Category Archives: love

Planting Seeds: On being grumpy

A couple of times recently, I’ve found myself getting grumpy at someone I love.

There hasn’t been any rational reason for the grumpiness, but I’ve expressed it anyway. The other person has received it, graciously and with love. And then I get upset.

The grumpiness has turned out to be a tender insecure feeling, masquerading as a spoilt and angry child.

John Welwood puts it perfectly in his book ‘Challenge of the Heart’:

These parts of us that give us the most trouble are like children in need of our attention, whom we have cut off from our unconditional love. We say to ourselves, in effect, “I can only love me if I don’t have this fear, etc.” However, any part of us that is cut off from our love eventually becomes sick, for it is the circulation of the heart’s energy that keeps us healthy.

I’ve been lucky enough to have someone else help me with my troublesome grumpy-ness. But I think we can also offer this unconditional love to ourselves. Little by little, we can accept the parts of us that give us trouble. We can listen to them, kindly. They will transform all by themselves.

Things to be curious about:

Which parts of you give you trouble? How could you share this part of you with someone who could love it? How could you be more loving towards it yourself? What might be behind the trouble?

Quotes:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our love.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Anger as soon as fed is dead-
‘Tis starving makes it fat.

-Emily Dickinson

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What really matters

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This is the house where I’ve been staying for the past ten days, minus my laptop.

I’ve shared those ten days with four Buddhist cats, 27 fellow psychotherapy students, three faciliators, a resident Buddhist community, and two Lord of the Rings geeks.

I’ve sat in a circle and sobbed. I’ve laughed at Pictionary until my stomach ached. I’ve sang Taize and floated in the bliss of sweet voices coming together. I’ve played Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuits and been scared by the geekiness of the Lord of the Rings geeks. I’ve chanted Namo Amida Bu and bowed to the golden Buddha. I’ve drunk tea and tea and tea. I’ve sat in a circle and felt soaked in love.

Who am I now? My old life doesn’t quite fit me any more. I’m clearer about some of the things I do (a long story), and I know how I’d like to be different. I’m clearer about some of the stuff I’ve been wasting my time on (the internet, buying stuff, trying too hard at anything), and some of the things I’d like to do more of (creating space for poems to enter, journalling, walking outside and looking at the flowers).

What next?

Nick Drake is playing on my i-pod. I’m going to listen to this song. I’m going to give it my full attention, and I’m going to feel grateful, for Nick Drake, for my i-pod, for my black cat coiled on my white furry cushion, for the sofa I’m sitting on, for the Green and Blacks caramel chocolate on the table. I’m going to love it all. Does anything else matter?

Melting and opening, and a gorgeous nude

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Matt found this photo online earlier, and if you’re reading Ruth’s diary you’ll recognise it from today’s post. I thought it was rather beautiful. We’ve got out of the habit of appreciating proper curves.

I’m reading Perfect Love: Imperfect Relationships by John Welwood. He doesn’t make it explicit in the book (or hasn’t so far) but Welwood is a Buddhist type, and the influence on his writing is very clear to me.

He speaks about ‘the wound of the heart’ as the parts of us that haven’t felt truly loved and accepted as they are, and how these parts close down so they don’t get hurt again, which cuts us off from the very love that would heal us. Basic stuff, but I think that this basic stuff can be the most difficult to really ‘get’.

Here are a couple of bits I’ve really resonated with so far:

Love and the wound of the heart always seem to go hand in hand, like light and shadow. No matter how powerfully we fall in love with someone, we rarely soar above our fear and distrust for very long. Indeed, the more brightly another person lights us up, the more this activates the shadow of our wounding and brings it to the fore. As soon as conflict, misunderstanding, and disappointment arise, a certain insecurity wells up from the dark recesses of the mind, whispering, “See, you’re not really loved after all.”

Yes – the more brightly another person lights us up…

And then this bit feels especially relevant to me, as ‘the pursuer’.

One way that couples often deal with their fear of receiving love is to split into two poles – one partner becomes the pursuer and the other the distancer. Although it looks as though the distancer is the one who is afraid of letting love in, in fact both sides are choosing control over receptivity. Pursuers remain in control by demanding, seducing, or chasing after – all of which keep them from having to melt and open. They are often frightened of having to receive and respond – which is why they would rather do the chasing. Distancers remain in control by withholding. While each side complains about the other, they are in fact doing the same thing: engaging in a strategy that avoids the risk of opening fully to love.

Don’t you just hate it/love it when you hear yourself perfectly described by someone who doesn’t know you?

Melting and opening. Amen to that.

Happy weekend x

On being foolish and full of human passions (and a moist poem)

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I attend a group regularly – I can’t tell you what kind, because that bit needs to be anonymous. But it is a group of regular people (I’m going all American – ‘regular’!) and we meet to share our experiences and listen to each other and learn and love each other.

When it was my turn to speak, my theme was how truly messed up we all are. There’s a saying – ‘we are all very sick people – it’s just lucky that we’re sick on different days’. It felt somehow glorious that we were all bumbling along, NO idea most of the time what we are doing. There’s a Buddhist term – bombu nature – we are all bombu, we are all foolish beings. We are ordinary and full of passions. Well, I am anyway.

Last night it was a joy to be in the same boat with all the other bombu members of my group. Last night there was so much love in the room that I thought I might go pop.

Here’s a very appropriate (and moist) poem. Love you all too, readers – you’re in the boat too.

My Love For All Things Warm and Breathing

I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time,
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
on the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my love for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.

by William Kloefkorn (from Cottonwood County: Poems by William Kloefkorn and Ted Kooser)
Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac – do support them, they’re fab.

Thank you, people of Worcester

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I had a strange and wonderful night last night. I was meeting a friend for dinner in Worcester – a city I’ve never been to before.

After circling the one way system a few times, I parked Rosie in a random car park and struck out into the city. After a few seconds a young homeless man with no front teeth approached me and started his spiel – he needed £8.80 for…

I interrupted with a pound, and asked if he knew where Cafe Royale was. He said he could show me the way, and I followed.

Whilst we were in a particularly dark and deserted alleyway I did wonder about how sensible I was to follow this strange man in a strange city, but he delivered me safely to my destination, having told me all about his son in Ireland and showed me his injured finger (he was concerned it had gone yellow – I reassured him that iodine did that).

The waiter in the cafe recommended us an Indian restaurant, and told us to tell him he’d sent us.

A girl from Hungary insisted on walking us (out of her way) from Cafe Royale to the Indian. She told us she liked England. People did what they said they were going to do.

The waiter in the Indian recommended a restaurant in Bromsgrove, and told us to tell them he’d sent us. Then he gave us a free Baileys each, ‘because it’s Sunday’. The curry was AMAZING, and ridiculously cheap.

Two men gave us perfect directions back to Rosie. The Christmas lights twinkled merrily, and I circled the one way system several times again, and all was well with the world.

The people of Worcester all turned out in force to help our evening run more smoothly. I think this is how people are. I think we like to help people. I think if we expect the world to help us, and ask it nicely, it will.

Shabby old Essential Zen

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I’m a person who likes shiny new things, as evidenced by my love of Rosie, and my excitement every time I get a new mobile phone.

I was disappointed when my second hand copy of Essential Zen arrived yesterday. It is an ex-library book from Wiltshire. It has a battered plastic cover and the pages are yellowing.
And then I read this paragraph, in the introduction.

We all tend to possess, accumulate, store, and consume, trying to have as much influence and control as possible in our daily lives. This produces a great deal of anxiety, which in turn creates a longing for freedom from such a mode of clinging. Sooner or later we may come to understand that we are free when we are not preoccupied, that we receive more by letting go, and that we achieve more by being selfless. This is the dynamics of nonpossession, which is an essential part of the creative process in the Zen world. (by Kazuaki Tanahashi)

Clever old Zen book, turning up in a battered form to give me another lesson.

My book has passed through at least forty hands – I counted the date stamps. Everything wears out. We can love things as they are.