Feel the Love; Don’t Pick the Flowers
As a young child (4ish years old), I found some flowers in my neighborhood. They were radiantly beautiful, complex and colorful. They made me feel the way my mom made me feel! Naturally I gathered them up and picked them to bring to my mother. I just knew she would love them as much as I did! I was filled with joy as I planned my little surprise.
Then I heard, "HEY!"
My eyes widened and my body stiffened. I abandoned the flowers and ran to my mother.
A woman (presumably the owner of the flowerbed that I had ruined) followed closely behind me and I had the feeling of being chased.
While I hid behind my mother’s legs, the woman talked angrily while pointing emphatically to the flowers I’d left on the ground. No longer a symbol of love, the flowers were now a symbol of guilt. Shame burned me all the way through.
In this moment I learned that I could not trust my feelings of expansion and love because they could bring me into harm, or worse, TROUBLE. Not only was my gesture of love not seen for its true intent, but it was characterized as bad, wrong, or bratty behavior— the OPPOSITE. A double whammy.
It broke my little baby heart! I remember crying from my deepest depths when the lady had finally gone. I sobbed that I was sorry and I didn't know.
It would have been great if I could have learned that love, expansion, joy (all of the conditions that led me to pick those flowers) were wonderful things to be cultivated and enjoyed, while also learning that it's not okay to pick flowers from the neighbor's garden.
But when we are little, we are simple creatures and we can’t learn two things at once. So that day, my lesson was: LOVE AND EXPANSION ARE DANGEROUS. DO NOT DO.
This happens to all of us hundreds (thousands?) of times before we reach adulthood, and each one of us has to re-learn that while we must manage our behaviors, we do not need to limit or control our inner experience.
Imagine:
Noticing with glee that you think someone looks silly
Feeling attraction to someone other than your partner(s)
Being fully aware that you hate looking after your child sometimes
In Healing Work, we learn how tightly we try to control our experience and the myriad ways we shut them down, thinking that this is the only way to control our behavior. For children this is largely true: as a child, if I feel desire to eat a cookie, I will most likely go eat that cookie even if I’ve been told not to. So, naturally, in order to stop the eating of the cookie, a child must shut down the desire for it.
But adults are capable of nuance. We can feel all kinds of things without acting them out, and I’ll tell you firsthand, controlling one’s behavior becomes a LOT easier when one is fully aware of how one ACTUALLY feels. For example, if you know that you hate looking after your child sometimes, you can learn why and make moves to address it. If you don’t allow yourself to feel that hatred—you think doing so makes you a bad person— then you’ll still have the hatred, you just won’t be able to do anything about it, and if that isn’t bad enough, you’ll secretly think you’re a terrible person all the while.
So! I have a three part question for you:
Name an emotion or inner experiences that you find difficult to allow.
If you sense into this emotion, what associations come to mind? (i.e. why is feeling this a bad idea?)
Can you imagine what it might be like to feel this but without enacting it?
Enjoy! Want some help with this? Reach out.
