No Walking away from yourself?
When the hurricane of life has you directly in it's path, you have a choice you can face into it or walk away, for all life's complications, sometimes there is a binary choice. There are things that you do not get to sidestep away to safety from, cross winds are more dangerous and powerful because they are unbalanced, you will fall, then you are at the mercy of pure chaos, you either have to oppose or embrace the direction of the force hitting you. We never know when the background storm of unpredictable wind are going to blow up into a serious life changing event, and they are not all bad, you can turn a corner and bump into the love of your life, though there are plenty of ways to get knocked off your feet.
You can run away from love if you wish and many do, clearly that is a poor choice however sometime people just do not have the energy to face that storm of emotions, they have been hurt, disappointed or just plain disillusioned with the whole process too many times, it takes a fool or a hero to marry for the tenth times with the hope that it will be different this time round. Though if the alternative is facing the solitude of your own company for the rest of your life you need to be sure that is what you want and it is not just the response to fear, as fear is amplified by space not lessened. However being able to be happy on your own is probably the most important quality that dictates whether you are going to be a better person in the company of others, you have to like yourself before others can truly know and love you back, you have to face into who you are both with others and without, that is the test of character that is resolved by relationships, can you be yourself.
It always dangerous to walk away from yourself because you have a bad habit of following who you are where ever you go, though it is hard to face who you are, it is hard work and sometimes it is better to go with the flow and just do what you do without the drama of trying to solve the mystery the in's and out's of why you are doing something? It is fine to do this for awhile, it can feel good just to catch a breeze and drift with it, almost flying, but the gravity of your past will drag you back to ground zero if you never deal with it. Whether you choose or are forced to face your past in the form of your character, it is the actions of that character that matters and is inescapable, that is what traps you and what it is that affect your life in such a way that it is unavoidable, that is the moment that you have to turn into the hurricane and face who you are.
The one guarantee I can give you that the longer you run, the further away you get, the rebound is going to be harder and more devastating, and no one cares apart from you, it is an entirely personal accident. You can deal with childhood trauma when you are a teenager or a pensioner, it is coming for you and if you get through it, you will be amazed by how you were control by it, how the direction of your life has been altered in ways that you never wish it were. Balance is not something that really exists in nature, there is only constant change, the rising and passing away of tides, moon, sun, life and even love, none are fixed or eternal, it is our greatest achievement and illusion that we are able to create unconditional love, even for the shortest amount of time. That is why we can not help but be impressed by the tight rope walker, to see someone achieve balance is beautiful, even if it temporary, that is why young families seem so perfect, they are at the moment of balance in their lives, in full flow, it is a midpoint, but ultimately it is an illusion of time between birth and death, like only seeing the blossom of a flower.
Though it is not wrong to walk away when you know that is the best thing for you, you get to walk away from your childhood, you get to resolve it, to put the ghosts to bed, you get to have a clean break from the past if you want it, and then you get to decide who you want to be now. However it is essential that you can honestly face yourself without excuses or harshness, your mind is not a criminal court where you sit in judgement upon yourself, it is an honest inquiry with mercy and compassion, a truth and reconciliation process who's focus is the avoidance of harm in the future. You get to treat yourself with kindness and patience, and you have to, because you are an unreliable witness to your own experience.
The experience of a child is emotional first and foremost, that is the lens through which you saw your life, how things made you feel was the entire landscape upon which events occurred, fear and love were the colours that were never quite inside the lines that our parents tried to give us. Part of the role of a parent is to help us in that process, to guide us in how we feel about the world, whether we feel safe and loved, or unloved and afriad of everything, is something you never had control over and yet it set a course and a habit of being that is difficult to change from our older point of view. That is the beauty of reading, talking and listening, we get to have different points of view that sets our own experience into the context of a million other points of views, some resonate, others seem completely alien and that is normal, we each have an individual experience, but we are not trapped by it, we get to choose better actions and that is the purpose of life, to be a growing being of consciousness.
You do not get to grow when you hide from your past, you need to grow from somewhere, we do not get a blank slate, we are born in the soil of our childhood, as our parents were born in theirs, the earth is mother of us all and it where we return to. Our roots need to be strong and secure, which comes with our honesty and truthfulness, if you are alive today, you experienced kindness in some form, and if you have the strength to breath, you had resistance that you overcame, no childhood was perfect, some where plainly imperfect, but so are we, it is something we need to be at peace with, just as our future will not be perfect. It is irrelevant to the universe if your life is perfect, the only place perfection can exist is in the present moment, that is all that is important or relevant, you can only be in balance with the forces that you are experiencing in this moment.
It does not matter how overwhelming the forces are, how much pain you are suffering, how upsetting, your mere presence allows the possibility of perfection, grace, ease and joy, even when it feels unbearable, you are bearing it, you are surviving and you can find meaning in that, and meaning gives us purpose, and in fulfilling purpose we are growing as being of consciousness and awareness, and that is heroic. Life is not a test, but we are always being tested by the degree that we experience our life in this moment as wonderful, that is not an easy thing to do constantly and continuously, most of us are lucky to have presence with it once in a while, however it is always there under the surface (literally in our heart, just pay attention to that physical space and it feels like wonder, love, joy, always) waiting for us and our awareness to note it again.
By facing into our fears, thoughts, worries, we are able to confront and silence those ghosts that distract us from this presence with our own emotional field. It is a lost that we have all felt since we gained the gift of language, that ability to be at ease with ourselves was lost in our thoughts, we gain so much by communication, it gave us a social mind and society itself, but it took away our presence with our physical being from the love inside us. Monasteries and retreats recreate that hunter gatherer experience, silence with purpose, they take away communication by speech and give you a mission to just experience being, where you only witness your senses, not your thoughts.
However you do not need to retreat to give yourself space to face yourself, you can do it one moment at a time. You can face each thought, feeling, emotion and sensation, on it's own term as they emerge, you do not have to do anything and half the battle is doing nothing, no reacting, you are just letting them be, you note them and where they came from or ask yourself if you do not know. Give yourself space to just observe the experience of being you, whilst taking the actions that pursues what you want in life, you can move through life with purpose and by allowing the winds of our past to hit us, we can actually gain energy, it can feed into our momentum, it can add depth to our purpose and ennobles it. We all have a past, it can be where we came from or where we are stuck, let it go, let it be and you will be amazed at where you can go.
