A Day of Grace
Strange day. Getting ready for a weekend at Sevenoaks — a program for helpers/faculty I shall co-lead. Usually I am nervous about leadership roles, concerned about what will happen, about doing a good-enough job. This often manifests a defense of over-preparing. But today I realize I have not been over preparing and rather have been experiencing ease this day, a very obvious ease. I find this evening that I am even just looking forward to being with folks without a lot of concern of what we shall do together. Interesting to take these feelings in, good feelings. Feels new to me — this taking in good feelings.
Not sure what brought this positive mood or attitude along in me. I have been working today on editing my recording of Pathwork Lecture 93 — The Link Between the Main Image, Repressed Needs, and Defenses. I found this lecture powerful and seemingly applying directly to me and my relationship with my Mom and Dad — including a several-page example in the lecture of a mother/son relationship that could have been Mom and me. Could my engagement with this lecture have contributed to my ease this day? Or reading a related lecture, Pathwork Lecture #92, the day before?
As I read Lecture #93 it became clear that my main image is that I must be competent to be approved of, and further my image is that being approved of is being loved — love being my real underlying need or longing, consciously or unconsciously. Suddenly I got it on a felt level. Or maybe not so suddenly. Maybe from having read it earlier when I first recorded it and then discussed it with my Pathwork helper Moira.
Following the message of this lecture 93, I see that being approved of is NOT being loved, so being competent is NOT the road to the love I long for. In fact, the more I try to be competent the more I push people and their love away — just like it spells out in this lecture. People do not like to be around “super-competent” people and the energy I would put out trying to be “super competent” would be and is, I can see, off-putting.
So in the end this experience of ease feels like Grace. Grace any way you slice it. Grace that this felt sense came upon me at all, and Grace that I “happened” to be reading this lecture at a time when I was ready for it.
A forerunner of this day of felt ease was a delightful weekend with Andreas and Regina who joined Pat and me for a day of Journal writing with Faye Schwelitz on Saturday. The writing was profound for me — especially coming to see that my body is the sense organ for spirituality! My body, with its sensations, feelings, moods, and the like is the instrument by which I experience Life, including spirituality. This obvious statement has been anything but obvious to me up until recently.
And I think that my daily practice of Mary Stokes’ EmbodyBeing also has played a role here — for two months now I have begun nearly every day doing 50 minutes of a clearing breath practice so that I can have a chance to feel my feelings. All the puzzle pieces seem to fit.
But no matter the background leading up to this day of felt ease, and no matter how long the ease lasts, it all feels like Grace. I am grateful.
Feeling love, Gary