Showing posts with label Emotions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Emotions. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Blog in Review Best of 2014 #4 Unconditional Love, or What We Really Mean

"Wow look its a unicorn, how cool is that?"

I mean come on
This statement is the peak of a very important conversation I was having with my bestie last night about love. At the onset of the New Year I made a promise to myself in regards to my emotions and how I express them.  For as long as I can remember I've tried to make myself as unemotional as possible.  I saw it as weakness as a lack of discipline and self-control.  I thought it was base and beneath me. I dislike scenes and emotional outbursts but more than anything I disliked them on me. It was very simple. My emotions give people power over me. I will rob them of that power.

It’s a very authoritative idea of a ruling mind.  I believe astrologically it is a very masculine Pluto or Mars disposition. In women it is likened to the Eris, Lilith position which is of the Queen of the Underworld Persephone herself.  Robbed of her innocence a new embodiment is given. Let's just say the story has always felt. .  familiar.

Hades and Seph
I always told myself that my emotional disengagement was just a sign of advanced maturity. A hallmark of class and grace under pressure. Which it can be seen as. I believe those who have had to deal with me when I am in an emotional clinch call it something else. . . cold, icy, quite a bit frosty. And it is.  The statements are calm, and poetically polite. My face dead cold giving not an ounce of emotion and my manner dismissive.

It is the defense of a child robbed of innocence of being as emotional as she can be. It is the foolish attempt of one who feels deeply at mastering what can be an all-consuming opus. My emotions always felt like a cliff overlooking raging rapids that plunge into a waterfall that ends somewhere at the center of the earth.  The levels of emotional lost I could and still can experience are extreme.  So I've always practiced at being practical in regards to them because practicality is the last of their concerns.

In many ways my emotions are always battling my intellect, which is the heavy Mercurial influence in me. However being a highly instinctual person I realized that denying emotions was the first step in taking away my natural gifts. So balance had to be attained. Which meant I had to explore my extremes on both ends.  I'm just glad I survived it. It was a near thing.

So back to my new year's resolution. I told myself I was no longer going to stifle how I feel about anyone.  I in fact practiced this by sending very personal very gushing messages of love to my closest pals who in some way inspire me by doing nothing more than being who they are. The results were as I expected.  I got back some gushing replies and silence.  I knew who would do what. The gushers are just what they say they are.  The none gushers, the silent, were whelmed. You see all of these people feel as deeply as I do and I know what such a message would've done to me. I would've gushed back but first I would've needed to be silent.  And sometimes when you're silent you just are because "Wow look its a unicorn, how cool is that." Bask in the moment.

Me and my bestie in film
As my bestie and sister from another mister put it, all her life she had thought that family should respond and behave as I have with her and yet due to never really seeing it our having it, my acceptance of her became like walking into your living room and seeing a unicorn. In the message I sent was what it was always supposed to be but never quite was, forcing the person to truly believe deep in their soul that it cannot exist. And then holy smokes there it is.  It was a very pertinent explanation that stuck a chord with me and made an odd kind of sense. It led me to a thought process that became spoken that symbolizes most relationship troubles in this world.  If you walked into a room and saw a unicorn what would you really do?

The response tells us a lot about how we as individuals process love. But not just any love, Unconditional love; this facet of human emotion few of us experience and none of us feel worthy of. The truth is of course you don't deserve it, but look it’s a unicorn.  Its beautiful, wondrous, miraculous and most of all a gift. Would you shoo it away for its own good or would you keep and cherish it for as long as it would let itself be yours.  Most of us say we of course would choose the second option.  However the truth is many of us actually choose the first.

What they are made of
Let me explain. Relationship patterns are an interesting process because usually the person committing the pattern cannot see it.  In someone else eyes its so clear.  Oh you date the same fundamental type of person and are always surprised at the results? The person watching shakes their head and considers this a lost case and cause.  And it is but not for the reasons you may think.  Those people aren’t stupid; none of us are really stupid.  We love patterns. In general we choose what we know, what we want and what we expect. Dating the same type of person guarantees that every relationship ends the same way.  There is comfort in knowing where you'll be before you get there. And we humans are nothing if we aren't addicted to comfort.  Even if that comfort is pain.  The need is sometimes nothing more than to fulfill the pattern.

This is also a very sad declaration on the nature of love and how it seems to be increasingly viewed as a burden that takes away instead of as a gift that gives. Most of us choose to chase away the unicorn not for its sake but for our own. The specter of unconditional love is such a miracle blessing that many of us instinctively choose to avoid it due to a higher self-preserving fear of loss and potential rejection in regards to attaining our dreams. The irony is that I think most of us do believe in some part of ourselves that we really can’t have it all.   Living your career dreams leads to sacrificing your relationship ones.

Often I explain that I don't do something or haven't done something because I've had peak experiences of it and now can't be bothered by less.  The real reason could be that I honestly don't want to find anything that would make those past experiences less beautiful. I want them preserved as the peak to make the pain I experienced worth the effort in the long run. And I use them as a road map to attaining something similar thinking that this time it might work. It is an odd sense of displaced loyalty to a younger me that had the illusions of a child looking for pixie dust in every kiss while telling herself there is no such thing as pixie dust. When faced with pixie dust you will deny deny deny until you have no choice but to see that the weird horned horse is really a unicorn.  But if I were honest it didn’t look like a unicorn then, but somehow it looks like one now.  We either traumatize or romanticize our pasts.  Its human nature.  The bad relationship was really bad; the one that got away was so wonderful.  But it is the lackluster present that enables a dramatic past because if we’re honest the lackluster present is actually a lot more like the dramatic past than we like to admit.  The implication being we are still making the same mistakes and learning nothing from them.

Oh naughty black unicorn
It is the same for a person who continues to date those who can never really love them the way they need to be loved. But this is a different level of affliction I think. Addiction to love is a terrifying thing. It is a declaration that someone else has a level of control over your well-being that could potentially end your desire to exist without them. It is a lure and a trap that many find no solace or comfort in the idea of attaining.  They instead choose to forge temporary unions with tried and true results of interest, excitement and inevitable endings.  They tell themselves it will end differently this time.  Deep down inside however they realize that it’s too similar to previous relationships which are why they are preferred. At the core of this is the desire to win the heart of the one that started the mess to begin with. In every new person that holds the attraction the way the one before did, they try again expecting different outcomes.

The result is a declaration about self-worth and what you consider sacrifice to be.  Love is within itself a paradox, a selfless selfish thing. It gives and takes, it births it kills. It is all and none. The true fabric that holds this thing together because it can be everything and nothing at all. It fills in the empty spaces.  There are many people who lack the proper perception of their self-worth, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It is a fundamentally human flaw and sometimes it takes viewing yourself from the eyes of others to temper it. But self-worth is a highly misunderstood concept.  It is a process of finding all parts of yourself worthy of care and love. It is why religion is so popular. Most religions are based on an idea that the human spirit that embodies a human body is worth unconditional love just by dent of being a creation of an all knowing all seeing all wise and powerful God.  It establishes the ultimate authority on loving yourself. But this is not really a love that can provide a true understanding of self worth.  For some religiously minded people they have done the work, the soul searching and the forgiveness. Some are just going with it.  But a true dialogue that defines self worth starts with self.  Its starts with looking at yourself under a harsh lens and being very critical. This is why people usually find self-worth through either successful or failed love. The successful lover loves your flaws to the point that you realize they aren’t that bad.  A failed love affair forces you to take those flaws to heart and may make you aware of them.  In the last is where self-worth is mostly lost, as some people don't hold the glass up to see what is worthy in them, just why they no longer have a lover.

Me and my bestie in our heads
In the core of that thought is sacrifice. The trick to the thing like all else lies in sacrifice. In order for my bestie to find that unicorn she had to sacrifice, thoughts of family, thoughts of herself, everything.  For people like me, my privacy, my truth must not be held in, it must be made public.  My hard fought for emotional self-control must be ripped to shreds at my feet. 

My favorite song about love is by Mumford & Sons. Its called White Blank Page.  Within this song is the pathway to the light. In this song is the greatest sacrifice.  As the singer finally understands a fundamental divinely uncontestable truth about love that the heartbroken hardly ever ask themselves. The thought centers around the idea, that you can be better, you can do something different and love will be the result. You can read articles about your attitude, consider new style trends.  All the things you can do to make yourself more lovable will not change one simple thing. Who you decide to love. In the end you might just need to date someone you would never date and consider a perspective you’ve never considered.  Sacrifice all of your thoughts about your fault in something and accept a truth about your inherit worth.  Accept that the person was never able to see it and no . . . that was not your fault.


I’ll leave you with the song. .



Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Unconscious Love and the Path to Duende


In some sports and other physical activities when someone hits a streak of perfection they are thought to be unconscious.  In basketball especially.  A player can shoot lights out for a quarter and he’s having an amazing game.  If he shoots lights out for an entire game, has double digit assists and rebounds he is unconscious.  The idea stems from the player attaining a visceral plane of existence beyond themselves, beyond the limitations of their own body.  He has in essence abandoned his own form and become in those moments the game itself.


Flamenco
In dance and music the Spanish refer to it as Duende. Its most commonly associated with Flamenco. With their attempt to quantify this elusive concept they describe a nature that creates something to aspire to.  It carries the power of a dark goddess and an insistent muse inciting liberation from all forms.  The spirit of evocation.  What makes music move us to become it in the form of dance, or when singing or playing an instrument.  It is the tapestry of human will, emotion, thought and form where all pours into and out of the spirit and soul at once.

Christopher Mauer the editor for “In Search of Duende” has isolated it to four key elements, irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.  The Duende is not a possessor but a foe.  It flashes the artist a glimpse of the Universe, life, death and the beyond forcing them to acknowledge the primal forces civilization has attempted to weed out. For to create something of a Duende nature you must drink from the fountain of the divine.  With ambrosia on your lips the art is force of creation reshaping the artist, the viewer and in that moment the fragments of time and space themselves. The artist battles with the dark, the opus, to try and harness it’s power with their own will. The nature of it is to consume and the will of the artist must fight to prevent being lost to it because then it is misspent force producing only destruction.  The terms are simple; you either create or be destroyed. The force cares not which one is the result, only that the show, the dance, the song go on.

Beyond
Duende, being unconscious, are states of love.  Instant blind unquestionable moments of human connection to the will of creation.  Built in a second yet somehow lasts an entire lifetime.  When you hear the plaintive whining, words of desperation, pain, elation, humiliation in the verse, the chords, the pull of a song like Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  The untamed temerity, angst, dark lord rise of Ravel’s Bolero.  The soul shattering burn of desolation, delusion, and degradation of Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves aWoman. You are in its presence.  Its seat its foundation its very will empowered by love, of a concept an idea and even upon occasion an actual person. Our love and ability to feel and pursue it is a myriad of self-serving justifications of our own selfish desire to know joy and joy alone.  However we forbid the whole story choosing to determine the measure of that love, only the joy, only the sweet, only the succinct. 


The beast will not abandon parts of itself to humor your earthbound delusions. It is a full serving, a full course that has to be taken in as it is whole and unbound. It will show you suffering and revel in it knowing how sweet that next climax of joy will now be.  It will bury you under your own filth knowing the elation that freeing yourself from it will bring.  It knows love in ways that only subjugation can embody.  The will of the spirit is not a benign entity but a ravenous specter.  A poltergeist of your own creation that hungers for the fight because in battle alone can it reveal its true face.

Instinctively we seek the ones that will bring us the fight.  We seek the ones that will embody our spirit, empower, provoke, goad so we can rise to the fight again.  Know our true faces. FEEL.  The pain, the rage, the fear, the hope, the rise, the push, the ease, the release, and the fall.  Always it begins and ends with the fall, pain the catalyst and the affirmation of life, of love. Search through those dark, dark, dark spaces.  Love lives even there.  Love sees itself clearly there. It settles with the comfort of an old friend, for in the dark all is free. Stare into its phantom less eyes and know the wonder of the creation of life again and again.  All rises from the darkness and that’s where all shall return.