Love really is a sacred brute
Dear friends,
Merry Christmas and a very happy and expansive New Year!
The longest night is behind us and that feels like a relief to me. 2024, you were no small affair and I am happy you are coming to an end.
This time of the year, I usually get inspired by the process in Nature to withdraw in the dark womb of winter and reflect on what has happened in the last 12 months - what lessons have been learnt, what fruits have been harvested, what leaves are to be shed so I can give birth to the new.
But this year, the inspiration is low. In fact, I’ve been laying low for many months, hence the sporadic newsletters. Not because I lost my love for writing - I haven’t. It is because I've been in the midst of a difficult, painful, messy and deeply confusing relational process.
It sounds like 2024 was rough for many of us and when I look around, it seems to have been devastating for the world as a whole. Our core wounds seem to have been touched and challenged by our life’s circumstances. If this is your case, I hear and feel you. It is somewhat comforting to know that we are walking together through this strange darkness.
My ego really wants to write to you about a heroine’s journey: one where I confronted my shadows, learnt beautiful lessons that I can triumphantly share, came out on the other side stronger, wiser and more loving. I want to show you how I’ve integrated all sorts of shadows and that’s what makes me good at my job.
But I can’t. It’s bullshit.
In fact, it is part of my shadow to want to share with you only when I’m “out on the other side”. Only when I can stand back in my power and strength. Only when I can proudly report on a heroine’s journey that came to a beautiful fruition…But there is no heroine here at all and no fruition.
In fact, I’ve slowly come to realize that the path I chose to walk takes no heroes at all. It’s a path of less, not more. Less masks, less beautiful roles, less illusions, less excuses, less life hacks that work, less self-help solutions that fix it all (temporarily), less skills, less self-delusions. And though that’s painful, it is also so freeing and real. Slowly I start to realise that however painful, this is exactly what I asked for.
So 2024, you have definitely been the hardest year of my life. You were like one of these Ayahuasca ceremonies that one never wants to repeat again, yet the heart is strangely full of gratitude for the painful lessons learnt. Earlier in the year, I shared with you this poem and I feel like its meaning kept being revealed as the year went by:
Sacred Brute
Love is a sacred brute
she’ll break into any heart
more or less uninvited
and bring up every well hidden wound.
She’ll take your pacifiers one by one,
if she’s kind
or the whole bundle all at once,
if not.
She is imprudent, manner-less
a deity of wreckage
to every comfortable structure.
She does not care about maintaining you
anything like you were.
She is a vandal to every tidiness.
She opens
your well-stored inner boxes
and giddily loosens your collection
of rage and griplessness.
Her only intention?
To fully take off your mask
so God’s face can finally
shine through you.
From: Susceptible to Light by Chelan Harkin
2024 Lessons I wish to remember well
Here is what this year taught me (and I hope I’m a quick learner):
Suffering is the resistance to things as they are. It is the denying of a certain (painful) truth or, you could say, the holding on to an untruth. All of our suffering can be reduced to that simple sentence.
I’ve been conditioned to resist through my early experiences as a child, the example of my parents and the whole of society. We all have - the more I speak with people, the more I realise we all do it.
Resistance can often be disguised in beautiful clothes, so it’s unconscious - giving people a second chance, being understanding and forgiving, being “strong” in the face of adversity, staying “through thick and thin” in a toxic situation, working hard towards an outcome out of duty, rather than love. At the core of these behaviours, there is fear of surrendering to the hopelessness of the situation.
We all carry deeply repressed emotional pain (rage, terror, grief, worthlessness) from the failures in love and care we all lived in our childhood. All of us. Just by the virtue of being born on this planet. This is the hardest shape resistance to pain takes - it happened long ago and is hard to unravel, yet still lives our lives.
In a way, we are all walking around in adult bodies, but inside, we are actually deeply wounded and very immature inner children. It is these small guys that wreak havoc in our lives and relationships, wage war in the world, cause harm to another. They are crying to be reclaimed and healed. By us.
It wasn’t our parents’ or our environment’s fault - they (and society) are the unloved children of other unloved children. Still, knowing that doesn’t diminish the damage caused or the pain that awaits to be felt. In fact, concluding that before feeling the pain is another form of avoidance.
It is somewhat easier to acknowledge that pain if our parents/environment were overtly abusive. But many unloving behaviours are totally normalised in our society, they appear loving on the surface and it is much harder to see the damage done. They are also mixed with love so the pain goes unrecognised. Emotional enmeshment is such an example. I didn’t like learning about that one this year, I have to say.
The greatest repression of rage and pain happens not towards the parent who openly mistreated us, but towards the one we had on a pedestal and felt loved by. I didn’t like this part either. It is precisely this conflict of feelings of love and rage that led to deep repression as our young selves couldn’t deal with it otherwise.
This unacknowledged pain bubbles up on the surface of our “grown up” lives as judgment of others, righteousness, entitlement, arrogance, (passive) aggression, self-doubt, toxic shame, verbal and physical abuse, compulsive behaviours, addiction, chronic physical pain, autoimmune disorders, muscle tension, overachieving, people pleasing, sexual acting out and so on.
Time does not heal this pain. Time makes it feel more distant and buried deeper under all these self-avoidance mechanisms. Life has its (often brutal) ways of poking the old wound through the Law of Attraction.
And that, my friends, is LOVE itself. I also had a very fucked up idea of what love was, but She indeed is a sacred brute as the poem says it so well. Though it feels brutal, life is very loving…it wants us to feel and heal everything that we once suppressed, so that we can be free and whole again.
It goes a long way to take responsibility for our lives - everything that I attract is my own creation, through my own Law of Attraction. If there is a pain in me that I refuse to feel or have suppressed deeply, life will bring about circumstances that put fuel in the wound (out of love). Of course, I prefer to ask “why did you do this to me?” and stay comfortably in my victim mentality. It’s nice, warm and familiar here. But the real question is “What belief and repressed pain IN ME attracted this circumstance?” And that’s where doors began to open.
It was not until I had a sincere heartfelt call for help that help was finally given. I wanted to be shown the truth of the situation, however painful it may be. The help came in strange ways - in dreams, in random insights on the walk, in the midst of total panic. But it was very clear that “something” was helping me out, because I would have never seen these patterns on my own.
“It” (whatever it is) showed me that every time I judged someone else, I actually revealed a part of me I hated and refused to accept. Again, that resistance at play created my suffering. I learnt to hate it at a young age, because someone else’s love (that I depended on for my survival) was conditional on me not having this part.
This simple sentence took me many painful places…I judged arrogance and inflation, because actually deep inside there was a little me who liked to perform, and be the centre of attention, but got shamed for it. I played to men, protected them and tried to be their perfect partner all my life, because deep inside, there was a little me who failed by definition to be the perfect partner of my dad. I judged neediness, because I learnt young to be strong and self-sufficient, but inside there was a little me who didn’t get its basic needs met. And on and on…
The “exit” is not in stopping the judgment - that’s impossible. It is in feeling the original pain that caused me to cut that part off. And that’s hard to uncover, as it’s covered by tonnes of unconscious resistance. The basis of suffering. Because the resistance is totally unconscious, we all need help.
The resistance to the original pain is much more painful than the pain itself. That’s the first good news. The second one is that the more we get to the bottom of this pain and it slowly starts to leave us, the more our heart is filled with love and our self-sabotage strategies slowly come to and end.
Healing is my responsibility, changing my dysfunctional patterns is my duty, but their existence in the first place is not my fault. This one has been big for me this year. Remember “the unloved children of other unloved children” part. With less self-blame, there is the possibility of curiosity and change.
Though I knew all this intellectually, it had never really landed in my heart. There is an ocean of difference between these two ways of knowing the truth - one leads to no change at all, but lots of “wise” conversations to have on the surface. The other one changes your life irreversibly in ways you cannot understand and therefore cannot even talk about. But you radiate it without words and it changes the world.
My wish for 2025 is for this process to continue, however painful. I wish to learn who I really am as a human being once all the fake facade of past pains has come off. I wish to set boundaries without guilt and choose the company of wise and loving people, so that I can grow. I wish to surrender with less resistance and more Grace.
May all beings everywhere be free and courageous to feel.
Much love from my heart to yours.