It’s school holidays over here and I’ve learned it helps me remain sane to re-post favourites until we are all safely contained back in the hands of the good teachers at school. Here’s one from May 2013
It truly amazes me how I couldn’t see myself. How with all my introspection and insight and intuition I sometimes can’t see myself at all. I get drawn into the illusion that things happen ‘out there’. I KNOW that what happens ‘out there’ reflects what is going on ‘in here’ – for goodness sake’s that’s what I’m writing about parenting – but still… the illusion is SO powerful.
Lately I’ve been seriously stretched out of my comfort zone and I am SO not comfortable. Can anyone say ‘panic’? I’m not used to thinking of myself as a worrier or an anxious person but I hardly recognise myself these days. Then yesterday an inner light bulb flashed and suddenly I could SEE! I saw that my recent anxiety – which I thought was so new to me – is actually so old and so foundational and so familiar to me, so much part of the furniture, that I couldn’t see it had always been there.
Now, I have some very precious people in my life who are prone to anxiety and I have to admit that I’m not at my best when they are caught up in the grips of it. But yesterday, mid-light bulb moment, I gasped, “No wonder I get so impatient with them when they do this. It’s because they’re showing me this part of myself and I don’t want this to be me!”
On the flip side, I had a moment with someone where I strongly felt my spirit, my healing power, my connection with all things and a deep peace with my capacity for greatness. Do you know what I was left with afterwards? A feeling like I was a little bit in love with the person who inspired it in me. A twinkle of ‘aren’t they just wonderful?’
In psychology we call that transference (or counter-transference depending on what’s happening in the connection) and it shows up internal dynamics that are guiding the interaction. “Why would I feel a twinkle of ‘in love-ness’?” I wondered to myself? Well darlin’ maybe it’s because this person helped you to see a part of yourself that you long to spend more time with, to have union with, to commit to for the rest of your life and create new life with. “Ah yes, that. I want that to be me.”
So this week I met my love and it was my greater Me. And I met my nemesis, and it was my shadow Me. And in both cases I first thought other people were causing me to feel the way I did.
Who is showing you things about yourself you’d rather not see? Or things you wish you could spend more time with?
