Day 147 - A Tribute To Arthur Janov And Primal Therapy

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 147 May 26, 2012

A Tribute To Arthur Janov And Primal Therapy

(And All The Little Boys And Girls Inside Of Us Needing To Cry)

I remember when I was a little boy and I felt like I knew so much. I often said to myself: “What is wrong with all these kids and mommies and daddies anyway?”  I would see or hear a person in pain, or witness them in an embarrassing situation, and the kids and adults around them would laugh at them, or mock them, or tease them. “No, no, no!” I thought. “You’re supposed to hug them and listen to them and help them!”  When I was a little boy I used to cry easily, and due to the sad and scary scenes unfolding all around me constantly, I cried a lot. Of course when I cried I knew that I should receive hugs and people wanting to listen to me and help me, but instead I got laughed at and mocked and teased, just like the poor animals and kids and mommies and daddies that were suffering to the point that I cried.  That made me cry even more, and so I was ridiculed more, and that made me cry more, and that caused everyone to laugh at me more, and that made me cry more, ad infinitum, which is an expression that must have been invented for disappointed little boys that find themselves in overwhelmed by sadness.

That is when I figured out that I had been born into hell here on Earth.  I figured out that “crying is a bad idea”, and I figured out that my parents and all the people around me were very, very sick people also living in hell.  I finally decided to run far, far away inside myself where no one could find me, and I resolved never to come back until the world could hug and care and listen to me and anyone in pain.  The funny thing is that I promised to come here to Earth to hug and care and listen to sick people, so they could love again too.  Now I was becoming a victim of hell just like the people hurting me were victims of hell, and I figured out that they must have run far, far away too from their loving hearts, so they must all be lost from themselves, just like I was about to be.   “Did they forget their Love?” I thought.  “Did they forget themselves?”  I thought.  “Am I about to succumb to hell and lose my loving self just like them?” I thought.  “Uh oh!” I thought, I had to find a way to stay alive and loving inside, and not know it so no one else could find me, and still remain a loving person, but without being aware that I was still loving.  Yikes, what a challenge for a little boy or girl like you or me.

What a very mind and heart bending conundrum, having to run far, far away, deep into self, to hide from the abuse that is hunting our very loving selves, to have to hide from a cruel world administered by cruel people and survive, but without losing contact with our original loving selves. It is in fact impossible fully, and we all find tricky ways of sort of being available to self, while being sort of destroyed by our parents and the world around us.  If our sick and cruel parents and all the sick and cruel kids and the sick and cruel mommies and daddies around us can find any vestige of our real loving selves, we are hunted with taunts and ridicule and mockery, and physical and emotional abuse, until they break us and break our loving spirits. And so we must be completely invisible in our original form, and that means to become lost to our own selves, lost to our original loving hearts. Sadly, when we cut ourselves off from our our selves to defensively survive, we become sad and sick and hurt and cruel just like the parents and people hunting us.  How very tragic and how very, very dangerous.  This process of disconnection from our loving self is the actual springboard to all illness, all criminality, all insanity, all suicide, all violence and war, and potentially the end to us all. I knew this as a little boy, and I virtually died crying, but to no avail, I had to disappear before I was annihilated by those that were meant to love and protect me.

Despite having lost myself and most of my life, and despite having navigated blindly from the inside out without even knowing it, I am here writing you about being a lost little boy that knows that we need to hug each other and care for each other and listen to each other, and not hurt each other.  How did I do that?  As ironic as is sounds, I found my little boy by crying, when I had long lost the ability and right and privilege to cry. I found my lost little boy and reconnected to him thanks to Arthur Janov, the founder of Primal Therapy and author of many books on the primal recovery process. I spent most of my live lost and wandering and searching, but carefully avoiding all the traditional pitfalls that sick and cruel people succumb to.  When I read the original book “The Primal Scream”, at age 30, it was the first time I choked up with tears since I could remember, which at the time in my memory was never. 

Thanks to Tracy, my Primal Therapist that I chose, after a harrowing decade of simply trusting to cry again and learning to cry again, I am now able to cry about anything I need to cry about, which as usual for little Roe, is very often.  Tears are medicine for the heart, and my heart is still severely wounded, and I cry deeply and often, and I cry backwards in my mind and heart to the times in my life when I could not risk crying.  I have learned in the last 20 years of primal recovery to reclaim my self by reclaiming my right to feel all my natural and beautiful emotions, and to feel them at appropriate times and places, and in an appropriate way. I have made friends with my sadness and my rage, I have learned to hug my little Roe and let him feel bad and down and mad, and I have virtually died crying many hundreds and hundreds of times about all the tragic things that were done to me, and all the things that happened to me, or should have happened and didn’t.  I deeply cry and profoundly grieve so many traumas and deprivations that it breaks ones heart to imagine what we do to our own children day by day, and I mourn for the poor me that still has so many unfulfilled needs of a loving little boy.

I also think of poor Hiroo Onoda each and every day. Hiroo was a second lieutenant in the Japanese army in 1944, and he was sent to a remote island in the Philippines to fight.  Tragically Hiroo was forgotten, and never told that the war had ended.  Hiroo spent 29 terribly lonely years defending himself from the enemy, and surviving on virtually nothing.  Finally in 1972, after 29 years of fighting a war that was over, he was discovered and safely brought to safety. When he was told that the war had ended 29 years before and that he had been forgotten, he wept like a child, or more appropriately his own lonely little child within wept. 

Arthur Janov reminds all our little boys and girls inside us that the war is over, we have survived our childhood, we have survived the war, and sadly, we have forgotten our own little Hiroo’s on our own remote little islands within us. Arthur reminds us that we have not yet felt any of the traumas and deprivations and unfulfilled needs that are hidden with deep within us, we are effectively still 1 and 2 and 5 years old inside, still fighting a war, yet never feeling the pain. I have learned to lie little Roe down in a safe place and with a loving family member any time I feel sad and mad, or lost and angry, and cry my heart out.  My parents and the mean and cruel people that tortured me and hunted my soul can’t hurt me now, and I will no longer fear the fear of simply feeling fear, I will no longer run from the pain of not wanting to feel my pain.  My pain is me, and I am hurt, and I need medicine, and my beautiful tears bring me closer to my little Roe each and every tragic and magic cry.

            Janov reminds us that our tears and grief, and feeling our pains and integrating them into our whole selves will never hurt us or kill us. He reminds us, since we all know this already but we have simply forgotten it, that the only way to heal ourselves is to grieve and cry back into the original traumas that we are hiding from.  Every time I reclaim one more precious piece of little Roe I say thank you to Arthur who triggered my recovery, and thank you to Tracy (Hi Tracy),  for her brilliant, adaptive patience with me and my little Roe, and thank you to my Hiroo (what a beautiful pun), for braving to come out of the jungle and face his fears and find his connection to a peaceful life again, and set the example for all of us who are so lonely and fighting so hard to survive.  Love to all inner children in all people.  Yes that means me and you.  

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 146 - The Professional Mopey

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 146 May 25, 2012

The Professional Mopey

Have you ever been around a person that makes you feel like a black cloud is hanging overhead?  These people are constantly pouty, constantly moody and mopey and depressed, these people are constantly feeling sick and down and bad, and they bring down others around them. I call these people professional mopey’s. Whether the professional mopey manifests his or herself as a hypochondriac, or as a constant complainer or expectant needer, or pouty, moody, depressed whiner, professional pouty’s are a real downer to be around. 

People that have problems with their attitudes and moods and behaviors have real problems. People that have problems with their attitudes and moods and behaviors get off on having problems that become everyone else’s problems. People who have chronic depression, and people who chronically must share their woes with us, people who are chronically a pain in the ass to other people, wallow in the fetish of attracting attention from other people, people who also get off on listening to and doting on and serving the chronic, professional moper.

When we are babies and children we are ready to give Love, and we are ready to receive Love. When we have parents who give and receive Love readily and often, and who give us healthy Love at healthy times, we grow up to be adults who give and receive Love in a healthy way. Professional mopey’s are simply people who are reaching out for attention and Love in the only way that they know, the way that they learned as babies and children, and that is as a needy and mopey and sickly child.  Professional mopey’s get attention the only way they know how, and the attention that is received and the service given feels like the same Love (or lack of) that they received as children.  The listener and server and victim of the professional mopey also receives the feeling of giving or listening or caring or serving, and this also feels like Love. Professional mopey attention that is given and received as Love is neurotic Love, and it is a fetish for both the mopey and the mopey-victim in symbiosis with each other.

If you ask the common, professional mopey in yet another bad mood or bad behavior or bad illness what is really troubling them, the answer comes back as “I don’t know”.  The issue is that they do not want to know, for the ailment of feeling down or sick or mal-tempered is the defensive fetish of basking in self-loathing or self-martyrdom or self-pity and self-stagnation, and often all of the above. Professional mopey-ism is a defensive maneuver to manage internal pain on the part of the mopey, and in fact feeling supposed pain of a hundred kinds and making sure we all know about it keeps far larger pains from surfacing in the mopey.  The people in symbiosis and co-need with the professional mopey also give and give and care and care, and tolerate and tolerate the misery of being a mopey-victim, and this is also defensive to keep large pains of their own from surfacing. 

Professional mopey-ism is devastating to children, and every hypochondriac and depressive, every complainer and ill-behaved and ill-mannered parent creates his or her now little servant-slave to happily serve their master. These children will then grow up and marry chronic black-cloud people, and the co-dependency of the black cloud and the person constantly being rained on repeats generation after generation. Children that live under black clouds and constantly get rained on grow to seek the shelter of black clouds that will constantly rain on them, so that the rainer and the rainee will feel as if they are back home in their parental nest. 

Professional mopey-ism is not genetic or hereditary, professional mopey-ism is a learned response of seeking Love neurotically where in effect there is or was none. Professional mopey-ism is a defensive survival response from severe trauma during childhood. Professional mopey-ism is repressed rage, and professional mopey-ism is a weapon of torture to those around the mopey. Living under a black cloud is miserable, and the miserable mopey gets off on making sure that everyone around them is also miserable. The people who live around the professional mopey also thrive on the misery of the black cloud after having grown up that way.

The professional mopey appears as a victim of suffering and down-ness and ailments, but in fact the professional mopey is an aggressor, and the bringer of difficulty and manipulation to those around them.  The professional mopey has no intention of ever becoming a light and bubbly, positive and constructive soul, and the professional mopey has no intention of helping themselves or healing, for the professional mopey is feeling repressed rage and pain and suffering, and the fetish is to spread the same around as torture to all, all so that the professional mopey does not have to face or remember the deep trauma and deprivation and unfulfilled needs that caused the mopey-ness to being with.

If a mopey-victim feeling or living under a black cloud were to say to a professional moper:  “what is your problem again? I don’t appreciate your manipulation of me, and I don’t want to see or hear any more about your problems!”, they will immediately receive the expression and reaction of insult and anger and offense that the professional mopey is masking. If this very healthy rejection of manipulation is repeated by a mopey victim, eventually the professional mopey will move on to a new victim to feed on.

We all have moods and ups and down, we all have ailments and needs and complaints, but healthy people cycle through their lives and processes quickly and easily, and healthy people do not feel the fetish or need to rain on anyone else’s parade. Professional mopey’s are professional rainers, and their very serious personal problems create very serious problems in other people, especially children.  It is crucial that any person with anything at all “chronic” seek help from caregivers and professionals, and when any chronic anything turns out to be the chronic pattern, this person must realize the pain and harm that they are causing others and get help.  Let us never rain on anyone else’s parade, and if we feel like raining ourselves, let us reach to others for sincere help to understand our problems and cure them, and not to bask in our fetish of drawing others into our problems that never end.  Let us become professional lovies and smilies to brighten the day of all those around us by getting the healing that we need for our problems.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 145 - Peer Pressure

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 145 May 24, 2012

Peer Pressure

Our peers are our contemporaries, they are supposedly our laterals, people of the same place and time, people who inhabit our paradigm and our sub culture. Why in the world would or could we feel pressure from them? If we feel pressure from anyone for any reason, then we are feeling coercion, and ironically we are out of lateral, out of place and time, and out of our paradigm and sub culture.  We all have a sense of self and a sense of “heart”, and we all know who we are and what we want and why, and when, and how we are meant to “be”.  If we feel peer pressure, and especially if we acquiesce to that peer pressure, then we are out of touch with our sense of self and our sense of heart, we don’t know who we are and what we want and why and when, and we don’t know who we are meant to be.

Human beings are social, tribal creatures, and human beings have peers.  We have always had peers, and we will always have peers. Our peers are our own people, they share our own lives, and they live when and where and how we live. It can be assumed that our peers are like us, and that we are like them, it can be assumed that we look like our peers, and they look like us, it can be assumed that we act and do and live like our peers, and that they look and act and live like us. Our peers are deemed to be equal to us in background and status. If we are supposedly so homogenous with our peers, why in the world would we feel pressured by them, or why would we pressure others to be like us? Clearly there is a difference between us and the others in our subculture, or there should be and would be no pressure to acquiesce to be like them, or coerce them to be like us.

The base of all Life of all kinds in all places is Love. We humans especially seek to love and be loved.  Part of Love is feeling accepted and feeling admired and feeling approved of, and fitting in.  When we seek to be like others we are seeking Love, we are seeking to be accepted, to be admired, to feel approved of, and we are seeking to fit in. When we feel the pressure of being accepted by our peers, when we feel the pressure of wanting to be admired by our peers, when we feel the pressure of wanting to be approved of by our peers, and when we feel the pressure of wanting to fit in with our peers, we are seeking Love from our peers, and acquiescing to our peers is the way in which we receive the desired Love.  The problem is that molding ourselves to the shapes and colors and sizes and behaviors and attitudes and interests of others is not actually authentic Love, for real Love is universally accepting and universally admiring and universally approving.

            If we are feeling pressure from our peers to be like them, with equal backgrounds and status, we clearly are not yet like our peers, and we feel the pressure to be like them if we want to be loved, and we clearly have a problem.  The first half of the problem is that we don’t know who we are and don’t accept and love who we are and what we want, and rather than surround ourselves by peers more like ourselves, we mistakenly reach out for Love from people that expect us to adapt to them, rather than accept us just as we are. We that acquiesce to peer pressure do not feel our own love of self where we can clearly give and receive Love without changing to be like others. 

The second half of the problem is that we are lacking Love, Love of self, and Love in giving and receiving, and we mistakenly believe that we will become fulfilled by being like “them”, especially those that we admire, rather than realize that we already have everything we need.  We that feel peer pressure have lost sight of ourselves and have lost track of ourselves and our true needs and Love fulfillment.  When we are emotionally and psychologically healthy, when we are grounded in Love of self, not only do we not feel peer pressure, but we also feel no need to adapt and fit in to the pressures of others or their distinct sub culture.  Sub cultures have a way of accepting and admiring and approving of each other in their shared likeness and shared, common relations, while judging and even ostracizing others outside of the sub culture.  In truth, sub cultures that are not freely accepting and freely admiring and approving of all other sub cultures are insecure and selfish, and we that gravitate towards the Love of a judgmental and critical sub culture of peers tend to seek insecure and selfish Love.

Whether we are the one who pressures others to be like us before we show acceptance and approval and Love for them, or whether we are the victim of succumbing to peer pressure to obtain our desired fruit of acceptance and approval and Love from sick people, peer pressure is conditional Love, it is Love pressure, and Love pressure of any kind is neurotic. We all grow up as children who are never good enough for our parents, never right enough for our parents, never the way our parents want us to be or expect us to be, and we therefore are all victims of the original peer pressure, known as parental pressure. By the time we are grown up we have been kicked in the teeth of self by our parents and teachers and our sub culture so often and so viciously, that we become like sheep, followers always of another, nose to tail, desiring to fit in with the sheep up in the front of the herd, or off to the left of the herd, or off to the right of the herd, or in the rear of the herd. 

            In order to really be who we are and not care about peer pressure or ever acquiesce to it, we have to have had parents that honored and valued and supported and approved of us as we are, we have to have had pure respect and pure honor of our true selves, and we therefore will always be our true selves.  In order for us to know who we are we must have had someone love us as we are, and we must love ourselves as we are.  A parent should never mold a child, and never expect anything of a child except to simply love the child.   Schooling and homework and chores and manners and do this and don’t do that and wear this and don’t wear that and say this and don’t say that and be like this and don’t be like that and look at those people and they are like this and they are like that, and on and on and on, turn children into robotic sheep with dead spirits that identify their own selves by what others think and feel.  Parents therefore create children that are measured and defined by peer pressure, just like their parents did the same to them.

            There is no such thing as peer pressure, except to people lacking Love of self, who are reaching out to people who are lacking Love of self. Let us all only succumb to the pressure loving only our true selves.  If we are unable to do that, we must realize that we are reaching out to others for the self that we are lacking, since we were never valued as we are as true selves by our parents, and we must get help for ourselves.  When we can love ourselves truly we will never feel the pressure of loving or being loved by our peers. When we can love ourselves truly we will only recognize and feel and share simply peer Love.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 144 - Forever (Not) In Love - Part 2

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 144 May 23, 2012

Forever (Not) In Love

Part 2

There is of course a possibility that romantic and sexual Love can wane and die, or disappear altogether, but only if we are not in real Love to begin with.  Love is like electricity that flows, and it originates in the farthest reaches of the universe exactly in the spot where the Big Bang originally big-banged, which happens to be everywhere, including especially in every cell of your body, and beautifully, in your heart.  As previously shared, Love as light and electricity does not have a light and electricity switch, you cannot simply feel it and then not, you cannot turn it on and off.  You either love romantically and or sexually or both, which is forever, or you do not, which is and was never.

The kind of Love that is a fiery flame and obsessive desire and need might actually be real Love, and if it is, whether you are together forever or not, the Love endures as long as the stars burn in the sky, and that is a very, very long time. If our fiery flame of Love and our obsessive desire and need of Love wanes and dies, or turns to indifference and forgetting, then what we felt was selfish and self-based Love instead, we felt projected Love or recipient Love or idealized Love or hopeful Love, or many other kinds of Love that were not the beauty of resonant, mutual, romantic and sexual Love.

Most people are in love with how the person in their heart space resonates with how they felt to be in Love with their own parents when they were children, and their Love is a nostalgic rekindling of being in Love as a child, and still hoping for that same Love now grown up.  We are all in Love with everything that went right as babies and children, and we are all wanting to be back in that Love again. We can be in Love with the feeling of being in Love, but not necessarily in real Love with a real person. When we are babies and children many things went wrong with our Mommies and Daddies and how they loved us and how we loved them, and we all seek to heal and amend, and correct our unfulfilled Loves.  Most people are in Love with people that resonate with the feeling of their parents, and most people are in Love with the feeling of being able to recreate situations of childhood and then try and correct the situations and change the people that they are in Love with, and it feels like changing Mommy and Daddy to be and do what we hoped for as children.

            Most people are in Love with giving Love, but not necessarily receiving Love, or perhaps receiving Love, but not giving Love.  True Love is a reciprocated, mutual resonance and exchange of two giving selves.  Most people are in Love with the idea of the other person, or the benchmark of the other person, or the status or beauty or performance of the other person, but not necessarily the other person themselves. Or perhaps we are in Love with how our other person is in Love with our idea of self, or our benchmark, or our status or beauty or performance, in other words we are in Love with ourselves as seen and expressed to us by other people.

Love that goes away or dies or changes into non Love or forgotten Love was never Love to begin with, but instead our idea of Love as expressed or received solely as our vain or selfish need or insecurity or expression of self through other people.  Most of the time we use people to Love because we need Love so much, but we are really sucking and not giving.  Most of the time we get used by people desperately needing to Love and be loved, and they suck from us and take but do not give. Love is the feeling of planting seeds in the other person that grow into beautiful flowers, while the other person plants seeds in us that grow into beautiful flowers, and then we intertwine our stalks together and share fragrances, eye to eye, body to body, genital to genital, egg to sperm, and child to children that grow once again into loving, sexual adulthood.  If our Love is fragrant and fruitful and real with our other person, beyond our own vanities and needs and dependencies and insecurities and selfishness, and if the person that is in Love with us feels fragrant and fruitful and real Love, beyond their own vanities and needs and dependencies and insecurities and selfishness, then we are in true Love, and forever Love.

The irony is that all Love lacks fragrance and fruit, and all Love is unreal, for Love is all things, especially it’s opposite. All Love is vain and needy and dependent and insecure and selfish, on the part of one soul, and it is the same from the other person as one soul.  But when two people join together, even for the wrong reason, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, against all odds, when two people share a childhood effigy of Love, a vain and needy and dependent and insecure and selfish Love, they in fact share Love. How beautiful it is that you cannot “not” feel or express Love. Time and challenges will tell, when the Love is seemingly broken and dead or lost, if we were or are in fact in true Love that is eternal and unchanged as described in part 1 of this essay, or if we are simply angry and hurt and in denial that we are still in Love, as also described in part 1 of this essay.  Or perhaps we realize that we were simply fooling ourselves all along, and we were in Love with our own vain and selfish selves, and we used another person, or our partner was in Love with their own vain and selfish selves and simply used us, or most probably, both.  Perhaps we will realize that our Love was not real Love. That is an interesting conundrum since any and all Love is Love.

The only way to fall out of Love is to never have been in Love at all.  If our relationship ends and our loving body to body and eye to eye ends, we will always remain in Love with that person that is in Love with us, there will always be a part of our heart connected to them.  Is it so hard to admit:  “I am in so much pain still, but I still Love you!”  Yes it is.  Is it so hard to admit:  “I’m so sorry, but I loved our Love and not you.”  Yes it is.  Is it so hard to admit how much we need Love and try to Love and mess up Love?  Yes it is.  How beautiful an irony that Love can fix all that.  All we can do is keep loving. 

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 143 - Forever In Love - Part 1

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 143 May 22, 2012

Forever In Love
Part 1

What is Love?  That must be the most asked question in history since the advent of consciousness, which is an irony, since consciousness is Love.  It seems like Love is chasing its own tail. Love is the energy that promotes and markets the universe, Love is the twinkle in the night and the dark space in between, and Love is the synergy, the synaptic energy of Life and Being.  Our most delicious Love is romantic and sexual Love. If it were not for romantic and sexual Love, we would not be conscious, and if we were not conscious we would still “be” Love, but not “in” Love.

It is an interesting idea to “fall in Love”, since we “are” Love already.  Technically and theoretically and psychically Love is all things, and we are all connected, and we are therefore all in Love with each other. Romantic and sexual Love, the kind that we say we “fall” in, is a distinct kind of Love, it is a Love that is not only the core Love of procreation and survival, it is the original Love in the sense of Mommy and Daddy and their Love that brought us into being.

When we “fall in Love”, in actuality we are “falling in nostalgic childhood imprint with Mommy and Daddy and how they loved each other and how each of them loved us”.  It is much faster to just say fall in Love. Our prototype original experience of Love, both for the right and healthy reasons and the wrong and unhealthy reasons, are imprinted in our hearts and psyches during our womb life, during our births, and during the critical first hours and days and weeks after birth.  How very interesting that our romantic and sexual Loves are determined by times and events long forgotten in our memories, and long repressed due to the trauma that these events and this time represents. Most of us if not all of us feel that we are unique and different and we feel that we are finding a partner that is nothing like our Moms and Dads, when in fact we are all consciously or unconsciously simply recreating the joy and pain of our babyhoods and childhoods.

We are of course distinct spirits, born with our own unique personalities and genealogical, bio-physical, and psycho-emotional predispositions.  We all will of course “hook up” with our other halves, our supposed soul mates, our conjugal partners, and of course we fall in Love with how we synch or jive or resonate with the unique predispositions of our Lovers and spouses. But in our girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands, right there in front of us, obvious or hidden, is Mommy and Daddy and how we were loved by Mommy and Daddy or how we loved them.

Even though we “are” Love, we can still “fall in Love”, just like we fell in Love as babies and children when we were born and grew up.  When we come of age we have Nature’s billion years of survival and propagation fueling us, we have the celestial search for our other missing half, and we have the limbic-cortical, the feeling-thinking memory imprint of how much we were loved by Mommy and Daddy, how much we loved them, and a detailed accounting of everything that went right and went wrong in our young Love lives. 

When we fall in Love we seek to recreate all that went right in our baby and childhoods, and bask in returning to the joy of Love, but we also seek to recreate all that went wrong in our baby and childhoods, and then correct and amend and relive these times again to get it right.  Unfortunately you cannot fix in the present what when awry in the past, and no male or female in the present, no lover or spouse, can ever fill in the gaps or pains of Mommy and Daddy from our childhoods. We commonly fall in Love with the wrong people in an attempt to fix them and correct them and change them, but in fact we fall in Love with the right people, because we simply fall in Love with the proxies and effigies and resonances of our Mommy and Daddy.

You cannot fall out of Love or stop loving a person.  We are Love to begin with, and then we are Love to end with, and all there is,   . . is Love, so Love is all there is.  In terms of romantic and sexual Love, when you fall in Love with a person you are in Love for Life, no different than being a child of Mommy or Daddy in Love for life.  Love doesn’t start or end, Love doesn’t make a mistake, Love doesn’t go on and off like a switch, you can’t give Love and then take it back, you can’t feel Love and then change your mind, you can’t be a lover and then not a lover, and you can’t change Love from one thing to another, and Love does not wane or die.

The opposite of Love is not hate, the opposite of Love is Love, and hate is just angry Love. The opposite of Love is not indifference, for indifference is just Love that is hiding.  Once you feel Love and are in Love, you feel Love and are in Love, and though you may feel a thousand things that are variations of Love, defenses from Love, manipulations of Love, denials of Love, forgetfulness and amnesia of Love, Love is still the same as it always was, Love is loving and so are you. Love may be painful and difficult and trying and challenging and untenable and unable and unwilling and rebellious and vindictive and grudging and retaliatory and sad and sorry, but Love is still trying to love and so are you.  Love is always trying to find its primordial other half and Love is always trying to come home to the joy and agony of Mommy and Daddy. Once a person has entered into our hearts and minds as resonances of our baby and childhoods and Mommy and Daddy, we fall in Love, and we never, never, never fall back out, no less or more than we stop loving our Mommies and Daddies, which is impossible.

To all those people and girlies especially that I have ever loved, I say that I love you still, and I always will, despite the fact that I may be in pain or regret or anger or denial or indifference of our Love.  I meant Love then and I mean Love now, but that doesn’t mean that my or our Love was meant to continue face to face or arm to arm or genital to genital or sperm to egg. I did not make a mistake, and I do not regret bungling up my Love, or having it bungled up at or for me. Love knows what it is doing, and I trust Love, for if I did not trust Love I could not “be” Love, and I most certainly am Love, just like you are. Love is for better or for worse, till’ death do us part, and how marvelously lovely is that?  What else is there to do on this beautiful and harrowing blue planet out in the middle of nowhere, but “be” Love, and joyously and agonizingly fall in Love forever.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 142 - Our Changing Biases

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 142 May 21, 2012

Our Changing Biases

It’s funny how we can be so biased about things.  “I hate chocolate!”  “Such and such sport is no fun!”  Then something happens to change our original bias, and surprisingly, and sometimes embarrassingly, we change.  “I thought you hated chocolate!”  “See, I knew you’d like such and such sport if you tried it!”  What are biases anyway, and why are we so passionate about them?  And if we are so resolutely biased about what we do and don’t like and why, how could we possibly change?  Why and how do our biases change?

We are like steam locomotives, and the tracks we follow were laid by our parents and environment as we grew up. We are the locomotive called “nature”, our personality and distinct and unique selves are all pre made, just like the locomotive in the locomotive works. When we leave the shop all brand new, when we pop out of our mommies, we are a distinct person, and we already know exactly what we want and what we will do and why, despite the fact that we are baby locomotives and yet to chug on out into life.  Our mommies and daddies and the life we live, and where and when and how we live, are our railroad tracks, they are our “nurtures”, and despite being special machines designed and built our own perfect way, we end up having to follow the tracks that Life laid for us. Our personal biases are our own unique combination and compromise of how we as locomotives run down our tracks. We are nature-nurture, and our biases are the results of “us” as applied to the life that we have lived and are living.

One may think that they don’t like broccoli, and in fact after a life of trying broccoli at many different times and places with many different recipes, we still don’t like broccoli. Yuck to broccoli! In this case the nature of our true selves and how our life played out regarding broccoli ends up as a lifelong and resolute, unchanging bias. Still yuck to broccoli!  But broccoli is innocent, and we may also in fact be innocent of our own bias against broccoli.  When we were growing up we hated broccoli and we hated being forced to eat anything green by our parents. But when we grew up we realized that when no one was watching, and when broccoli was still crispy and not mushy, and sautéed with a bit of herbs, broccoli was in fact quite tasty. How interesting that if we throw the switch on the tracks and try a new railroad spur,  of simply having matured, or remaining open minded, or letting the trauma of our parents go, or a different method or flavor of broccoli, our bias in fact changes.

A bias is a mathematical heart-mind-self formula from deep within our genetics and then how our spiritual and emotional and biological self is affected by our life circumstances. One plus three minus 2 divided by ½, over 2, is still two. If you are biased against math you may think that this is a bad analogy, but in fact if you are biased against math the analogy works even better. A shy, introverted, loving child, born to a plantation owner in 1820’s southern America is biased against black people, but at heart still a shy, introverted, loving person. You may have been born to be a mathematician, yet the above simple math line causes you to be uneasy.

Racism is bias, sexism is bias, and basically any ism or ology is a bias, and these are false tracks that we sadly follow, when we as people are and can be only loving.  Everything we say and do and feel is a bias. We lean towards one bias or the other bias, and we feel sure of ourselves, based on our biases. Our biases are our selves in expression, based on who we are, how we feel, and what we believe, and this all depends on our exposure and experience, and our life situation vis a vis the idea or belief or act in question.  We change our biases based on our exposures and experiences and situations, and though we may be lead astray for a time, we tend to gravitate and evolve towards true core self, towards our original locomotive works of how we were truly built. Liking chocolate or not may be simply be time and place, it may be variety or environment, or it may be truly us.  Liking a sport or not may be our lifelong calling and most natural expression, or it may be simply and emotional or mental railroad track imposed or catalyzed by others.  How can we truly know what is “us” as a locomotive, and what is simply the “tracks” that we are compelled to be?

Our human hearts contain our true emotional codification of who we are, and our experiential memory banks alter and adapt and compromise our true “us” depending on what happened to us and the influences upon us.  As we grow up and grow old we all tend to search for own selves and our own meanings, our true interests and hobbies and motivations, our true joys and inspirations.  When we evolve and change our biases we are evolving, and we are changing, and evolution and change is the impetus of Life and humanity.  We are Love and we are Life, and Love and Life are existent, universal  back drops to judgment and valuation, and decision.  Having a bias is part of intelligence, of discerning and measuring and leaning towards a stance, and this is the inheritance of consciousness and self awareness.  Having an open mind, and the process of change and flux is also part of consciousness and self awareness, and so not only is having a passionate bias a natural state of advanced consciousness and self awareness, but changing ones bias is the final demonstration of advanced consciousness and self awareness, and of human evolution.

It is said that we are simply human, with all of our frailties and miracles. The beauty of our lives is that our biases, and our changing of our biases, are our never ending search for self, and our never ending search for self requires constant reassessment and growth. The irony of our biases and then our change of these biases exposes our ironic selves, which are simply human, and in this simple humanity we are by no means simple at all.  Like Love and Life, we are moving forward, and when we move forward we are always searching for ourselves backwards. We are who we are, and we are what happened to us, and it takes having biases, and then changing our biases, it takes challenging our own tracks, to be the true locomotives that we are. Finding our real truths requires that we take a stance, have a bias, and then in time challenge and reassess these biases to renew our selves and our lives. The changing of biases is self discovery and self renovovation and self realization.  Any process that honors and values the evolution of self, including and especially the evolution of any bias, contributes to the evolution of all Life.  Let us all hope and wish for biases that evolve towards Peace and Love.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

            

Day 141 - Human Relationships

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 141 May 20, 2012

Human Relationships

We humans cannot live without our relationships.  Without human relationships we cannot live.  That sounds like the same statement, but in the first statement, we find that we are in relationships with other people as we live, and we cannot avoid it even if we wanted to. In the second statement, the truth is that without our relationships we would simply die.  Human beings need meaning to live, and what gives our life meaning are the relationships we have with other people. Human beings need other human beings to live, and it is not simply that we are social creatures. All life is an expression of Love, and humans in particular, as conscious, sentient creatures, aware of their own existence, are aware of their own manifestations of living Love.  Human beings ARE Love.  Relationships are an expression of loving and of Love, and we humans cannot avoid being in Love, and we humans will die without the meaning that Love gives us.

Love in its purest form is a nonentity state of pure-acceptance, pure-balance, and pure-harmony.  Love in its purest form need not exist, being full and total existence in its pure state of perfect potentiality. The Big Bang, the origin of all existence universe- wide, and in all realities, is the manifestation of non-acceptance and non-balance and non-harmony, and ironically the actuality of irony itself, and the reality that in pure acceptance and pure balance and pure harmony there exists the potential reality of its opposite.  The relationship of pure acceptance and pure balance and pure harmony to its opposite of non-acceptance and non-balance and non-harmony is beautifully a relationship.  All life is a relationship, for all life is Love, and therefore all Love is a relationship.  We are Love embodied, like all Life, and we are consciously aware of our conscious awareness, we are aware of the relationship of ourselves to Life and Love, and we ARE therefore relationship.

We say in French Vis a Vis, face to face.  As one simple face we humans are nothing.  We only truly exist as the resonance and relationship of our face to another face, and this goes back not just to cellular level, but to the origin of the universe and all Life.  Non entity is one face, and entity is the other.  Living is one face, dying is the other. Egg is one face, and Sperm is the other face.  We humans are the one single soul of Life-Entity manifested, but split down the middle into the face of the female and her vagina, and the face of the male and his penis. The primary core of all Life and how love propagates and engenders is the two halves of sexuality and Mommie and Daddie. Below and beyond Yin-Yang we are Vagina-Penis, and below and beyond any representation of opposites we are either Mommie or Daddy.

Our human brains are wired from the base up, from the reptilian brain of Vagina-Penis, to the limbic brain of the Mommie-Daddie emotion imprint, to the administrative thought-cortex expression of conscious and sentient existence in relationship to our environment, and most importantly in relationship to each other. We express our relationship to Life and others biologically, historically, and reptile-emotio-cortically in how we feel Love and fall in love with our opposite sex. Sex is wired up from the base of our many billion year old existence right into the present moment of how we love in relationship to each other.  Sex is the original relationship, and how spermy meets and is accepted by eggie is our original relationship and the very origin of us.  We are the relationship of how we grow inside our mommies, the very place where daddy put his Love.  We are the relationship of mommy or daddy ourselves, coming out of the place where Love was made, and desiring our whole lives to return to the place where love is made ourselves in our relationships.  We are the relationship of being a baby who grows up to make babies who grow up to make babies, and we are the relationship of Life that breeds and survives and the breeds more Life.

Our relationships are about Love and loving, from our own Big Bang of conception, to our exit through the same portal from where we came when we die.  We did not come into Life alone, for we are only half of Life in reference and relationship to our opposite sex.  We are the union and complement of Daddy swimming up arduously with his other 5 billion suitors to knock on Mommy’s one egg, and we are the one and only that little boy or girl that was invited in.  We are the gender that we are, and we are constantly missing our other half, we are male needing female, and we are female needing male, not just as Mommy-Daddy imprint or biology, but as the endeavor and natural need for universal acceptance and balance and harmony once again.  We are Love yearning for its own acceptance and balance and harmony through acceptance and balance and harmony with our other sex.

Relationships, especially amorous sexual relationships, are the most exquisitely beautiful and satisfying and joy producing experiences in our lives that we all live and die for, and they are the most painful and difficult and challenging experiences of our lives, for they represent all of us and all the way back to the original sperm that knocked on the original egg when the universe exploded into being, and the recreation of when we came to be with the explosion of conception inside our Mommy.  We handsome males are the original Big and our gorgeous females are the original Bang.   We humans are the living, daily manifestation of the best that the universe can do, and we humans are literally Big-Bang.  We love to be in relationships and we loathe to be in relationships, we are happy in relationships and are miserable in relationships, exactly like the original non-entity entity ironic conundrum that created irony and conundrums.

Let us all live and die happy and miserable,  let us all live accepted and unaccepted, let us all have experiences of balance and unbalance,  let us all experience harmony and disharmony.  Let us all live and die in relationship to Life and Love and each other, and know it, and own it, and make the very best of it.  Class is not always in session, and so when we have the possibility to live, let us all make lots of Love in relationship to each other, sexually and otherwise.  Let us love each other, and let us really live.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com

Day 140 - The Confusion Of Priorities

Musings From The Heart

An Essay A Day For A Year

By Roe

Day 140 May 19, 2012

The Confusion Of Priorities

            “What do I do?  What do I do?  When do I do it and in what order do I do it and what if I don’t do it and what don’t I do and  . . .uh.  . .  but  . . . Argh!  Help!  In our modern lives we are not just often torn and confused about what our priorities are and what to do when, we are always torn and confused about our priorities and what to do when. If we do only what we want to do when and how, we are labeled selfish, and we suffer. If we only do what is required of us for by others when and how, we suffer worse.  It seems as though our lives are a complicated mixture of the confusion of our priorities that cause us to suffer. What do we do?

            Our first priority is and should always remain being faithful to our own selfish and self-serving and self-centered ways.  When we pass through a healthy and necessary series of stages of me, me, me, and my way or no way, we eventually mature and end up with spare self for others. We are all given a cup to fill up when we are born, and if we are allowed to grow up our way in our own time, for our own reasons, then we fill up our cups in our own time, and for our own reasons.  Duh.  When we grow up our own way, in our own time, the way we choose, for ourselves, we live out all the stages of me, me, me, and we end up owning our cups, and ourselves. When we own ourselves our own way, we end up with a whole dollar of self, and we end up willing and able to share some spare change with others.

            When we grow up struggling to get our cups full, when we struggle for recognition and struggle for attention, and struggle for Love, then we spend our whole lives struggling for recognition and struggling for attention, and struggling for Love.  Double duh.  How in the world can we get our priorities straight when we aren’t straight ourselves?  How in the world can we get our priorities straight when our cups are not full, and we spend all out time trying in the present to fill our cups that are only half empty or half full from our past?  How in the world can we get our priorities straight when that takes spare change, and we are so limited in our dollars of self that we have no spare change for ourselves or others.

In order to get our priorities straight we must first know who we are.  When we know who we are we know what we want, and when we know what we want, we can compare and contrast and value and judge and prioritize ourselves and our lives. To know who we are we must have a full cup of self, a full cup of Love.  To know who we are we must have a full dollar, and with our full dollar we clearly know what matters to us most, and what matters to us in the middle, and what matters to us least.

At the base, primordial core we are our triune brain. We are first reptilian, lower brain, and autonomous natural creatures, then we are emotional middle brain, limbic creatures, and finally we are cortical, mental, thinking higher-brain creatures.  As whole selves we must be a harmony of our biological, feeling, and thinking selves.  Our first priority is to oxygenate our blood, then we must pump our blood, then we must drink and eat, then we must digest and evacuate waste.  We are biological, living creatures, and our first priority is to survive.  Luckily for us, our reptilian brain handles all of our autonomous functions to leave us free to be aware that we exist.  Just imagine if we thought minute by minute: “Gee, I’m just not sure what to do!  Do I pump blood or have a candy bar or shit or breathe. Darn!  I’m so hesitant and confused!”

Next in our priority is to “feel’, and we do this in our middle brain, our limbic, feeling brain.  We are not aware of the fact that feelings come before thoughts, not just evolutionarily and historically, but in sequence in the here and now.  Our thoughts are reactions to our emotions, our thoughts are manipulations and controls and responses to our feelings.  The vast majority of our actual true feelings are unconscious, based on repressed primal experience that is in fact mortally threatening to us, or was when we were children.  It is impossible to be able to prioritize our lives and actions properly or accurately when the vast majority of us is hidden from our very selves.  Our desires and needs and abilities to live and function and respond and act are largely controlled by our unconscious histories, which ironically we are unaware of due to defensive repression. In order to not be confused about our priorities we must be aware of our whole selves, and we must be fully conscious of all needs and motives and limitations and issues of self.

Once we are fully conscious, once we know who we are, we will automatically know what we want, and powerfully enough to not be confused about our priorities.  Our priorities must be arranged within our self in order of value based on our needs and based on the outcomes that best fit into our realities. The prioritization of our responses to our life depends on the value of the outcome of each individual gain or loss.  We may rate our need to visit our aging parents as a 9 out of 10, and we feel compelled to do so. We may also rate our need to spend a joyous night of making love with our date as a 99 out of 10, meaning no comparison whatsoever, and so we make love and neglect our parents.  We may rate the guilt and shame that we will feel tomorrow for not visiting our parents, based on past experience, as a 999 out of 10 on the painful side, and off to visit our parents we go.  We may rate the loss of our disappointed lover forever as a 9,999 out of 10, and again we decide to visit our parent some other day.  In order to choose where we are on the scale we must know and decide where we are on the selfish scale, where we are on the self-less scale, we must know clearly how we rate the issue in question, and how badly we want or do not want the outcome or sacrifice or joy.

Prioritizing is about compromise, and compromise is about dividing up the cake of life.  Do I want to drive my Ferrari fast enough to get a thrill and risk dying, or do I want to make it to my daughter’s recital?  They say that you cannot eat your cake (it’s gone because you just ate it), and have it too (you can’t, because you just ate it).  But that is what we all want, and our confusion about priorities is simply the difficulty in placing value on one thing or another, or one thing or all things, and then having to decide which, and having to compromise. When we are whole and connected selves, fully known to ourselves, we can much more easily know what cake we want, when to eat it and how much to eat, and how much to save for another time and why. Being clear about priorities is being clear about valuing our own selves vis a vis the demands placed upon us by our lives and by others. Being clear about our priorities is a by- product of being clear, and clearly living.  Being clear about our priorities is about honoring the most important two letter words in the language of self, the word ME, and the word NO.  And when we can own ME and NO, we can own the time when we clearly and honestly, with heart and mind, can say YOU, and YES, and clearly know the place and time for one and the other, us being the one, and you being the other.

My first priority is to breathe and pump blood and to nourish and evacuate myself, and when I have the time and energy, my next priority is to fully know and love my whole self so that I may truly know how much you and what you want of me means to me. The rest takes care of itself.  But it all starts and ends with ME and NO, as it does with you.  We may then come together as US and YES, which is also known as LOVE. There is no confusion of priorities in true and clear Love.

See you tomorrow.

www.dear-roe-the-muse.com

yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com