Our bodies disease when we fail to confront disappointment with loving persistence. The small cleaving occurs the first time, the cleft widening as our spirits are buffeted about over time. Failure to love, failure to joy--these are the seeds of unsought unchosen illness.
Love and joy, then, are key to healing: this is why aligning ourselves, our minds and spirits, becomes critical. Thus we infect ourselves day by day and arm ourselves against disappointment. More importantly, the infection spreads to others.
And helps them to heal.
Thence also we conclude that rage destroys body and mind in loosening our attachment to life and affects others' attachment, as well. We may leave the susceptible in a weakened, disappointed place.
***
When young ones are small their parents help them to redefine their emotions: the child exclaims I don't love you any more or I hate you; the parent says You must be so angry right now, so disappointed. Because being angry doesn't mean you stop loving. I won't believe it does.
I have raged until my mind and body and life went entirely to pieces. Exhausted, I hear the small mental voice: Just because you're angry with someone, it doesn't mean you don't love them. Rage-and-pain magmaspatter resolves to swirl of ash and then to clean settling snowsift, and I stand holding all that love in the bowl of my hands--and I begin to heal.
And because I know there is no spatial separateness, not really, I pray that my anger's cooling-receding cools and transforms the anger of others.
2 comments:
I hope it's ok to be firmly ambivalent about this. I know you are right, but I also think one has to be very careful not to make it somehow the angry/sad person's fault if they can't find their way to love and joy.
I'm thinking of my mother who is going on 89, blessed with strong health and a carefully adopted positive attitude. As long as she can send lunaticly cheerful emails about how much fun it was to go to Target with a van full of other old ladies, she might live forever...
I'm thinking of my oldest friend L., who for 45 years that I know of has believed she is loving and soft and that everyone can feel the soft breeze she knows is in her heart; but who is so prickly, abrasive and difficult that lately she has burned up the goodwill of most of the people in her circle and now is exactly when she needs them, as she just had major back surgery.
I'm thinking, of course, of that crazy suffering lonely man in Virginia, who was offered by our society a catastrophic model for what to do with his rage about his suffering, and took it. (Oh it is very bad for crazy people and loners and misfits, that one of them went over that line. A whole new way for people to be profiled and then mistrusted...)
Sam, it's posts like this one that make me wonder why/how/if you ever really considered doing healing work professionally. You certainly have "It."
And it's also the kind of post that reminds me (in case I accidentally forget) why it's so much more important, in the long run, to have a "healing" experience, than just to see a doctor (not that seeing one isn't also a good idea on occasion).
mb, I don't think there's any blame implied. We can't hold people responsible for insights they don't have... even though it's really tempting sometimes.
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