Swimming in the Sea of Life
Coffee Time – Sunday morning, October 21, 2012
Caveat: Much of the following contains Pat’s words. Let the reader know that these words are, of course, my words, how I heard Pat, and often not containing the nuances that are Pat’s truth, coming from a place different from where I can hear her accurately.
Pat: Last night when we came home from Louisville I was in a time of lostness. At such times I can’t stay with myself, I lose myself in my conflicted emotions. I become identified with my emotions – one of the demonic obsessions: I think I am my feelings. This was the experience I was in last night. Gary: I want to understand. Are you saying you experienced a split in yourself? Who was the “I” who was “lost from Myself” and who was the “Myself?” Pat: It is a very strange feeling. When I am caught in a thought form what is there is the patterned reaction to my environment and “I” become identified with that pattern, that reaction, and not “myself,” that is, not identified with my true Self. I lost my faculties to think and to feel. In those spaces I don’t know what to do. Should I do this or should I do that? And either way I have no energy to move forward.
Gary: I hear you. (pause) When you are in that space, what do you need? Pat: To slow down and connect with “myself.” Gary: “Myself” as distinct from “patterned reactions”? Pat: What I need is connection with my own inner world. Maybe Sage and Anthony are trying to guide us to this place of meeting all parts of ourselves – letting every inner character show up at the table. I am very curious about this whole experience of lostness. When I am lost it is a good opportunity to really look deeply and come to understand the dynamics of all that is going on inside of me. It is a palpable state, a state in which I am clueless, and I can feel my fear that these feelings of lostness and cluelessness will take me over. Gary: When lostness and cluelessness take you over, how do you feel? Pat: In addition to lost I feel helpless, powerless.
Gary: Let me compare with where I go in my dropping to a deeper place. In those times I feel sadness, hopeless, helpless and powerless. I feel sad in the unfulfilled longing for connection, and hopeless in believing that the connection I long for will never manifest. Pat: Is there sadness in seeing me, another human being, in my lost place? Is there compassion for the world lost in pattern and distractions, not really living Life? Sadness in seeing me disconnected from having access to my own faculties? My state of lostness yesterday was pervasive in me. In such a state I don’t know how I feel or what I want. The patterns, the automatic reactions, obstruct the natural flow of my energy: the spontaneity, my creativity, my feelings in my true and real self. Gary: The Life Stream. Pat: Yes, I disconnect from the arising natural flow of Life in and around me.
Gary: Pathwork Lecture 152 Connection Between the Ego and the Universal Power speaks of Universal Consciousness, that is, our Higher Self, as our potentiality. But our Real Self is not yet purified or transformed. Our lives are intended to be opportunities for purification and transformation – a movement toward Union with God via identification with our Divine Nature, a process of purification and transformation. Pat: Yes. When I am in a Lost Place I am in an Ungodly Place. Gary: The Hell Realm? Pat: Yes. So I am curious. What puts me in this Hell Realm of Lostness? And how about you in your place of Sadness?
Gary: It is profound existential sadness, hopelessness, powerlessness – and I do not know what to do other than just to be in it, to not run away from the pain of it. Pat: I say my Hell Realm is characterized by lostness, helplessness, and powerlessness. From what you say for you, your Hell Realm is Sadness. And in your sadness as a child you would just cry inconsolably. This is a bit of a difference in us from our respective childhood experiences. Gary: Yes, and these are the issues we came into this incarnation to work on — you lostness and me sadness. Pat: Yes, for you it means to take up those tears of sadness and honor them!
Pat: Last night when I said I was lost and you said “What do you need?” I was triggered. I just needed to be. Movement helps, so our going for a walk in Milford helped. There was preciousness in what was there: feelings of lostness. Gary: What do you need to hold and honor your feelings of lostness? … You say going for a walk. That may work for me as well – I could hold and honor my feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and powerlessness by going on our walk.
Pat: So what we both need is support for our emotional beings, our emotions of lostness and sadness held in our bodies. How would it have been to have had my mom say, “Oh Pat, sweetheart, you look so lost. Just come up into my lap and let me hold you”? Gary: And from what I understand of you, it could have been hard for you to have trusted her. The old antennae we’ve spoken of would have popped up and warned you not to go there, would have resulted in a “No!” Pat: Yes, wanting that support from her, but not trusting her. Thinking it would not be smart to trust her niceness or think she would really be there for me to support me in my lostness. Rather I would fear meanness, harshness, and impatience coming at me. AND in this moment right now I can feel my compassion for Mom. She was, in her own words, the original “latchkey kid” – coming home from school and waiting on the porch for someone to come home. And then later in life to have had four children two years apart – that was a lot for her to deal with! Yes, I can feel my compassion for her.
Gary: What about Dad? What if he had invited you onto his lap to just hold you in your lostness? Pat: I can’t imagine that happening – this would have been more possible with Grandpa. I did not know that space of comfort with Dad. But you and I are moving toward wholeness – the intention to look for what is hidden in the darkness — including longing for and fearing being supported. These things can be monsters when not acknowledged. Gary: Yes, part of our shadow.
Gary: As you with Dad, I cannot imagine Mom seeing who I really was and welcoming me into this world as a unique and precious ME. Pat: My relationship with Mom is healing in these recent years. Another sadness for you is that your parents died so early, when you were turning thirty. They did not get to know you nor you them – adult to adult. Could you access that feeling – the sadness that your parents died early, accessing a natural arising of sadness? Gary: On some level the truth was that I had (though unconscious of it) a sense of relief because with their deaths I no longer had a need to perform, to be what I was not. Of course this was very painful because apart from pleasing them I had no idea how to be in life. My life became meaningless for many years, and I grasped onto Christian fundamentalism for many years to reestablish meaning, and at the same time also held on to the values involved in pleasing Mom and Dad – these were now inner voices. I did not individuate into myself until after I turned fifty. Pat: My experience was similar. When Dad died something cleared. I no longer had to be a nurse. And much more changed as well.
Gary: Bringing these patterned backgrounds of not trusting parental support back to our relationship, I’m curious about you and me with each other. Perhaps on some level I won’t trust you and on some level you won’t trust me. You had that experience in finding that when we listened to the recording of our most recent session with Sage and Anthony. You shared that you felt safer listening to the recording than when we were actually in the session. And I can share that in the session when you said, “Gary, darling, I am here for you,” part of me said, “No way am I going to buy into this!” I was pushing away any support you might offer me. My image is that being supported is just not an experience I can trust or will ever have. I have a negative intention to never be supported by Mom or anyone. So I push away any support (or love) coming my way. Wow. Good to realize.
Pat: When the shoe is on the other foot – as last night when you said “What do you need in your lostness?” I, too, had a negative reaction. In that moment I just needed you to decide what we would do – here go for a walk – yet knowing that I would not have liked whatever you decided! There is a great deal of oppositional energy in me – not aggression but oppositional energy. I have a glimpse of a karmic play out here. What we bring in and how our parents supported what needs to be transformed in us.
Gary: I remember Sage saying one of the things we needed to work on was grieving. Pat: How do you grieve what you didn’t have with your mom? And how do I grieve what I did not have with Dad? Ten-year-old Pat when Grandpa died – how could she have been supported?
Gary: So here we have been sharing for 90 minutes this morning. This is what Sage suggested is Meditational Intercourse. Pat: And being a meditational experience, may we both take this light into our day! Gary: Amen.
Shared in love, Gary