I'll meet you there
Good AND bad, shadow AND light, and all is Love
CARE.CHECK*: Are you a safe place for yourself?
How quickly do you abandon your side of the street, your own back, your sense of self if someone mirrors something you don’t know how to love or project onto you something that scares you?
How connected are you to your body and heart? How blindly do you trust your mind?
And at the end of the day, who decides who you are? The world, your self-talk or the truest you?
Let’s talk about integration this week… as if our lives and world depended on it. Because. It. Does.
I love you.
In case this letter gets cut in the email, you can click HERE to read the full post now :)
Hi Care.Friend,
What’s up? What’s happening? What’s shifting? What’s leaving? What’s beginning?
How are you?
What needs to be felt, known, witnessed… What needs to be released, completed, accepted?
How often do you give yourself permission to pause and contemplate where you’re currently standing on your journey? Without judgment. Without expectation. Without disappointment. Without resistance.
If you’re like me—and like most humans I know—this is no small feat for you to give yourself permission to be with what is, without trying to immediately intervene. Without needing to view the situation as a problem... Without starting to look for a solution compulsively! Without needing to make sense of it.
It is so hard to not try to understand. To not ask “why”. To not rage against what happened… To be right here, right now, in the aftermath, as a compassionate witness—and not feeling as a victim or as a rescuer.
And that’s because we’ve unlearned how to feel in our culture. To the point that we truly do not remember how. We call symptom ANY sensation in the body, and we grab anything we can to make them go away as fast as we can—be it a pill, a drink, food, work, netflix or a person.
We’ve pathologized the entire human experience. And that’s why the healing journey often has you convinced that you’ve gone mad.
And maybe we are “mad” by nature. Mad according to the mind that is.
But I personally believe is that what we are, ALL OF US, is misunderstood.
By ourselves first and foremost! And then by everyone else—because if we don’t understand ourselves, we can never truly understand others. We can’t because what we cannot accept within ourselves, we cannot accept within others.
And we’ve been trained to aspire to an ideal that is not human bound. To a kind of perfection that cannot be found—and that, more importantly, is neither what we nor the world needs.
It is so hard to not try to understand.
We are feeling creatures. We belong to Nature and to the stars. We are made of Love, made for Love and made to love.
Of that I am SURE.
But that is not what I’ve been told.
I’ve been taught to worship my logic, my ability to think and to rationalize. I’ve been taught to DO and then to do even more. I’ve been taught the ways of this world by people who have been taught the ways of this world—and what we can all witness is that the ways of this world do not work.
We’ve unlearned how to feel in our culture.
To the point that we truly do not remember how.
Because we are not our minds! But since that’s all society has been trained to reward, we sacrifice our bodies and hearts in the name of ideals that serve misguided power dynamics and turn us all against each other… while harming all the living creatures around us from humans, to animals, to plants and to Mamma Earth.
Our bodies are our temples. The seat of our energy, intuition and wisdom. They’re the compass we were given to find our way on Earth—so when we lose our connection to them, we lose our home, our best friend, and one of our truest treasures.
Our hearts are our greatest gifts. The seat of our dream, ability to offer and receive and to love. They’re the light we were meant to embody and offer to this world—so when we lose our connection to them, we lose our spark, our sacred guide, and our most nurturing anchor.
We’ve pathologized the entire human experience.
Minds are computers. They’re translating all the data that were inputted into them and they run programs all day. That’s what they’re designed to do. That’s all they CAN do. And those programs can either come from the outside world—and most of them did—or they can be intentionally shaped by our own soul energy.
When we’re children, we have no choice in that matter. We are open-hearted little sponges who absorb all the ideas, expectations, guidance, trauma, aspirations and fear of those who surround us—be it literally our mother when in utero, or be it our family of origin and all those we encounter at school, in our communities, streets and in the media we’re exposed to. We can only hope that we’re being programmed in a way that serves us and the whole, but chances are we’re at least partly being wired in a way that is disempowering at best and hurtful at worst.
And so there comes a time when we have to go within, drill into our skull and review why we think and act the way we do. It’s the most beautiful and rewarding adventure we’ll ever embark on, but it requires us to feel and face everything that we were so convinced we would not survive it got buried six feet under the reach of our conscious mind. So it is NOT for the weak of heart.
What we cannot accept within ourselves, we cannot accept within others.
And I believe this is why we can get so stuck in talk therapy and why a lot of spiritual practices call us to vilify and exile the ego, because if we want to INTEGRATE all those parts and emotions that we do not how to love or feel, we’re going to have to embark on a descent into the dark forest that we call the unconscious.
Which would be terrifying in any world, but is even more so in one where the darkness has been equated to horror, perversion, wickedness or demonhood.
As I keep witnessing, the darkness is anything but! Mostly it’s a mystical, whimsical, fertile, extraordinary realm where all our light and magic is born… You know what I believe in the most by now: the darkness is a nursery of stars. But it can also be a scary and dangerous place at times.
Horror, perversion, wickedness or demonhood are not features of the dark, they’re seen in the light on a daily basis! But their roots can fester in the darkness even faster, because they intoxicate parts of us that we shuffled down so long ago that they are more often than not very immature and at times a tiny bit antisocial.
We are made of Love, made for Love and made to love.
Think about it… If you take an enraged human being and lock them up in a cage, in the dark, and leave them there isolated and starved from love, light or any other kind of nourishment, do you expect to find them enlightened if you ever stumble upon them on your way home?
It could happen... But odds are incredibly low because enlightenment comes through the heart, and those parts of us that have been relegated to the abyss of our unconscious are NOT connected to our hearts.
Those of us who emerge from the worst as their best do so because they’ve learned how to support and nurture the parts of themselves that are driven by terror, angst, despair or rage… so that they can be felt and alchemized back into love. Which is the very OPPOSITE phenomenon from repression.
Especially since, intentionally or not, we are the ones who put them there.
When we lose our connection to our bodies, we lose our home,
our best friend, and one of our truest treasures.
One day, for some reason, we felt something that we didn’t know how to handle or that someone else did not have capacity for and in order to survive—figuratively mostly, but sometimes in a very literal fashion—so we pushed them out of the way and into exile.
Indeed the part of us that got angry or sad on our behalf, that part that felt hurt and victimized in our name, got punished on top of that. Punished in the worst way imaginable: they were cut from ANY source of Love.
So chances are that part of us is not too pleased with us. Chances are that part of us resents us at the very least and/or hates us plain and simple. And if we’re very honest, that makes a lot of sense.
This is again why Dick Schwartz’s IFS system is so life-saving and healing. (If you’re not familiar with it, I described it HERE.)
Because it allows us to, first, recognize that those parts of us exist! And second, to understand that it’s also another part that did the pushing away. It’s not “our true Self”. That’s how we can find our way back into our center—through reembodiment of our bodies and hearts—and then come in the middle of what Dick Schwartz calls our inner orphanage and reparent each of those parts, until all of them feel welcome, accepted, understood, unburdened and free to be just as they are.
Because we are not our bodies. We are not our parts. We are not even our hearts. We’re the presence that can love, nurture, heal and lead them all.
And if we don’t learn how to do that for ourselves, we either need to put all our energy in keeping those parts of us repressed… OR we recruit others to do our heavy work for us: save me, heal me, regulate me, soothe me, take my discomfort away, fix the world, fix me. Fix yourself! Do more, do less, but whatever you do, JUST MAKE IT GO AWAY."
We don’t do this because we’re sinful, manipulative creatures. Of course not.
I deeply believe that we are good inside, but I’m realizing that this saying can be misleading and hinder our path to integration. Because it can lead us to only focus on those parts of us that we label as good and to exile even further the parts of us that we’re afraid are bad.
And so we cover our shame with an armor of people-pleasing and perfectionism… and we end up burnt out because, again, all our energy is focused on repressing what we don’t know how to hold, while carrying what Brene Brown calls “a twenty ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us, when, in fact, it’s the very thing that’s really preventing us from taking flight.”
When we lose our connection to our hearts, we lose our spark,
our sacred guide, and our most nurturing anchor.
Rumi wrote: “Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will meet you there.” As souls, I believe we’re the flowers in that garden. So we are inherently GOOD and worthy. We are, again, made of Love!
AND… at the level of form, of personality, we are good and bad.
Parts of us are delightful, free, rooted into our hearts and a pleasure to be with. A pleasure for ourselves! A pleasure for others. That’s because they hold our sweetest stories and emotions. Those are the parts of us that are either celebrated by the world at large or at least by the world we created for ourselves. They’re in alignment with who we truly are. We and/or others UNDERSTAND those parts of ourselves, so they know they belong here.
Now, other parts are rude, demanding, judgmental and heavy. We can call them bad but what they are is misunderstood. They’re heart-less. Not because they’re cruel! Because they’re disconnected from our hearts, which is our well of love on Earth and how we can connect to our Source. They’re what Dick Schwartz calls “BURDENED”. They carry our deepest wounds and most uncomfortable emotions. We and/or others reject them so they live in a constant war zone—either trapped against their will in the dark forest or showing up in our lives against our will and in a way that only builds more alienation towards them.
Those parts make us feel inadequate, shameful, untrustworthy, hysterical. They can lead us to self-harming behaviors, boundary violation, aggression or depression. We hate those parts of us and that’s the very reason why they keep on showing up in a way that feels like self-sabotage.
Enlightenment comes through the heart.
What those parts need is INTEGRATION. It seems to me like this is the new phase we’ve entered in healing consciousness.
At the beginning we pathologized everything, because minds are not skillful at description. They often need to judge first.
Then we started bringing compassion into the mix and realizing that no matter how inconvenient or harmful, most behaviors somewhat made sense.
Then we learned regulation and hoped that we could bypass all that we don’t love by rooting into peace, forgetting that peace stems from love and that love is unconditional!
And now we’re learning how to integrate. How to go into the darkness and realize that we confused unruly lizards in need of a hug, with venomous snakes with an homicidal agenda. And that it is our resistance to hug those lizards that turned those misguided little creatures into enemies of state that we’re now at full-on war with.
Integration means finding safe places where we can let our grief flood the floor without someone (including ourselves) getting terrified that we (or them) will drown.
It means finding safe places to air the rage that is SO valid and welcome and that holds the very energy that allowed us to survive, without someone (including ourselves) getting terrified that they (or we) will die in the explosion.
It’s freeing ourselves to say or write things we don’t mean, so that we can hear or read where the heart disconnect is… and so that we can reshape the story into love.
Integration requires us to find a safe place where we can let ourselves go mad, so that we can know for sure how sane we are.
Sane not according to the mind... Sane according to LOVE.
Which requires our willingness to be with all parts of us, to feel every inch of our bodies and every ounce of those sensations that are not here to kill us but to let us know we’re alive. Our willingness to be good AND bad—and to realize that those are only conceptual stories that hold no value when disembodied…
“Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden.
I will meet you there.”
Rumi
Integration requires the courage to say “This is me”, but NOT in a “take it or leave it” kind of way. Because this is not about others. If we fall into a take me or leave me narrative—be it with a defiant tone or an imploring one—we either cut ourselves from the precious mirrors that others offer us on our way into embodied love and lose many others… or we become who we think others desire us to be and we lose ourselves. Both are prices we cannot affors to pay!
Integration requires the courage to say “This is me! And I love and accept me exactly as I am now... Some of my behaviors are good and some of my behaviors are bad, and none of them define me. And I know that through Love, Acceptance and compassionate witnessing, I cannot not be driven to change organically what hurts others and what hurts me, so I’m done being at war being myself!
War begets war. And only Peace can lead to peace.
Love being the vanguard of Peace, let’s try to unpathologize our experience for a while—and to fall back into love with what is.
Yes, dear Care.friend, let’s give Love a chance… and watch everything shift.
Only Peace can lead to peace.
With kindness, love and light—knowing that all three are born in the sacred darkness that we do not need to fear anymore.
leo