My goal in life is no longer to KNOW myself but to BREAK-UP with myself!
I used to think of self-love in a similar way to the picture below. But what I used to think of as 'myself' is actually not myself at all...only the perception I have of myself through my identification with my thoughts. I am a teacher, artist, mother, cancer thriver etc etc.
Instead of having the goal of KNOWING THYSELF perhaps we need to become clear with what we perceive of as 'the self', otherwise we risk strengthening a relationship with something that is not the self at all.
I am writing this post because I think this is an important consideration.
I am starting to come into the awareness that the self is actually timeless and wordless... and, like Eckhart Tolle describes, is more like a sense of ...being.
The very function of thought is to categorise and name things, including ourselves.
Thought tells us we are this VS that. Consider the idea that nothing we could ever 'think' or 'do' can give us a relationship with being our SELF. In other words, you don't get to know your 'being' through your thoughts. This is impossible. They are diametrically opposed. The only way we come to know our being is through joining with it and entering a state of being. And this can be done any where and any time. Through prayer, meditation or simple awareness. It is also a relationship will can cultivate, not through trying to know it, but simply by showing up to it.
Being WITH presence is very similar to how you get to know a child. Forming a relationship with a child is almost impossible if you are always absent. When that child becomes an adult, they won't remember the words you said all the gifts you gave, only that you were not there.
So many of us are absent to our lives. In the years previous to my cancer diagnosis I was lost in a sea of resentment and isolation. I spent days, weeks, months and even years in a place other than 'now'. The now simply wasn't a place I wanted to be. I didn't identify with being a single mother. I was more identified with being a free-spirit. An artist, a traveller, a business woman, a poet or an academic.
Perhaps the main benefit of having a nuclear family is that each partner ideally takes on a more equal share of parenting. Of course it does not always work out like this, but there is certainly more opportunity in this style of parenting dynamic to give the other spouse a chance to exercise their 'other' identities; to step outside the mono-role of parenting and experience the roles they still cling to. The parts they are not ready to let go.
Here in lie the suffering of the single parent. For me, it was a pain which grew into resentment toward my ex. I was tied to a life where the main currency was time. Time to release the role. Time to one-self. Of course the time I so desperately needed diminished in direct proportion to the amount to which he took. As he took more time for himself, there was less time for me. I watched on the sidelines as he designed the life he wanted without considering mine. No matter how much I kicked and screamed for a more equal share of parenting, it was never offered. It was non-negotiable. His career came first. Apart from the occasional night or weekend (thanks Mum), I was not given that time to exercise my other identities, nor was I ready enough to let them go. Not only did I grow to resent the father of my child for yielding so much power over my life, but I also came to resent my life.
I loved and wanted my child, but I didn't want my life. I still wanted my other identities.
I had little choice but to do it all. 100% of the school drop offs, the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, laundry, sicknesses, late nights and play times. I was not exhausted by parenting my daughter. I was exhausted by the act of clinging to something other than parenting. I was holding onto a life and an identity that I thought I needed. And because of my unconscious relationship with time, it all felt as though it would last forever.
I grew more and more resentful. More trapped in a life I hadn't agreed to.
The mother, the artist, the traveller and the teacher in me had left the building and I felt like nobody without them. I experience long periods of detachment and depression. I am sure this was because I was allergic to the present moment, because that is where my life resided. As a result, the dis-ease within my body grew.
My daughter was seven years old when I developed three different types of cancer. Bowel, breast and skin.
I acknowledge it is not like this for everyone. Some of us experience less existential pain than others. Some of us may find it easier to let go of our identities more quickly than others. I believe the quicker you can let go of false-identity, the quicker you can get on with living, thriving and being present to the enormous gift which is life. To be clear, I am also not saying that our identities are not important. I love the artist, the poet and the traveller within me. These are wonderful traits that I enjoy very much. Rather, I am talking about my attachment to them. Without them I thought I was nothing. Without them, nothing was enough. Without them, I started to die. I don't think that any aspect of the 'constructed self', no matter how enjoyable, should be so conditional, nor hold that much power. It was time to take that power back and reframe where I placed the focus of my existence.
If I could rewind and go back to myself as a young single mother I would tell her this:
"you are all of those things and none of those things. In fact, the self you truly are has none of those labels at all!"
You are much simpler and deeper than this. You are not expressed in the doing but experienced in the moment. You are not in some action that you do, say or think. You are a sum total of the way you respond to the life force that is surging through you in this moment. Like a flower in bloom. Tend to your garden and the ecosystem of your child. You have no where to go and no place to be right now in these few precious years of your daughter's early life. It is enough to simply be here. It is enough to feel your feet on the earth and tend to your garden".
Looking back, I feel certain that had I not been allergic to the moments that I was in, I would have been able to tend to my garden. I would have been able to see and feel myself more clearly. I would have been able to relax. To breathe. To accept. To open.
I always thought I had to learn 'I am enough'. Ha! What a cliche! As it turns out, it seems what I most needed to learn was 'this' is enough.
Eckhart Tolle says
"the body loves our attention. When the master of the house is not home, all types of shady characters can take up residency there".
I'm grateful for cancer (and Eckhart) for teaching me this. Had it not been for cancer. I would not have been squeezed or pressured into the awareness of presence and paying attention to the present moment, without judgement. Not only have I been forced into a journey of present awareness, it has become a life-long necessity. I have come to understand that presence takes practice. It is not something you do once... especially for a body like mine that is prone to developing tumours in response to a lack of life force in my body. Who is to say that this is not also a genetic trait? Perhaps my ancestors also had an allergic, tumour growing response to lack of present moment living?
SICKNESS AND BEING
The deepest exploration I have ever had of learning how to let go of my SELF came to me during a time when I was the most, weak, alone and unwell. It was a weekend when my daughter went to her Dad's house. In the days lead up to her departureI was so overwhelmed with staying upright in the aftermath of chemotherapy, that I failed to remember to reach out to a friend to come over. To be with me. On this particular weekend I was so sick from the effect of chemotherapy, that my knees found the floor and I curled up alone on the bathroom floor and I cried.
In bed that might, I I could do little else but to cry out to God and ask 'what is beyond this pain? Then I got a feeling of peace that washed over me. It seemed like something was always there waiting for me to call out to it in the darkness of night with a softness that reminded me I was somehow never alone. Since then, I have understood this to be similar to asking myself 'What is beyond thinking?" Who is actually doing the thinking?" "Who is doing the 'pain-ing'? There was something in the background beyond it all.
At my sickest, when I wondered if death were a better option, I sometimes had no other choice than to become silent, and feel my inner being. It was the only space where I could feel the absence of pain. In other words, pain and sickness only seemed to appear in the 'separated, direct self that I experienced in the foreground but not in the unified self I experienced in the background (behind it all).
As soon as I thought about my sickness and wished it would go away, it got worse. As soon as I thought of the tumours in my body as 'obstacles to eradicate', the battle felt overwhelming. It still does. Slowly, I am learning to sit with the tumours that are currently in my body. To not see them as obstacles but as nothing really at all. They are simply a pattern of cells behaving in a certain way. As I become more present with my body, the pattern can no longer thrive. Because patterns cannot live within presence. The very nature of the word pattern, involves the idea that it repeats itself. Nothing repeats itself in the present moment does it? So therefore in the present moment a tumour doesn't really exist. This is where I choose to spend my time these days. As much as possible. I am not very good at it yet, but like my mother has always told me "I can do anything I put my mind to", or in this case "put my mind aside from".
I'm not saying that disease or pain isn't real. When we fall over and cut our leg, it hurts right? But the second we accept that pain, it feels like a kind of anaesthesia. The physical pain might still be there but the balm of the anesthetic takes away it's power and potency. I am also not suggesting that being present will make a disease vanish, I am suggesting that being present is a profoundly underestimated gateway into the potential of healing.
Through teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Marrianne Williamson, and cancer, I am learning that dis-ease can only thrive where there is a state of separation. This is a simple enough concept. We all know that healing is wholeness. It is a flow state. It is a state within the body where everything is working in union.
And ...the 'thinking' part of me is only capable (no matter how clever) of creating further separation (rather than union). So this is why I am choosing to break up with my mind. To break up with my constructed sense of self. I am choosing to spare myself of any further negative effects of separation. (aka dis-ease).
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong about the act of 'thinking'. I actually love thinking. I have a very quick and intelligent mind. However it becomes deeply problematic when I over identify with it or let it create a false reality or a dependency on a specific identity. For instance , it is false to say "I have cancer" or "I am sick" (an identity). Rather, a more useful way to say this would be 'currently there is cancer in the body. To notice it. Give it my full presence. By doing this, I break it's pattern of proliferation (because nothing repeats in the present moment). I could then practice feeling the presence of life force within and all around me, thus showing up to life.
So, In this way, I seek now to break-up with my mind as I am growing less interested in a reality based in separation and over-identification. I am no longer interested In living in a body where a tumour is bad or good. In a way, a tumour is just another thought. Another thing to over-identify with. It really holds no power if I stop focussing on the tumour itself.. but in 'who is growing the tumour? and do I have a relationship with being-ness. With union? With life force? And more importantly, can I truly have this relationship if I am constantly trying to access it through thinking?
ADDRESSING THE DULL ACHE OF SEPARATION
If you really pause and feel into the present state of your life, do you have a dull ache? I have felt this so many times in my life. Especially when cancer had metastasised in my body. I remember once being so close to the possibility of death, that my life flashed before my eyes and it was beautiful! I saw many instances. I saw my daughter's birth, winning an art award in high school, making love with my soul mate. Afterwards I realised that all of these 'flashes' had one thing in common. They all occurred in instances when I was fiercely and vividly present.
What puzzled me were the long gaps that existed between these vivid instances. It occured to me that these gaps were a result of long stretches of my life when I was absent. How many of us are absent from our own lives? From a connection with our deep, timeless, true selves?
Marianne Williamson says "most of us believe we have so many problems, but really we only have one problem. And that is our belief that we are seperate from God. I like to think of God as that divine presence to which we all have access to. Not some illusive being who is 'out there'. But 'in here' where our vivid presence resides. Maybe that is why we see those flashes before we die. We are seeing all the places where God was made manifest in our life. Where God always resides, and we showed up, in the moment to meet it.
In this way, God... and the true nature of the 'self' (which can be thought of as the same thing) is not something out there, or even in here. It is just who you are. Right now. Always waiting for you to become vividly aware of it. All it simply requires is our presence. This is something you have access to now. In this moment. In this One Day. To the connected, timeless formless noticing. I believe that by recording ONE moment every day where we notice life force, we begin to build that relationship. The habit of truly living.
I invite you to start now. This is why I have created a public facebook group called This One Day. It is a thriving group (almost 500 people now and growing all the time) who are enthusiastically building presence into this day.
Remember, finding more ways to be present to your life is kind of like that relationship with a child. It doesn't just happen, we need to show up. At least once a day. Be present. Notice. Be with the day you are in. Then perhaps, one day when your life does flash before your eyes, you won't have so many gaps.
lll see you here.
In this One Day.
Start here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1353784689240804
