Hi Anita
“Something for me to understand. how?” Using Richards words – “No, so you can participate in it”

When does understanding become wisdom?

What does a hurt feeling feel like? The space between emotion to feeling to a measurement, label, judgment… as thin as a breath. I wonder if we even notice how quickly and subtly we move from raw experience to interpretation, deciding good and bad… Yet its the breath thin space where mindfulness lives…

“Without love, do what you will, be as clever as you like, you will solve nothing.” – A criticism of Krishnamurti who was himself accused of being too clever with his words and paradoxically path to love was though negation, Emptiness, Kenosis, silence the undoing of words – what I think of as non measurement.

In the space between emotion and feeling were feelings hurt? No one that knows me would think me clever though as I have expressed before I have been accused me a lacking feeling, that my communication style and personalty type is lacking, away to avoid feeling… I don’t disagree, sadly its a core part of who I am. A trigger where I fill the space with a suspicion I’m not suited for relationship, something I fear my history confirms.

Funny when I saw this topic the first thing I wrote was a warning to myself, that any discussion into insignificance would only stir up existential angst and likely not end well.

Anita

“Eight-plus billion people on this planet, each existing within the width of a breath”—but how many truly love and are loved in return?
I suspect all eight billion wonder… then I hear a voice whisper, who am I to ask of life such a thing?

Love as a temporal measurement and experience is always going to fall short. My feeling was that Richard, along with Jung, Campbell, Buddha Krishnamurti, was that what is significant is experience itself. To participate. That from the perspective of Life, participation in all its forms is Love. That from which we arrive and return.

Love that exists beyond the ticking of clocks; it’s felt in echoes, in the imprint it leaves, in the ways it changes us. A single moment of real connection can reverberate through a lifetime.

But that isn’t what being looking for, or behind the question of significance and pain such questions bring. The real question isn’t just about love itself, but about the weight it carries—the longing, the ache, the quiet desperation for significance in the face of impermanence. Love, when examined too closely revealing all the spaces where we’ve been wounded, all the unanswered questions left behind by the loves that did not stay or did not fulfill. Maybe it’s less about defining love and more about reckoning with what it leaves behind—the imprints, the shadows, the moments that haunt or heal. Love isn’t always gentle, but it’s always significant.

I recall the days the excitement, the fire, the bliss of being possessed by love. There’s something intoxicating about those early moments— the unfiltered passion, the consuming energy, the way love feels like it’s overtaken every inch of you, a kind of surrender, a beautiful chaos that colors everything in a different light (even if only the idea of love)…. until… the clock ticks… and we measure…

One of the blessing of getting older is the discovery of being able to love without a desire to process or be processed. A love that doesn’t demand, doesn’t consume, but simply exists in its own quiet strength. Can it be enough? What are we to do if it not…

Each day, each moment I hear, from myself, from everyone, all 8 billion voices… the cry, see me, know me, love me… the suffering that connects all… what are we to do? Bigger then big, smaller then small, what are we to do?

That cry—so vast, yet so intimate — the heartbeat of existence. Beneath the layers of ambition, fear, and longing, the universal plea: witness me, understand me, love me.

We suffer because we are bound to one another, woven into the same fragile, aching fabric of humanity. It’s overwhelming, both the enormity of it and the crushing smallness of a single life within it. And yet, the answer, though elusive, might not be grand or complicated.

Maybe it starts in the smallest acts offering presence, kindness, truly seeing another. Maybe it’s in allowing ourselves to be seen in return. If love and suffering are the unifying forces, then perhaps the response isn’t in solving or escaping, but in choosing, choosing to love, to reach, to acknowledge.

None of us can bear the weight of eight billion cries, but each of us can ease one, if only for a moment. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

Hi Anita

“I would never think of strength in surrender“. Recognizing I think that Transcendence involves a experience of surrender as a act of strength and not one of giving up, but that the line between to two is a thin one.

I recall something Jung said about someone needing a healthy ego before they can surrender (let go/flow) ones ego. A healthy ego having the strength to trust and surrender itself to life as it is. A notion that I ‘know’ as a Truth yet continue to struggle with.

Sometimes I imagine how a Maple tree surrenders to the wind… a light breeze bringing its leafs to a flutter and caressing its bark. How good that must feel. Even the stronger winds that tests the trees roots an branches ability to flex and bend must feel good. I imagine that the tree knows the wind will sometimes be to strong for it, that no amount of bending will prevent a loss of branches and eventually one day bring the tree down. I imagine sometimes the tree feeling the loss of a branch and watching as it lays on the ground then witnessing new life, if different life, arising from the fallen beach. That also feeling good if bitter sweet. Its the bitter sweet I think were the strength of the surrender resides. Just maybe when were still the space to feel the moments of the breeze caress.

A friend of mine teaches yoga to seniors, and she would tell me about one the ladies, 95, never missing a class with wonderful posture… My friends eyes lighting up as she talked about how inspired she was by this woman. A few weeks ago the woman fell and broke her hip and didn’t survive the stay in the hospital as such things tend to end. I could see the grief in my friends eyes as she me. I sensed that my friend wasn’t sure if she had a right to feel sad… and I wish I would have talked about how blessed we are when our lives cross paths with such people if for a short time. That the feelings in such moments of loss are complex and that its right to mourn someone as a act of witness. How oddly the experience of grief calls out memories of gratefulness. A surrender to the breeze of life though the leaves? It saddens me that in our fear we sometimes don’t allow for such grief and instead hold it back.

I digress. What does it mean for surrender to be strength? It takes strength to know what is ours and what isn’t – surrendering to the Yes.

Hi Anita

This raises a deeper question: Even when healing is possible, why do we sometimes resist it?

That is the question… I suspect it may be related to do with something else you pointed out – The problem of isolation.

What does your bridge look like? Sometimes the bridge is one of those old roman stone bridges, others its a rope bride swaying in the wind were you can’t help but look down into the trouble waters.

Hi Anita
I’ve been re-reading Clarissa Pinkola Estés ‘Woman Who Run with Wolves’ and read the following last night and thought it related to this topic.

For the woman who truly has had an experience of destructive mothering in her own childhood. Of course, that time cannot be erased, but it can be eased. It cannot be sweetened up, but it can be rebuilt, strongly, and properly, now. It is not the rebuilding of the internal mother that is so frightening to so many, but rather the fear that something essential died back then, something that can never be brought back to life, something that received no nourishment, for psychically one’s own mother was dead herself. For you, I say, be at peace, your are not dead, you are not lethally injured.

As in nature, the soul and the spirit have resources that are astonishing. Like wolves and other creatures, the soul and spirit are able to thrive on very little, and sometimes for a long time on nothing. To me, it is the miracle of miracles that this is so. Once I was transplanting a hedgerow of lilac. One great bush was dead from a mysterious cause, but the rest were shaggy with purple in springtime. The dead one cracked and crunched like peanut brittle as I dug it out. I found that its root system was attached to all the other living lilacs up and down the fence line.

Even more astounding, the dead one was the “mother.” She had the thickest and oldest roots. All hir big babies were doing fine even though she herself was botas arribas, boots up, so to speak. Lilacs reproduce with what is called a sucker system, so each tree is a root offshoot of the primal parent. In this system, even if the mother fails, the offspring can survive. This is the psychic pattern and promise for those with little or no, as well as those who have had torturous mothering. Even though the mother somehow falls over, even though she has nothing to offer, the offspring will develop and grow independently and still thrive.

Except from the Chapter on ‘the Ugly Duckling’ where Clarissa highlights the mother’s role in the story and uses that to explore the various kinds of mother experiences we have. I first happened on the book 20+/- years ago and it changed the way I relate to stories. Though not written specifically for my gender it very much helped in the task of integrating the masculine and feminine archetypes so highly recommended.

Hi Anita.

To be candid I don’t feel safe responding to this topic…

I wanted to express that I’ve experienced the reverse, a suggestion not to ‘get over it’, when I was communicating a intention to engage in the Buddhist practice of detachment and letting go’ in the last quarter of my life. To live out what I learned and make it mine. Some of the responses appeared to me to question that engagement as a denial of my past and the work I’ve done to process it…. (To be clear I read that into the responses, I own that, I do not feel their was any intentional desire for anyone to disavow my experience or the work I’ve done. In hindsight I assume the trigger was the ‘Universe’ trying to get me to notice something. (the person undermining my experiences was and has always been me, a way to avoid owning what I ‘know’.)

What you say is true: the people we reach out in our isolation and desire to be seen in forums such as this won’t always understand and sometimes will say hurtful things… yet we still reach out. Something brave and foolish and beautiful about that. It really is though suffering that we see each other.

So I find myself confused and hurt by what I feel as silencing…
Sometimes being supportive means pushing back and getting it wrong. I know I’ve appreciated the times you push back as I feel its only though tension that we learn. Unfortunate tension is usually painful.

We all have our path to follow which we must honor… and if part of that path involves reaching out to others for understanding we need to allow for and expect disappointed and suffering that follows, a safe place to suffer.

Personally, I don’t feel the practice of detachment and ‘letting go’ are well understood so think a dialog on the subject could prove helpful, but I don’t know how to proceed without it being triggering.

Your a amazing person Anita, It is my hope that you receive the above in the spirit of love it was intended.

I just realized a trigger associated with being silenced in my past… which if I have projected onto this topic I ask for forgiveness.

Hi Everyone
I’ve been silent over the last few weeks as I struggled with doubt about the work I had done and experiences I’ve had with the relationship of the temporal (duality) and the eternal (non duality). Of being connected to the web of life. I fell into analyses paralysis-depression of my Type 5 personality, doubting if I ever understood what it meant to process the past and or emotions.

Alessa asked if I learned how to manage emotions and my first thought was, yes, realized that managing emotions is not necessarily having a good relationship with them. Emotions, Feelings, states of mind, thoughts, memory everything gets so tangled to the over analyzing mind.

In the rising and return of every breath I lost connection with the return. Metaphorically I have a tendency of holding my breath.

Something W.H. Auden surfaced: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment, and let our illusions die.”

Then Alan Watts words about fear: “The instant we become motivated by fear, we become unfree. So long as the mind believes in the possibility of escape from what it is at this moment, there can be no freedom. When you are freed from being out to improve yourself, your own nature will begin to take over.”

Begging the questions: Is improvement a type of resistance? Do I, can I, trust life’s flow?
Why do I resist owning the realizations the processing of emotions and events has taught me? Am I afraid to ‘know’ and make mine what I experienced as healing? Has my identity been linked to being broken?

Fear one emotion that I have a solid relationship with, a prison of my making refusing to notice that the doors and windows have always been open.

Krishnamurti encouraged individuals to examine their thoughts, feelings, and motivations to understand how their minds function and what drives their behavior. I didn’t notice before, but the intent is understanding on how the mind functions and noticing how that drives behavior. The mind not the experience being processed driving behavior. I feel that this is an important difference as I notice my minds tendency to create the problems it is at the same time trying to solve.

Last night as I lay awake with thoughts coming I gave up I picked up the book The Dispossessed by Ursula Guin.
“He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out… that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he Knew; indeed, it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.” (Something for the heart as the mind trips all over itself – longing to return, knowing he can’t, but can as he never been – ‘knowing that as a truth.)

At the end of our exploration, we return home and see it for the fist time… a Truth – the possibility of every breath.

I suspect I’ve confused anyone attempting to follow as it relates to the Sun rising and return contemplation. For me it supports my feeling that in my fourth quarter of life that the time of self improvement as a intention/goal has passed and time to trust the realizations and truths of the relationship of the temporal and eternal I have experienced. I know this goes against most self-help advice but for me its something I intent not to question again. Their is a time for all things, including the time to let go of the notion of fixing and engage life as it is.

Hi Anita

“What if sadness is necessary for true kindness?- then I am truly very kind.”

That made me laugh, I had a similar thought. Alas though it is necessary to a path of kindness its not a guarantee that the path will be taken. 10 points to me for using the word Alas 🙂

I like the idea of Love as a powerful force that can be cultivated and experienced, rather than just a feeling, and fitting for a Easter contemplation.