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Love letters happen on the inside first
All the world is a mirror for me. Whatever I see and react to mirrors something in my internal universe.
When I respond positively to something, I am seeing something that stimulates my internal universe in a positive way.
When I respond negatively to something, I am seeing something that does not fit into how I think the universe should be.
Despite the fact that I can make split-second decisions on what I like or dislike, it’s actually an amazingly complex procedure to describe.
For example, what do you think of Tiger Woods? Bill Clinton? George Bush? Sarah Palin? No matter where you go in your thoughts with any of these people, you’re making all your judgments based on your internal universe and the data you have fed into it. Unless you know these people personally and intimately, you are getting all your data through filtered, mostly opinionated sources. You may make snap judgments on them without even thinking. It doesn’t matter whether they are heroic or demonic to you.
How many thoughts gets out alive?
Do you ever find it fascinating how little of our truth we communicate in the flow of our conversations?
I am not talking about consciously telling lies. I’m talking about all the thoughts we don’t share because we’ve learned that there is an appropriate time and place for everything, and the scope of what’s inappropriate has been growing like a wild weed patch. We sense that too many of our thoughts would be perceived as impolite, naughty, irrelevant, inappropriate. So much good stuff gets lost in the translation from the flow of raw thought to the refined politeness we eventually utter in our social conversation.
“What do you really think about me” gets blanched into “Great weather we’re having, huh?”
I recently wrote a blog post on soul hugging, and something I touched on was the idea of hugging total strangers for a whole minute. Gasp! It was just a minor chord in the piece but it seems to have captured people’s imagination and I thought I would explore it further.
I wonder what the psychic impact on the world would be if we had places where it was socially acceptable to hug strangers. In my mind, the ambiance would be more spiritual like a church than like a single’s bar. Embracing strangers would be respected, even revered. Whether it was free-form or facilitated, people could visit this venue to give and receive long embraces with anybody.
Hug from the soul
Have you ever hugged someone for a whole minute? A whole, long, no-cheating sixty ticks?
That might sound like a piece of cake, especially if you envision or remember hugging the love of your life or if your minute-long hugs were simply a prelude to steamier activities. But what about hugging a friend or relative or (gasp!) even a stranger for a whole minute?
I’d love to see the changes that would occur in our society if we made hugging more prominent and acceptable. I’m not referring to the fleeting body collisions many people in our culture produce for the occasion (“give” would be the wrong word here). You know, the A-frame, don’t blink or you’ll miss it phenomenon.
I’m talking about a true connection, a long pause at the traffic light of time to hold someone in your arms and be present with that person for a whole minute. Hug that person with reverence and respect and empathy. Hug as a prayer and give thanks for our existence by taking the unusual step of holding a kindred soul close.
Exploring the important stuff
For as long as I can remember, I have loved peeling back layers of pretension and social masking we all have been taught to use. I adore having real discussions with real people about real feelings. I don’t have much appetite for non-stop surface talk, especially when it is clear that it’s all about avoiding intimacy.
My favorite kind of group to be in is somewhere that encourages people to open up and tell their stories truthfully. Here is some of my personal history that may shed some light on why I love deep, heartfelt conversations so much..
Friendship is the bridge to another soul
Whenever I see It’s a Wonderful Life and get to the ending that never fails to make me teary-eyed, despite knowing exactly what’s coming, I still find myself both nodding and cringing at the part about no man is a failure who has friends. It tugs at my heart because close friendships have been rare in my life.
How do I explain this? How do I rationalize this? Most important, how do I overcome it?
The idea of true friendship has always been powerful for me, yet ever since encountering the famous sentence “Let’s just be friends” from girls back in high school, I recognized that as a culture we don’t think much of the institution of friends. “Just friends” is an insult, a buy-down, a limiting of a relationship. But then “more than friends” usually means becoming lovers and in a strange way, sex sometimes inhibits intimacy. Lovers frequently keep secrets from one another as a strategy for not rocking the emotional boat with confessions or sharing their vulnerabilities. The result is that lovers are often less intimate than friends and the sex that lovers have is often more like acting in a movie than being real.
Loving you is easy
Part One
I have a personality something like a nice mellow golden retriever. I quite simply love to love. Love to love you, Baby. Yeah.
If I had my way, I would openly love anyone. I’m aware how unrealistic that is on our troubled planet, but in my dream world, loving openly, freely, wildly, and enthusiastically would be a brilliant way to live. I have a natural inclination to look for the good in people; it simply feels better to me to look for good than to look for bad.
I think it would be great not to have to censor my attraction for people. If I liked something about someone I would like to just say so. I could talk about anything without filtering for political correctness or worrying how the other person might misinterpret my words.
In my last blog I wrote about my disappointment in how conversations with blood relatives or adopted families are frequently superficial and often characterized by secrets and lies. I grew up thinking that families should somehow be primary support systems where you could talk about anything from agony to ecstasy.
I have seen very few models of that kind of openness in real life.
But it goes beyond that. I think in general that we are an intimacy-phobic culture. We are trained to be aloof, defensive, surface, catty, and in many cases, mindless (as opposed to mindful.) We are taught that if we are too open to someone, we’ll get hurt.
Is that being cynical and critical? I’m not trying to be. I am trying to express my inner hunger for intimacy and involvement.
So often I feel I have to censor my thoughts in conversations with people. If I have to do a lot of mind-editing, I am not being intimate. Further, it is quite exhausting to spend so much time monitoring every thought and having it rubber-stamped as ACCEPTED or REJECTED by my internal standards and practices board.
Here I am thinking about family dynamics. How “real” can you be with your family?
I don’t know very many people in real life who are real with their blood relatives. I see way too much telling stories and hiding truths.
I know the practicalities of life, but in philosophy this seems rather bizarre. A man and a woman come together and decide to raise a family. Yet as the family is born and takes shape, so many forces intervene. The kids quickly learn not to be truthful with their parents. It’s a survival skill.
