A Missive for You

Hi Mary,
Your comment resonates deeply with me. I hear you. Right now in my life, those words at the end of each Daily Way message, are like a raindrop falling on a bit of tarmac highway; I cannot feel their meaning in my body and mind. I can read them and remember having felt that Source love in so many ways, but they do not sink in to me as a feeling right now.

For myself, I recognize that I am resisting the experience of love. It’s part of an old pattern in my own human personality, something I created for myself as a small child, as a way of protecting myself from emotionally unsafe circumstances that I didn’t have the power to change or escape. It’s a defense mechanism that my nervous system switches on when my present circumstances feel equally unsafe in similar ways, even now, when I’ve learned and integrated much healthier ways of experiencing life. We are human, after all, and to be human is to exist as a story, a narrative in the mind about who we are and what all This (life) is, what it all means. At times, sometimes for long periods even, that involves getting lost in the story, the mind narrative, in the same way that we get lost in our night dreams, forgetting who we are in waking reality.

Even though I’ve had experiences of being divine love, of cosmic oneness, of incredible spiritual healing,…I still have to walk my human walk, and it involves trauma and long periods in the desert of disconnection. I’m learning to love even those experiences for what they are, to love myself through them. Sometimes all I have is the memory of feeling loved, and sometimes it doesn’t feel very close or real, and all I seem to have is my sense of respect and responsibility towards what I knew in those remembered experiences of divine love. Sometimes all I can do is choose to honor them by acting with kindness towards myself, even though I cannot feel the love directly. Sometimes it comes back and I remember the soul view that Suzanne speaks of here.

Have you ever felt loved? There’s nothing wrong with you if you sincerely feel like you haven’t. There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons why a human personality would feel that way. It only means we are somehow blocking the flow (unconsciously) from reaching our human perceptive field. The starting point may be to allow yourself the fully and directly feel your own body.

Rather than meditating with any goal, and rather than trying to achieve any sort of mind state, just laying down comfortably, and beginning with each toe, actually FEEL your own body. Not your mental avatar of your toes, but your actual toe-sensations, right through to your toe bones, your toe-muscles, your toe-nails and skin…every sensation your toes are offering. Feel the tension in them, even heighten it a bit, and then allow it to release and your toes to completely relax. Work your way up your whole body as thoroughly as you perceived your toes, right up to the crown of your head, feeling all the sensations directly. Allow yourself to feel whatever sensations are present, even the lack of any sensation at all. Allow yourself to perceive, if you are able, your bones, your connective tissues, your intestines, heart, lungs, noticing any tension, heightening it if you can or wish to, to really make it clear in your awareness, and releasing it. Whatever is present is fine. Whatever is not present is fine, If you fall asleep, that’s fine. That’s the message your body is trying to give you right now. In time, you will not fall asleep, and you will experience more and more deeply the truth your body has to share with you. When I first did this practice, and for many weeks, I couldn’t feel much of anything in my body below my waist. That was a bit of a shock to discover! Over time, I began to be more and more aware of my lower body, and discovered some important emotional information I was holding in my knees, of all things.

I cannot go into the complexity of this sort of practice here, but it’s something I found incredibly helpful on my journey of healing. I don’t know what is blocking your ability to feel Love, of course, but in my studies, and also in my own healing journey and in helping others to heal, I’ve found that very often, the ways in which we protect ourselves as we develop from infancy onward, can become powerful emotional blockages, and that these show up as tension in the body.

I”m not talking about the very apparent tension we create during a work day, say a stiff neck or tight shoulder. I’m talking about extremely subtle tension that we spend years, even a lifetime, holding but not perceiving. For example, if as an infant, I have a mother so overwhelmed by her own fear and depression that she is unable to really see me or hold my emotional experiences in a calm and compassionate way, I have no ground on which to build a feeling of self-love and security. I will need to contain the terror and pain of this so that I can survive (ie., feel whatever form of connection she is able to give me) so I’ll contain my own emotional needs within my body, as tension. That tension might exist within the cells of my body for decades, until I am able finally to experience it and the emotions it contains, and release them fully through expression in a safe and compassionate setting (which, in this case, is me, myself, holding compassion for my infant self during a body meditation). Releasing the stored tension begins to open the channels it has blocked all these years, through which the divine love that was always present, can begin to be experienced by my human personality.

In addition, the body is precisely the same expression of divine wisdom and perfection as any flower, snow crystal, ray of sunlight, oak tree, mountain, or elephant. It is a part of the wisdom and perfection of Gaia, our planet. It’s patterns arise from the same sacred geometry, the same love, the same Source. If Source knows a thing (and there is nothing Source cannot know), then Gaia knows it, and if Gaia knows it, then every particle of your body knows it. Think about that!

I hope you are able to find some ways to open up those channels and heal your love-receptors. It’s hard, being told you are loved, when you simply cannot feel it! It’s like, watching every one else eating delicious ice cream, while you have a cone of something that tastes like a bitter pill. I used to make up stories about how I must be unloveable, to explain why I didn’t feel loved, when others talked about how loved we all are. They were just stories, and I’ve since actually, really, learned to LOVE MYSELF (which ultimately, IS divine love), but the stories still arise to offer their faux shelter in times of extreme trauma and disconnection. I have to consciously choose to set them aside, consciously choose to work instead with the truth of love that I’ve experienced at other times. It’s not always easy to do, and it doesn’t necessarily magically switch channels for me so that I suddenly feel perfectly loved. The human experience goes on as long as we’re embodied. But it doesn’t have to be an experience of never feeling loved. If nothing else for now, know that you are not alone!