compassion – Page 3 – Soul Reflection

Our Natural State

My husband and I are in the very midst of ironing out some of the bumps and grooves that appear in any long term relationship. To add to the fun, we are both in our early forties and hitting that developmental stage (yes, adults have them too!) aka ‘ the midlife crisis’ where all of our childhood wounds pop up with varying stages of intensity, to be faced and dealt with. To top it off, we are just through the very very early years of parenting, which is just one big fog, and now that the kids are at school there is space to face the shit.

It sucks. It’s hard. And mostly it is bloody painful. I think I have cried more in the last 3 weeks than I have in the last 10 years. And with this ironing, unpicking, rebuilding and connecting there have been some sweet and tender times, a second honeymoon of sensitivity and kindness. But mostly it hurts, just like any wounds do. We are digging out the detritus that has been left in over the years, the bits causing sores and infections, cleaning them out and suturing them up.

So whilst I have swung between grief, rage, love, hope, fear and happiness like some sort of rollercoaster on hyper drive, my grounding has been the understanding that our natural state is love.

This is the state we come into the world, pure love.

So when my own or someone else’s behaviour, actions or words appear unloving or hurtful, my faith in humanity and our core state, helps me to understand that these come from a wounding that needs to heal. That our natural state of love is our instinctive place to wish to return to and our intentions are drawn from there. It is so easy to hear and be the worst of things, to use anger and coldness as a crutch for survival, but true connection, true living can only come from love; no matter how much it might hurt to get there.

Trigger Me Tantrum

I have been musing over children’s tantrums and how so often the initiating triggers can be unnoticed; the act of distress being so all consuming and energetically confronting that the source becomes lost in the moment. Sadly, when the catalysts are missed the opportunity for empathy, resolution, connection and growth are usually missed too.

My reflections have led me to narrow down what I believe to be the 3 key triggers that lead to emotional meltdown: diet, sleep and anxiety/fear.

Guaranteed that my children will flip out if over tired, filled with refined sugar or too much wheat and guaranteed, if they are unable to control events that cause them concern or are faced with an emotionally threatening situation, they will act out of character and generally become obstructive, unreasonable and sometimes hysterical. But, if I spot that initiator and manage to support them through it, they feel understood, heard and loved. And they grow to understand themselves better because of the complete process.

As I considered these flashpoints, I realised that they naturally apply to adults too. Maybe we don’t tantrum quite in the style of kids (maybe we do sometimes too!) but those places where we act out, where we are less patient, less tolerant, less kind, also predominantly derive from these 3 core triggers.

Sleep and Diet, whilst often in disorder, are more simply managed and controlled. By recognising the importance of their part in our mental wellbeing they can be adjusted to the appropriate priority.

Anxiety and Fear are trickier; far less control; the numerous possibilities of spontaneous and unexpected catalysts; and generally some of life’s more challenging obstacles that can be hurled in our direction at any given moment.

But knowledge is still power and in this case often retrospectively. At those time when I find myself presenting the less pleasant side of my nature, it is so helpful for me to investigate these 3 triggers and see how I can adjust or support them. If it is anxiety or fear that has reared up, I can take steps to learn to manage that better, to implement change in my life that can reduce that possibility, or even overcome them completely.

Empathy, resolution, connection and growth are created for me, for my children and for others when I take a breath to explore the source of the behaviour. No one tantrums because they think it’s cool or healthy, it’s a hard place to go and it deserves every effort to understand it.

Initiation

I was listening to a lecture by Robert Moore the other day and heard him describe what happens to our children when they are not supported through to adulthood with the appropriate initiation.

An appropriate initiation meaning a rite of passage supported by the elders of the community that delivers the teenager into their authentic strength, their self belief and their burgeoning knowing.

Robert Moore described how men without initiation have a tendencey to lack the wisdom to handle their natural aggression; it has not been tempered or guided with the knowledge of the elders. This is a big topic of conversation on social media and the world stage right now. Men and their aggression. I’ll come back to that…

He then went on to say that women without initiation have a tendencey to fall into the space of victim; they are not empowered in their self belief and inner strength. Bingo!

Aggressive Men / Victim Women…. is that not the constant narrative on twitter/facebook/instagram etc at the moment. The topic du jour.

Except that we are looking at it face on, rather than behind the scenes. I have heard very few voices who actually understand where this dynamic is coming from, reaching back to our ancestry and forward to our knowledge of psychology to bring forth this vital information.

Our society is failing our children by not supporting, creating and delivering this aspect of transition, from child to adult. We can continue to spend the days verbalising on social media or we can take action and begin to change the world with a true and meaningful understanding of how to achieve that.

Healthy initiation (and university style trauma is definitely not that!) is a critical piece of the puzzle of healing.

***

I personally know of three global organisations that help to create that process of initiation for men & woman, no matter what age:

The ManKind Project

Woman Within International

Women in Power

Me, Myself, The Snob

I was brought up to be a Snob. Not with any real conscious intention, but just because that’s the way my family’s beliefs lay.

I believed that people who said ‘hay’atch’ instead of ‘aitch’ for the letter H were intellectually inferior; I believed that those who called supper ‘tea’ were common, likewise if napkins were called serviettes. I believed there were strata in society between humans and that our family was thankfully nearer the top than bottom.

I believed this because generation after generation of my family had all believed something similar for far too long.

At 18, I left my privileged echo chamber of private school (and I say this not without gratitude for the experiences and opportunities it provided) and fell into the real world. Not the real real world mind you. Public relations could hardly be called that, but a more culturally diverse environment than I was used to for sure.

In this world, the two A levels I had scraped were deemed major qualifications rather than the desperate failures by my family and academic peers. I was mixing with people whose backgrounds afforded me a window into lifestyles and upbringings that contrasted drastically to my own (and I, who thought I came from the broken side of the family, the rough edge of posh).

And then I dived further… over the years I waitressed and travelled and met more and more people who showed me over and over again how ridiculously narrow my familial belief system had been; how I had been raised to judge people by meaningless standards instead of learning to look into their hearts and meet them human to human.

I see that my family had no malice in their own judgements, they were products of their own upbringing, a continuation of the lineage of pomp and snobbery and done with as much kindness and love as those beliefs can afford.

But now I am entering a new era, a time and age where my own children are beginning their natural formation of opinions about the world around them and I am constantly checking in with myself as to the values I am modelling. Am I carrying old, unhelpful, unkind, judgmental beliefs that I am passing on to my kids or am I shifting the familial system to compassion, acceptance, difference and diversity? I know what I wish to model, but I’m sure my parents thought similarly too, I bet they thought they were raising progressive kids through their own shifts of self awareness and yet I feel their burden of unnecessary opinion heavy on my back.

I feel reactive and triggered by any form of superiority, be it qualifications, age or otherwise. I know now that the humblest and wisest of voices can come from any direction, without a cloak of ego announcing their arrival.

I wonder how my children will view me in another 30 years, what they will perceive to be antiquated notions and what they will choose to do differently.

As I say to my clients, as long as we are moving forward, no matter how slowly, we are still moving forward.

On, on I step, smashing my institutionalised snobbery, one day at a time.

Goodbye My Friend

In the early hours of the morning, my beautiful friend Kim left for spirit. She has left behind, not only her amazing little family, but also her legacy of kindness and wisdom.

Kim and I met in our early 20’s, both hostesses in a restaurant on the eternally cool Kings Road, Chelsea. She was just a couple of years older than me but had already travelled and explored so much that she carried this worldly aura. I was frippish and naive to her calm and sense. It would have been easy for her to be disdainful of me but instead she embraced the best of me, she’s always done that.

We whiled away the hours with humour and candour; our friendship honest and simple. And then she left to travel some more and our paths diverged.

Some 10 years ago, through the gifts of social media, we reconnected across the world; Melbourne to London. We watched each other’s lives as we dived into love & parenthood and the crazy all consuming discoveries that flow with that; we engaged in light comments and philosophical discussions here and there.

And then she got sick, she was told she had very little time, and we plunged right back into that friendship we had left behind at our hostess stand 20 years ago.

She has given every ounce of herself to be around for her family for as long as possible, she has walked this illness through three and half years and I have walked alongside behind the written word of our messages as we have shared our loves, our fears, our histories and our hopes. There is nothing like the shadow of death to focus our hearts to truth.

As she did so many moons ago, she saw the best in me through every conversation, she offered wisdom won through pain and joy and I know she offered that to everyone. One of her fears as she neared the end was that her children might think she had not ‘fought’ hard enough to stay alive and it breaks my heart that she could even consider that of herself when she loved them so passionately and absolutely. She raised herself up and away from her own childhood of pain to offer them the very best of herself because that is the strength of woman she was.

And now I have had to say goodbye to one of my closest and dearest friends despite not having as much as hugged her for two decades. That is love, that is friendship and that is heartache.

I Need A Man

There is a huge part of me that is sitting in anxious resistance to this title but I also know that now is the time to walk through this barrier and embrace a new paradigm.

I have spent 40 years of my life adamantly claiming that I don’t need a man to be happy or complete or to help or support me. It’s an added nicety that I’ve had one by my side for the last 13 years, who has fathered my children and kept food on the table (organic at that!) and a roof over our head. But in my head and in my speech I have still maintained that I have never ‘needed’ him.

In fact, in some ways that was a part of our success so far, the fact that I didn’t need him, but I did want him. Need is the ultimate vulnerability and hey I wasn’t going to give into that without a fight! My mother brought me and my brother up mostly single handedly from when I was 8 years old; she was fiercely independent, DIY-ed her way around the home and shunned the lesser skills of her masculine counterparts. She could do a better job and so often that was absolutely true.

But I have finally clicked. I don’t just want a man, my husband, but I need him too.

As much as I can take on most of the skills, often assigned to the masculine, there is one thing I absolutely cannot do for myself. I cannot create life.

No matter how I choose to conceive; in or out of relationship, with or without the actual presence of a man, naturally or aided, personally or anonymously, I still NEED a man’s sperm to unite with my egg in order to create life.

It was this flash thought that made me reconsider my stance on needing and wanting. In light of the energy of radical feminism, blanket equality and other passionate discussions on gender roles or otherwise, I realised how much my refusal to ‘need’ my man is damaging my relationship with him and with the masculine.

If I ‘have’ to need him in order to create life, I can either consider that need and minimise it to crude function or I can enlarge it to the more spacious picture of balance; two sides, two offerings, two parts to make one whole.

By allowing myself to need him, I can expand this idea into exploring where we can support each other within our own personal strengths and weaknesses; to be the yin to his yang and work as a whole unit rather than just as connected individuals.

All of this makes deep spiritual sense to me now.

How much have I been holding and carrying simply because I have refused to need him? Now we can share our loads with respect and harmony, acknowledging our united power and grace whilst balancing our souls.

I am curious to take this back out into the world and let myself openly need others too; to offer my willing vulnerability as a partnership in so many ways, with my children, with my friends and peers and, most significantly, with the masculine. Just because I can do and achieve something on my own does not mean it is the best or most enlightened way for it to be done.

Nature offers me constant visual reminders of the beauty, significance and necessity of duality and, as I choose nature to be my guide, I am proud to say how much I need my man.

A Ruthless Mirror

Recently the bickering of my kids has been driving me a little demented. Hearing the impatience retorts, and unsympathetic reactions that then spiral into fisticuffs and cruel words, triggers me something rotten.

So I hear myself saying all sorts of unhelpful snaps: ‘stop!’; ‘be kind!’; ‘there will be consequences if you continue!’. And then they look at me square in the face, deaf to my protests.

And I know why.

Everything that I accuse them of, I am guilty of myself. Am I patient with their needs and issues? Often not, I am too frequently distracted by the next need of meals, or school runs or crazy head thoughts; I judge their problems of colouring pens or space or choice of game to be of lesser value than my preoccupation and I respond with sighs and frustration.

Am I kind? Oh yes, lots of the time I am but not when I am pushed and tired, then I can be careless with my words and energy and hurtful with my reactions. But somehow I am expecting my kids to be above that. They ‘should’ be better at controlling those bitchy words age 8 and 6, seeing as I’ve got it handled aged 41. Not!

Am I generous? With all of the things I have plenty of then I am super generous, but I know I can horde and snuffle away my precious and less abundant treasures, including my time and attention.

Am I violent? Never. Well never with my fists or feet, but I can carry the violence of energy in my huffs and silences when hurting. Just like them.

So I recognise this ruthless, searingly honest mirror of my children. I know that the trigger, the unbearable bickering, is my lesson to walk through.

I said to my husband yesterday, I have used my will power to overcome so many obstacles in my life, to change patterns and habits that have been destroying me. I have cured myself of eating disorders, quit addictive substances, abandoned my self harming, walked away from abusive relationships, all through the power of my own choice and determination.

Yet this space, where I know that it is ‘I’ who needs to model the change I wish to see. ‘I’ need to offer more patience, kindness and generosity so that my children have that reflection in their mirror of learning. If I am triggered, it is my issue to work through, not theirs to force into submission.

But I am finding it astoundingly hard. I want to make it their fault, I want to make them wrong for not being able to work through their issues with calm and resolve. I want to abdicate all the responsibility of being their guide because otherwise I have to face the fact that I’ve still got to dig deep for some strength to create change in myself so that my children have a role model I can be proud of.

I have done well for children and I have conquered many mountains to give them a start in life that they and the world deserve. And this is the next station on my journey, uncovering the source of my trigger, to free us all for our next destination.

Literally

I have come to the conclusion that the world has become too literal.

Dogmatic science has replaced dogmatic religion and we are no better off for it.

Dogma is bad in whatever form – irony at its finest!

What I see, as indicative of this literal attitude, is the lack of softness towards each other. The words we speak or write are to be perfectly crafted or suffer being torn to shreds by baying hounds. The nuance and subtlety of life are lost in favour of documented evidence. Science is dictating how life must look, from education, medicine, child rearing and career trajectories, everything seems to have a right or wrong way defined by statistics and data. Non-conforming becomes a label of conspiracy theorist or anarchist rather than simply a different perspective.

Recently some mothers inferred that one of my children should somehow be different and I saw this ‘literal’ thread play out in their reasoning. Firstly, they couldn’t seem to grasp that children aren’t always literal (our beautiful shining lights of sanity is this crazy world), therefore strong words or adult themes were read from the adult standpoint of shocking brevity rather than understanding how children explore and play with ideas and concepts that cross their paths in a truly innocent and harmless way. Second to that was the right or wrongness that comes with this societal indoctrination, if my child behaved differently to theirs, they must label mine wrong, so that their way would still be ‘right’. No allowance for different child personalities, developmental stages, parenting influences, beliefs and values… just simple right or wrong.

And it is utterly exhausting. One of the nails in the coffin with my mother was her determination to contradict and undermine my parenting values because they were different to hers. I saw that for her, it felt like I was somehow rejecting her by choosing a different approach and I understand how easy it is to interpret that but just far more simply, I’m my own person with my own viewpoint and that is all. I don’t have to back it up with data and science and facts and figures and I don’t want you to either.

Last week, a stranger mum apologised to me because her son was standing in my pathway and gazing dreamily up towards the sky. Shockingly, I managed to take an extra moment out of my day to walk around him rather than demand him move! But it really hit me hard how that mum felt she must apologise for her naturally day dreamy little one because we have become so desperately unforgiving as a society.

The rigidity of belief is what defines dogma and be it science or religion both lose their true beauty and power under these terms. Science can be a place of magical discovery with the full allowance to release a past belief in order to welcome a new and faith offers us the gentleness of understanding and forgiveness. All so beautiful when held lightly and playfully rather than with heavy and fearful hands.

One of my most memorable lines
from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I am happy to be as queer and different to my neighbour as they are to theirs. It makes life so much more vibrant and gentle and interesting.

WTF

So last week I had one of those ‘what the f*** just happened’ moments. The sort when I think everyone’s on the same page and getting on happily and then I get smacked in the face by someone’s reaction and am sent reeling into next month.

And, in typical style, I have been reflecting on it….

So as a very quick précis, my child and their best friend had a minor falling out, nothing out of the ordinary for their age and stage. My child was feeling vulnerable and upset about the situation so I asked the other mum if we could meet before school to resolve it all before facing the day ahead. No biggie. Or so I thought….

My child started to speak to the friend but was so overcome by upset they burst into tears and asked for my help. I checked in with the friend to see if they knew what it was all about and before either of us could speak another word the mother interrupted, shooed her child away and angrily stated ‘she wasn’t having this’!

SMACK!

What the f*** just happened? Weren’t we all just gently and kindly trying to help the kids work things out?

The mother went on to state that she didn’t want her child ‘put on the spot’; that they could ‘figure it all out at school’; that I ‘shouldn’t be involved’ (facepalm!); and it went on. I goldfished for a few moments before fury hit me, my child was by this point sobbing with distress that peace hadn’t been made before school started. Honestly, whatever the perception and judgement on my way of doing things versus theirs, what left me speechless was the total lack of compassion towards another small human being. I simply cannot imagine seeing a little one (mine or anyone else’s) in such distress and refusing to help. What has happened to compassion?

So that is what I’ve been reflecting on. I am still feeling totally rageful towards the other parent but that is my journey to process and release over the coming days and weeks. And for me to find compassion for her – oh the irony!

But actually I think there is a deeper and bigger issue at stake. I believe, in general, the population are feeling pretty disempowered, taking charge of their own lives seems to be becoming a foreign concept. This feels deeply frightening and ultimately dangerous.

What I saw in this dynamic and in other recent moments has been a lack of personal responsibility, not out of malaise, but, more insidiously, out of habit. This is how our recent generations have and are being trained throughout their childhood, to pass the buck of responsibility. This litigation culture means that it’s always someone else’s fault and there is inevitably someone who can resolve the issue for them, be it teachers, parents, police, the lawyers, the government. And by always passing the buck, there is never an opportunity to learn how to handle and resolve conflict before it becomes overkill. When I brought my child to that conversation it was not only a space for them to express their fears and worries on the friendship but also perhaps to hear some hard words in return; maybe the friend was annoyed, maybe my child had done something to upset them, but there is no shame in facing our shadows and deciding how to integrate that into our psyche.

The constant avoidance of these moments not only creates this desperate place of disempowerment, where our own strength to face discomfort and challenge is never experienced and therefore not integrated fully into our beings, but with that comes this lack of compassion that I witnessed. The fear of conflict overrode natural human kindness and actually created a greater and uglier conflict than was necessary. That’s what fear is like, powerful, pervasive and ultimately distressing. In this scenario it was so strong that the other mother believed I had no right to be involved in the situation, a reflection perhaps of her feelings, if she hasn’t the power to face conflict calmly, why should I be allowed to carry it? Disempowerment demanding further disempowerment to justify their own.

Urgh, it feels like a big ugly tangle of disallowed feelings and suppressed strength. In venting conversation with my friends, I questioned ‘what happened to just having a conversation about it?’ Have we really reached a point in our society where the gloss veneer is all that is permitted?

Dark and difficult conversations are so vital to understanding the complexities of existence and humanity. Please let’s keep exploring them, it is only fear that makes them truly unpleasant.