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  • Longing

    Longing

    LONGING

     What is your heart’s deepest longing?

    Over the last couple of years many of us have longed to connect with friends, to have the freedom to visit them, to travel overseas and resume a natural rhythm and autonomy. Our longing has many faces. It tries to get our attention, and yet we often push it to the recesses of our heart, trying to rationalise it away. Yet the more we try to banish it from our hearts the more it returns.

    What You Want, Wants You.

    Have you ever contemplated why we long for something in particular, why it doesn’t let go of you?

    Our deepest longing comes from a movement in the soul beyond the ego, often an unconscious invite from our psyche, and if denied one’s soul finds a myriad of ways to get our attention. It can be a systemic longing, whereby the family soul longs for resolution or acknowledgement. Or it can be an unfulfilled part of ourselves longing to come into fruition more in our life. Longing for the truth, understanding, to be seen, heard or have a particular need being fully met. Or it could be a longing to connect with someone in particular as a way of soothing that part in oneself.

    However our longing, it simply connects us from what has been banished.

    One might ask oneself:

    • What are the barriers I have built up against longing to avoid disappointment, hurt, grief, heartbreak?
    • What story have I employed to protect myself from connecting?
    • How have I packaged up my longing and stored it away?
    • What won’t I give myself permission to live?
    • What kind of life am I living keeping this deep longing at bay?

    Our Longing Connects Us

    What if our difficult behaviour was trying to get a need met?

    I recently found myself dealing with values collisions conflict when reconnecting with family again after years of separation. My longing to connect with family after such a long time apart was immense, yet disguised as independence, sadness, lack of motivation, depression, exhaustion and the like. I needed the nourishment of family connection.

    Longing for connection can be packaged up in challenging behaviour, strategies, a myriad of bids for connection, which can be hard to decipher. At times these behaviours trigger nervous systems, old wounds, beliefs that are loyal to sub-groups in families, yet the need for connection is fundamental in the behaviour.

    Even our judgements about one another keep us connected!.

    For example ‘in my hatred I remain connected to you’. It takes a lot of energy to keep another at a distance, to recycle the same disdainful story of hurt about the other, which in turn keeps us connected. We all have a need trying to be met in challenging behaviour.

    Resistance empowers what is being resisted.

    Feelings of disappointment point to longing unfulfilled, often appearing as a result of our connection cues not being decoded in a way that meets our needs. Our old attachment injuries become mobilised. We reject, isolate, withdraw and/or punish displaying ambivalent-anxiously attached traits. We are quite creative in our responses!

    Our unmet longing can be painful, yet the key is to find the fundamental underlying need that is trying to be met, and in turn a new way of communicating that need to ourself and then others. There is never a conflict of needs, only a conflict of solutions!

    Stories About Each Other Cause Suffering

    Over time the inability to identify our needs trying to be met and to communicate these to ourself and others creates stories about others that support our inability to reach out, to ask for what we need, to discuss heart break. Our unquestioned beliefs cause suffering and more longing. To simply ask the questions: Is it true? Can I absolutely know this thought about the other to be true? Whilst answering from your heart.

    Stories about each other can be created from generations of disappointment. Take a moment to look at the disappointment you carry for your gender in your family towards the opposite sex.

    • What did your mother long for? Was she disappointed and enraged with your father? If so, what stories were adopted from her about the opposite sex?
    • What did your father long for? Was he disappointed and enraged towards your mother? If so, what stories were adopted from him about the opposite sex?
    • Who are you loyal to? How does this play out in your relationships?
    • What sub-groups were formed in your family? Whose longing did they fulfil? What was the unfulfilled need that was trying to be met?

    Who would you be without these stressful stories? What connections would you make without them?

    We Inherent Our Nervous System

    Whose longing is it?

    Not only do we at times inherit our longing but we also inherit our nervous system. Imagine our parents being brought up in war times, food scarcity, and the anxiety created from those experiences they carried that we responded to as children. Systemic trauma alters how we parent. What happened to our parents and what happened to their parents is told in our body. Our bodies are the family story. In turn how we were parented creates survival strategies, known as attachment styles endeavouring to get our needs met, yet each comes with a longing embedded deeply within it.

    Attachment styles are created many generations back.

    For an ambivalent-anxiously attached person, systemic trauma is often the theme in the family lineage. For someone who is more avoidant-anxiously attached, loss, grief appears in the family lineage.

    Ambivalent-anxiously attached, are external regulators, ie ‘you do me’, yet will reject the other, blame and punish. Their greatest fear is they will be rejected and abandoned so they get in before anyone else does, yet their greatest longing is for the needy part to be fully met and held, to be completely got. Getting those needs met for a ‘wave’ as we colloquially address these styles, can be quite dramatic at times. They fear there needs are ‘too much’ for others to hold. The longing is simply to be held and met in the depth of the need.

    An Avoidant-anxious person are internal regulators, ie ‘you do you’ and I do me’. They separate, withdraw and isolate themself as they long for space, fearing being swamped by other’s needs, yet cannot fully regulate themself independently. Yet in truth longing for connection and someone to come and get them by gently inviting them off their self-imposed island.

    Securely attached individuals have enough secure interactions with parents where their needs were met that they are capable of going and getting their needs met, by talking about it, inviting the other into connection having developed an intrapersonal intelligence that can be communicated easily with themselves and others.

    Looking Longing in the Eyes

    “The bigger the judgement, the bigger the longing” Bertold Ulsamer

    Contemplating Bertold Ulsamer’s quote whilst reflecting on a Family Constellation workshop I took a couple of months ago, I was reminded how we are strengthened by looking at longing in the eyes, inviting it in, opening to it, surrendering to the feelings, rather than quashing them. Workshop participants were invited to look deeply in the eyes of longing. Longing revealed its true nature, it came alive in them, strengthened them as they stopped running from it and expanded their hearts. We build walls around our longing and judge anything, or anyone that comes close at times.

    • What would happen if you stopped running away from your longing to connect?
    • What if you were honest with yourself about all the strategies you have employed to keep yourself safe from connecting?

    As Richard Schwartz highlights in Internal Family Systems Therapy, we have an internal ecology of parts, each doing different jobs, some of these are overly protective and get in the way of our longing and of reaching out.

    In acknowledging this, the invite is to look where the most judgement is and look at it in the eyes.

    • How does that protective strategy work within you?
    • What happens within you when you thank those parts who have guarded you from getting disappointed in unmet longing?
    • What does this part protect you from?

    What happens when you give that part, that was being protected room space within you, to feel, breathe, be seen, be understood, come alive in oneself. Let it tell its story through your own body. Opening to the feelings, yearning, hurt, fears simply letting your whole being experience the array of feelings inherent in this moment in your life revealed.

    • What does it need from you now that it didn’t get back then?
    • What happens to that part of you that was being protected, when that need is offered?
    • What changes in your being in relation to the world? 
    • What quietens and opens in you when you soothe that part calling?

    Our longing is a pull to connect to parts of ourself calling, to life in its fullness and to each other.

    What would happen if you fully opened to your longing?

  • Going to Pieces without Falling Apart

    Going to Pieces without Falling Apart

    Originally I heard the term, ‘going to pieces without falling apart’ on reading the book of the same name by Buddhist Psychologist Mark Epstein in early 2000. Combining western psychology with buddhist philosophy he highlighted that Western psychology has promised fulfilment through engaging and strengthening the ego. We are taught that the ideal self is a strong, individuated, constructed and reinforced over a lifetime. Yet the truth is this cannot be maintained over time. Happiness comes from letting go!  Epstein states “happiness that we seek depends on our ability to balance the ego’s need to do with our inherent capacity to be.”

    This is not a book review but a compassionate cry to give yourself a break! To stop! As a therapist of over 30 years, I have seen over the last months clients, and therapists themselves including myself, experience burn out and stress breakdowns. There is a fundamental need to relax the ever-vigilant mind in order to experience the freedom that comes only from relinquishing control, our endless pursuit of how we think it should be.

    Epstein, in the introduction of his book, tells a story about an “eager professor who sought wisdom from an old Zen master. The master offered him tea and, on the professor’s acceptance, poured the tea into a cup. To the professor’s dismay, however the master kept pouring the tea into an overflowing cup, even as the tea spreads across the floor. “A mind that is full cannot take in anything new,“ the master explained. “Like the cup you are full of opinions and preconceptions. “Wisdom and happiness are to be found only by emptying one’s cup.”

    We are full!

    Two years we have spent surviving, be it COVID lockdowns, losing loved ones suddenly, an ever changing political landscape, financial uncertainty, the devastation caused by floods, endless work without seeing family and loved ones who live overseas, and the constant need to make new decisions rather than engage our automated brain and COVID itself. It takes an enormous amount of energy, focus and adrenaline to get us through, and now we are experiencing the effects of the last two years. Exhaustion! We cannot take anything else in. This exhaustion appears as deep emotional and physical lethargy, as though our internal foundations are untethered and our emotional landscape is in pieces. Some describe it as though they have post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) symptoms. A mixture of grief, frozenness, overwhelm, anxiety, hopelessness, and emotional and physical fatigue. It feels like we are falling apart.

    The key to going to pieces without falling apart is surrender. The more we try and fight the feelings, go against what is innately present, the more it feels like we are falling apart, and we cannot control the emerging unchartered emotional landscape.

    Clients often seek out solutions to this state via counselling, yet then the ego continues to do, plan, strategize, when one’s whole being is telling one to stop and rest. We cannot continue what we are doing without changing something, scaling what we are doing down for a time, changing the scenery, and giving ourselves novel experiences. For some, the time it takes to come home to oneself, feeling like you have solid foundations again, may take longer than others, this depends on the level of self care, the difficulties you have encountered over the last two years as well as the ongoing challenges.

     

    How does the ego surrender when we have let it rule for so long?

    The truth is there is always a little voice that knows what is needed but is overridden in pursuit of this idea of good, to achieve, to become something, someone. Quietly it tugs a little and then a little harder, and if not listening even harder. It rattles the cages of our soul until we cannot ignore it any longer. We have to surrender or fall apart. Instead of this internal war an easier way is to listen to that little loving voice that gently tries to guides you, even if you don’t quite know where it will lead you, it has your best intentions at heart.

     

    In support of that little inner voice here is a little help….

    • Stop and Rest and do nothing
    • Meditate
    • Eat well, yet lightly
    • Directly experience feelings, rather than trying to change them, or think you way out of them
    • Talk to your soul, let your soul talk to you – find a way through poetry, art, nature, movement, creative visualisation
    • Do the things you love daily, even if it is one little thing like putting on a particular lotion, or drinking from a favourite cup, or taking your shoes off and burying them in fresh grass, make room for it
    • Reach out for support – we are wired to each other and were never designed to do it alone
    • Take a break away somewhere you haven’t been before
    • Hang out in nature – when was the last time you watched the clouds sail by?
    • Swim in the ocean – water relaxes us on so many levels
    • Walk along the beach
    • Come back to that one practice that you know brings you home in yourself.
    • When there is energy, let yourself grieve
    • With those habitual thoughts causing suffering, question them – is it true? Who would I be without this thought?
    • Stop pressuring yourself to make those decisions when the time is right decisions get made
    • Do that thing that you have always wanted to do, be it travel, a particular project, hobby or career. Do it, as it wants you.
    • Befriend the part of you that has had enough. Lean into them, find their need, let them have a voice and a home in you, by embracing them exactly as they are. Their feelings are correct.
    • Hang out with your favourite people
    • REST is paramount right now, the rest happens when needed.

     

    So how do you go to pieces without falling apart?

    “So if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me, for I too am fluent in silence” R Arnold

    Let go, surrender, stop fighting those feelings, stop and rest! Your being knows how to bring you home to yourself.

    As Mr Curly said to Vasco Pyjamas: “...Tiredness has become the most suppressed feeling in the world. Everywhere we see people overcoming their exhaustion and pushing on with intensity – cultivating the great mass mania which all around is making life so hard and ugly – so cruel and mingles – so utterly graceless – and being congratulated for overcoming it and pushing it deep down inside themselves as it it were a virtue to do this. And of course Vasco, you know what happens when such strong and natural feelings are denied – they turn into the most powerful and bitter poisons with dreadful consequences. We live in a world of these consequences and then wonder why we are so unhappy. So I greatly urge you Vasvo, do as we do in Curly Flat – learn to curl up and rest – feel your noble tiredness – learn about it and make generous a place for it in your life and enjoyment will surely follow. I repeat: it’s worth doing nothing and having a rest. yours sleepily Mr Curly” By Leunig

    _________

    Bibliography

    Epstein, Mark (1999) ‘Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness’, R Wyler & Co, USA

    Rediger, Jeffrey, M.D., M.DIV. LESTON HAVENS, M.D. ‘Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness Book review’

    Cambridge Hospital Cambridge, MA 02139

    Leunig: The Curly Pyjama Letters

     

  • Celebrating Love In All Its Forms

    Celebrating Love In All Its Forms

    …every evolution
    starts and ends
    with your lips…..
    – rupi kaur

    Valentines Day is an invitation to celebrate love in its many forms; eros (romantic), pragma (enduring), platonic, familial (familiar, storge), collegial, agape (selfless love), philia (affectionate), ludus (playful), philautia (self love)….modern love takes many forms.

    How do we miss out on the depth of love, in our relating, by wanting it to be ‘eros’, romantic love?

    “Naming Love Too Early..

    is a beautiful but harrowing human difficulty. Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who or what we love and the way we love, too early in the vulnerable journey of discovery. We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find our selves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.

    The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship, not only in following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and beautiful abasement but strangely, through its fierce introduction to all its many astonishing and different forms, where we are asked continually and against our will, to give in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned.

    We name mostly in order to control but what is worth loving does not want to be held within the bounds of too narrow a calling. In many ways love has already named us before we can begin to articulate what is occurring, before we can utter the right words or understand what has happened to us or is continuing to happen to us: an invitation to the most difficult art of all, to love without naming at all.’ David Whyte.

    Happy Valetines Day to ALL the LOVERS in the World, may your heart shine bright….

    May you tell the ones you love, in all the forms it takes how much they mean to you today, and everyday…..

     

    Here’s a little how:

    1. Name your Valentine
    2. Write one word that describes the ‘tone’ of your love letter
    3. What are some things about your valentine that you appreciate about them? A couple of sentences.
    4. How has your Valetine changed you having known them?
    5. How do you enhance your Valentine’s life?
    6. What you would like to change or improve in your connection between now and next Valentine’s Day?
    7. Add a little music, poetry, something from nature, food, wine or a small thoughtful touch…

     

    Play Games

    Games create novelty, connection and bring out our innocence whilst getting to know each other more intimately. Games spark our curiosity, conversation and insights which create further connections and deepen our connection….we never tire of playing.

    1. Card Games:

    The School of Life has a number of Games: Connect, 100 Questions: The Love Edition, Pillow Talk

    Esther Perel’s Where Shall We Begin

     

    2. Mysterious Adventure Date Games to create memories, novelty and mystery:

    try: The Adventure Challenge

     

    3. Plan Date Nights including weekly ‘Sex Date Nights’

     

    4. Renew your relationship vision, commitment to each other

     

    5. Add your own here….there are infinite possible ways to connect.

    ———————————————————————————–
    ©2014 David Whyte. Excerpted from ‘NAMING’ From the book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.