Emotional Literacy

It is in the coming, wholeheartedly to meet the Divine that we always find her, always.  We could never be separate but in our minds. She cares not whether you acknowledge her existence as you, yet she is always there.  The funny ways of our mind resist this so greatly.  Turning within is the most challenging turn in the human world.  Humans are the only species that has the capacity to turn inward.  We are the only kind, that we know of, with the gift of self-contemplation.  We are the only being where God can look at itself, looking at itself. Surely this gift was designed for some greater good and yet, it has also caused great many trouble.  Be supported as you turn inward through mentorship with folks who know the best in you and love you unconditionally and have gone through the landscapes of their own consciousness and seen what humans would judge as not favorable about the ways that they have behaved in the world.  They also know that they are not bad people for having behaved in less than whole and integrated ways. Once we have faced our own missteps we can hold greater space for others' perceived mistakes. We live in a paradigm where judgment has become a protection mechanism… a guard to the gate at the entrance of one’s own consciousness.  Many have never even approached this gate… but, somewhere deep inside of them, they know it’s there. They also sense that there are monsters in there that no one should EVER see. So, the guard of that gate judges anyone who walks by it, giving clues as to the false realities that have been stored in there over the years of a person’s life.  

I was listening to a Brene Brown podcast Unlocking Us the other day.  She was interviewing a Yale Professor on the topic of emotional literacy.  I loved this podcast because I feel passionate about helping to unlock these gates which were built by a society that has demanded perfection and therefore instilled the gates at the entrance of our feelings and emotions.  We were meant to feel and express every single one of these emotions throughout the moments in our lives but we were told for various reasons from a very young age that we were not to express them because sadness was not for boys or anger, shan’t be expressed by girls because it is so very unbecoming.  Well, fuck that. If I don’t express anger, I repress anger and that, my friends, is a loaded gun stored, gaining ammunition, in my consciousness… waiting to go off sideways at some inappropriate time down the line. All because your gates to your true feelings are locked and my anger threatens you and the sturdiness of the lock on your gate.  You have no space in your emotional body for me to feel a goddamn thing. And, literally, this is a damn for God. God is at the center of me and of you and is dying, literally, to be unleashed, but we have blocked this flow with this lack of emotional availability as a nation, a culture and, as individuals. This has GOT to stop. You do not need to fix somebody because they feel sadness or pain… no, that is just energy in motion that needs to leave the body, the system, before it becomes dangerous and toxic and another brick on the wall of china that you have been building between yourself and God.  And, we wonder why the drastic increase in disease, addiction, mental health challenges. We are damned up human beings as a result of our fundamental priorities in our culture. We must create space for emotions and feelings… we must, else we will continue to whither individually and as a race. Emotional literacy and emotional availability are two sides of the same coin… the topic needs to be addressed and built into the foundation of the way we live.

Start with being unafraid to feel your feelings.. Express them as emotion every day.  Unblock the damn and let it fly as art, as beauty as the movement of life into this world where it was meant to be expressed.  Do not harm another in your pursuit. Stay true to the truth that your truth should not harm another… if it will, find another way to express it.  But, express it - else you will be damned...

On Codependency

Where art thou in the bubbling fire of resistance

Here and now in the midst of all of this

Resist not the journey of another

for she is in my hands 

loved and directed as any other.

Ok, father, then I pray…

for the highest and best of everything

for my love and all of her ways

forgive me for trying to fix 

what does not need to be fixed

forgive me for forgetting

that you know what you're doing.

I humbly turn my attention to the most appropriate inward place

focusing on the growth of the only one I am meant to change

I will grow in love and compassion and empathy for my love 

and all whom I come across and meet

May I just stop trying to fix everything out there

and see the Divine perfection I bear.

God Has My Back

Yesterday I was having a tough time making a decision about something fairly important.  The decision was clouded by fears that I have struggled with for many moons. These are rooted in codependency.  Codependency is the disease of the lost self… what this means is that we are disintegrated. That due to childhood trauma we begin to depend on non-sustainable forces outside ourselves and most often this shows up as overdependence on a person or people in our lives to meet our basic needs.  We have come to believe that whatever we depend upon is the source of something that we absolutely need at a fundamental level. Therefore the thought of losing this thing, a fear fantasy set up in the future, also a mechanism of trauma becomes terrifying and we can often go into a panic about something that is both created and has its life in the mind.  When my trauma is activated it can be very difficult to make decisions because I am busy trying to control my environment and the people in order to feel safe. Of course, this is an illusion and an example of codependency. The only true safety is the safety of embodying the knowledge that God lives within us and this God that also lives in everyone else is the true source of all of life.  I don’t have to be afraid to lose a person or a situation because, although it is ok to desire and value connection with others, they are not the source of our happiness. We can be dependent on others… it is not a matter of going about life alone, but, if something changes, the source of that very thing that I am afraid to lose will rush to meet me and all of my needs in the next moment of life in some other way.  This is faith or trusting the process based on past life experience. Sometimes faith has to start with the reasoning in my mind. What I mean by that is that if my trauma triggers a shit storm of fear, I can grab a guiding light that will lead me back to the truth. In this case, the guiding light may be a statement of Truth like “Regardless of my fear, I know that God has my back… I know that God is everywhere present and all-powerful and all-knowing and that somehow within this truth is a path to my fulfillment.”  Fulfillment is having all needs met….and, my God is not stingy with meeting my needs. My God is so Good beyond anything I can imagine, that meeting my needs in abundance has always been her way. I am not saying that she gives me what I think I want all of the time, but when I truly surrender to her I find myself blown away, again and again. Sometimes it’s unanswered prayers that I need to trust the most. It’s times like these when I have learned that God has a specific path and place that she is working hard to bring me toward.  It’s like sometimes I get the feeling that I am on a one-lane road with my brights on and here and there I see a little side road that I think I want to take but I am already past it by the time that my thought catches up to me. Or, I may even turn down that road but inevitably I come to big orange construction barricades that say… do not enter. What I find during these times when I seem to get rejected over and over again is that I am close to something big that has been in the works for my life and that last stretch is protecting me from myself.  This is one the Divine says NO, you may not take this side street today. Get back on track, stay the course, you’re almost there.