Relaxing Into Health

For much of my life I have beaten myself up.

A kind of vortex or triangle beginning with a small sense of failure which includes huge and disproportionate portion of  self recrimination begins to swirl and erode my sense of health and well-being from time to time. This small sense of failure flwos into a sense of hopelessness and anger resulting in greater and greater self-punishment and a greater sense of failure which goes underground and finally  becomes a kind of numbness and unconsciousness–refusal to look at what is happening. It is like a spiral and accelerates with each feedback loop.

In the long term moving in and out of this negative spiral produces a fear of success and of happiness. The fear is that having obtained even a mesure of happiness and success it will inevativly be dashed. Sometimes we also fear that other People will really see us and we will not measure up to what is actually our own unrealistic standard of “perfection.” In fact, unconsciously, we tend to find people who are often very happy to project their own self loathing onto us and give voice to the harsh criticism with which we so often baste our poor hearts and minds. 

Even when there is no one alive or present to harshly criticise us we enforce this destructive standard in the voices of others, especially the primary ones of our parents and early teachers, along with our own often with great cruelity. We carry a quorum of self recrimination within ourselves wherever we go.

All of this is exausting! It makes any accomplishment unsustainable or so expensive in a psychic sense that it errodes our quality of life and often runs us to ground and into a quagmire of despair.

Some of us mistake this cruel voice with healthy and necessary self-discipline. For long periods of time it may produce “success” but at what cost? We are afraid that if we relax into our “true self,” which we believe is slovenly and unworthy, it will take over completely and we will be as clearly disgusting to everyone as we feel in ourselves that we are.

We can escape these catagories of self lothing and self doubt.

There is a kind of relaxation that will actually make it possible to access our inate gifts and our deep font of strength and will allow us to become a loving presence in our own lives and in the world at the same time. It will take away the corrosive voices and will comfort our hearts and allow us to embrace ourselves in a way that will enable our ability to embrace others with healing and acknowledgment. This is all that is necessary and in and of itself is the full expression of our imago dei humanity. We need accomplish nothing else.

Ironically, everything becomes possible if we can relax into this way of being. We can respond to whatever arises with love and equnamity and can act in the world with creativity and conviction.

I have been able now and then to stand in this space and to feel its power. Having know this space I know clearly when I am in it and when I am not. Loving and relaxing, loving and relaxing–smiling (I now call it the Obama smile) when the crazy critical voices come at us from within, serves to help us relax and love ourselves and others–even those embodying the hateful criticism. It helps us acknowldege mistakes but not identify as our mistakes. It helps us break the circut and return to the healthy and balanced place that allows us to move foward and open more and more to the grace that bubbles up in us and in every particle of the Kosmos. Relax, regroup and move forward again with confidence, compassion, forgiveness and love.

I have been in a brief unhappy spiral. I’m not sure why. It happens from time to time but less and less often and I have learned some skills that help me to stop it more quickly and turn it in a loving and happy and healing direction. Trust and prayer and opening meditation–opening to love–to grace makes it all much more powerful and possible. I trust more and more that I will not descend into the hopelessness again for long because I have tasted my deepest, highest self which is the light, the One, the Whole.

This is a growing sense of health and wholeness. It must be experienced on every level at once. It must also be held and expressed in the body while I am in the body, in fact, in every body that I AM.

Light and life,

Lewis