Truth be told: I have greatly enjoyed the past two months of blog silence. It's representative of a rather extensive time-out I've allowed myself; the better to hear/know that Self as changes in all sorts of intentional and previously unimagined ways. This coincided with a time in the year's natural order when I'm always very conscious of an energetic spiral that moves inward and then back out in a pattern of unwinding. And that's what I've been doing: unwinding various layers of buried tension, carefully crafted assumptions and presumptions, intentional focus that's outlived its organic lifespan, and so forth and so on.
When I decided to indulge in a growing need for more (meaning of a higher quality...) solitude it was very clear to me that I would have to be disciplined and self-compassionate enough to heed the rhythm of my own inner time clock rather than falling back on patterns of withdrawal that chronically short circuits itself by jumping back into the fray ASAP. Or permitting my accommodation mechanisms to be activated through the stated needs/preferences of somebody else.
The latter part wasn't easy to maintain and I didn't expect it to be. I'm the sort of person others depend on for inspiration and psychic nourishment. I'm also someone who seems to spend an unusual amount of time hearing the (unsolicited) confessions and emotional outpourings of others. Sometimes I know the people involved well enough to anticipate what's going to happen but, more often than not, it just happens and nine times out of ten without any acknowledgment that this process can be quite taxing (and perhaps not situationally appropriate) for The Listener.
Usually, the fact that it's nearly always up to me to set boundaries (and assume sole ongoing responsibility for maintaining them), causes some inner friction between my dualistic capacities for knee-jerk compassion and frustrated impatience. For much of my life it's appeared that I have far more multi-directional empathy than is good or constructive from an I, Me, Mine perspective. What this has tended to mean is that I chronically reach a point of critical mass when I must demand space to tend to my own issues in a way that seems very sudden and, more often than not, completely unexpected from the perspective of the person who has come to rely on me listening to them on their terms and otherwise behaving as if I don't have any issues or attendant neediness of my own.
Oftentimes, in the aftermath of making it clear (primarily to myself but then also [at times problematically] to the other party involved) that I've reached the end of the line, I seek out the company of a tree - such as the Weeping Cherry pictures above - with trailing branches. These trees generally hold a medicine spirit that offers nourishment for those with a powerful need to ground their energy and re-connect with Source.
I also tend to seek out contained bodies of water that feed or are fed from a swiftly moving source. This type of landscape offers great meditational value during times when I feel overly pressured or pressurized at an emotional and psychic level. I began the time-out I'm currently attempting to end with a series of dreams that involved bird nests full of newly born babies. They were always screaming insatiably for their mother's attention.
Over the course of a few weeks the dreams morphed so that the mother was actively quashing the babies' demands. She wasn't hurting them (which I kept expecting her to do with the part of my mind that generally remains lucid during dreamtime) but very firmly building little walls around them which were made from nesting materials. And I took a cue from these dreams: what if I didn't have to tell people to step off and let me breathe so much as I need to provide nest/nurturing material that offered them a sense of safety and comfort through the materials themselves rather than my unflagging attentiveness?
Something I fully realize: for the [oftentimes damaged and emotionally bruised] recipient such attentiveness has an illusory quality that strongly appeals to anyone who hasn't received sufficient helpful/positive attention at critical points in their development. As a result the helpful/positive quadrant of that equation doesn't tend to be understood. It's oftentimes rejected or undervalued within a larger craving for attention, period. And attention is a lot like potato chips. The more you consume the more you entitle yourself to go right on consuming.
Thus the illusion of finally having "enough" attention is inevitably destined to shatter and sometimes that process can be quite spectacular in its unpleasantness. Clinical healing dynamics make tangible allowances for such a process but more personal inter-relationship doesn't generally hold a mutually established blueprint. And this is where a lot of murky dysfunction finds a place to root itself: in the metaphor of a baby and bathwater, a great number of people will consciously strive to save the baby without due awareness focused on the fact that this often leaves them floundering in some ultra-grimy bathwater.
I've thought about that particular metaphor a lot over the past two and a half years; consciously striving to remain mindful of bathwater. The swampier it's appeared the more diligently I've forced myself to deal with it. And I've been analyzing my character and its inherent nature. For example - what actual gift of useful value do I offer to those to whom I listen with a stalwart intention to keep on listening come hell or high water. I've consciously replaced my established question: how can I develop a longer and more authentically tolerant fuse for such things with: what am I broadcasting about the gift of listening that needs to be fine-tuned or perhaps outright eliminated?
I definitely know enough about psychology and my own roots-of-origin underpinnings to realize I've held an ongoing degree of responsibility for the fact I often seem to magnetize other peoples' Inner Baby Bird. I then silently collude with the resultant neediness that may start filling the metaphorical Baby's bathtub waaaaay too fast for effective bailing of bathwater.
Many lists, thought-squeezing/emotionally convoluting journal entries, and conversations with my own preferred confessor/Mama Bird figure later, I arrived at an inescapable awareness that if my conscious mind won't talk to me effectively than the rest of my physical body certainly will. Having been at that crossroads of understanding before I have also periodically arrived at the understanding that some kind of inner lightbulb really needed to want to change or I was just going to keep looping back around to the same point of awareness with increasingly high personal stakes involved.
My resolve to actively develop a fertile seedbed for such change is what led, most pragmatically, to the life-encompassing time out I've just taken. I entered the process feeling somewhat jury rigged and held together with tape and old paper clips; my psyche felt like it was supported in a tenuous fashion similar to the hydraulic jack pictured above. That jack is holding up three stories worth of a rambling living structure. It's no small measure of insanity to imagine it can go on doing so in an indefinite fashion. Likewise the time had come for me to begin re-building an emotional broadcasting system that's more realistic and hence a lot more authentically humane in the all-around manner.
What I've realized - and not just over the past two months -- this is something I've been thinking, talking, and writing about for upwards of a decade, now - is that the healing community (and this seems especially true in alterna-healing circles) doesn't really honor burn-out as part of a hero's/heroine's journey. It's seen as a pattern of failure: something to be disavowed in the self and used as some kind of moralistic object lesson when it's perceived in somebody else. But, more truly, this is just another form of necessary dismemberment at the gates of our collective underworld. Only an authentic hero/heroine would want to acknowledge that it's happened for them - and, more than likely, repeatedly - and then set about the task of making something sensible and sustaining from the wreckage.
I won't claim to have managed such a task at a done-deal level but I have definitely committed myself to maintaining the effort rather than simply hosting a periodic realization that it's work that needs to be done. Recovering a more authentic self from a period of professional and/or personal burn-out ought to involve more than simply heading back to routes of behavior and intention that inevitably double back to more spent fuses.
I know I'm not the only one working with this particular Chinese puzzle at this time. Your thoughts and opinions are welcomed either in comments or by way of private mail ...
