Ask A Question
I want to create some options for interacting and thought a space to seek answers to your questions might be the perfect solution.
“Love and love alone has the authority to name who you are.”
Question: What do I do with the weight of loneliness inside of me? It is a heavy burden to feel unknown, unseen and unwanted. Help.
Can you tell me what you KNOW about yourself and your inner world? Can you tell me what you recognize and acknowledge in yourself, what you affirm, validate and challenge? Can you tell me how you show yourself that you want you and what you do to make yourself feel desired and loved? Maybe you can. Maybe you are loving yourself well most days. And maybe the connection is lacking between adult you and younger versions of you. Maybe the unknown, unseen and unwanted comes from the disconnection and avoidance you find yourself in when you are alone with you.
Could you write a love letter to yourself and all your ages and experiences, all your successes and mistakes? Could you find generosity and grace for the younger versions of you that believed things you no longer believe, knowing she was doing the best she could with what she did know back then? Could you gift your perceived failures with acknowledgment for taking risks, showing yourself compassion and learning important things along the way?
Can you tell me, when you are all alone, who is with you then? Whose voices do you hear whispering up ahead? Whose criticisms echo in your home? Who is listening to your voice and hearing what words are manifesting? Maybe the trees in your backyard? Maybe the lifeforms in your stomach digesting your food? Maybe the spirits in the air or the animals living everywhere around you and in you? Maybe a Higher Power who is disguised as you or the energy carried in your skin and bones? You are never alone, my dear. Truly, it is impossible. All around you, where you can see and where you cannot, love exists. You breathe in life. You breathe out life. How connected to these life forms are you on a daily basis and how willing are you to experiment with the life forms you cannot see?
Loneliness hurts. This universal heartbreak may be an invitation to go deeper, to look where you have ignored, to connect with what you have rejected. Maybe what hurts are the lies we tell ourselves: I am alone. I am unworthy of love. I am forgotten and abandoned. Maybe it is when we recognize the lies and tell ourselves the truer stories that we find comfort: I am supported by all sorts of living beings, seen and unseen, at all times. Everything that exists is made of love, including me. Love is a gift that I already am and can never not be. I have forgotten and abandoned myself at times, but no longer will I consciously choose this. Instead, I will hold myself gently and honor the human experience before me.
Question: I am home alone, in pain, most days. I cannot fathom how to find meaning or how to stay positive and grateful. Help?
There is no more appropriate response than this: I am so sorry for the pain you are enduring, both physically and emotionally. I hear the hopelessness in your words. What is the point of living, you ask, when the body’s limitations seem to steal life from you?
We travel through this existence asking at every turn, what am I doing here? The answer is experiencing the present. This is the point also, to experience what is present. Oh, but the experience feels cruel in its torment and you wonder where comfort could be or relief from the endless punishments you face! The answer is in offering yourself endless compassion. We stop trying to escape what is here, we let go of efforts to make things better, we put down tools to avoid and we face it, instead. I do not mean that we stop seeking treatment or taking helpful supplements. I am speaking of holding space for this pain to be told. We listen to the inner children once neglected or abused and we see the fears inside are young and traumatized.
Wrap your arms tightly around your inner child. Listen to her feelings and her memories, knowing that you are safely here in the present and those traumas are far, far away in the past. Tell her what year it is and how old you are now. Show her that it is safer here with you, that no one will be allowed to hurt or manipulate her here. Invite her to join you in your adult experience and leave forever behind her frozen obedience.
Bodies can heal from a lifetime of contraction and fear. I wonder how much of my own fear goes back to years of breathing shallowly, curled up around my middle, hoping to be left alone in my bed. When I feel the habitual protection rituals happening inside me after years of sleeping in my own, completely safe bed, I take a deep breath and wrap my arms around myself. The weight of consequences that rest on my muscles, straining them till they are like jello, is mine to take responsibility to heal now. I am in charge now, not the perpetrator. And so…
I listen to the body’s need for rest, stretching, moving and pain relief. I listen to the inner child’s need to be heard and loved, to get what they didn’t get years ago. I honor them instead of suppress them. I realize trauma taught me suppression, but I can do better now because I have been taught better. I can love them and heal them with my love. It will take time and no miracles of healing the body are guaranteed. Inside, outside, physically, emotionally, environmentally, even, I believe Love will transform me. I choose to believe this.
Sending you gentle touch, kind words and a patient spirit as you love yourself deeply.
Question: Going to work feels like having my teeth pulled daily without novocaine, but I cannot survive without income.
Our current state, here in America, is one of flux. Old systems in disrepair are functioning at incompetent levels. And new systems still need creating! The young people I have worked with and loved have all said the same thing: there is nothing for me here. And I have to validate their experience! So many older generations preach that the past was rosy and something to go back to, but my experience is different. I would love to move forward to a system that invites marginalized voices to lead and asks privileged people to listen and assist.
This is what boils out of me everytime I face a question about survival in a world that is dying. Friend, I don’t know your specific pain at this job. I know the prevalence of racism, disrespect, gaslighting and abuse that exists especially for anyone who isn’t privileged or inheriting privilege. This is not a question from a privileged position.
I want to tell you how sorry I am that you are facing this kind of difficulty. Sounds like torture to one who is terrified of the dentist. You feel helpless and stuck, and those are two of the easiest emotions to get trapped by! Helpless and stuck create their own cycle in your mind. Beliefs, like you have no options or you will never get ahead, inform the loop in your mind. The beliefs then start looking for proof in little things you overhear or read or say to yourself. A little self-doubt creeps in and you can watch the mind create a windstorm of similar or related thoughts that create panic.
Watch what words pour through your brain when this happens. Write those sentences down, those statements or questions that induce panic. It’s the only way to pin those elusive buggars down. Then, use your tools to compassionately calm the reptile part of your brain that has been seized by fear, and record what thoughts were leading you.
I learned a little trick from my favorite book ever, Diana, Herself by Martha Beck.
The statements you wrote down… you wrote them down, right? You gotta write it down before you read on if you want to experience the magic.
Okay, the statements you wrote down, when you hold these in your mind, what happens? Your mind collects other thoughts to substantiate your ideas and you begin to experience emotions like fear, panic and claustrophobia. Your body begins to join by sweating, shaking or nervously rushing.
The magic is this: the opposite is most likely the truth.
I will be stuck at this job forever TRANSFORMS TO… I can leave whenever I am ready
This is a dead-end job TRANSFORMS TO… No matter how small, all steps forward propel us towards the goal
My boss hates me TRANSFORMS TO… Harsh criticism, control and disregard are indications of lacking in them. My love for me is what matters most.
All energy is sucked out of me TRANSFORMS TO… I know my time and energy are valuable
I must be broken TRANSFORMS TO… There is something beautiful growing inside of me right this minute
I have nothing to give TRANSFORMS TO… Presence is the greatest gift any of us have to give
There is true transformation in trying on new perspectives, widening the realm of possibility. There is grace and mercy always. There can be. Give kindness to yourself and take a moment to contemplate…What if this was true? What if the beautiful statements are more true than the original ones you wrote?
Practical advice: 1.) Analysis of current job, survival needs and possibilities of finding different work, 2.) seeing if there are local, state or federal agencies that may help in the meantime and 3.) creating some coping skills and boundaries at your current job to reduce pain. Ask a friend or someone you trust to brainstorm with you about these three subjects and see if there is an escape plan in one of them. I do have a free emotional regulation list here.