel particularly personal, but that’s a distortion.  They’re part of the human condition.  They come to us who do what we love, who do for well-evaluated intentions, who put out with courage and who put in 10,ooo hours.  They come to us who haven’t found what we love, who work for a martyrs salary or who do not have the privilege to go toward their temperament.

Rejections are.  They are like the surface tension, the space between water and air and they hold us together.

We love success and too often are like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates.  We forget from sunset to sunrise what a day’s labor brought us before.  We forget easily.

But with Magic and Love, we can lose ourselves once again in the experience of doing what we love to do despite it.  We can remember better with the help of rejections.  Remember all sorts of things.  And without turning this into a script from Cheers, we can still say that rejections become the best parts of our life’s experience.

Those darn personalizations though, those distorted perceptions, those rejection-clots that cut off circulation – if it becomes that the space between water and air gets too thick, if rejections seem life defining, tell your physician about it.  It’s not “just the stress.”  It’s from the brain and might be a symptom of brain illness, much like achy joints and arthritis go together.

Questions:  How are you able to use the rejections you received to be friendly to yourself?  Please tell us your story.

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I Am A Poster Child For Sinners

IMG_4706 Leather pants

I am a poster child for sinners.

Sitting with a respected mentor, a leader of women in medicine, I couldn’t stop myself as usual from playing with the ideas of being a friend to yourself.  She caught on quick with where I was going and I felt wishes winging in.

I wished I could have practiced with her, have had her for a peer, a voice in the room that gets me, a mind that might even have resonated and crescendoed the healing process that comes from being a friend to Me.

Oh that guy is as stiff as they come!  She knew.

He always made me feel like I was a poster child for sinners.  …And I knew I loved her.  It wasn’t just me.

Sometimes, remembering that “it’s not just me” seems like reciting folklore.  The longer that Time clutters up between real encounters with like-minded folk, the more magical the thoughts brew of being chosen to suffer, I am alone and I am special for what hurts me.   However, perhaps a good this or that can come out of even things such as these (insert, “human connection.”)  Is that so much to ask?  Do I really have to sacrifice a chicken on a full moon over whitened unicorn bones to make it happen?

In becoming a Friend to Yourself, we know there are many times when living with not much more than our better choices for company is almost more than that stringy thin young muscle of self-care can sustain.  But know this.  Just when you think you might collapse, the Truth that “you are not alone” will wing in.  More than a wish or a perception of reality, “you are not alone” is Truth.  Something great comes to us, like,

I am a poster child for sinners.  

Stigma comes from ignorance after all and in being a friend to Me, well, our community has undeveloped awareness about it.  Some who don’t know that everything starts and ends with Me feel threatened, angry and even verbally aggressive toward us.  But, just when we think that the whole world is touched with ignorance and cruel responses except for Me, we find Thee.  (Yet another variation on the  quote by a Yorkshireman –  “Everyone in the world is quite mad, except for me and thee.  And sometimes I have my doubts about thee.”.)  Me finds Thee, just in time.

Suddenly we see ourselves for the stud-muffins that we are, courageous and in company.  Leather pants may be included if you like.

Self-Care Tip – Remember the Truth – you are not alone, even in being a friend to yourself.  Keep on.

Questions:  How’s your company these days?  Do people ever treat you like you are a wrong-doer for loving yourself?  How does that go over?  Please tell us your story.

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