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on forgiveness

11/29/2017

"Forgiveness is an essential key to healing. The opposite of forgiveness is judgment,
and judgment always creates separation and guilt."

~ The Way Of Mastery

Forgiveness is a loaded term, and it can mean different things to different people. The most common understanding of this concept is as an act of absolution, to grant pardon to another for an offense they have committed. To forgive is generally seen as kind, evolved, and spiritual. The bible is full of references to forgiveness, and it repeatedly encourages us to forgive those who have sinned against us as an act of kindness and mercy. But when we forgive someone, what exactly are we doing? Is it something we give to another, or is it something we give to ourselves?

As a therapist, I have seen many clients who have been burdened by their ideas of forgiveness. They often think that forgiving those who have hurt them is something they should do in order to be a good person. Many seem to believe they have forgiven, and let go of whatever happened, but it becomes clear that a charge of unfelt emotion remains. Can we “forgive” too soon?

I believe that forgiving someone before you have worked through and felt all of the hurt and anger and betrayal - and any other unfelt feelings and impulses - is an act of self-violence. It is a bypass, a skipping over of the natural process that needs to happen. This act becomes another layer of imposition and trauma that only serves to drive the hurt and angry parts of yourself deeper, where they fester and remain unresolved. Seeing forgiveness as an act, something you do in relation to another, doesn't seem to work.

So what is this forgiveness? The word as we know it today is derived from the prefix for, meaning “completely,” and the word give, “to give, bestow, grant.” The basic sense of the word give, from the original Proto-Indo-European root ghabh, is “to hold.” It forms the Latin habere “to have, hold, possess,” the Latin habitus “demeanor, appearance, dress,” the Lithuanian gabana “armful,” and the Sanskrit gabhasti “hand, forearm.” The original sense here is to have and to hold, completely.

When something hurtful is done to you by another, the first order of business, as soon as you are able and ready, is to feel it. All of it. Allow yourself to have the full experience of whatever it is. If you have been betrayed, be betrayed, feel betrayed, completely and without minimizing or rationalizing. If you feel angry or enraged, feel all of that. Express it fully, without censoring or judging (and without hurting yourself or anyone else). If you feel rejected or worthless, let it have its way with you, without avoiding or protecting. Allow yourself to have the experience. Let it have its impact on you, without deciding if it’s good or bad, right or wrong, and without trying to change it in any way. A compassionate witness is very helpful here.

Notice that this is not what we typically do. We naturally go to great lengths to avoid all these feelings because they are so painful and threatening. That is part of the problem: the unfinished business stays unfinished. Unfelt feelings have a charge to them that requires energy, in the form of tension, to hold and contain. They want out, but for various reasons other parts of us won’t let them out. This tension is a burden, constantly draining energy that could be used for something productive. It damages our health and degrades our bodies. When we forgive prematurely, the initial feelings are banished even further down than they were, where they wreak havoc. If some of those angry or hurt feelings leak out, we often then feel guilty and ashamed, further adding to our burden.

Feeling fully the impact of what was done to us is consistent with the original meaning of forgiveness: to hold it, to wear it, to inhabit it. If you can safely let the painful feelings work their way through you, they are then completed, finished, resolved. Their charge is gone, and there is nothing left to contain. In my way of thinking, that is forgiveness. It is the full acceptance of what is. It is admitting and experiencing the truth of what happened, honestly and directly. It requires safety, and vulnerability, and compassion. You can acknowledge your innocence, how vulnerable you were to being hurt. You might then also be able to see the humanness of the perpetrator, and yes, even their innocence. Perhaps they were scared, or felt threatened, or were unconscious, and that led them to harm another.

It is a gentle process. Forgiveness naturally happens within you, all by itself. It is not something you do, nor is it something you give to someone else. It imposes nothing, bypasses nothing.

I believe it also helps us to see that the things that happen to us, including the unpleasant and painful things, make us who we are. The gifts that we possess, the unique perspective we have of the world, the level of compassion we are capable of, the person we are, flows from all our experiences, even the nasty ones. Wishing them away would be to wish ourselves away. Our experiences prepare us to be who we are, to live the life we were meant to live. I would not wish it otherwise.

"There would be no need for love if perfection were possible."

~ Eugene Kennedy

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on desire

11/11/2017

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"What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning."
~ Charlie Chaplin

Desire gets a bad rap these days. It’s a dirty word for some, often bringing up images of sexual lust, or selfish ego-driven compulsion. The dictionary defines the verb desire as: “To wish or long for; crave; want. To express a wish to obtain; ask for; request.” Seems pretty straightforward, right? It’s simply a wish, something wanted. Desire in some form is always there, part of our humanness. When we get hungry, do we not want something to eat? That is desire.

Interestingly, the word was not used to describe sexual lust until the 14th century, around the same time that bands of “flagellants” commonly roamed the countryside whipping themselves as penance for their sins. Any personal wish or wanting that a person might have was increasingly seen as sinful, selfish, willful, and against God.

Before such puritanical suppression sullied the whole concept of desire, the ancients saw these experiences as coming from heaven. Originally, the word desire had a different meaning. It derives from the Latin de sidere, “from the stars.” It is a mystery where these desires come from, is it not? Why does one person adore classical music, while another finds it boring and greatly prefers something with a beat that’s easy to dance to? No one knows. It just simply is. “From the stars” is as good an explanation as we are likely to get.

What we do know is that our preferences in large measure make us who we are as human beings. Our passions and interests provide the variety and range of possible experiences that makes life so interesting. There is so much to choose from! Why then, do I love this particular thing?

"Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds."
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I work with many people in my practice who are struggling with burdens in their life - usually originating in childhood - in the form of poor self-image, limiting beliefs, low expectations, destructive survival strategies, and others. They are working so hard just to cope with these burdens - living in their “zone of survival” - that the questions “who am I?” or “what do I like?” never get asked. They don’t have that luxury.

After some inquiry and inner work, as burdens are slowly resolved, there often is a moment of panic that goes something like: “Well, if I’m not my burdens, then who am I?” The burden, the struggle for survival, is all they have known. When you leave the zone of survival and gain the luxury of inquiring within how you might like things to be - your “zone of creativity” - you usually draw a blank, at least at first.
So, how do we answer this question “Who am I?” The ultimate response, agreed upon by every true wisdom tradition in the world, is: “I am God.” This ultimate truth of our identity, our true essence, is the key to everything. I am God, unity, and I am also a seemingly separate person. I have my own body, my own perceptions, my own experiences; my own reality that is unique to me. We are hybrids - spiritual beings (God) having a physical experience (human).

This brings us back to our desires. Our desires are a bridge between God and human. It is one way Spirit speaks to us, lives through us, has an experience of itself.

“Desire in the heart is where you will discover the phone line that links you
to the will of God that would be expressed through you.”
~ The Way of Mastery

We can quiet ourselves, look inside, and ask: “What is so?” “What is my heart’s desire?” “What do I love?” “What have I always loved?” We can notice the impulses, the longings, the inclinations, the dreams and fantasies we discover there, deep in our heart. You see, desires are not something we invent or choose, they are something we discover. Our desires choose us. They are a kind of deep knowing, simply the way things are. These desires are easily covered up by drama and busyness and myriad other survival strategies we commonly employ. But once we clear the decks and inquire within, they start to make themselves known.

The ancient Greeks called these desires your daimon, or guiding spirit. Later, it was variously known as genius, spirit, angel, destiny, calling. The ancients believed your daimon was assigned to you before birth. It carries the image of your destiny and calling in this life, including your passions and preferences and talents. If ignored too long, your daimon will nag you, pester you, remind you. It might send you a depression or a deep ache of dissatisfaction or some other symptom if you stray too far from your gifts. I often imagine a young Michelangelo working in an accounting firm. Do you imagine he might suffer from a few unpleasant symptoms, straying so far from his calling?

"Everyone has been made for some particular work,
and the desire for that work has been put in every heart."
~ Rumi

Let’s see our desires as coming from God, connecting us to the divine blueprint ordained for our life. They are how we know what we are supposed to be doing in this life. Our desires guide us on our righteous path, our true path, the path we were meant to walk, the life we were meant to live. A seemingly separate human being serving as a hollow bone, channeling Spirit as a unique expression of life. We can trust our desires because they come from within, out of our deepest core essence. An inner knowing of what is right and true. They are not edicts or impositions, handed to us from “out there” somewhere, of what we should do, and who we should be. No, they well up inside of us.

Desires could be seen as our marching orders from God, our mission in life. This idea might conjure up images of sacrifice and obligation and duty in you. That is our religious conditioning in action, I believe. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Our desires, ordained by God, feel good! It’s what we truly want. It’s what we would do if no limitations existed. Our desires guide us toward our purpose, and that is what makes life worth living, and what gives it depth and meaning. When we are living in accordance with our desires, we call it happiness. When we live by what someone else tells us, it can feel bad, heavy, like a burden. So we can trust our feelings here. “How does it feel?” is a good question to ask. If what you are doing is truly in accordance with your genius, it will feel good. Always.

Now, I would like to make a distinction here between desires of the soul (large Self), and desires of the ego (small self). When the ego wants, it is always for the purpose of making itself bigger, more important, more desirable, more powerful, more impressive. These desires can never be satisfied. There is never enough. The small self knows nothing of Spirit, and is oblivious to any connection to Spirit. It believes the night is dark and full of terrors, it is on its own, and must therefore depend only on itself, and live by its wits. For the ego, everything is about survival, impressing others, and rising in the pecking order where life is easier. These small-self desires are what most of us think of when we hear the word desire, but they are superficial and not true and soulful desires.

"Boredom: the desire for desires."
~ Leo Tolstoy

Desires of the soul run deep. They are in accordance with our genius, our angel, our purpose. Desires of the soul are righteous, and have always been there. Allowing yourself to be guided by your truest desires makes the world a more soulful place. Following them is not selfish. In fact, it is selfish not to do so. For to ignore one’s desires is to deny the world your true gifts. It is overruling God - pure hubris. If you do what you think you should do, or what you have been told to do, or what others expect you to do, you are ignoring the Word of God. Expect consequences. Not punishment, just feedback. Expect unpleasant symptoms of every variety, for the daimon won't take that lying down for long. It is far too loyal to you for that. It will do what it can to wake you up and get you back on your path towards soulfulness and wholeness.

It has been said that whatever we think is going on, we really only need three things: 1) Listen to and connect with the longings of our own heart; 2) Find the courage to act on behalf of those longings; and 3) A community of people that supports us in doing that. Amen.

"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."
~ Thomas Merton

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on loneliness

10/23/2017

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“We live as we dream--alone....”
~ Joseph Conrad

I have been thinking a lot about loneliness lately, and I have noticed that it’s not what most of us think it is. Loneliness is a common complaint, even among those who are married or living with someone. After working with many clients struggling with it, and noticing it inside myself, I have come to believe that loneliness is not a problem to be addressed, or a symptom to be relieved by learning new coping strategies or medications. It has little to do with how many people are around, if we are in an intimate relationship, or how many friends we have. It is not caused by a lack of connections with others.

Rather, more and more, I believe loneliness to be a direct experience of who we are; a fundamental aspect of our human nature. Aloneness is our natural human state. In this life, we simply are alone. Think about it, no one else has had our exact experiences, or sees the world in just the same way, or thinks the same thoughts that we do. Our reality is unique, our experience of life unlike anyone else’s. No one else can possibly know what it is like to be us.

We are thrust into this life alone, go through all our adventures essentially alone, and die alone. We have companions along the way to keep us company, but there is always this fundamental separation between us. We are physically separate from all others, different, not on the same path.

I believe it goes back to the nature of our existence on this planet. At our essence, we are infinite spiritual beings, connected to, and an expression of, God. One with everything. This is our absolute nature. The large Self. Simultaneously, we are finite, discrete, limited, mortal human beings. Separate from everything else. The small self. Both are true; this the paradox of being human.

When we are born, we incarnate out of the Great Silence, and are plunged into the human experience. We move from unity into duality, our plight as humans. The fall from grace. But as if to soften the blow of this jarring transition, we are (hopefully) merged with our mother for some time. We get all our needs met by others, and are kept safe and warm and well-fed. Not quite the bliss of unity perhaps (ahh, my diaper is wet!), but not too bad. Any discomforts are taken care of forthwith. I love the world, and the world loves me.

Alas, this merged, undifferentiated state can not last. Eventually, we begin to separate from our mother, to individuate (Mine!). We gradually realize we are separate beings, and we begin to experience unpleasantness such as disappointment, pain, rejection, loss, and frustration. This is a necessary step in our human development, and ideally it happens without undue trauma. But for many of us, we’re not so lucky. We have early unpleasant experiences that overwhelm our ability to cope, and less-than-perfect caregivers contribute to us creating survival strategies such as dissociation, suppression, repression, perfectionism, obstinance, pleasing, and others. Through this unpleasantness, we realize, to our horror, that we seem to be all alone. No one is there for us, no one to talk to, no one to help us. We are on our own, and it is an absolute horror.

I think of that still face experiment video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0) where the mother is right there, but goes still and stops interacting with her baby, and within one minute the baby completely decompensates and freaks out, losing control of her body in her distress of “losing” her mother, even though she is still physically present. I think of a toddler with his mother at the grocery store, when he loses sight of her for a moment, how it terrifies and shocks him, taking some time to recover after mother reappears. That we are so vulnerable, so needful, such is our fragile condition, our humanness, our vulnerability.

“ Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself."
~ Janet Fitch

Because of our vulnerability in our youth, many of us develop a real aversion to aloneness. It feels so unpleasant to us, so overwhelming, so deeply threatening and painful, that we will do almost anything to avoid feeling it. Enter addictions of all kinds. I am convinced that many of our addictions exist primarily to help manage these feelings of aloneness. As long as we are looking at our phones, watching TV, getting high, or eating something yummy, we don’t feel alone.

So because of our traumatic early experiences of being alone, and long avoiding feeling aloneness all our lives, it becomes part of our shadow, the disowned, rejected part of our selves. We hate it (It’s so painful!), judge it (People who are alone are losers!), and avoid it (Hello, iPhone!).

So, as with all polarities, in order to heal, we must live out both poles of opposites. Most of us greatly prefer one pole (We are God, infinite, one with everything) and reject its opposite (We are human, separate, alone). Welcoming, accepting, and integrating the rejected pole is what is needed here. We must eventually accept aloneness as part of the human experience. Embrace it. Live it out. At the beginning of this process, experiencing the aloneness may be quite unpleasant. After all, we have been suppressing these horrors for many years. When they are allowed to come up to be felt, there may be a fair amount of charge behind them. It has been that way for me. But once the feelings have been sufficiently acknowledged and felt, the way is clear to embrace aloneness as a necessary and healthy part of our life experience.

The healthy expression of loneliness is solitude, a deep, abiding presence we experience within ourselves. Solitude is an honoring of our true nature, the Stillness from which everything comes. In this place, there is no self and no other, therefore there can be no loneliness. Only love, only presence; all that is. In solitude we can cease to identify with our small self, and it is only the small self that is capable of feeling lonely and separate. We accept and honor our human nature, our ego or small self, and accept it fully, but remember who we really are, our true nature. In this way we relax with the paradox of this human experience.

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”
~ Hermann Hesse

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Introduction

10/8/2017

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Hello, and welcome to my blog! My intention here is to share ideas, concepts, methods, and other information that I think might be helpful to others. In the process of gathering and organizing these ideas and concepts, they are further fleshed-out in my own mind and my own life, thus it is helpful for me too. Nothing I write here should be confused with fact, and I don't pretend to know how it is, or what is best for anyone. These ideas are presented only as possibilities, as invitations to go inside and inquire, and to decide for yourself.

My name is Craig Ellis, and I have been "on the path," to my way of thinking, for 28 years. That was the year my sister, my most intimate personal connection in the world, died. Nothing was the same after that. I have been questioning, seeking, exploring, studying, wondering, discussing, hypothesizing, pontificating, and experimenting ever since. I am primarily a seeker of truth. I am also a student, forever curious and learning. Some people are primarily right-brained (creative) or left-brained (analytical); I am split squarely down the middle. I know people who are non-linear and spiritual and creative and seemingly not-of-this-world; I also know people who are eminently practical, straight-forward, logical, and linear. I happen to have one foot in each of those realms, and speak both languages. A kind of bridge.

I am open-minded and believe that anything is possible, and that all things have merit and possibility. My imagination is rich, as is my ability to perceive things from many different perspectives. I also was trained as an engineer, and have a side that is skeptical, logical, practical, grounded, and possessing common sense. All the ideas presented here come from that background. I will continue to add to these posts over time. It is my wish that they are of some help to you as you walk your path towards the life you were meant to live.

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