Holding Hands With Personal Demons

As I said in the meeting tonight, “I believe that life is perfect right now, and there is a pretty good chance that will be true tomorrow!”  Perfection , for me, does not mean there is no room for growth and change, it just means that things are just fine the way they are and that I very much enjoy the human experience.  That attitude is quite remarkable since I have spent most of my life living with guilt, shame, low self worth, rules of conduct and a lot of fear.  It took being near death a few times for me to realize the truth of what I heard years ago, that “nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all”.  With that in mind, the emotions that were troubling me, my personal demons, fell away, with effort.
As I said in the previous paragraph, I had a lot of personal demons.  The way I have gotten (mostly!) past them is to “hold hands” with them, confront them and work through them, one at a time.  When I say hold hands with them, I mean accept and embrace them as part of me, I can then do the work of confronting and working past them.  During the process, my central focus was my spiritual condition.  I could only do the work from within love.  The process was neither pretty nor fun.

Complete Understanding

During my experiences today, both with clients and at my recovery meeting, it, once again, became quite clear that it is not possible for most people to completely understand the experiences of another.  What I call “deep listening” makes it possible to come a great deal closer to a complete understanding, but it is still like being outside of the experience looking in, rather than having had the experience.  Deep listening certainly allows for greater understanding and genuine empathy, but it is not the same as going through the experience.  This realization came about through discussions about what it meant to be addicted, dependent on and obsessed by some sort of chemical, what I typically describe as ‘being owned” by the chemical.  It is not possible for a non-addict to completely understand what it is like to be addicted.  However, even without a given experience, it is possible to truly listen and come to a valid understanding, rather than simply projecting beliefs, it just requires more effort.

A Divine Meeting

Today, while working with a family, I was reminded of a comment made by deCastillejo in her book Knowing Woman, "For there to be a meeting, it seems as though a third, a something else, is always present.  You may call it Love, or the Holy Spirit.  Jungians would say that it is the presence of the Self.  If this 'Other' is present, there cannot have failed to be a meeting." In this case, there was a very strong feeling of a presence and I felt very much like a divine conduit along with my typical indications of sweating, runny nose and speech improvement.  Also, each of the family members were being authentic and completely present.  It was an important, loving, magical, and totally exhausting, couple of hours.  It feels amazing for me to be present for such a life changing moment.