29 Jul How is attachment protest also a spiritual moment?
“Why do I always have to be the one?!”
It seemed like my common refrain when there was conflict while I was growing up.
I was supposed to “be the better person.”
My response back then?
“Why do I always have to be the one? Why can’t they?!”
Laying down my side of the sword always seemed fraught.
Over the years in my therapy practice, hearing a client share some version of…
“Why do I always have to be the one?!”
…was commonplace.
And it points to the crossroads that many of us face.
It’s a delicate point…that attachment protest…that moment of spiritual anguish: “Why do I…?!”
How is that attachment protest also a spiritual moment? Because each of us is always being guided from inside (through prana; through longing; through an innate compass) and outside (including through the behaviors of others)… to become the person you’ve always wanted to be – always sensed you were deep down inside you.
There’s a slogan in the Buddhist Lojong teachings: to take the hit
“To take the hit” here means training the body|mind|heart to transform the “stuff” of life into compassion.
But those child parts we each have, those parts that never got what we needed, hate this idea of taking the hit of life. We want life to be easy…we want it to flow goodness and sparkles forever… or at least not be so chock full of turbulence.
Yet, as the researcher Ed Tronick says, optimal stress is character building.
Breaking the protests of life into granular pieces allows us to benefit from taking the hit – instead of deepening the old patterns of resentment, upset, bitterness, envy, despair…
The other day I had the enormous joy of being with someone who was caught in the tsunami of a part. They were swirling down, down, down into the Original Pain that part was holding – only problem was, it felt like it was happening NOW.
The good news is this person has been practicing the energetic martial art of taking the hit in the Buddhist sense, and using it for their own benefit. Doing so, they rode the roller coaster of experiences in the here and now.
And started to realize… OH… that was how it was back then, back in the day when the part had no agency to be different in the situation. Oh! Oh! All the links started to come together as words fit…words describing feelings and memory after memory evoked the cascade of emotions.
Rise. Crest. Fall.
The person then realized “I’m calmer now.”
That’s the moment when we meet who we really are, not the tantruming child, the angry part, the defensive, rejecting, confused, bitter, resentful, jealous parts. Those are important imprints of life experience that need to be welcomed and attuned to.
Their role is to point us to who we really are. The protest of each and every one of those parts, their cacophony is vibrantly alive so that we’ll pay attention – yes, first to them…
…but more importantly to integrate them back with our heart’s wisdom so we can energetically touch the luminous glory of BEING a unique and utterly fabulous expression of the Divine Source.