Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
M Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled
I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.
bell hooks, All About Love
A miracle is a shift in perception from fear to love — from a belief in what is not real, to faith in that which is. That shift in perception changes everything.
Marianne Williamson, The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles
The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.
Albert Einstein
Recent events have thrown me off kilter, emotionally and spiritually.
Thanks to the many resources available to me today — the fruits of over two decades of Inner Work — I have been able to steady the ship somewhat. This state of relative calm has allowed me to begin exploring even deeper layers within, with the goal of identifying and providing treatment to long-standing unhealed wounds.
My intuition has drawn me, in particular, the effects of an incident that happened in my family shortly after my first birthday. While we (our parents and my four older siblings plus grandparents and some of their youngest children) were on holidays at a remote fishing lodge in the west of Ireland, my father was involved in a serious angling accident.
As an avid fly fisherman, he could not resist fishing the pool directly in front of the house at dusk, even though the wind had increased to almost a gale. While casting into this strong wind, the hook of one of his flies embedded itself in his right eye causing great pain and, ultimately, blindness in that eye.
As I was just 13 months old at the time, I have no direct recollection of the incident. All that remains is a so-called „felt sense“ — a quality of memory manifested more viscerally in the body than cognitively in the mind.
On the back of some worldly setbacks and losses over recent months this „felt sense“ has apparently been (re)activated.
Some years ago, curious to explore this incident in more depth, I asked around in my family of origin, but the recollections of the incident were scant, and my parents have long since passed on.
One of the recollections relayed to me was the awful sound of Dad’s loud moaning when he returned to the house, the state of shock of everybody involved, and the ensuing immediate departure of both parents by car to get medical help.
As it turned out, they had to travel through the entire night, all the way across the island to Dublin, to get to see a specialist and the emergency treatment needed. They may both have been gone for several days.
My mother did return alone, Daddy needing more time to convalesce, and we eventually returned to our home in Belfast without him.
The ramifications of this incident were wide-ranging. It represents a rupture in the unfolding of the story of our family of origin.
At the age of 32, Daddy had, by this time, established a private dental practice in Belfast which, by all accounts, was flourishing. As a result of his losing the sight in his eye, he decided to seek more secure employment in the state health system in the Republic of Ireland, which he eventually sought and took up one year later. With no money coming in, I imagine there was considerable fretting about financial insecurity in the family during those times.
Furthermore, when he did take up a position in the state health service in Limerick, his salary was only a fraction of what he had been earning in private practice.
Then there was the upheaval of moving from Belfast to Limerick, first to an address of which I have no memory and, one year later to a cramped three-bedroom semi-detached house in which we lived until I was seven. My parents, two sisters, five brothers, and myself all lived in that very small house. Newborns kept arriving roughly every 24 months until we were eventually ten children in all….
That is the context in which Daddy’s accident appears to have had a traumatic effect upon me. Leading practitioners of clinical psychology are at pains to point out that trauma is not what happened to us but rather our inner response to the events in question.
In later years, little was spoken of these events. In hindsight, my parents seem to have supressed their own feelings about them and could, therefore, provide little support to me in terms of „repair“. As far as trauma is concerned, what is not transformed in any generation gets transferred to the next. Thus is the nature of generational trauma.
The concept of „rupture and repair“ is one which has fascinated me for some time. Ruptures are inevitable in all relationships, but the quality and consistency of repair determine whether relationships flourish or otherwise. Recognizing ruptures, engaging in empathetic repair, and learning from these experiences are essential for emotional maturity, mental health, secure attachment, and long-term relational satisfaction.
A simple example of this dynamic can be seen when the mother of a one-year-old leaves the kindergarten classroom and the child suddenly finds herself separated from the otherwise ever-present carer. A wide variety of reactions on the part of the child are possible, depending on the mood of the moment, the quality of the bond between the two, and the degree of emotional maturity of both parties.
At one end of the continuum, the child may be unaffected and continue to play with the other children, or she may become deeply distressed and show this by means of crying and fretting. She may appear inconsolable, even throwing a tantrum.
The key, in the latter case, is that the child is quickly comforted, that the mother (or a substitute) soon returns and can provide solace and a sense of safety, through body warmth, eye contact, and reassuring words, until the child calms down and relaxes.
Such an experience — successful regulation of the autonomic nervous system with the help of an adult — repeated over time, tells the child that, while rupture can be distressing, she will be OK because the parent will always return to make things better.
It is the absence of sufficient repair which can cause the child to lose trust — in self, in the caretakers who should be providing a sense of safety, and in the benevolent nature of the universe. She may be led to conclude that the universe is, indeed, inherently hostile.
The repair on offer to me on that fateful night and in the subsequent days, weeks, and months appears to have been inadequate. This is understandable in the context of the fast-moving situation, the overwhelmed parents, and the number of children competing for attention.
The time has now come to redress this unintended deprivation.
As a person graced with the experience of long-term recovery from addiction, I have learned the art of extending myself for the purpose of nurturing spiritual growth — mine and that of others. We learn in recovery to admit that life cannot be managed, in terms of dictating outcomes, though it can well be navigated, whatever might transpire.
Recovery is a process whereby we shine the light of discernment on our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, breaching the dams of denial, and separating out illusions, delusions, and the belief systems which do not convey the truth, thus rectifying the perception disorder all addicts develop over time.
It is a gradual shift in our perception which results in unlearning the programmes which are no longer working and replacing them with new behaviours, new thinking, and new ways of dealing with feelings.
In my case the issue of trust keeps arising. It seems that this traumatic experience in very early childhood etched on my psyche and embedded in my body — at a cellular level — the idea that life cannot be trusted. Though my mind knows that the opposite to be the case, my whole „felt sense“ sometimes hijacks me and there I am, with zero self-esteem, no trust in the Universe, and severe doubts about my self-worth — even my right to exist.
I believe that the situation was exacerbated by the fact that, while there was a clear rupture, to everyone as well as the family system, there appears to have been little or no repair. My guess is that those who could have provided repair (the adult caregivers) were, themselves, traumatised and so could not adequately support the children, me included.
When we are incapable of processing reality, we choose to avoid it. This often happens in the realm of the unconscious. We do not realise that we are avoiding.
Avoiding reality at any cost is a form of emotional sickness. Emotional health, or Emotional Sobriety, is facing reality at any cost.
In „The Road less Travelled“, M. Scott Peck states: It is in the whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has meaning. Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure. Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and our wisdom. It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.
This confronting and resolving needs to happen simultaneously on two levels: in the outer world, where relationships, job, income, financial responsibility, etc. play major roles.
The less obvious dimension is that of the „inner work“. In what way do outer occurrences present us with gifts and opportunities to take stock: to revise our belief systems, our ingrained reactions, and our expectations of life?
To extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, we need to calm the mind. In a world full of chaos, disorder, and busyness, this is a real challenge. For most of us, the mind is like a snow globe which is violently shaken every thirty seconds.
Under such circumstances, the mind — filled with shame, fretting, regrets, anxiety, etc. — becomes our worst enemy. Only by establishing and maintaining Mental Fitness — otherwise referred to as mindfulness — can we turn things around. Our mind then becomes our best friend in learning to confront and solve the challenges of life.
Think of a vehicle travelling along the road with two different tanks of fuel in the back. One tank is marked FEAR. It contains all those Saboteurs which intend to keep us from extending our selves: Judge, Controller, Victim, Hyper-Achiever, etc.
Each has its own lie to safeguard self-perpetuation. For example, the Controller says: Either I’m in control or out of control, ignoring all the possibilities between these extremes. All our Saboteurs are driven by fear.
The second tank has LOVE written on it. It contains the Powers of Sage, such as Empathise (Compassion), Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. These are all manifestations of love of life and new possibilities.
With increasing Mental Fitness, we, the drivers, get adept at identifying — in real time — whenever we have regressed to utilising the fuel of FEAR and can shift over, tapping, once again, into the fuel of LOVE.
This happens in the overall Sage Perspective that states that: Every situation contains a gift and opportunity to grow, to heal, to practice love.
As with physical fitness, Mental Fitness requires daily practice. Every true transformation is made up of 20% insights and 80% practice. In this respect, my daily practice of the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality has proved invaluable.
It is the peace of mind and sense of awareness that now enable me to work through old wounds that bubble up to the surface from time to time.
As such I have been able to learn to shift from the old pattern of judgement and shame to the new approach of discernment and enthusiasm, grateful for everything I have experienced throughout my life and those who have shared this journey with me. Indeed, this is now the core of my professional work, helping others to learn to shift from fear to love.
I suspect there is no limit to the extension and growth we can achieve in one lifetime. Any ideas of a finish line are simply the product of the Saboteurs coming in through the back door once again.
