One of my fellow participants on a retreat with Jeannie Zandi once told us about her devastating childhood and it touched me to the core. The abandonment and loneliness of her story reminded me of my own childhood and it killed me. I couldn’t get over it. I didn’t want to cry too loud during her share and after that it was break. I cried the whole time and still I couldn’t stop. When we came back I told Jeanie I simply couldn’t get over what the woman had told us and Jeannie invited me to cry it out.
I howled and howled and cried my heart out for half an hour. The moment I came to the depths of my pain, I suddenly saw that everything is sacred, even the most horrific things. All the way down it is all Love. I realized that everything somehow is orchestrated by this infinite intelligence that we are part of. It is not our job to understand it, it is simply our job to grieve it, to experience it, to feel it all the way down. The anger, the devastation, the horror, the fear, they all have their own integrity. They all teach us something about Love.
As long as there is only Love, we don’t see it, simply because we are a part of it. Here on this earth, in our bodies, we have the chance to explore being deprived of love. We explore losing love and being hurt, since being here means slowly losing everything. Growing up we are all traumatized to different degrees. Through the exploration of this trauma we understand deeper what love is. Usually our deepest trauma becomes our most beautiful gift to help others. After we have explored it and experienced it all the way, we understand deeply how to help others with it.
It can take a long time, this exploration of trauma and it is all about learning to love ourselves in places that have been abandoned and hurt by our caregivers. It takes patience and perseverance to dig up young parts out of the shadows, thaw frozen scared parts of us and hold them, so they can grow up and realize they were always innocence and love itself.
As long as we are still reacting from our own pain, our actions will not be as effective. It is still simply the playing out of the pain and that is ok. It is all part of our exploration. The more we realize the world is simply a mirror of our own relationship with ourselves, the more we understand that it is mostly an inside job.
When we allow ourselves to move through grief and devastation we can love so much deeper, we have so much more compassion. We see how underneath everything is this place that holds us. We recognize how sacred everything is, how everything is birthed from innocence. Our actions in the world to help people will come from a place of love and understanding instead from reaction.
Then we recognize that being deprived from love was the most loving experience that could have happened to us.