'Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.'
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Years ago I wrote this quote on my bedroom wall. There was something I loved about it and something I didn't. This morning, it was the first post I noticed on facebook. My friends are usually witty but a few of them have a habit of posting poems or quotes that strike me at just the right moment.
Lately I've been thinking about wisdom and knowledge. From a Buddhist perspective, knowledge is what we learn from others - from their experiences whether told to us directly or read in books. A teacher can tell us what books are useful for gaining knowledge. They can help our minds decipher the lesson.
Wisdom is what we learn from our own experience. The lessons we live...and in Rilke's quote, the questions we live. When we live a question and come to its answer, that answer is alive deep within us just as the question was.
I think what I love about this quote, apart from the language, is that I prefer to figure things out for myself, to experience them, to investigate, to wander a foreign city until I define how it feels to me.
What I didn't (don't?) love about this quote is that living a question is sometimes terrifying. Often the things we need most to experience ourselves are the questions we are afraid to live. The ones our egos want answers to before we take a single step forward. For those questions we want scientific data, a road map, an agenda, a weather report, a contingency plan and probability reports regarding the outcome.
I could live just what I know - just the answers. Or i could try to live the questions and trust what I already know on some level... that when it comes to my existence and my questions regarding it, I'm the only possible teacher since I'm the only one who will experience it. And the only way to teach myself about my existence is to live it.
It makes me think of part of a poem I love -
'Drawn by the song of our keel,
who are we but horizons coming true?'
To All my Mariners in One - Samuel Hazo
Friday, June 24, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Guilt and Spirituality
In Integrated Energy Therapy, which is the primary modality in my energywork practice, the negative emotion of guilt is believed to block the crown chakra, which connects us to 'god' or our higher spiritual self.
When we believe that we have done something wrong or that something about us is wrong, we can cut off from our spiritual nature. We create a black and white, absolute approach. "If I've done something wrong than I AM bad. And if I'm bad, then my higher, spiritual nature is no longer part of me...maybe never was." We can steep in this feeling of guilt, believing there is nothing to do but hide from 'goodness' lest we be seen as 'bad' in comparison.
Guilt is so prevalent and yet so unproductive!
Sometimes we give value to the feeling of guilt as a barometer of morality. When we feel guilty we recognize that we've done something that isn't in resonance with our idea of how we should be and what we should do. But often, we assume others' ideas of how we should be and what we should do. It's important to be clear on where the guilt is coming from. Have we really acted against our own self expectations, or are we feeling guilty because we feel we haven't met someone else's expectations of us?
If we find that we are truly responsible for having acted in a way that is in conflict with our own standards, then we can act to rectify our mistake. But if we cling to the idea that we are guilty and don't forgive ourselves and believe in our higher selves...if we don't accept that we are capable of both good and bad, it becomes difficult to resolve our guilt and move on into the present moment.
If we feel guilty about not living up to an outside expectation that we don't share, that guilt isn't really our own moral discomfort and we are left with a feeling of responsibility for a discordance we don't deeply understand because it is not within. Often in family dynamics, people confuse love with guilt. If I take responsibility for you - for your feelings and your idea of how I should be, then I am showing you that I love you. If I fail to be responsible for your feelings and live up to your idea of how I should be, then I'm not showing you that I love you.
When we fall into this habit, we can become motivated by guilt - by the avoidance of it. And instead of acting on our own truth, we try to act to avoid blame by others.
When we are so caught up in guilt, in our idea that we are guilty, in our fear of doing something that will incur blame...we are not in the present moment. Instead we are reliving past mistakes or trying to avoid future ones. We aren't present in ourselves - the fullness of ourselves.
It can be hard to open up to spirituality when we are so focused on what we perceive as its opposite. Love and connection to the universe may seem completely unreal, distant and impossible. We can become jaded and hardened in our negative idea of self. Because that's what feels real. We might think we have to burn off bad karma or suffer until our wrongs are somehow righted. Yet just by recognizing and being open to our own spiritual self, we can do the most good for ourselves and others.
I speak from experience when I say that it can be difficult to believe this and even harder to alter a pattern of thought that has become ingrained throughout life. But it's also been my experience that it's possible to do this, even if just for a little while. And that's what a practice is - spiritual, energetic or otherwise...training ourselves to do something we believe will be beneficial.
Holding onto guilt isn't beneficial...trying to let go of it can be.
When we believe that we have done something wrong or that something about us is wrong, we can cut off from our spiritual nature. We create a black and white, absolute approach. "If I've done something wrong than I AM bad. And if I'm bad, then my higher, spiritual nature is no longer part of me...maybe never was." We can steep in this feeling of guilt, believing there is nothing to do but hide from 'goodness' lest we be seen as 'bad' in comparison.
Guilt is so prevalent and yet so unproductive!
Sometimes we give value to the feeling of guilt as a barometer of morality. When we feel guilty we recognize that we've done something that isn't in resonance with our idea of how we should be and what we should do. But often, we assume others' ideas of how we should be and what we should do. It's important to be clear on where the guilt is coming from. Have we really acted against our own self expectations, or are we feeling guilty because we feel we haven't met someone else's expectations of us?
If we find that we are truly responsible for having acted in a way that is in conflict with our own standards, then we can act to rectify our mistake. But if we cling to the idea that we are guilty and don't forgive ourselves and believe in our higher selves...if we don't accept that we are capable of both good and bad, it becomes difficult to resolve our guilt and move on into the present moment.
If we feel guilty about not living up to an outside expectation that we don't share, that guilt isn't really our own moral discomfort and we are left with a feeling of responsibility for a discordance we don't deeply understand because it is not within. Often in family dynamics, people confuse love with guilt. If I take responsibility for you - for your feelings and your idea of how I should be, then I am showing you that I love you. If I fail to be responsible for your feelings and live up to your idea of how I should be, then I'm not showing you that I love you.
When we fall into this habit, we can become motivated by guilt - by the avoidance of it. And instead of acting on our own truth, we try to act to avoid blame by others.
When we are so caught up in guilt, in our idea that we are guilty, in our fear of doing something that will incur blame...we are not in the present moment. Instead we are reliving past mistakes or trying to avoid future ones. We aren't present in ourselves - the fullness of ourselves.
It can be hard to open up to spirituality when we are so focused on what we perceive as its opposite. Love and connection to the universe may seem completely unreal, distant and impossible. We can become jaded and hardened in our negative idea of self. Because that's what feels real. We might think we have to burn off bad karma or suffer until our wrongs are somehow righted. Yet just by recognizing and being open to our own spiritual self, we can do the most good for ourselves and others.
I speak from experience when I say that it can be difficult to believe this and even harder to alter a pattern of thought that has become ingrained throughout life. But it's also been my experience that it's possible to do this, even if just for a little while. And that's what a practice is - spiritual, energetic or otherwise...training ourselves to do something we believe will be beneficial.
Holding onto guilt isn't beneficial...trying to let go of it can be.
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