Over the past couple of months I’ve had a more challenging time than normal staying grounded and anchored in love. I seemed to fall somewhat frequently into grief, helplessness, anger and despair. It was pretty intense and all my usual efforts at self-care weren’t as effective as they have previously been.
Have you ever had moments like this?
Days where you wanted to just quit caring, crawl into a hole and wait for the insanity to pass? Moments when it took everything you had to keep engaged and active in the creation of a more compassionate world, because you weren’t sure you really believed in that dream anymore? It can be very painful, confusing, and scary.
I have a large tool box with many tools of self-care. Prayer, meditation, movement, eating right and exercising, reading spiritual literature, spending time in nature and with loved ones, and getting plenty of quality sleep. They are all vitally important and I make a practice of tuning in to see which tool is most needed on any particular day – and frequently several tools are necessary. This time, however, I needed another incredibly important and often neglected tool: doing my own personal shadow work.
Fortunately, I’m taking a Pathwork course with other Pathwork Helpers across the globe. It is definitely what Andrew Harvey calls my “Network of Grace.” I love that term. Creating a network of grace for yourself offers strong support for taking a deep dive into your inner landscape. Let’s face it, if we could do this on our own it would already be done. We need each other!
Our latest gathering had us focusing on negative pleasure, a Pathwork term that points to the energetic charge we get out of recreating our painful childhood experiences. It isn’t exactly pleasurable in the sense that we think of that word, but it is a charge that is full of life energy, and it gets attached to our painful experiences in childhood, and then resurfaces in our current life until we bring our attention and compassion to the repressed painful feelings that are calling out to be acknowledged. If we skip this step, the negative pleasure leads to an addictive tendency to keep repeating painful patterns in spite of our sincere intention to create a fulfilling life. It’s usually unconscious, which makes things all the more perplexing.
As I turned my attention to this grief and despair that I thought was triggered by world events, and as I begin looking for my negative pleasure, I discovered that these feelings did not originate with world events, but came from two different childhood wounds – one from my mother, and one from my father.
I found that my response to the cruelty happening in the world was so intense for me due to the humiliation and helplessness I felt in the face of cruelty as a child – and the fact that I had negative pleasure in recreating this helplessness. I also found that the grief and despair I was feeling was tied to the pain of my emotional needs not being met as a child, and my fear and belief that they will never be met in my close relationships today. There is also a negative charge for me in longing for connection and never receiving it, and it has an addictive quality.
So while I do not wish to negate or minimize the horrible cruelty that is being enacted on the world stage, and I am not saying that there aren’t people who are incapable of meeting me emotionally, what I am saying is that when I am identified with my child consciousness that thinks I am still that helpless child dependent on parents who were quite limited in their ability to meet my needs and create a safe environment for me, I perceive my current situations with an unrealistic version of the truth.
Embracing the self-responsibility to separate and fully feel the pain of my childhood grounded in the adult consciousness — that has the capacity to tolerate feelings and hold them in compassion — brings me back to reality. Having a supportive group of like-minded souls serve as a network of grace enabling me to go deeper than I would be able to do on my own.
I’m happy to say I’m back from my self-created hell. I cannot overstate how important it is to recognize that when you are actively engaged in some way to serve a cause larger than yourself, it is so important to connect with how your childhood wounds exacerbate the pain of the current situation. This tool prevents burnout because it separates the pain of the past from the pain of today’s events, and you can bear the pain of today because you are an adult with many more resources than you had as a child. In this way, activism becomes the catalyst for spiritual growth, and spiritual growth becomes the catalyst for more effective activism that doesn’t wreak havoc on your mental health.
We are not healing our childhood wounds exclusively for our own personal gain. We heal our wounds so that we are free to love in any situation, and that brings us fulfillment but also contributes to a collective energy of love, justice and unity that is growing daily and that will eventually have the last word. When each of us heals the hate, cruelty, and separation that lives inside us, we become part of the evolutionary shift that is in the birth canal right now.
If you are navigating difficult feelings and would benefit from some support, please know you are not alone. You do not need to give up, but you might need to add a few tools to your self-care toolbox. I would be honored to support you on an individual basis, or you can join in the last installment of the Sacred Activism series, entitled “Rekindling the Flame.” You can read about it here.
In closing, I’d like to leave you with some powerful words from Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times….Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good…. We are needed, that is all we can know.
In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours. They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here. In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.”
