The image I was born with
# me finding out life is full of meaning after all
A while ago, I had an intense experience of unconditional love. Flowing out of a period of overfocussing on something unreachable, because projected outside of myself, in response to grief because of suffering around the world, in interaction with my existential research into anger, and as part of a transformative relational crisis, my emotional world synchronized into a state of intense unconditional love during a trippy meditation.
Like other people’s descriptions of such experiences, in those moments I no longer practiced a contoured (and separated) self. Lacking precise descriptions, all I knew to be consciousness. And even though there were brief moments of resistance towards the all-encompassing reality of this consciousness and interconnectedness, whatever we might call ego could not resist for long. ‘I’ lost all ability to talk, imagine and …worry. What I ‘saw’, felt in every cell of my body, was that awakening is being with what is, unconditionally. It was quite an impactful process to be in.
Reality is just…reality. And, mind you, that is a lot. Every(no)thing! Everything that I normally rejected (and might still do, in the relative sense), including violence, felt part of the unity of consciousness sensable during the meditation.
Afterwards, I humanly struggled to – ha! – get a grip on that experience. It surely altered something inside of me. Or maybe it brought me back to something I had ‘known’ before. For a couple of weeks, I felt a swift entrance to what I might call a deep silence ‘inside of myself’ which had the same quality as the heightened state. It felt like the birthplace of a new quality of ‘interiority’. It catalyzed a fresh dive into literature about spirituality and existential development and it boosted my active acceptance of anger (and everything I associate with it) as part of our human experience.
The grasping for meaning that rose out of that intense experience also came with a couple of strong emotional responses. Projections got a hold on me again! It goes too far to share every one of them in this reflection, but the main characteristic was an internal fight against the depth and breadth (also known as ‘void’) of that sensed awareness in the peak moment. In response to a climax of fear popping up when I tried to consciously lean into the void (or silence), something inside of me started to fight reality. The irony, anger got a grip on me! Also, in interaction with our daughters’ intensities, namely her rightful exploration of embodied power, my body and mind were challenged to integrate the emotional intensity of anger. I had been taught to deny anger in my body, and now it was time to integrate that suppressed and often self-rejecting energy. In particular, it was time to own a fuller extent of my life’s energy instead of projecting or suppressing it . "Add" to that the discovered, now deepened need to take ownership of the impact of complex trauma.
This was testing, could my cherished connections, and should I add frightened ego and heroic superego?, ‘survive’ these outbursts? All the while I was questioning many of my learned assumptions and convictions, which took a toll on my mental and emotional energy level and was quite disorienting. Surely, that experience of unconditional love wasn’t easy to smoothly integrate throughout my whole system. Some old conditionings were fighting hard to be seen and recognized. Relational and personal emotional work is ongoingly part of the journey.
At this point in time, I feel I can look back on that journey a bit more. Retro – and prospection are becoming entangled in a deeper and broader sense of reality. Impressed by the panoramic and deeply sensitive peak experience, humbled by the inner conflicts that arose out of that sensed, freeing yet frightening abyss, I get a new feeling for what it is like to be me, how it could be, perhaps even communally rooted in “the image I was born with” (See this poem by David Whyte).
More on this later. For now, feel invited to dance with me !