As Romance Fades: Whetting the Head of My Id

What's happening?  I'm finding out that when the id reemerges on its own terms, the romance fantasies of the ego are no match for the raw, hot drives that lay beneath the stories.  Moreover, I'm realising that the narrative function must spring into action in the service of transcending the dangers of the living id - to transmute the youthful expressions of those energies into a maturely, well reigned and contained dynamic grounding.  This spot isn't 'nice'.  It's real.  Full-blooded, expressive and always moving, all the while being in the service of self and others.  It is not at all cognitive. The grounding is felt-sense, but of a hot and powerful kind.  It can express gently, but it ain't gentle.  The stories of romance have very little scope for intrigue against the call forth and the call home.  It's as though they were only ever a script, and it is now opening night.  No time to merely act when it's time to perform.  All of this isn't news to my thoughts.  I've talked this talk for years.  But these living energies aren't controlled by language.  They're only known through intimacy. Through fearless acquaintance. These life-creating forces are the volatile fuel which drive me home only when they're contained, and otherwise throw me adrift... and throw me adrift they will, time and time again.  But now, crossing this threshold, where the naive play gives way to a dedication and commitment, the responsibilities aren't in a mercantile relationship with the rewards.  They are two sides of the one coin, and perhaps, as more hairs grow on this chest o' mine, will become indistinguishable.

... and so what of romance?  Well, in offering up the boy, I can finally hear the voice which says: "Son, pack your things we've come to take you home".

Lover, You Should Have Come Over...

Looking out the door 
I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners
Parading in a wake of sad relations 
As their shoes fill up with water

Maybe I'm too young
To keep good love from going wrong
But tonight, you're on my mind so
You never know

Broken down and hungry for your love 
With no way to feed it
Where are you tonight? 
Child, you know how much I need it.
Too young to hold on 
And too old to just break free and run 

Sometimes a man gets carried away,
When he feels like he should be having his fun
Much too blind to see the damage he's done
Sometimes a man must awake to find that, really,
He has no-one...

So I'll wait for you... And I'll burn 
Will I ever see your sweet return?
Oh, will I ever learn?
Oh, Lover, you should've come over
Cause it's not too late.

Lonely is the room the bed is made
The open window lets the rain in
Burning in the corner is the only one 
Who dreams he had you with him 
My body turns and yearns for a sleep
That won't ever come
It's never over,
My kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
It's never over,
all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her...
It's never over,
All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter...
It's never over,
She's a tear that hangs inside my soul forever...

But maybe I'm just too young to keep good love
From going wrong 
Oh... lover you should've come over...

Yes, and I feel too young to hold on 
I'm much too old to break free and run
Too deaf, dumb, and blind
To see the damage I've done
Sweet lover, you should've come over
Oh, love, well I'll wait for you
Lover, you should've come over
'Cause it's not too late.

- Jeff Buckley

Stephen A Mitchell's Relationality

"Loewald argued repeatedly that is a fateful error, which has become a cultural norm, to equate the world of objectivity with the true, sole reality... If language has been drawn completely into secondary-process functions, if the original affective density of language has been almost completely severed, the result is a functionally competent but affectively dead and empty life. The french word "connaître" which stands for knowing signifies "to be born with". Has the highly fragmented and intellectualised modern man become a master manipulator of things without ever really knowing anything from the inside out?"

- Stephen A Mitchell in Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity

More great RAM...

"I'm tired of hearing others say: "It's just my story." I'm tired of spiritual teachers telling their students "to drop their story." And I'm just as tired of us devaluing our story — our personal history — as I am of us overvaluing or overdramatizing it. What's needed is a deep honoring of our story, through which we mine from it what we need to become more integrated, more real, more at home with all that we are.

There is no more need to drop our story than there is for the sky to drop its clouds.

If our story is only told by our mind, we will not be able to integrate it, let alone clearly view what is relevant about it. Our story is also told by our body, through its gestures, posture, aches and pains, asymmetries, expression, texturing, encapsulations, etcetera. The body remembers, however inarticulate its movements and sounds may seem at first

When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable. To not be intimate with our past — to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and its originating factors — keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present.".

- Robert Augustus Masters

The Great Gatsby

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, the last line in The Great Gatsby.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Robert Augustus Masters permitting the odd sook sans a pious spirituality...

I'm part of a great little online group that allows eachother the latitude to let it all hang out as I used to when I was a kid. Recently, one of our friends posted the excellent Robert Augustus Masters quote below. I felt a weight lift from my chest. I've been craving the legitimacy of that spot for years - ever since the sanity of private sphere was gobbled up by the politeness of the public sphere. I was joking saying that Gawd really should have built us an all-purpose kosmic agony aunt. The bastard gave us mummy, then whisked her away before we were done sooking, leaving nothing but self-responsibility and a cavalcade of polite expectations. Wanker. Perhaps our little online group serves as a "go fuck yourself - get your own beer" to the big one... while you were sleeping, we worked it out between ourselves you son-of-a-bitch! ;-D

"I can see myself later on looking over these lazily wandering words and trying to extract something that is essay-worth. But I say to that unslumping wordsmith: Go fuck yourself. I don't even yell it. It's more like telling him to get his own beer. I'm not walking that far. I don't even have the juice to get the remote control in my hand. The couch will probably just stick to my skin. Maybe we need more support for complaining. I don't mean conscious complaining - that's too spiritual, too much work. Just everyday bitching, with all of existence being our uncomplaining ear."

- Robert Augustus Masters, "Sloth and Torpor," from Divine Dynamite: Entering Awakening's Heartland

Michael Washburn and the Pre-Trans Fallacy

I've been reading Michael Washburn's epic Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World recently, and continue to rave about it being one of the most important reads of my life. I'm doing a long-analysis with an excellent Sydney Jungian and Conversational-Model analyst, and the material which I'm integrating through this, as well as the process itself, feels extraordinarily sympathetic to the view expressed by Washburn. I've been wanting to read this one for quite a while - years ago Sass, when finishing her PhD read a couple of Washburn articles and we'd discussed him a few times. She'd read about his spiral view, and in particular, the regression in the service of transcendence and came waving the paper about at me as if her unconscious were saying: "Look here kids! You need to be doing this!". In the hot and heavy days of our courting, we never properly explored it. It took us both three years of other shenanigans before Washburn's worked reentered our lives, and it was in stunningly synchronistic style: I'd had three fairly significant emotional catharses in the fortnight prior to the book showing up on my doorstep, and only that afternoon had been journalling about the value of the dips into the underworld (and especially the libidinal and autosymbolic realms), and how I'd only very recently come to terms with it being a seriously important process after a couple of years of only focussing on emotional exploring and Gendlin focussing. With the much wider view of the nonegoic dawning on me, Michael Washburn's tome arrived from the dark to illumine the exact corners of the psyche, soma and spirit which I'd prepared myself to receive. I'd clearly known there was something I needed to know two months prior when I ordered the book from the State University of New York.

I've mentioned his treatment of Wilber's pre-trans fallacy, and a couple of you have asked me to expand on it. In the following, I've transcribed the parts of his first chapter which I think are important in making the point. It all centres around old debate from 20-30 years ago in the transpersonal psychology field which this book replies to. There was an ongoing conversation between Wilber and Washburn way back when, and Washburn adds to the debate again with 15 pages on the pre-trans fallacy conception right at the beginning.

Essentially, Wilber takes the Piagetian developmental view of increasing stage-structure unfolding and suggests that there is the potential for arrests in development at each of those stages (e.g. his fulcrums). Because of that 'linear' march north, he didn't like the spiral concept which Washburn observed in his work - that is, that post-latency, there is a steady return of the id, and that the move to transpersonal identifications includes the 'regression in service of transcendence' (Wahsburn: "Spiral theories are mistaken, according to Wilber, because (1) nothing essential to the psychic inventory is lost during the course of normal development, and therefore a return to sources as described in spiral views is unnecessary; and (2) if such a return were to occur it would only result in a descent from higher-level basic structures and, therefore, only a u-turn of regression rather than a spiral of transcendence"). What Washburn argues is that: "Wilber's criticism of the spiral perspective, although incisive and of heuristic value, is flawed because Wilber, in correcting one pre-trans fallacy, commits a pre-trans fallacy of his own. In exposing the error of equating "earliest" with "highest", Wilber falls prey to the opposite error of equating "earliest" with "lowest". That is, he mistakenly assumes that everything that, in normal development, is *developmentally* pre must therefore be also *inherently* pre. Now of course there are inherently pre-sturcutres, and many of these, as Wilber explains, are both bases and preserved functional components of later or higher structures. A great deal of research supports this point. An immense amoutn of evidence supports the structural-developmental perspective generally ans Wilber's structural-hierarchical perspective in particular. There is no question that Wilber's structural-hierarchical theory describes important dimensions of human development. There is a question, however, whether it accurately describes *all* of human development, for Wilber's assumption that everything that normally emerges in prepresonal stages of development is inherently - and, therefore merely - pre is suspect. Indeed, according to spiral theorists, this assumption is false".

He goes on to say that: "In this book then, care is taken to distinguish between psychic resources that are inherently pre and psychic resources that, although expressing themselves in a pre way early in life, are not. Among these latter resources are dynamic potentials - here called nonegoic potentials - of the deep psyche or Dynamic Ground: energy, instinctual rives, sources of affective response and the creative imagination or autosymbolic process. Attention is given to these nonegoic potentials because in the spiral view, they are the original sources of life form which ewe depart and to which, at a higher level, we return. They are sources of life that (1) express themselves in a pre way early in life (2) are then quieted to a significant extent in the transition from prepersonal to personal stages of development, and (3) can, if reawakened in later life, begin to express themselves in a trans way. Because nonegoic potentials are inherently neither pre nor trans but can have both pre (early) and trans (late) developmental expressions, they are psychic resources that can be revisited on a higher level. they are resources that, having been experiences pre, can be revisited as trans as part of a spiraling, rather than a merely regressive, return to origins. The reawakening of nonegoic potentials in the course of adult life is, in the spiral view, an essential dimension of the transition from personal to transpersonal stages of development. The nonegoic potentials of the dynamic ground, which had been subdued during the course of ego development, begin to reawaken in the fullness of their power, and the ego, which had developed its functions in relative isolation from the dynamic ground, begins to be reconnected with the ground. This reconnection is a return to origins that, to be sure has a dangerous, regressive aspect in its initial phases, for it is a return to sources of life that had been banished and limited to a pre expression. This reconnection, however, despite its initial regressive aspect, is by no means merely a regressive u-turn. It is rather a spiraling return to nonegoic potentials that, having earlier expressed themselves as pre, are about to begin expressing themselves as trans. It is then, a return to origins that is the beginning of transpersonal stages of development. To modify an expression coined by psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, this return to origins is a regression in service of transcendence. Although Wilber's argument against the spiral view does no achieve its aim, it nonetheless has heuristic value because the idea of the pre=trans fallacy presents a needed caution to spiral theorists, alerting them to an error to which many have been prone. Mistaking pre for trans, although not inherent to the spral perspective, is an errot to which many spiral theorists haev in fact fallen prey. The prepersonal and the transpersonal, in being alike nonpersonal, are easily confused. If, then, Wilber is incorrect in holding that the spiral perspective is based on a pre-trans fallacy, he is correct in holding that many spiral theorists have mistaken prepersonal levels of experience for transpersonal levels, with most unfortunate, merely regressive consequences. Too many romantically oriented writers have indeed been retro-Romantics. Too many romantically oriented writers have fallen prey to glorifying young children or noble savages for the wrong reasons, as if earlier were necessarily better, when it is not earlier that is better but rather reconnection with earlier lost psychic resources that is better".

He also concludes with: "The spiral and structural-hierarchical perspectives are not inherently in conflict. Conflict only arises when a proponent of one or the other perspectives insists that only the spiral or only the structural-hierarchical perspective describes all of normal development. Such an exclusivist approach is self-limiting and traps the proponent in pre-trans fallacies... The implication for transpersonal psychology is clear: an inclusive "both-and" position with respect to the spiral and structural-hierarchical perspectives is needed in order to clear away errors and make progress in mapping human development. Neither the spiral nor the structural-hierarchical perspective is based on a pre-trans fallacy. Wilber commits a pre-trans fallacy only becase he holds that all normal development follows a structural-hierarchical course, and therefore, that all that is developmentally pre must also be inherently pre. The challenge for the future, then, will be for transpersonal theorists to explore how the spiral nd structural-hierarchical perspectives might be brought into fruitful collaboration on matters of concern to transpersonal inquiry"

If that doesn't give you a kosmic chubby, I don't know what will!

More excellent quotes on Spiritual Bypassing from Robert Augustus Masters (via William Harryman's Amazon review)

"Instead of trying to get beyond our personal history, we need to learn to relate to it with as much clarity and compassion as possible, so that it serves rather than obstructs our healing and awakening. This also means relating in similar fashion to our tendency to spiritually bypass, casting a lucid, caring eye upon the part of us who buys into us."

"When we remain outside or removed from our fear, we are trapped by it, but when we actually do get inside, cultivating intimacy with it, we are no longer trapped by it, discovering--and not just intellectually--that it is but darkly contracted energy, a knotted-up vitality that can be freed when we become intimate with it."

"Real shadow work does not leave us intact; it is not some neat and tidy process but rather an inherently messy one, as vital and unpredictably alive as birth. The ass it kicks is the one upon which you are sitting; the pain it brings up is the pain we've been fleeing most of our life; the psychoemotional breakdowns it catalyzes are the precursors to hugely relevant breakthroughs; the doors it opens are doors that have shown up year after year in our dreams, awaiting our entry. Real shadow work not only breaks us down but also breaks us open, turning frozen yesterday into fluid now."

Excellent Quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Ivan the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov

"There are three powers, only three powers on earth, capable of conquering and holding captive forever the conscience of these feeble rebels, for their own happiness – these powers are miracle, mystery, and authority"

According to Ivan's Grand Inquisitor, the Church (here the Roman Catholic Church, not the Russian Orthodox Church) deprives men of their free will through engaging their belief in miracles; disabling their critical thinking processes through mystery; and controlling their actions through authority.

 

Wonder

"Philosophy begins in wonder" - Aristotle

"There is a sixth sense, the religious sense, the sense of wonder" - D.H. Lawrence

Sam Keen answering the question: "What do you ask yourself first thing in the morning?"

"The first thing I try to ask myself every morning is: "Who was I last night?. "Who was I just before I woke up?". That is to say, I try upon waking to remember the stranger in me. Because if I'm not careful I'll put on Sam Keen right away. Howard Thurman said to me: "Sam, when you wake up in the morning, never get out of bed. Simmer. When you go to bed at night, never go to sleep. Simmer". What he was trying to teach me was that ancient, ancient wisdom that there's a whole dark side to me, there's another life that I'm living in my dreams, there's the shadow self of me that I need to be connected with, and if I don't look out the first thing I'll do is start thinking: "Now well let's see, I couldn't get the tractor started yesterday, I wonder if the horses are going to be fed before my 9:30 interview.." My god! I've got Sam Keen on before I can inhabit the image of the stranger. I have to go back into the image of the dream first thing in the morning and ask: "Who was I last night? Where was I?" To wonder things like: "Why did I dream last night that my wife abandoned me? Why do I feel abandoned? Who in me feels abandoned? Oh... what's that got to do with the one who woke up in the middle of the night knowing about dying". That's what I have to do each morning. I don't always succeed. I don't always want to succeed".

- Sam Keen

Sam Keen on Asking Questions

"I need an answer lord. I need one answer, to one question: "What should I be asking now that the world is burning?". If I could engrave a question on the Washington Monument, on the halls of Congress, on he front of every school, if I could engrave it on the front of your diaries and on the front of my diary - the question of our time is "What should I be asking, what should you be asking, what should we be asking... what is the question we should be asking now that the world is burning?".

- Sam Keen. From 'Living the Questions - A Discussion with the Institute of Noetic Sciences'.

Sam Keen on the Abesnce of G-d

"I don't know enough to be an atheist. I don't believe in the kind of God I hear about on Sunday morning television, or the God of Jihad and Country, and I don't know how to think about the unknowable intention, energy, mind, purpose that unites the myriads atoms and galaxies into a single timeless universe. So I remain, happily, ignorant of the totality. But I do have a sense of being at home in this strange world and dwelling in a sacred place".

- Sam Keen

Robert Augustus Masters - Spiritual Bypassing

"Imagine a place with no pain, no judgment, no nasty moral dilemmas, a place where whatever happens is just karma, just the perfection of Being unfolding as it must. Imagine not just visiting there or dreaming of being there, but actually dwelling there. Such is the narcotic promise of spiritual bypassing. This is a dream not to fulfill but to awaken from".
- Robert Augustus Masters, in Spiritual Bypassing

Nice Rolfing quote...

"As Rolfers, we are after grace, pleasure, aliveness & coherence of the body in motion. Joy & happiness are more important than perfection"

- Monica Caspari

Dr Marie-Louise von Franz on balancing visionary experience and ordinary life...

"The dream world is only beneficent and healing if we have a dialogue with it and actual life. We must not forget actual real life and the duties of actual real living. As soon as one begins to neglect outer life, one's own body, doing one's ordinary job and so on, then the dream world becomes dangerous. It can suck us away from reality and spin us in to neurotic or even psychotic unreality. Into a fantasy world which is not constructive. So the dream world is only positive if it is in a living dialogue and in balance with an actually lived life".

- Dr Marie-Louise von Franz

Jung's Rhizome

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Right Speech - Chögyam Trungpa

In Sanskrit the word for speech is vac, which means utterance, word, or logos. It implies perfect communication, communication which says, "It is so," rather than, "I think it is so." "Fire is hot," rather than "I think fire is hot." Fire is hot, automatically—the direct approach. Such communication is true speech, in Sanskrit satya, which means "being true." It is dark outside at this time. Nobody would disagree with that. Nobody would have to say, "I think it is dark outside," or "You must believe it is dark outside." You would just say, "It is dark outside." It is just the simple minimum of words we could use. It is true.

From "The Eightfold Path" in The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation.

Eat Your Heart Out (Self Portrait) - Ajrin Mihajlovic

EAT YOUR HEART OUT, AJRIN MIHAJLOVIC
Self Portrait © Ajrin Mihajlovic

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Jung

"The great events of world history, are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch".  - Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man.

The Transformation of the Negredo

"The negredo represents the initial state of the prima materia, a misunion of opposites caught in an unconscious state of conflict, which appears in projection as the leaden massa confusa. What is required is a unifying framework, a vessel or vehicle of transformation by which to contain the conflict and subject it to a process of simplification and sublimation, a reduction to order through concentration, distillation, and reconciliation of the chaotic prima materia. For the art perfects that which nature left unfinished.

But this is just where the real problem arises, for instead of ordering the chaos of the prima materia it is difficult to avoid simply adding to it, for it does not willingly lend itself to order and clarity. One's voice becomes lost in the impenetrable darkness of disorientation and distress. Without direction things fall apart. Yet out of the material itself shines imperceptibly at first the light of the lumen naturae, by which we are able to find and follow the middle path of the transcendent function that seeks to unite the opposites.

Within the collective unconscious there are certain ruling principles, or archetypal motifs that have an ordering or constellating effect on the cosmogonic material, and these above all must be brought out and made effective. These archetypes in turn are centred on the ruling principle par excellence, the archetype of the Self, a symbol with power to hold the opposites apart and reunite them in living form".

- From http://web.ukonline.co.uk/phil.williams/transnegredo.htm

Published by New Alchemy © MM - Philip Williams (1993)

Echinacea

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Heartbeats - Jose Gonzalez

One night to be confused
One night to speed up truth
We had a promise paid
Four hands and then away

Both under influence
We had a divine sense
To know what to say
Mind is a razor blade

To call for hands of above
to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough
for me, no

One night of magic rush
The start a simple touch
One night to push and scream
And then relief

Ten days of perfect tunes
The colors red and blue
We had a promise made
We were in love

To call for hands of above
to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough
for me, no

To call for hands of above
to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough

And you, you knew the hand of the devil
And you, kept us awake with wolves teeth
Sharing different heartbeats
In one night

To call for hands of above
to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough
for me, no

To call for hands of above
to lean on
Wouldn't be good enough

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Loss, Subpersonalities, and the Core Self - Integral Options Cafe

I found this excellent, and very personal post from my friend William Harryman today, and it was absolutely what I needed to hear at this difficult crossroads in my life. The coming together of younger subs in the face of the anterior self is the real work I'm being called to do at this stage of life, and much of the drama in my love relationship seems to be so critically linked to each of our abilities to stay connected to enough core self to consciously hold the subs. There's a mountain of other psychodynamics at play, but bolstering the grounded presence of the self is so critical to allowing the repressed parts, the frustrated fantasies, the forgotten objects, the developmental arrests, the traumatic memories, the upsets, the losses... all of that to come out of the shadows and into the light. Cheers for being on the same road Bill. It's nice to have company.

Loss, Subpersonalities, and the Core Self - Integral Options Cafe

http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2007/05/loss-subpersonalities-and-core-self.html

Each of my three primary subpersonalities [Apollo (the little professor), Cyman (the cynical young man), and Sophia (the wise emotional one)] developed in one way or another as a result of facing loss and fear. When I experience loss in my life, each of these subs thinks it knows best how to deal with it and get me through it.

For the last 48 hours or so, these subs have been at war, each one trying to dictate how I navigate this challenging period in my life.

Apollo wants to think it all better, argue with logic for how things should be, and avoid allowing emotions to cloud the situation.

Cyman thinks it's all fucked and I should just accept that I will never have anything good in my life. His approach is to avoid the pain by any means possible, usually in self-destructive ways.

Sophia wants me to dive into the pain and let it work itself out. She doesn't care if I am unable to function in my daily life as long as I don't ignore how I am feeling.

None of these approaches can work on its own -- they may have been appropriate responses at one point in my life (given who I was then and the tools available to me) -- but they are no longer healthy ways to deal with loss and pain.

Each of the three major schools of subpersonality work (Psychosynthesis, Voice Dialogue, and Internal Family Systems) suggest that we are not just a collection of subs. Within the swirling voices of our subs, there is a core self or authentic self that can manage the voices. This deeper self is who we really are beneath all the voices.

In Psychosynthesis, this core self is called the Higher Self. In Voice Dialogue, they talk about an aware ego that is not attached to any one subpersonality but has access to higher awareness, a kind of observer self. In Internal Family Systems this function is referred to as the Self. In Ken Wilber's integral model, this function is named the anterior self (the I/I of awareness).

One of the primary goals of subpersonality therapy is to help the person identify and gain access to this core self. In doing so, the client can learn over time to disidentify with subpersonalities and intense emotional states in order to gain some much needed perspective.

I've been working with this process on and off for more than six years. Each time I go through something challenging, it becomes easier to find access to that core self.

Last night, as I was sitting outside enjoying the cool night air, my core self spontaneously emerged. From the vantage point of higher awareness, I could see all of my subs fighting for control. And I could see that no matter how much pain I am feeling, I will survive this challenging time.

But I was also able to see that the happiness of the woman I love is crucial to my own happiness. I could see that it would not serve me well to let Apollo try to logic her into agreeing that she should stay with me. She would end up resenting me at some point. I saw that I have to allow her to choose her own path -- and to hope that she will not let fear dictate the decision. If she does, there is nothing I can do about it. I have to trust that she knows what will make her happy.

Most importantly, I was able to see how blessed I have been to have her in my life these last months. I still hope there are many months and years to come, but if not, then I will cherish this time and move forward with my life, a better person for having known her.

This morning I am still operating from this space. At the same time, I am allowing myself to hurt and feel sad that this relationship may be over. Disidentifying with pain does not mean it goes away, it simply alters the experience from one of "I am hurting" to one of "I feel sad, but I am not my sadness."

One last note. Subpersonalities aren't all bad -- they have positive qualities that we can access when we operate from the core self. This post comes from Apollo's love of systems and making sense of things, but also from Sophia's need to extend compassion to myself and to the woman I love. When we can step back from our subs and see them as tools and not as who we are, we can use the gifts each one offers to navigate challenging times.

I'm going to spend the rest of today reading Pema Chodron and meditating on equanimity.




http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Compassion Practice for Receiving Projections

Receiver imagines the projector asking:

When I am locked in a hall of mirrors, I need patience and help realising that.

Can you love me while I suffer the shadows projecting on to you?

If you can see it as mine, then can you muster fearlessness in the face of it?

Can you muster genuine compassion without deleting yourself?

Can you be there while I move through it? Remain patient?

Can you muster the bravery to see me like this? Will you see deeply into me?

Can you see me not seeing you and still love me?