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When belonging is cut off, the pathway back is some way being nurtured,
some way of either nurturing ourselves, being nurtured by someone else...
When belonging is severed early on, we don’t have access to our wholeness,
but the severing is not irreversible; we’re incredibly resilient beings
and neuroplasticity is the word that describes how, when we then at any point in our life,
through our relationships and as we’ll explore, through meditation, begin that self-nurturing and
nurturing with others, we can re-awaken that intrinsic potential for belonging.
There is an attachment psychologist whose name is Cozolino
and he has a line that has very much impacted me.
He says, “We are not the survival of the fittest.
We are the survival of the nurtured.”
We are not the survival of the fittest; it’s the survival of the nurtured.
The fittest is, you know, the survival brain, fight-flight-freeze, you know, do it, control it...
But it’s the nurtured that actually experience
that integrated brain and that sense of belonging
and the love and freedom that come with that.
So the remainder of our exploration together will be: well, when there’s been severed belonging,
how do we nurture and heal? And we
unless we’re free, unless we’re feeling that one-ness and communion with the
universe or the divine, there is some severed belonging,
we're not fully connected. So we all need nurturing.
Every day we need it.
Ok, a story for you - and this is from Rachel Naomi Remen,
one of my favorites, who is a physician and a very wise woman
- and she describes a colleague who is the head of
the department of family medicine at a great East-coast school,
and describes how this doctor had a patient, a homeless woman,
and her possessions all fit into a shopping cart, or two shopping carts,
and once a month she’d climb this hill and lash her carts to the different meters
to get up to his clinic and he’d see her once in a month.
And her speech was a little rambling and her clothes were dirty and eccentric,
but he is this very kind, respectful man,
he wasn’t troubled by any of the appearances
that presented; instead, he was really incredibly courteous and present with her.
And he’d listen to the details of her difficult life and did what he could to ease her burdens.
This would happen once a month.
And after he had been seeing her for some time, he became aware that
she sometimes came to the hospital on the days that he wasn’t there
- his staff told him that.
And the clinic nurses were puzzled by this because she seemed
in a mysterious way to know it wasn’t her day to see the doctor.
So, after they talked to her, they determined that she
simply wanted to go to his consulting room.
And when she was there she didn’t go in but she would stand on the threshold
and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room
and then withdraw it again and again
and after a while she’d be satisfied and she’d go home, or go away.
And Rachel writes, “In the places where we are seen and heard are holy places.”
I think that’s so beautiful.
“The places we are seen and heard are holy places.”
We each need those holy places.
We need them with each other, and we need to create that kind of
space of presence for our inner life.
And this is what to me is so empowering about meditation
I sometimes think of it as a spiritual reparenting;
that we all have some severed belonging but we can heal that
if we learn how to offer mindfulness and kindness inwardly
to the parts of ourselves that feel rejected in different ways.
This is what we call “the two wings of the bird that free us”; that we
see what’s going on inside us
and we offer kindness, we let it be there and we offer kindness.
For myself, right now I’m in a season where
there is a lot of activity, a lot of things stirring,
and several things that are really challenging and that actually bring up, you know,
a lot of, you know, reaction in me.
One is a dear person who is physically sick and can bring up a real sense of
a powerlessness - I can’t help him, you know - and upset.
And then I’m part of several organizations, non-profits, where there’s different
conflicts and misunderstandings and so on and mistrust
- and this stuff happens in spiritual groups too, you know, and
and that can stir up things, so
what I find is so powerful
- and this has everything to do with this self-nurturing, with these two wings -
is that when something comes up whether it’s that powerlessness
or a sense of impatience or anger or hurt or whatever it is,
I start by just noticing it and saying, “This belongs.”
And what I mean by that is: this is part of what’s going on,
it’s like a wave in the ocean; it belongs too.
Not to make some inner experience wrong.
Because we can’t feel belonging to our world
if we don’t let the parts of ourselves belong.
Does that make sense?
We have to really open tenderly to the parts inside us and let them be there.
No matter what they are; no matter if they’re hate
or shame...
Just to say, “Okay, this belongs, this is a wave in the ocean.”
Because the suffering comes when we are identified with them.
And in the moment that we say, “Oh, this wave belongs too",
we become more ocean-like, we are not caught inside it, it can come and go.
So, over and over again, the message from, you know, my inner life is: Oh, okay, this too.
Sometimes you don’t have to say the words “this belongs” - “this too”.
It's a great mantra if you want a very pithy, little one. “This too”.
And then, in some way, to offer kindness.
And in that there is some enlargement of being so that it’s still there maybe,
there's still the impatience or the sorrow or whatever, but there's more space for it.
It’s like the difference between having dye released into a sink
and having that same amount of dye released into a lake.
In the moments that you say, “Oh, this too” and offer kindness,
that nurturing, you become more lake-like.
This is the potential
of the two wings of mindfulness and compassion;
to heal that place of severed belonging.
And the more we practice that and we begin to trust our belonging,
the more we start looking at the world and feel a trust for other beings,
that there is friendliness in the world.
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