Inner work consists in the main in finding and feelings emotions which have hidden. Accepting feelings is equivalent to completing the delivery process. They arose to tell you something, but you didn’t have the capacity or insight at the time to hear them. So they held on, perhaps in the viscera, perhaps in a persistent tightening of the shoulders, perhaps somewhere else or in overall body tension.
The core insight I think some of us walking wounded have to come to is admitting we did not get the love we needed as small children, and that there is NOTHING we can do about this. We cannot change the past.
And to some greater or lesser extent I think a great many of us carry some incompleteness into the present. There are many ways of dealing with it.
Abstraction is a great one. I literally think muscle tension leads to the need to philosophize. Intellectuals, people who talk and write and think all the time, do so as a means of dealing with and expressing persistent tension. This is the root distinction between intellectuals and what I call thought workers. The latter are trying to solve concrete problems. The former think because they have to, and inefficient thinking is actually preferable, because if no problem is ever solved, they never need to leave their comfortable thinking place. I think this is a CORE problem with Leftists, and this tension is a principle reason that violence comes easily to them.
Work is a solution. Addiction is a solution. And developing unhealthy relationships with others is a solution, particularly grown men asking women to mother them. It is an emotionally logical request, but it is unfair, and it does not solve the problem. No wife or lover can take the place of a mother, although this request is perhaps related in some way to Freud’s Oedipal Complex. He was always almost right, but never quite.
But what I am realizing is that all the components of self love, of the feeling of having been loved, can be assembled from scratch.
What are they? The capacity for deep relaxation, a positive self image, positive self talk, the capacity for pleasure, and the ability to relate in a healthy way with other people.
Both a top down (a decision to act in certain ways), and a bottom up approach are applicable. Bottom up, though, is vastly more important, which is where the Kum Nye comes in. It is a gradualistic process of first undoing tensions and emotional blockages, and then of developing positive feeling. Positive feeling, in turn, becomes at some point (I’m not there yet, but this is the theory) self reinforcing. This is the Nye.
What I felt today is that I have been waiting for someone to rescue me. It is not fair that I was unloved, and frequently abused. It is not fair that I didn’t get a chance at a happy childhood, and that all sorts of things have carried into my adulthood, all sorts of dysfunctional patterns I could not even see for a long time, expectations about the world and other people, unacceptably low standards for myself, and an absolute incapacity to imagine what love might feel like. It’s not fair.
But of course this doesn’t matter. It is what it is. The key thing, though, is I have finally accessed this sense at the root, base, bottom level. I have confronted it, owned it, allowed it to percolate, and can now imagine holding myself to higher standards, which in turn will begin over time to generate the results I want. I think 2017 will be a great year.
And it helps a lot that I don’t have to worry about our highest leader working daily to undermine and destroy everything that works in this country and around the world. Trump will have flaws, and no doubt I will disagree with some decisions. But he is not a zealot focused on avenging crimes none of us committed, in the name of people he holds in contempt. That is an ugly world. That is a world where hate truly wins.