I awakened this morning to a beautiful poem written by my 9 year old daughter.
I love you when you give me ice cream cones
I love you
I love you like the wind loves the sky and the sky loves the world and the world the UNIVERSE
Whew! I think this is all there is to say!
What a week! I have never experienced this many calls from clients in crisis.
It has been amazing to see my own state of being holding steady and riding the storm of intense emotions floating around me. It is as if I have an anchor in the sea of despair and am holding steady with a loving force as the immense waves keep crashing in.
On Monday, I was on the phone from 7am till 7pm offering unconditional love and support to families in crisis. The main thing I work with is first attuning and joining with their emotional state. In the case of desperation, I allow myself to feel the desperation and make friends with it inside my own being. As I meet it and open to it I am able to attune to a greater love that can hold desperation and allow it to express itself without making a move toward the external.
As I do this, I am encouraging the other to meet me in this space and realize that they too can meet their desperation without playing it out. The challenge is to stay with the feeling without projecting or futurizing the feeling onto their child. Sitting with the discomfort and telling the truth about it.
When we are able to make friends with the feelings and take the power out of the external circumstance, the power returns to us and amazingly shifts back into love, its original state.
My daughter continually enlightens me to the old blocks and beliefs I still so valiantly hold onto.
I wear them, like an old worn out sweater that I’m afraid to give away because maybe I’ll never find another one that feels so good. I defend and justify them to the hilt when I am triggered because being “wrong” is just unbearable to my belief that I am “right”.
I project them onto my daughter and convince myself that I am teaching her the “lessons” she needs to live a responsible, adult life. I play many games with myself when I feel the discomfort her behavior brings up in me, for it is easier to try and control her instead of sitting with myself and questioning what is going on inside.
It has been quite and amazing journey to finally recognize that my discomfort is ALWAYS a block between my heart and hers. So why would I try to get her to change instead of taking the power out of the block? I ask myself that question whenever I am hearing myself lecturing to her about her behavior and how it affects me. I am always struck by the “pain” I experience after severing our connection in the name of my own comfort.
So, over and over I vow to return to my favorite spot, my couch, to sit with myself as I witness my own discomfort and tell the truth about it. It is a belief, in consciousness, that I have given power to which snatches the present moment and my connection with myself and therefore my daughter. I want that power back inside me so I can be the “loving being” I know I am and that my beautiful alive daughter reflects back to me with her amazing joy.
See me beautiful,
look for the best in me.
That’s what I really am,
and all I want to be.
It may take some time
It may be hard to find,
but see me beautiful.
See me beautiful,
each and every day.
Could you take a chance?
Could you find a way?
To see me shining through
in everything I do
and see me beautiful.
~ by Kathy and Red Grammer
Love
“Whatever they grow up to be, they are still our children, and the one most important of all the things we can give to them is unconditional love. Not a love that depends on anything at all except that they are our children.”
Rosaleen Dickson
What beautiful and challenging words to live by. I know for myself it has taken me quite a long time to even understand what unconditional love is. The only way I recognized love was if a condition came with it. When I first experienced someone unconditionally loving me, I immediately thought, “what do they want in return?” It is still hard for me to believe that love can be given without a price tag.
It has become so clear to me that when my daughter didn’t “act” the way I wanted her to I would use my love as a commodity, withdrawing it, to achieve compliance from her. What a painful realization this was when I began to truly embrace my own abandonment of myself when it came to self-love.
Seeing the terror in my precious daugthers’ eyes, when I withdrew the love that she trusted would keep her safe, was so painful that I began to look inside to see what was going on with me. When I saw how I consistantly withdrew love from myself for not being the “perfect” child who could heal my mom’s wounds I slowly began to realize that this was where I must start the journey toward being the loving mom I wanted to be.
Even with all the years of psychotherapy and understanding in my awareness I had never experienced the magnitude of pain when I emotionally withdrew from my own child. The feeling was almost unbearable for me. I knew that there had to be another way, and I became determined to find it. So, my exploration truly began to find the meaning of unconditional love.
This site is dedicated to my continued search and longing to live and breathe the truth of who I truly am. The journey is filled with my challenges as well as my joys and I look forward to sharing and learning together.
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