“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.” –Rumi
I was spiraling and on fire, expressing the frustrations, ins and outs, of what I do each day. The journey I have been on for the past year and a half. What sparked it, I’m not sure. I know it had something in the promise of purpose in my work unfolding, something in the questions I have held all this time about what I am doing here, in this job, and why. Questions about my tendencies to avoid, distract, find some reason to think it is not enough. Always wanting something different. Always distracting and averting and needing needing needing. And all of the sharing and spiraling coming from a place of wanting to connect. Excitement at bearing out a long process of figuring out and questioning with this amazing light of a human who has come now to walk with me, and feels like he might be walking with me for awhile. Thrilled and curious to see how he might see what I may have missed.
But my mind got away from me. My mind, tethered with thought and feelings, desires and aversions. We had set the intention that night to have calm. Quiet. Deep breathing and reseting. Intentional therapeutic touch of one another to help us ground and recover from this insane, exhilarating, thrilling and exhausting three weeks of heart explosions, opening up, ripping out, and deep seeing that came to us both, all at once. My mind wasn’t having it.
And then, my heart got away from me, too. It lost the connection with your tenderness and need to breathe, heal, wait. Your heart, having so much to give, and so much to make space for, has been dealt some heavy blows in the midst of all this love. It needs to clean out. And it simply couldn’t take all that spiraling excited, mind-driven energy. It needed space and time and breath.
But the conditioning trapped me and I shut down.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
I stop. Jarred out of openness and sharing and seeking to connect, into confusion. Hurt. Rejected. You don’t want to hear this. You don’t want this part of me. Confused. Don’t you know me?
“Your energy is so amped up right now.”
Defensive. Protecting. Walls up. This is the way I am. Mind spiraling into explanations and disclaimers for myself. “I am a verbal processor.” I am searching for my path and wanting to share it with you. This is where I am right now and I can’t force myself to be different.
“I can’t handle this level of energy right now.”
Retreat. Withdrawal. You don’t see me. You don’t know me. You don’t want me. Not like this. But this is who I am. Thinking, no longer feeling. I was foolish to think you could know me so quickly. Regret. A need to protect my heart. Wait. Breathe.
Enter a twinge of guilt. I simultaneously know you need something different than I can give you right now. Your needs matter. You are important to me.
Trapped. Stuck. Lost. No words. Whatever I say will be wrong. Wait. Breathe.
You are hurting and needing healing. You are expecting me to provide that for you and I can’t right now. How can I even begin to give to you when I don’t feel seen? What do I do? Do I pretend? Do I suppress? Do I run? Blocked. Wanting to give but needing to receive. Needing to receive reassurance that I’m seen. Not knowing how to ask for it.
A new thought. What do we do in a moment like this? When we both really need something that the other isn’t able to give? Wait. Breathe.
I offer to lay hands on you as you had asked, as was your expectation, and our agreed upon plan. I want the offer to mean a letting go of this mental spiral of doubt. I want it to get me out of my head and into my body. I want it to connect me back to you and that lovely, visceral love between us. Like the first time I touched you that way at Valentine’s, and you cried in gratitude, basking in the feeling of receiving love. I was moved. And I was so grateful to be giving.
I press my fingers down your spine and feel the tension. I feel forced. My gut is full of feeling my triggers have not been seen or understood, and not knowing how they can be. To ask for that kind of knowing feels selfish. Greedy. Pulling attention away from the struggles of your day, of this tender and vulnerable season of your life, and for which today, you have asked for support. Wait. Breathe.
Do I ask you to leave? Do I need you to stay? Tossed between a twisted heart from a poked pain body, and a desire to do better than that, but not knowing if I can, and not finding words.
I swallow and ignore my body telling me to withdrawal, and push through. I touch you, and I feel ghosts of my past. At that time, I pushed the feelings away. I didn’t want to see them fully because I didn’t want them to be real. The past is the past, I told myself, and I know better now. I know I need to let go of my stories and my pain to be able to really love you. To keep on loving myself. But I know I felt myself pretending, again, that everything is ok. And writing and reflecting now, the past arises.
All of the pretending, because I didn’t want another fight. I feel the familiar return to the way I shrank into a shell of my body over the course of two years until I couldn’t take it anymore, and exploded one night on the kitchen floor, screaming to be seen and heard. I feel the memory of the promise I made that I would never be so dishonest with myself–or anyone else–ever again. I’d sooner be alone, or better, unattached, than live so far from my anchor. And while I traced the lines up and down your back, I knew I was putting that on you, and it wasn’t real. But the tears were in my eyes all the same. Writing this now, I can see that my fear was that it might be you one day. That I’ll keep compromising and tiptoeing backwards into that shell until I’m alone and suffocating again, until the moment when it comes screaming out of me.
I know that being real about the challenges that come are the only way to walk towards meaningful and healthy loving relationship. I can feel that this will grow me and you. But I am seeing some doubts that I have not felt until now. I know most of them are coming from a place of doubt about my own worth. Doubting my ability to love someone else selflessly without feeling trapped or taken for granted.
The mind says:
I’m an emotional disaster.
I’m so much work.
I’m fearful and small.
I am fragile and needy, craving validation and recognition beyond what it reasonable.
My mind is too strong. As evidenced by all of this.
I know it is all real but not true. But it is landing on you today; on us. I don’t want to go to that default and patterned weak place of my conditioning, of “flight,” pretending, or withdrawal. I want to walk through this trance of unworthiness and unknowing to the other side, and wake in that field of awareness, holding your hand.
Tired of Speaking Sweetly
“Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.” –Hafiz
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