Intention:
sence: holding it in impersonal awareness that remains now – while feelingly in embodied contact with the sensation of it in the present – and holding it in unconditional love. To purify personal identification with this information and all the patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior. The end goal is to be able to simply be with; to sit with it and allow it in the body without holding on to it, resisting it, or identifying with it.
Having been disassociated for a long time and only recently able to feel my emotions and my body, I simply don’t have the tools yet to be able to observe it from a distance without getting sucked into it. I also didn’t grow up with healthy models of how to self-regulate or socially express this energy in healthy ways – so with all these difficult feelings and areas I am undertaking a conscious exploration of them to ease my way into these scary places and find a way to stabilize in peace with them.
Where I am now:
So I am discovering I am feeling lonely. Prior to discovering and consciously feeling it, it was still in my subconscious driving neurotic behaviour.
I am discovering I have a lot of resistance to allowing the feeling of loneliness because I feel it so acutely. Just making contact with it, can drive me instantly into dating apps trying to find a partner.
I can see that being self-absorbed in your own need not to feel lonely is not the best foundation for a relationship and doesn’t give much room for real connection. Even so, there is a massive amount of neurotic resistance to feeling lonely, and sex and sexual connection have been the main way I learned to connect with others. (Healthy connections and relationships are other topics to address.)
https://tarabrach.libsyn.com/sheltering-in-love-part-5-loneliness-as-a-portal-to-sacred-presence
Tara’s podcast on loneliness really sheds some light. Especially on the sense of self-disgust or aversion layered into loneliness. That we automatically consider there must be something wrong with us for us to be punished with loneliness.
“Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few humans and even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need for God absolutely clear.”
― Hafiz
This poem she mentions really touched me. Loneliness really is the sense of the personal self, and the pain of separation that comes from being identified with it. The pain of loneliness is then the call to remember presence, that presence: the beloved is and has always been there observing and loving the personal self.
Will listen to:
https://tarabrach.libsyn.com/the-god-whom-i-love-is-inside
Not running away, but trying to deeply feel my loneliness. I liked the idea of negative self-critical voices around the self-disgust of loneliness are inner children and babies that don’t know better in this meditation.
What an existential pain!