Grant oneself

Back to the reflections.

So, I ended my previous reflection with a reference to the training in existential skills I decided to participate in. Before deciding to take part, my heart was weighing the yeses and the nos. I intuited, also because of my previous collaborations with trainer Stijn, that my participation in his training would be a jump into the abyss. This type of training, this type of being together under the guidance of someone who has already done a lot of existential research into the spectrum of human experience, would surely reflect the longed-for depth of feeling, complexity of thinking and life-affirming authenticity. Surely, there would be no escape to look for the deeper meaning of my restlessness in the eyes of an eerie familiar feeling beloved! Life’s experience had already shown me that a jump into the unknown, the shivers such as an action sent along the spine, is what makes for the feeling of aliveness. Meaning in the immediacy of the moment. And so, I decided to test my wings…

It is kind of funny. I have been writing about the topic of intensity (embedded in the fields of giftedness, creativity and existential development) for over ten years now. And here I was, longing again for that lost intensity... The training offered a great variety of practices from eastern and western traditions. We practiced with honest emotional communication, we explored the territory of the imaginal, got a visceral taste of dying thanks to a Tibetan ritual, we danced attuned to one another even if blindfolded, escalating vibrations articulating our boundaries found their way out of our contracting lungs and we held each other firmly, or softly caressed the parts of our bodies that were in need of rudimentary recognition. The trainig was, to me, an open exploration of how life can express itself creatively through our udiscovered, or rediscovered selves. How life essentially always seeks unstrapped expression through the roots and flowers of our overall being, beyond the internalized psychic structures that socialize our movements, decisions, ways of relating and expressing (in Dabrowskian terms one might say the training offered conditions in which ways of being alive beyond the influence of the second factor - socialization - were explored and embodied).

The seeker in me did find – remembered - the intensity she was looking for. My body and mind started to respond, something came over me, got a hold on me, and an all too familiar expression of that intensity, one that can have an obsessive quality to it, filled my existence. A profound concentration on the question what love is orchestrated the electric concert of my thousandfold psychic preoccupations. Existential fire was one! What makes life worth living in the face of death? I read on the website of House of Beloved, an urban monastery, a communal effort in Brussels initiated by Stijn. Oh no, some part of me grieved silently, now that somebody else, someone I know firsthand and feel clearly drawn to, exclaims this question I must listen to my own resonating desires…. I was lucky to be inspired by someone that felt dedicated to the practice of ownership of one’s experience and lot (pun intended). Identification, remembering Dabrowski’s reflections on the topic, pointed towards personal authenticity. My journey continued, I started visiting House of the Beloved quite often, and whatever was restless in me transformed more and more into passion.

A passion that has been thwarted into conflictual forms quite often. An intense drive, in interaction with traumatic life experiences and sensitivities, turned into eating disorders, other addictions and recurring ambivalences.

Could I sit with the passion long enough to viscerally know that I am not this, but a vessel of life, ever changing and uncontrollable? The paradox being that this thorough knowing requires simultaneously the act of allowing the passion to freely flow and the act of perceiving its motions razor sharply, embodying the passion full heartedly, allowing impulses to be fully felt and transforming this intensity into fierce mental discernment and compassionate action.

Now, a couple of months after the ending of the training, I find myself contemplating a next step. Besides working together with Stijn on the next cohort of the training authentic presence, I am looking into the option to create a (part time) home retreat for the upcoming months. My heart longs for the space to untether life’s potential while sharpening my minds capacity to be one with the process.

I have been alone for long hours before, the idea of offering myself undirected time and space brings back the felt sense of life back then. However insightful the suffering that I encountered in those enduring hours of aloneness, my recent mourning for the pain my body was in (for example, during the time I wrestled with eating disorders), and the inspiration I get from being surrounded by equally intensity voicing human beings, drive me to reunite with all those parts of me that have never felt that emptiness, being no-thing, was truly the birthplace of creation. Am I ready to walk into that vital void? The never-ending expanding and threatening space that solitude often was to my younger self. Is the emptiness I long for similar to the boundarylessness that felt neglectful back then – do I dare to embrace the rising feelings? It would be an opening towards deeper desires. Artistic drives, those parts that long for clearcut research into the workings of the mind, the expression and transformation of my calling, a restraint from stimuli seemingly confirming the right to be, to be connected. I long for a type of existential research that is by no means encapsulated by grudges towards the experience of being alive in this particular body, mind, place, these relationships, and processes. A total yes to life, really.

Can I fully lean into my own glaring impulses, decide to not follow through on tendencies, being authentic by not automatically following my good-old self but inviting to accommodate more and more of her unexplored potential, including (neglected) painful memories? Is this something that I can grant myself, along the way learning how to be of deeper service to the environment?

PS: interested in doing existential research? This invitation might be interesting!