The part of me I don’t want you to see


hiding

©istockphoto/sorendls

 

“I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost… I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.

walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

I walk down another street.”

― Portia NelsonThere’s a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery

Yesterday, I was talking with my wise friend Sandy about being annoyed to find myself in all too familiar territory.  When it comes to relationships, as the saying goes, I don’t like to make the same mistake twice:  I make it two or three more times, just to be sure.   Sandy suggested that we get two chairs, so I could dialogue between the part of me that was frustrated and the part of me that was making the mistakes.     I headed for the latter chair but jumped back up almost soon as I sat down, as if the chair was red hot, so intense was my reluctance to be in that place.

Falling in the hole is like falling asleep and waking up in a different world, a dark place in which I am disconnected from my sources and resources, a Winter place of starvation and survival.  Utterly disconnected from Spirit.   The part that is not merely frustrating, but actually terrifying, is that when I am in the hole I forget there is a world outside the hole to climb out towards. I forget who I really am.  The hole can be a place of excruciating and almost unbearable pain.  It is where I lose the Truth and I am in hell, lost in the suffering of my own mind’s making.

Sitting with relief in the other chair, it became clear that there was much more beneath my frustration about why I kept falling in to that particular hole when ‘I know better’. There  was a deep sense shame and beyond that, such anger, self-loathing about the person I become when I am in the hole.   When I looked at the chair, I felt scorn and hatred at the stupid, depressed, afraid, old, poor, abandoned, needy, selfish, ugly, fat, lonely, lazy, hurting, greedy, despairing, self-destructive, failure of a woman in front of me.   I could hardly stand to look at what I see.  And I certainly don’t want anyone else to know these parts of me exist.

But suddenly, something shifted inside me. I felt the hatred dissipate, replaced to my relief with a new understanding.  I stood up, instinctively knowing that this new feeling didn’t quite belong to the parts of me in either chair.   I placed a cushion in between the chairs and moved towards it to represent this expansive feeling, quite literally a new perspective.     I realized that this feeling which I couldn’t quite identify at first, was recently familiar.   And then it came to me.  It was the feeling I had with one of my patients, earlier this week when I could hardly bear to see her suffering and had been overcome with tears of deep grief at not being able to take away her pain.   It was Compassion.

Compassion for the one in the hole, but also as I looked at both the chairs, for the other one, the one outside who is so afraid to see the horror in the hole,  terrified that if she gets too close,  people may see the resemblance, decide she is broken and un-loveable and condemn her down there too.  Seeing this it becomes so clear that if the one outside would choose not to turn away, she could throw a rope to the captive in the hole and set her free.    Which reminded me of the last line of the piece I had written about my patient;

“If love could build a ladder out of suffering, I would have her touch the stars tonight.”

It seems fitting to be illuminating my inner darkness on the Summer Solstice.   And I wish you the strength and the courage to remember to shine the light of compassion into the places where you suffer, so we can heal together.  The fearless gaze of love will set us free.