Hello All,
My first and very long post. Get comfortable! They will in time become shorter
no doubt.
Protection - An illusion??
I am not an experienced facilitator nor a trained healer but this topic is
something I have raised questions about in my training early this year with
Maria not only on behalf of facilitators but participants. My question seemed
to be based on what Kay refers to as a "..collective fear that underpins many
protective rituals and cleansing practices."
Out of my yearning to better understand myself, I have also looked into various
methodologies of working with energy, including esoteric and different
metaphysical healing modalities and as a result of the fabulously rich postings
here, am now aware of Pema Chodron, Tonglen practice and Atishas heart
meditation. (Thank you Kay, Moira, Michael & Sadhana)
I agree with Maria's sentiments of fully, feeling and embracing and has been a
wise master in this area for me (Namaste Maria :)
My questions were based on "protection", but since then my current beliefs more
echo the famous Franklin D. Roosevelt "There is nothing to fear but fear
itself".
I guess that echo's Michael's statement too: "It is important to understand
that fear is a dead giveaway, the ultimate invitation to unbalanced energies. .
. . It is ultimately the creating and tending of a sense of "safety" that makes
the difference."
Upon reading the many facets provided on this subject and reflecting on my own
experiences, I began to ask: What is safety? Is it the absence of fear or the
absence of love?
Being a natural healer, unwittingly presenting myself with invaluable lessons
(which used to be called mistakes). As with all of us and the participants of
this work, I have carried many things for many people out of love and concern
to the detriment of myself. But it does not make sense to me that what is born
out of love needs to be healed, only transformed. I have learnt that the
"being" part of me instinctively loves unconditionally, almost naively without
any form of fear. When I am unconsciously doing this, my heart and soul do not
bother with questions like "is this mine, should I be doing this? Is this good
for the other person" It is a natural spiritual instinct because my heart
believes in love and it's amazing healing powers.
It sincerely believes it can hold and heal anything and so it can! However it
appears to me that this love goes outward and outward and outward until all
inner resources are depleted. The energy is like the in and out breathe and it
is a simultaneous process of giving and receiving as they are one in the same,
not one or the other. However along the way I learnt to block off receiving
anything because as I reached out, there was nothing there to receive. And as
my early childhood experiences were filled with trauma, my being quite
instinctively learnt to block block block, and give give give in "order" to
self preserve and to "protect" itself from that which was not in tune with the
essence of love.
If there is something that comes into my energy field as a result of
constellation work, I have been taught and found it helpful to check in with
myself and ask "If this mine or someone else's" However, through my experience
I then began asking, "If I have picked up something that is not for my highest
good to carry, then I ask for it be cleared. If I still feel that "something"
is there, I then ask "what is my learning from this". The answer always comes,
perhaps not immediately, but it comes.
But! And that's a big BUT, on every occasion if I ask for something to be
cleared it has stayed there because it had something more to teach me so was
always mine becuase it is born out of a co-created constellation process! If
the other is not feeling a sense of something, it just means that they have not
picked up their own individual learning, not that I have taken theirs. In my
experience lingering "energy" has never shown itself to be theirs or mine, but
both.
I also have found that if I approach the space in full trust of my heart
(intuition) and my soul (my knowing beyond reason), I don't really feel I have
anything to clear. The reason I no longer feel the need to "protect" myself is
that I will attract to me what it is I fear the most, which can lead to
powerful transformations anyway, when I drop the fear and judgement.
It poses the question, would anyone embrace something they fear! No way! It's
like walking past a dog with fear in your energy. The dog will smell your fear
and attack you! The very fear you had in the first place! And don't we all seem
to attack what we fear or not understand. It is our primal instinct!
With this premise, I know now, the only thing I need to protect myself from, is
my own fear, and even then fear has it's valuable internal lessons for my own
further personal work, which tells me there is just something else there I need
to surrender to and embrace, what would I be protecting myself from?
Paradoxically, it is the protection that I have needed to drop the most. The
fear itself is my protector if I am not afraid of it!
It teaches me to tread slower and offers me the gift of discernment. So when I
see that big scary dog in the street, I can feel my fear, embrace it, and once
it subsides, as it always does when embraced, my discernment is then available
to use to assist my navigation and I can then respond rationally not
emotionally. Given it is humanly impossible for the human brain to physically
be rational when we are highly emotional.
Given this work requires us to "step into" someone's energy field as a channel,
clearing might seem like the obvious solution, however what is residual is mine
anyway because it lingers and has touched on an unhealed part of me. One of my
avoidance processes has been to formulate my experience into lessons for the
healing of the world before I have fully integrated it as I often see how this
work mirrors out again and again into wider fields. Again, what I have read
today on what Atisha talks about.
I do however agree with Stephen that self nurture is highly essential and as a
facilitator would make a point of suggesting this to future participants. This
has arisen from my personal experiences of "leaking sacred energy" from my own
personal work, however not exactly understanding what it was I was doing to
feel so miserable after what seemed like a powerful transformation. Having
taken care of myself after a recent piece of work, leaving the energy to "soak
internally" on a cellular level has made a world of difference. This meant not
intellectualising, no mental processing, no dialogue processing, eating and
resting well with no heavy/busy/noisy energy around me has made a world of
difference and has allowed a magnificent "transformation/transmutation"
experience to unfold, whereby I am not then attempting to give give give it
away before I have received it's full power. This required a great degree of
trust which unfortunately is a block to those who have suffered great trauma.
Indeed the very nature of constellation work serves as an unblocking process in
itself, however I beleive specific suggestion of "after process care" is needed
to help the individual from further blocking their healing work unwittingly and
serve as an aid for them to "trust the process". I beleive the explanation or
teaching is necessary because how does one affected by trauma trust in this
"process" when it is an unknown entity and it is a natural human response to
fear the unknown.
To summise, I recently blurted out a self talk thought out loud to my training
group which just seem to "pop" out which was "Marie, your in your head, get out
of there now! It's dangerous"
As humorous as it was at the time, I am grateful it "popped" out as it has been
an invaluable Mantra for me when working individually, in groups, well in daily
living actually. Cognitive processes are important of course, as they offer
discernment, however mixed in there is a series of old tapes, social
conditioning that creates fear which get's in the way of the truth of my own
body, soul and heart can become confusing and I can go on avoiding myself as
Atisha speaks about.
It's easier to remain clear when I bypass my mental processes and stay within
my body and heart and don't allow myself to intellectualise and rationalise.
Surrendering to the wisdom of my body, heart and soul, which do not have the
capability of deception, can lead me safely to powerful transformations.
Staying with this whilst facilitating, helps me better serve the client, as the
majority of the time, clarity is the underpinning of the participant's motive
for doing the work. How do do you provide a clear unfolding? By being a clear
channel with the undeniable power of the heart and soul leading the way!
Thank you to all that posted on this topic. It has helped me immensely describe
the process in which I work and help me better understand it myself!!
The name Einstein just popped into my head. So as my "popping" seems to prove
valuable, I will leave with a portion of Einstein's most famous quote:
"Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is
simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man
has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is
not like faith, or love, that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the
result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart.
It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes
when there is no light."
If anyone hasn't already discovered Nasrudin, he is a middle eastern Sufi
mystic. I was delighted to see some of his wise words of wisdom in the clever
palatable guise of humour. If you haven't seen them, they are found on the Osho
site where the heart meditation is under the "jokes" link.
http://www.livingwaves.com/osho/jokes.htm
Being a stand up comedian, I couldn't resist mentioning him.
Marie
"Continually learning to be in this world but not of it"
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