Leadership Of Love
This was originally posted on June 28, 2011. I deleted it because it was causing problems with my email subscription services. I have retyped and reposted it on September 26, 2011. Hopefully, this one will get sent out to subscribers.
Early Monday morning, June 20, I am again meditating on my porch as the semi-cloudy skies across Lake Atitlan begin to shift from darkness to dawn. A magical ambience is created by crowing roosters and by the stirring calls of a large variety of colorful birds. The morning air is cool and invigorating – bringing new life to my soul – a soul that had struggled deeply over the last couple of days as I have courageously delved into issues of childhood blocks to my ability to communicate.
Suddenly a loud and nearby chainsaw interrupts the peaceful silence. I simply giggle as I note that it is only 5:50 a.m.; I love being so unattached to the noises that would have once triggered such judgment in me.
As I continue meditating, I note that there is a little energetic pressure and slight pain in my upper abdomen.
It Wants In
“Is this emotional density that needs to be released?” I ponder curiously. “Or perhaps is it some part of me that wants to get in, that is gently pressing on my solar plexus to get my attention?”
A few minutes later I notice the neighbor’s gate wiggling. My own gate is only about twenty feet away, at the bottom of a steep flight of stone-covered steps. The neighbor’s gate is slightly hidden from my view, directly adjacent to my own.
“Something is trying to get into the neighbor’s yard.” I ponder briefly.
“Fuera.” I call out lovingly and quietly to what I believe is a stray dog. Fuera means “outside” – and is an expression commonly spoken to dogs in Guatemala, telling them that they are somewhere that they are not supposed to be.
“It is something that wants to come in.” I giggle as intuitions suddenly give me the metaphorical message – and of course dogs bring to me a message of self-love.
Self-Love Messenger
For a while I focus on allowing part of my pushed-out energy to return. Even though I don’t feel anything to validate what is happening at a physical level, I intuitively trust the process.
Soon, I totally giggle when the neighbor’s little dog suddenly comes sauntering up my top step. He is so cute and smiling, seeming quite proud of himself for having maneuvered his way past my gate.
“Fuera.” I giggle at him as I point for him to go back down my steps.
My gate is only held shut by a stretchy bungee cord – yet in six months I have never had a dog make it past that gate and up onto my patio.
To my shock, a few seconds later when I look down the steps, my little visitor is gone and my gate remains securely closed. I smile with delight when I notice the little self-love messenger back in his own yard, also behind a closed gate.
“I guess something got in.” I giggle to myself. “But by sending him away, did I push away my own metaphorical self-love?”
Inner Ponderings
Soon, I find myself pondering one of the teachings of Hermes: “As above so below.”
I contemplate about the earth being a conscious being – having an entire living ecosystem of energies, plant life, animal life, weather systems, rivers, ocean currents, etc.
I then ponder my body in the same light, as being made up of conscious entities – seeing every one of my cells as having an individual life span, serving its own unique function with varying degrees of energetic consciousness. I have complex living systems that serve to sustain life, breathing, circulatory, digestive, lymph, and nervous systems, etc.
Just as the earth’s rivers and oceans grow ever-more filled with waste, so does my body get clogged by unreleased emotional densities that pile up year after year in my various organs and bodily systems.
“My body is slowly aging and dying from the physical effects of the emotional pollution,” I ponder. “I wonder if it is possible to reverse the effects of that bodily pollution by cleaning out the densities – replacing those densities with self-love.”
And another thing I begin to ponder is that my subconscious energies and all of the individual living cells and systems that make up my body – all of them look up to me as their leader, as their higher consciousness – as their Higher Self.
Clueless As Usual
After two beautiful days of writing and additional meditations I again find myself on the magical porch of my favorite chocolate shaman, eagerly anticipating another beautiful experience of journeying into the unknown growth of a Wednesday afternoon chocolate ceremony.
“Keith,” I speak up, “I have the usual blockages in my third-eye and solar plexus – but today they seem much more focused and pronounced – and I am also feeling lots of other little pains making their presence known, especially in the heart chakra.”
“I am clueless as to where to begin.” I beg for guidance. “Any suggestions?”
Surrounded By Support
“Go to your inner conference room,” Keith guides me, “and ask all of these pains and energies to join you there for a meeting.”
As Keith moves on, I invite my inner children, little Sharon and Bobby, to assist me in the inner heart-to-heart discussion that is being put together.
Distractions begin to repeatedly pull my focus in every direction other than the metaphorical conference room. I struggle to even be able to imagine a conference room. Doubts strangle me.
After inviting the doubts to leave, I continue focusing for another ten minutes before I am finally able to visualize myself sitting in a chair – Sharon is on my left, Bobby is on my right, and my Higher Self stands behind me. For unknown reasons, I am experiencing a great deal of fear, feeling extremely inadequate in performing the role I am being asked to take.
“Something really big must be going on.” I ponder as I contemplate the heightened level of intense resistance and fear that are attempting to sabotage the meditation.
Cat Clue
“Brenda,” Keith interrupts me with a smile, “Squeaky here has a clue for you if you will pay attention.”
I giggle when I look at Keith’s beautiful little cat. She is sprawled out on Keith’s lap, on her back, completely relaxed and comfy – as if she were lying back in a hammock. She seems to not have a care in the world.
“I am still clenching my hands and my body.” I respond to Keith’s obvious clue.
“Perfectly said … with precise intuition.” Keith congratulates me.
“I have clenched my entire life.” I express to Keith with frustration. “I want to relax more, I have tried for years to relax various parts of my body; I try, and try, and try, but I continue to do it. It seems to be beyond my conscious control.”
“Help me.” I beg. “I don’t know how to relax.”
A Clueless Boss
Finally, I am able to imagine all of my body pains and their corresponding energies sitting across from me, on the other side of the conference table. Not knowing exactly what to say to these parts of myself, I begin to focus on sending love and gratitude to these energy participants in my body.
As I focus, I recognize that the executioner and the Beast energies are among those assembled across the table. I again try to send them love with the hope that they can heal their pain.
Blah, blah, blah!
Suddenly I recognize my hypocrisy – an attempt to use love as a means of manipulating and controlling. I am like a clueless and insensitive boss that walks into a meeting and starts dictating orders without paying any attention to what is actually going on in the room at an energetic level.
Loyal Friends
Feeling quite humbled I again connect with these energies – this time with pure and unconditional intent. I desire to understand their pain, who they are, how hard they have struggled to perform their jobs for me, how thankless their jobs have been, how much they have sacrificed to honor my requests, and how alone and sad they must feel after all these years of being ignored and unrecognized.
“These are extremely loyal energies.” I begin to recognize. “These must be among my best of friends. I would never trust such an important job as orchestrating my childhood shutdown to just any old energy in my body.”
Real-Life Images
An intuitive idea suddenly flashes into my mind.
“Visualize each of these energies as being one of my dearest real-life friends back home.” The Jedi voices whisper. “Give them a real human face.”
“How would my friends feel if they had sacrificed their entire lives in service to me, performing such a difficult and heart-breaking task?” I ponder deeper.
Rivers of tears begin to flow as I soon imagine one of my dearest of friends – a friend who struggles with profound physical pain – being the one whom I asked to strangle the life force in my throat starting when I was a young child.
My heart is broken as I imagine the mental and physical anguish that her loyal service to me has caused in her own body. Yes, putting a human face on this executioner energy puts me at a whole new level of understanding.
A Painful Paradox
“Wow,” I ponder with shock, “I have made this energetic part of me literally sacrifice itself in my service.”
Then another profound epiphany floods my awareness.
“The pains in my body are not pains being inflicted onto me by these energies that sit across the table.” My heart begins to understand. “Those loyal energies are not the ones giving pain to me – I am the one giving the emotional pain to them.”
“Yes, I do feel the pain in my physical body.” I ponder the mind-boggling paradox. “But what I feel is their pain – these actual energetic parts of my self are suffering because of what I have asked them to do.”
“I am not hurting because of what I asked the Beast to do to me. “I put a different twist on the thought. “The Beast is hurting because of what I asked it to do. I am feeling the Beast’s pain.”
Loving Contrast
“Where are you at now, Brenda?” Keith interrupts at the perfect time from across the porch.
When I share my paradoxical understandings with Keith, he deeply congratulates me for the profound insights.
“But I still don’t seem to know how to deal with these energies.” I ask Keith for help. “How do I move past this place of stuck-ness?”
“Put your two hands out in front of you.” Keith guides me. “In one hand visualize all of the painful love that has been exchanged between you and these energies. In the other hand, imagine a pure form of unconditional loving exchange.”
Time To learn
I seem to have no trouble connecting with the painful process through which I have been accustomed to interacting with these energies across the table. This energy in my left hand is quite familiar. But after much effort I continue to deeply struggle as I attempt to connect with the feeling of unconditional/happy love that I expect to find in my right hand.
“Keith,” I share in frustration, almost twenty minutes later, “I’m not sure if I even know how to love these energies unconditionally.”
“Go back into the conference room.” Keith guides me firmly. “Ask the energies to show you how – to teach you how to do it.”
My own Higher Self
After struggling through many failed meditation metaphors, trying to work with these energies as if they were my co-workers, at the same level as me, I suddenly have a new thought.
“Are these energies my equals?” I ponder curiously. “Or are they my subordinates?”
I know that we are all in this together, but I begin to question if perhaps I need to take on a more leadership-oriented role.
“Higher Self,” I beg, “please guide me … please show me where to go with this metaphor.”
Suddenly I remember my meditations from early Monday morning.
“These energies in my body – in my subconscious mind – all look up to me as if I am their Higher Self.” The insights flash into my awareness. “The Beast and all of his friends look to me for leadership and guidance. Yes, I am supposed to be an unconditionally-loving leader, not just a coworker.”
Double-Edged Sword
A feeling of panic quickly consumes my body.
I have always hated being in charge. In fact, I have spent my entire life attempting to avoid leadership roles, and I have been mostly successful in that quest. What few leadership positions I have been coerced into assuming were accompanied by emotions that fluctuated wildly between significant anxiety and absolute terror.
I love serving behind the scenes in politically-invisible roles. In my software engineering career, my favorite positions involved situations where I could be the star background performer, while another more outwardly creative and confident coworker took the riskier leadership role.
As an employee, my perfectionism and people-pleasing earned huge recognition and pats on the back – but when interacting in any type of leadership capacity, when attempting to motivate others to meet my higher perfectionistic standards, I felt like a social retard. Not only did I not have the people skills to lead, but the thought of making any decision that might prove to be controversial sent my anxiety through the roof.
Avoiding any form of leadership has always been the safest and smartest thing for me to do.
Lifelong Core Issue
As I sit on Keith’s magical porch, I unexpectedly find myself cowering in fear as I ponder the responsibility that is being placed in front of me. For several years I have felt the flow of my energies guiding me down a path that I have always known will force me into ultimately facing these leadership fears – but until now I have been able to easily sidestep and delay those fears, leaving them to be faced on another day.
“I am being asked to assume a leadership role with these inner energies.” I ponder with terror. “And it is clear that the energies are asking me to assume that role, now!”
Profuse tears begin to flow as I ponder what happened just a few days ago with Debbie – I nearly destroyed a friendship when I tried to assume the uninvited-role of teacher.
“And I absolutely know that I would probably destroy a cherished friendship if I were ever in any type of supervisory position over one of my dearest friends,” I ponder with panic.
Yes, this is a lifelong core issue – it is profound – it is painful – it is deep – and I do not want to face it.
Frightful Judgments
For the next ninety minutes, the porch gradually shifts from inner work to random rational-mind conversation about various inner-work topics.
One young man first talks about his own inner metaphor of realizing that he “doesn’t want to be in the driver’s seat.” Portions of his work profoundly parallel my own. As I listen, my tearful whimpering greatly intensifies. Part of me fearfully wishes it could just remain the invisible passenger.
While stuck and terrified in this “I don’t want to be a leader” mode, I simply sit back and watch silently as the porch conversations further progress. To my shock and dismay, I find myself judging nearly every person on the porch – judging them for not pushing themselves harder.
One woman has simply been lying on a bench, not allowing herself to access or release any emotions, remaining stuck in her rational mind. I do not judge her as being bad, but I do judge her as “selling herself short”, as not living up to her potential.
“If I were in charge here,” I ponder with fright, “I would probably be subtly pushing her to perform better, manipulatively attempting to motivate her into doing some actual real work – just like I have been trying to do with my own inner energies.”
Hidden Potential
I know that the emotions I am feeling are being given to me for teaching purposes – but even so, these emotional glimpses frighten me. I am being shown that I have the potential to make a chaotic mess of everything if I do not heal my own leadership issues – if I do not process and release my intense issues of perfectionism. I am tired of holding myself up to unreasonable and often-unreachable standards, and of then tending to “lovingly” project those same standards onto others.
“Yes,” I ponder humbly. “With how I am feeling right now, if I were trying to help people from this dysfunctional, perfectionistic, mindset I would probably destroy our relationships, making a complete mess of it all. My genuine desires to help people would most likely drive them all insane.”
“But I do have to give myself a loving break here,” I ponder, “because I rarely do this to people under normal circumstances – but what happened last week with Debbie terrifies me, showing me that the potential is still there.”
“If I want to be a healer,” I cower in fear, “I have to face these frightening inner fears, and I don’t know how to do that.”
Scarf Hiding
This hour-and-a-half passes ever too slowly. With each judgment that is paraded past my mind, I am painfully haunted by thoughts of the potential damage that I could do to others. I wallow deeper and deeper into self judgment, pondering how I could so easily become a slave-driver in such a group, not allowing people to be people, instead insisting that they become healing robots.
I see this long rational-mind conversation as an incredible opportunity to quietly look at myself, and I continue to feel horrified by what I experience as I observe these inner issues repeatedly stomp around in my head while simultaneously kicking me in the gut.
Eventually, I am so lost in the pain and self-flogging that I pull a scarf over my head, bend forward slightly, and simply allow the rivers of tears to flow.
“I would be a horrible leader.” I judge myself harshly. “I would alienate people, push them to rebellion, and ‘psychologically fart’ all over everyone.”
Porch Nazi
“Where has Brenda gone?” Keith eventually asks playfully when he feels guided to take the ceremony back in a new direction.
I peak out from under the scarf, dry my tears, and take a few minutes to speak the truth of my horrifying journey of watching the porch for the last ninety minutes.
“I know I am projecting all over the place,” I express in deep frustration, “but if I were the leader here on the porch, I would make an absolute mess of everything. Everyone would hate me.”
“You would be a porch Nazi.” Keith drives my terrifying thought home with a verbal nail.
“Ouch!” Keith’s nail stabs me right in the heart … but I know he is right … that is exactly what I would be. I would be insisting on order and respect, not allowing fun, and not allowing most of the experiences that have brought my most profound growth.
Another Chapter
With this new realization, I sink even further into fear and self-judgment, recognizing that if I don’t heal myself, that I could never be such a fun and casual leader as Keith.
“I really do take things extremely seriously.” I stab myself in the heart. “As a leader, I am such a loser.”
The more I allow myself to feel this dysfunction to the core, the more I feel incapable, hopeless, helpless, stupid, doomed to forever fail.
“Congratulations Brenda.” Keith shares with a smile. “You have uncovered another profound and powerful core issue … another chapter in your healing process.”
A Great Place To Start
One beautiful woman quickly jumps in to engage me in loving and fixing rational-mind chatter. In many ways I perceive her words as patronizing. I listen very politely, but soon ask her to stop, explaining that I have repeatedly been through all of these thoughts and solutions at a logical-thought level – but what I need to do is go into the subconscious roots – to heal this dysfunctional pattern at a much deeper level than conscious thought.
“I need to go deep into the subconscious and uncover the cause of this insane desire to be perfect,” I lovingly explain through my tears, “and to understand why I am so terrified of being a leader.”
“Brenda,” another beautiful friend speaks up. “Think of the elevator scene.”
Immediately I flash to this scene near the end of the movie Revolver – a scene where the main character is engaged in an excruciating inner debate with ego.
“All of these self-defeating voices bombarding me are ego.” I suddenly remember. “I have heard these voices for so long that I believe them to be me. These dysfunctional patterns are literally masquerading as me, and I believe them to be true.”
“This is profound!” I ponder. I know I still have much healing to do, but recognizing these terrifying voices as being nothing but lies is a great place to start.
Facing Fears
“When there is too much fear,” Keith starts to tell me, “that means you are not yet ready to go into the issue.”
“Keith,” I protest, “Yes, I am crying and devastated by what I am uncovering about myself – and yes I have talked about these profound fears that are surfacing.”
“But I am not afraid to go into this now.” I add clearly. “I want to go into it.”
“Go back to when you were a child and envision yourself under the direction of an adult authority of some type.” Keith guides me. “How do you see them?”
People-Pleasing Sources
I fumble for several minutes, providing surface answers that do not satisfy Keith. Finally I speak words that resonate – words that I already knew but was formerly unable to bring together in concept. In fact many of these thoughts do not fully gel for several days.
As a child, my desire to please my parents and leaders became the source of my perfectionistic behavior. I believed that I had to perfectly meet the expectations of my leaders or I would be judged harshly. I craved those blue ribbons and pats on the back. They were my only means of self-validation.
Since I struggled so intensely to please my leaders, a subconscious part of me believes that if I myself am a leader, then the people I am working with should also seek perfection.
A Wise Strategy
But it goes much deeper than that. When interacting with friends and coworkers, I can simply relax and be at peace … but if I am responsible for the result of someone else’s work or behavior, I immediately panic. I recognize that their work becomes my work – that their behavior is accountable to my superiors as being equivalent to my own.
“That is why I am so terrified of leadership.” I share with Keith. “I end up micromanaging everything – being the porch Nazi – because I absolutely know that I will be judged by the performance of those whom I lead.”
“The behavior of other is not something I can control without completely ruining things.” I ponder the twisted paradox. “Therefore, any type of leadership on my part is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.”
If I agree to lead, I will be responsible. If I am responsible, I absolutely have to make sure that a good job is done or my superiors will not be happy with me. If I attempt to convince those I am leading to do a job that matches my standards I will micromanage and alienate them, making a huge mess of everything. Once I create the mess, childhood pain will force me into a desperate attempt to be understood … and the loops of my childhood dysfunction will splat all over everything, spiraling ever downward.
Yes, it seems that avoiding leadership has been a very wise strategy – a strategy that has kept me from making things much worse in my life.
Give It Time
“What do I do?” I beg Keith for answers or guidance.
“Know thyself.” Keith lovingly coaches. “Feel the pain, observe yourself, learn about your feelings and behaviors, understand what you do … and simply follow the flow of your higher energy.”
“The fact that this has come up so powerfully in the last few days means that this issue is on its way out.” Keith gently reassures me.
Keith again congratulates me, reassuring me that the growth through which I am passing is a profound part of my process and my journey to become a healer. He helps take the edge off my own self-flogging by sharing a few personal stories of his own early struggles – struggles where he too had to face and clean up many of his own personality issues.
Swimming In The Currents
As I prepare to leave the porch after what has been a profound and powerful Wednesday afternoon chocolate ceremony, another dear friend congratulates me for having the courage and determination to go ever deeper, simultaneously blessing others with the honesty of my writing.
As I walk slowly home, my heart remains heavy and troubled, and I continue swimming in the swift emotional currents. I know I am already being a leader, but the thought of further stepping down that path continues to terrify me – continues to trigger my issues of unhealed childhood dysfunction.
It seems that I need all the loving feedback and encouragement that I can get.
Follow The Flow
Early Thursday morning, sleeping is impossible. A local church is celebrating the Festival of Corpus Christi, and some of the noise begins as early as 3:30 a.m., with even more noise at 5:00 a.m. as two loud firework bombs explode in the air directly over my apartment.
By 5:30 a.m., I have given up on my pouting attempts to avoid meditating. I am still emotionally struggling from yesterday, and could easily have remained in bed if the local festivities had not insisted that I need to be doing something different.
Ego Extravaganza
During meditation this morning, I continue to feel deep distress over the amount of judgments (self and projected) that surfaced in group yesterday, and that continue to plague my heart. I cannot focus, and constantly find myself with eyes wide open, staring blankly at nearby birds and trees.
Inner ego voices consume me, screaming that I am incapable of unconditionally loving others, taunting me for feeling any type of judgment at all.
I imagine myself in the elevator scene of the movie Revolver, talking back to ego, declaring that this judgment is NOT me – but my words fall on deaf ears, drowned out by the noise of all my inner chatter.
I know these thoughts originate from ego masquerading as me – yet I struggle to remain aware of that knowing. The angry-preacher voice rages inside of me, ranting on and on as the voice of angry perfectionism, insisting that judgment is who I am.
“No, I was not judging people on the porch yesterday.” I remind myself with love. “I was simply discerning that several of them were stuck in fears. I was not judging them; I was only wishing that I could somehow help them to move beyond their blocks – to find more joyful growth.”
“The only judgment I felt yesterday was aimed at me,” I ponder. “I was judging myself for feeling so utterly incapable of leading others – judging myself on how badly I would screw things up if I tried.”
An Inside Job
What I am experiencing is not “out there” I begin to ponder with clarity. It is an inside job. My struggle with being a leader is being projected “out there”, but it too is profoundly about inner leadership – about learning to work with inner energies.
Those energies that sat across the table from me in my inner conference room yesterday – those are the energies I need to learn to love. As I learn to be a leader of my own inner parts, I will then cease to project that dysfunction out into the world onto other people.
“Yes,” I begin to understand with deep confidence. “My struggle with leadership is totally an inside job.”
Cycling Insights
At one point in meditation, I connect with my circle of friends in that heavenly room, asking them if they will simply hold and comfort me. As I do so, I sink into teeth-chattering sobs – attempting to remain quiet as I allow tears to stream down my cheeks.
“I am not afraid of leadership.” I clearly proclaim. “I am afraid of inner perfectionism projected outward.”
Back and forth I cycle into periods of sadness and self-deprecation before again returning to my beautiful circle of friends. Multiple waves of tears are shed as I vacillate between loving insight and self-loathing.
My drive toward perfectionism terrifies me. The thought of being a porch Nazi breaks my heart.
This cycling into and out of clarity seems to serve its purpose well. Eventually, my painful emotions are released and new hope finds a beautiful sunrise.
“I don’t need to worry at all about external leadership.” I profoundly realize. “I can truly focus on learning to be an unconditionally-loving Higher Self to my inner energies. The healing of my inner journey will remove the source of my projections – it is as simple as that.”
It is Time
One thing I always do before continuing my writing is to reread my most recent blog. After finishing my meditation, as I read through “A Love-Starved Beast”, one paragraph grips me, causing me to deeply sob.
“Please,” I feel the Beast respond pleadingly, “I can’t let go until I know that you will love me and forgive me – that you will no longer hate me for what I have had to do.”
As I read these words, I again see the Beast holding me by the throat, staring me in the eyes, pleading with me to understand him, to not hate him, to not judge him, refusing to let go until he can feel understood and know that I will continue to love him.
“This is one of those energies that I need to learn how to lovingly lead.” I ponder to myself. “These parts of me are indeed starved for love, suffering from neglect, from harsh self-judgment, from abandonment and blatant absence of leadership.”
It is time for me to step into a leadership role – one with myself.
Perfect Timing
As I prepare for bed on Thursday evening, I suddenly understand another profound truth.
“My inner energies will not fully open up until I find true self-love. And true self-love can only be found when I make absolute loving peace with all parts of my self – with every player in my metaphorical conference room. It is my job to be the dynamic loving leader that brings such unconditional love back into my body – into the ecosystem of all of those beautiful conscious energies that desperately desire to learn to love and work in peaceful joyous harmony.”
If my energies were to open sooner, before this self-love is in place, I would use those healing energies to project an unhealed version of myself onto others. That is the last thing I want to do. I trust that my healing process will progress with perfect timing.
It’s An Inside Job – Really
With as many times as I have grasped this concept, I now see it at an even deeper level of understanding.
It is not about learning how to stop judging others – it is about learning to stop judging myself.
It is not about learning to love others – it is about learning how to truly love myself.
It is not about learning how to be a leader of others – it is about learning to be an unconditionally loving leader of myself – of every part of myself.
Such concepts can be infinitely expanded to include any issue that I project out into the mirror of my reality.
An Abandoned Employee
Keith recently shared a web article with me – an article titled “Understanding Negative Ego” written by Jach Pursel: http://www.lazaris.com/publibrary/stjnegego.cfm.
As the flow of my being would have it, I read this article for the very first time on Wednesday morning, right before the chocolate ceremony. The article did not resonate with me at all, and the metaphors used to illustrate ego seemed silly and a waste of my time. The analogies did not conform fully to my belief systems, and I was ready to put the words on the pile of “thanks but no thanks.”
In this article, Jach Pursel shares a metaphor related to ego being a mail-room employee, and we, the observer-conscious-self are the chairman of the corporation. The metaphor finds us abandoning our leadership role and asking that poor little mail-room employee to begin doing all of the work and making all of the management decisions. In this unfolding analogy, the ego gets quite angry and resentful at having been abandoned and expected to do things that are clearly not his responsibility. Eventually, he becomes downright defensive, doing everything he can to preserve himself amid the chaotic non-management.
As I now go back and ponder the metaphor, I find that it fits perfectly with what I myself have been doing inside of my own body. It is my job to be a Higher Self to my inner energies – and I had abandoned that role, leaving all the various energetic parts of me to fend for themselves. Inner battles erupted, vicious hatred and feuds developed – ongoing wars between masculine and feminine, etc.
I now realize that my role as a leader is to return to the mail room, to find all of the subconscious (and physical) parts of me who feel abandoned, cheated, misjudged, hated, neglected, etc, … and to lovingly bring them back into my confidence. I will not achieve this as a projecting dictator … I will do it as an unconditionally loving servant, slowly proving to these parts of me that I am really here to do my job at last.
Amazing Self-Love
Friday and Saturday as I immerse myself in more passionate writing, it seems that my heart has risen to a new level. A new sense of joyful optimism reigns in my soul.
I am thrilled by the profound healing of these amazing six days. As usual it has been a powerful combination of meditations and metaphors that have all come together in perfect sequence and harmony.
Yes, I am indeed a Higher Self to my inner energies, as was so clearly shown to me in meditation on Monday morning – and yes, for most of my life I have completely abdicated the unconditionally-loving leadership responsibilities that accompany such an important role. The leadership that terrified me in the outer world was really a projection of an inner world in chaos.
As I further ponder an early morning meditation of only six days ago, I remember a cute little dog that somehow managed to sneak past two gates and joyfully run up my staircase.
“Perhaps I did not send away that missing self-love part of myself after all.” I ponder as I remember how I had shoed that little messenger away.
It seems that these last six days did indeed bring a profound gift of self-love – of being an unconditionally-loving leader to my own inner being.
Copyright © 2011 by Brenda Larsen, All Rights Reserved