Healing Arts

A first love can be quite painful, its intensity comparable to an infant’s unmet desire for food or touch.

Young immature love seeks to fulfill an unmet need.  Seeking comfort in the form of reassurance that you are indeed lovable, or yearning attentiveness to fill a void borne of experiences of feeling ignored, neglected or unimportant. Sometimes a love-relationship becomes the battleground where power is wielded: each skirmish a struggle for control and domination.  Inflicting pain or humiliation appears a measure of strength and the capacity for aggression the weapon.  For others, this relationship is the theater where the drama of martyrdom and self-sacrifice is acted out, and harm and suffering are in the script.

Immature love finds solace when it feeds the needs of the wounded self.  Giving is manifest with self-interest and measured in proportion to receiving.   Hungry and scared, it craves its next dose, holding one’s affection from the other as hostage.  Each one’s weakness manifests as strength in another, the struggle over power to control the other’s behavior.  Persisting brinkmanship suggests a looming possibility of an all out war.  The ultimate weapon is the threat of sustained withdrawal that can persist in silence and distance despite all manner of attacks.

Mature love is that which bleeds a thousand wounds, yet endures in strength and beauty.  Withstanding sorrows and separation, its resilience is an indicator for its maturity.   The adaptability of mature love allows for durability  – it can bend without breaking, weave without warping, and transform while retaining its truth in its essence.

Mature love finds meaning in its own purity, its purpose and procedure are one and the same: love for the sake of loving and loving for love itself.  A mature loving relationship engenders beauty in its many forms; it is a force of creation, harmony and peace.

At times when the traveler is rolling happily on the grassy knolls of life feeling like a seasoned expert,  something inevitably makes her tumble and she finds herself in a deep ditch of sludge, not knowing where she is or how she got there.  Squirming in the gravity of confusion, the messy predicament raises question of clarity and its illusions.

If only she can overcome the deep shame that comes from having fallen blind, unprepared. The traveler must rid herself of all unnecessary baggage when traversing through the sludge, and pride is the first to find its release as its unrelenting weight is an assault on her senses.  Pride is like a blindfold that impairs all vision and clarity.  Humility can take its place as a welcome companion as she releases the burden of the “should have’s” and “could have’s”…  Once she has overcome the paralyzing astonishment of how she tripped, she can begin to wade through the grainy depths and find her feet again.

She had neglected to see the signs and had stumbled, tripped and fallen waist deep in a substance that clung stubbornly on her skin, threatening to seep through her pores.  This poisonous, toxic waste-like matter was always there, unnoticed, unheeded.

It is waste that has accumulated over the years.  It is a trench filled with muddied waters in  the self.  The emptiness of the hole bore testimony to frailty and despair; the sludge was the filling of toxic rage and poisonous pride that defended against the hurling abyss of unfulfilled longing.

We are born with knowing love, wanting it, needing it. For someone to see how precious we are and value us despite our rages and hungers, demands and complaints, and differences and departures.  When that love is broken, absent, awkward or ill-fitted, part of the self is wounded and vulnerable to the maggots of blinding pride, raging anger, drowning self-pity,  and overcast shame. Once the traveler recognizes the sludge as a ditch of subconscious defenses, she can consciously sift through each emotion to confront the abyss.

Wading through the wasteland, she realizes that the sludge is just a provisional filling of empty space in the unconscious self.  The hole is a reminder to live creatively, consciously and deliberately – a magnificent offering to be filled with the beautiful treasures of all manners and forms…

The Universe is Generous, Benevolent.  Such is Grace.

There is no such thing as loving too much. That is a fallacy that has emerged from the economics-driven transactional notion of relationships.  To love is to give.  Giving, when deliberate, unconditional and selfless in intent, is always appropriate to the situation.

Kind thoughts, gentle words, affectionate feelings that intentionally offer significance to another’s needs are acts of love.  The act of material giving is only a part of love.  Extending one’s self in the service of another’s needs is loving. When we say she has a big heart, we usually mean that she is generous, attending to the needs of others, often putting aside her own.  Afterall when someone is generous only to bind a reciprocal transaction, one is hardly referred to as big-hearted.  Giving in that scenario is a loan conditioned on an expected payback.  Payback can be recalled in the manner of an equitable material transaction or through the fulfillment of an emotional need, such as approval or self-importance.  Selfless giving has no expectation of a reciprocal response attached: that is loving.

Imagine the Universe being filled with love and the heart as a basket in the center. The bigger the basket, the more love it can contain.  The size of the basket of the heart is a metaphor for the capacity to love.   Acts that reflect the faces of love such as mercy, generosity, compassion, and faith contribute to the unlimited expansion of the basket.

Enhancing one’s capacity to love is like conditioning one’s body. Disciplined effort and conscious practice – giving for the sake of loving itself – is exercise for the expansion of the heart.  The more we love, the bigger the heart grows, and the bigger the heart, the more it can receive.  The experience of being loved, understood, cared for and valued can be felt in direct proportion to the size of one’s heart. Physics meets spirituality.  It can feel the expanse of the Universe’s generosity, the depth of its compassion, and the intensity of its affection.  Such is the glory of the heart and its ever-related relationship with the Universe.

While the heart grows with the acts of loving, it contracts in response to the acts of un-loving. When it contracts it becomes smaller.  The Universe never stops giving, it is only the shrunken heart that inhibits receiving.

A heart may be bruised and battered.  There is a very real pain when the heart contracts and shrivels.  The throbbing ache in the chest is real: heart-wrenching.  There is, however, no such thing as a broken heart.  That is another fallacy.   That is because broken implies beyond repair.  Fear of loss often breeds mistrust, jealously, greed, or aggression: experiences that inherently devalue another’s needs as inferior or insignificant as compared to one’s own.  The heart, no matter how bruised and battered, always retains its capacity to give, thus to mend, repair, and heal.

The heart is bruised when we give in order to get. It is battered when loving is intentioned to receive: sometimes we give in order to be rescued from our shrunken heart, the debilitated nature of our embittered selves.  A shriveled heart can hold no love.  Hearts shrivel when the giving is conditional, stipulated, or restricted. That is, we give because:

we want something in particular
we want it from a particular source
we want it at a certain time

Love is selflessness.  What the heart gives, the Universe replenishes in abundant supply.  Such is Grace.

If I meet her now, the me of old, I smile at her with compassion and understanding, because I know that she had not realized the power of gentleness.  I can imagine her distraught as she naively slams hard against the immutable surface of reality.  The ever-increasing force of her blows were received with an unchanging ambivalence and her strikes returned in equal proportion.  Crippled by utter helplessness, she bruised and bled a thousand wounds and cried alone in misery and confusion.

She used to think that she had to fight her way through the world because you need strength to hold your own in the battlefield of life. She needed not only armor but artillery to protect herself.  To be strong meant having the will and the power to oppose, confront, and inflict harm when threatened.  She struggled to be free to journey through life to discover herself and the meaning of her existence.  Swathed in her ignorance, she forgot that the path set before her was both her riddle and her answer.

She believed that the world was an unsafe place and one had to be invulnerable in order not to get hurt.  In the face of confrontation, she considered acquiescence a weakness and self-restraint a flaw. If you could not stand up and fight for yourself, your life would be taken from you – your opinions would not be considered, feelings disregarded, desires repressed, and actions prohibited.  It was the ultimate capitulation.  And to surrender was the wrong above all wrongs, because fighting for what you believed was life’s singular purpose. Living was a battle, every inch of the way, and victory brought forth your destiny.

Gentleness meets reality and greets it with the accepting smile of a familiar friend.  Reality is not the force of a hostile opponent, but a deliberate terrain of steeps and valleys.  Gentleness can pervade the skies and traverse many  borders, enduring all manner of storms.  For gentleness knows the beauty at the end of a torrential downpour, when the rain drops on the wet leaves glitter in the reflection of the sun.  Gentleness is a persevering traveler that knows its destiny and embraces the adventure.

Gentleness is boundless in its power to be, to recreate, to give and to nurture.   It is in gentleness that one experiences the expanse of freedom, the breadth of generosity, and the depth of compassion. Its fate lies in its steadfast remembrance of its mission.  Its clarity is hosted by its consciousness: every breath, thought, feeling, word, and action is flexible in form yet deliberate in purpose.  Its wisdom appears in its restraint in the face of fear, anger, and compulsion. Its strength is in the love of the journey itself.