Day 135 - Feeling Lost

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 135 May 14, 2012

Feeling Lost

We all have a time in our lives when we feel lost, when we do not feel realized or fulfilled, or when we do not even feel that we are on the right track. Many of us spend our whole lives in this state. The ideas of self realization and self fulfillment and the feeling of being on the right track are primarily ideas of selfhood and the relationship of how our life is lived to our selfhood. Who am I? Why am I here?  What is my reality meant to be?  What is my idea of self fulfillment and life fulfillment?  What is and where is my “right track” to get there?  These are our questions of Life, and what we do every minute of every day, from birth right through to death, whether we realize it or not.

Ironically, when we are conceived, our potentiality of who we are and what is our self realization and self fulfillment is fully and totally encoded as our “Nature”. Our personalities and our unique and distinct humanities are our inherited legacies of genetic self that we bring with us. The effects of our womb life, especially the effects of our births, and the effects of our original life imprints in the first few hours and days after our births,  and the weeks and months and years that follow,  largely make up who we become through our “nurtures”.  As adults we are and become either an honoring or actualization of our beautiful, distinct Natures, if our self potentialities are honored and aligned through our healthy nurtures by our parents and our environment, or we are perverted and altered from our self potentialities, if our nurtures from our parents and environment are unhealthy and do not support who we are at heart, and who we were meant to be.  We all become averages of who we really are, and who we have become and what we are doing as a result of the effects upon us from without. 

A few of us are self aligned and relatively emotionally and psychologically healthy and somewhat close to our original identities, and this alignment of self reality with self identity is felt as harmony and happiness in our life, and this means that we had extraordinarily good parents.  Most of us are self misaligned since our parents and world did not welcome and value us as we are, but instead sought to align us with themselves and their world, which was not supportive or beneficial to us and our natural self identity.  When we do not feel welcomed and valued as we are, hen we do not feel emotionally and psychologically healthy, especially if we do not have a clear and strong sense of who we are, we will naturally lack harmony and happiness in our lives, and this reflects having had poor parenting.  In reverse, having had poor parenting causes us to lack harmony and happiness in our lives, it is because we do not know who we are, and this is because our parents and our environment did not honor and value us as we were as babies and children.

We are largely predictable and defined by how we live, and how we live is largely predictable and defined by who we are, or at least we think we are. John is Male, 40’s, Anglo Saxon, American, non practicing Protestant, middle class, working class in construction, basic education, married, two children, living in an average house on Elm street in rural small town Amercia, one SUV, one pickup, two i-phones, 180 cable channels, 3 computers, and a Harley Davidson in the garage. Kate next door and Ernie across the street are largely homogenous, white, Anglo Saxon, middle aged and middle class Americans just like John, and their selves and identities are expressed and manifested largely by having been born into families in America of white, Anglo-Saxon, middle class, working class parents, just like John.  Ernie, John and Kate are products of their parents and environments, products simply of their geographies and racial, socio-economic, political paradigms, and direct products of the needs and investments of their own parents, and the emotional and psychological health of their own parents.  John, Ernie and Kate are not necessarily living their ideal lives of harmony and happiness, and they may in fact feel lost at times, if not always, depending on the quality of parenting that they received that honored their actual selves and how this manifested into their own adult lives.

What is interesting is that deep in his lost heart, John is happily single for the time being and a world class dancer, he lives in a quirky loft in Greenwich Village, New York with his equally quirky girlfriend, and writes award winning musicals on Broadway.  John is a devout Zen practitioner, owns only a bicycle, and abhors electronic gadgets. John plays an acoustic bass for a Jazz ensemble, and he spends at least half the year trekking all over the world, giving dance and music lessons to orphaned children.  This ideal John lives a life of harmony and happiness, his life is self effaced, self realized, self fulfilled, and this ideal, harmonious and happy life of John reflects sensitive parenting that valued his unique self and how that would manifest into the world.  Poor John with the small, rural town life if he never gets to find out who he is.  No wonder he feels lost.

When we are lost as selves, we naturally search for a way to find our way home, and we call this “soul searching”.  This is a very good term, since we are searching for the source of our own spring, our soul, from where we originated.  We did not originate in ideas or belief systems, we did not originate in religion or practices of any kind, we did not originate in hobbies or trips or doing anything, that is how we lost our way, and all these things were imposed on us by others.  We originated in the wombs of our mothers, we originated in our births and our first imprints here in life that already began to change us, and we originated in the arms of our parents and homes of our parents and their world.  Soul searching can only become soul finding if we return to our own gestations inside of our mothers, if we return to our births out of our mothers, if we return to “what happened to us?” in the millions of seconds and minutes, starting with the first ones, in the arms of our parents and in the homes of our parents.

We “are” still inside of ourselves somewhere, no matter what happened to us.  To find ourselves and find our meaning and purpose and life, we must retrace the steps of how we came to be lost, and we must return to home base, also known as return to SELF.  To do this we must face the trauma and deprivation of what happened to us through self introspection, self awareness, and self grieving, and then self integration of our lost selves. We must fulfill our unfulfilled needs, or grieve them if it is not possible to do that. Once our pasts are healed, and once the failures of our less than healthy parents are faced and healed, we simply pop up out of the fog to be who we always have been, and our harmony and happiness return to us.  A Danish proverb says that you cannot run from the wolf, for the wolf travels within, and when we feel lost we tend to do anything but face ourselves to avoid our own wolf.  We do a million things to search and defend and maintain and destroy, rather than turn around and realize that we are right here all along, just simply afraid to face our agonizing truths. 

The truth is, “the war is over”. The Blitzkrieg of our parents and world upon our selves that caused us to become lost and without harmony and happiness is over, and we can now turn around and face those wolves, for they can no longer harm or destroy us.  We are now simply fearing ourselves and the tragic agony of what happened to us, and we are lost in defense of our feared pain, while at the same time searching “out there” for ourselves.  In truth, when we turn around inwards to face our own wolf, when we cry and rage and grieve what happened to us, we realize that our wolf is actually our own sweet and needy little puppy that was just scared and hurt and angry. 

I wish everyone all the best in “feeling found”, and finding home where your own frightened little inner puppy is waiting for you.  May you enjoy the harmony and happiness that follows the grieving of your lost childhood and life.

See you tomorrow.

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