example, when my girlfriend talks to me in a certain tone of voice I can feel an angry tightness rising in me. It starts in my legs, it enters my breath and chest, and can trigger a disproportionately dramatic rage reaction in me if I don’t notice it in time. The accumulation of all the times my mother spoke to me like that and I felt unseen or misjudged is still living in me, and the similarity of my partner, who is usually totally innocently observing something, challenging me or pointing something out, awakens all the unexpressed rage and claustrophobia of my past. At this moment I have a choice: I can spill years of undischarged bile all over her, blame her and reject her and hold her responsible for the horrid feeling I’m experiencing, or, if I am skilful and brave, I can turn inward, notice the massive volcano erupting in me, choose not to make it her fault but take full responsibility for it. In practice this would mean taking some space to breathe through and dissolve or discharge the sensation before I unskilfully fall into a row with her and end up sleeping on the sofa. Even better, to vulnerably express to her what I’m going through without making it her fault or triggering her into defensiveness is the real black-belt way to respond because then I can receive her support and gentle head stroking or holding while I process it, and it can be a route to a deepening of our intimacy. This is, to me, alchemy, transforming what could have been shit into relationship gold.
It is ironic, really, because we spend so much of our time worried about being abandoned or exiled in different ways, but, truthfully, whenever we try and battle or manipulate the external to avoid feeling these painful reactions, it is like we are saying to ourselves, ‘These feelings are not OK to feel, your feelings are not welcome!’ We are abandoning ourselves. No one else can abandon us if we are willing to feel all our feelings. So when, for example, we are hoping that our partner won’t abandon us, we are really looking in the wrong place. It is no one else’s job to make us feel safe. Yes, we can set up safe agreements and boundaries for ourselves, and hopefully the people we love will agree to them, but it is not their job to be scaffolding for our soul. They can support us and they can be there in the hard times, but it is no one else’s job to notice how we are feeling and make sure our emotional needs are met, and it is also a massive turn-off for a lover to be expected to be our parent or carer. They don’t have the capacity to guarantee to us that they’ll never ever leave. The only person that can guarantee to me that they’ll never ever abandon me is me.
DISSOLVING UNDERLYING BELIEFS
The second opportunity that Life’s genius is offering us when we are triggered is to discover what beliefs we are carrying that keep these kinds of reactions repeating and repeating. We never feel stressed or reactive about something unless we have a belief running inside us that holds the feeling in place.
Someone who has made a whole system for this kind of enquiry is an American teacher called Byron Katie. She has a sophisticated yet simple and effective method for going into these beliefs and dissolving them (www.thework.com). The first thing she asks is: ‘Is the belief definitely true?’ And we often discover, time after time, that it isn’t and that we have a choice as to whether we want to habitually keep believing it or whether we can let it go.
For instance, I have always been a needy, abandonment-phobic kind of a boyfriend (or husband). If I sense or suspect that my partner is attracted to someone else, internally I start tightening up and waves of anxiety begin to course through me. If I have more evidence of my partner being attracted to another man, I will likely surrender to excruciatingly jealous feelings and thoughts. Why?
What would I have to believe is true to feel this way about this?
I asked that question and I realised, wow, I would have to believe that if she left me for someone else my life would be unliveable, and in that moment I became powerful again, because it was then up to me to go deeper into the belief, maybe consider where and when it was implanted, and then choose not to live by its false projections (until next time – it can take a bit of practice!).
Fear is really such a blessing because it gives us a menu of the beliefs we are carrying that aren’t true for us any more. Of course there are some genuine survival issues in life that we do need to be afraid of, but most of our head-fucking about what might happen is a total waste of energy. As Mark Twain said, ‘I have lived through some terrible things in my life – some of which actually came to pass.’
If I go deeper into my beliefs I notice that somewhere deep down inside I believe that if my partner ever left me for another man then my life would be unliveable. It would be over. If I am holding that belief to be true, then when there is any kind of a threat or suspicion my body will react as if life is literally falling apart. I am so sure that life would be unliveable if she left me that if anything signals that possibility I begin to melt down. But is that belief really true? Yes, if she left me for someone else it would be really painful, maybe even hellish for a time, but for how long really? A few months maybe? Even if it was, in drastic circumstances, a whole year, before very long I would get over it and meet someone else.
Most of us have been in relationships that ended and we are all still here getting on with our lives, in new relationships or open to whatever is coming around the next corner. Very few of us died from a broken heart, but we (well, OK, I) act as if being left for another lover would literally kill us. So the second invitation which is on offer from the painful feelings that go off in our bodies is to enquire into the belief that is holding that reaction in place and to see, with a little scrutiny, whether that belief is actually true.
We usually reject feelings of fear. Of course, they don’t feel comfortable, but Bashar invites us to look at them differently. He says that fear is the same energy as excitement going through our body but bumping into beliefs that are not in alignment with who we really are, so although it can be painful, it is also a signpost. He says that when you play the piano and hit an out-of-tune note, you don’t run away from the piano and swear never to play it again; you tune the note. Fear is telling us where we have an out-of-tune belief that needs dissolving, so we could actually get excited about it. Wow, a fear, how exciting! I can dissolve something holding me back!
WILLING TO FEEL
They say that you can’t love anyone until you love yourself, but what does self-love mean? What does it entail? I mean, I bought some chamomile tea, does that count? Self-love begins with the willingness to feel all our feelings without rejecting our own experience, not by abandoning the young character who lives in us, but by welcoming the waves as much as possible and reminding ourselves that all our feelings are OK to feel. If I go soft and yield to it.
This is where the masculine side of our nature has to take a back seat. It is not about analysing the feeling or doing something to make it go away, it is not about taking any action. It is the feminine part of us that is most useful here. The part of us that gets impacted, that can allow the sensations deeper in. Every time we make space to feel, to allow, to yield to what’s happening, we send a message of self-care and acceptance to our wounded places and give them permission to exist. In this way we take one more step towards wholeness and integration and become less reliant on other people making it better for us.
When emotions arise we often try to stifle them. We mustn’t cry in public, right? We don’t want to be a burden on people, we don’t want to look needy or as if we are trying to get attention with our drama, and our intense emotions have rarely been supported and approved of in our childhoods, so the first impulse, when tears or anger rise up, is to push them back down. The self-loving practice that has created great shifts in my life is to cry and cry and cry, not self-indulgently wallowing, but consciously feeling all my feelings, saying yes, yes, yes, as I feel each wave pass through me, and soon enough it passes and ebbs, and I feel lighter. The times when I collapsed with anxiety or panic attacks, I would notice a pressure in my chest, the pressure of years of corked tears.
Once when I was sixteen, I was having such an intense meltdown that
