During this two month time of shutdown and isolation due to COVID-19, I suspect many people are wrestling with major longings which are not being met. In the past, these longings were unconsciously filled by the things and experiences we spent our money on whether it be food, leisure, alcohol, clothes, sports, status symbols, properties, books, social gatherings, cars, etc. Or we filled these longings unconsciously through befriending or merging with people who possessed traits in their lives that we enjoyed. Often, this happens because we found them missing in our own life, traits like strength, love, compassion, joyfulness, pleasure, order/structure, etc. Due to the economic and social shutdown of COVID-19, we can no longer do the things that take these longings away. We must now live with them, and this can be hard. However, living with these longings can truly be a gift to us. In this blog, I want to explore the opportunity this time of shutdown is creating around our longings in hope that we will not waste this precious gift that Life is giving us. Leonard Cohen wrote the song “Anthem” in 1992. Within this song, there is a set of lines that are sung many times. These words, seen below, have captured many people’s imaginations including mine. Ring the bells that still ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. During this COVID-19 shutdown, we are seeing all the cracks within our personal lives. Each crack is evident in every uncomfortable longing we feel. Normally these longings are well covered up through the many purchases, activities, and relationships we have in our lives. We usually avoid feeling these uncomfortable cracks until we are forced to due to economic realities (ie. we can no longer afford or are able to buy our emotional fixes), health realities (ie. we can no longer hide the fact we are aging or ill), or relationship realities (ie. people die or move away or no longer meet our needs). Thanks to the magnitude of the COVID-19 shutdown, which is affecting majorly our shopping habits, relating patterns, and financial resources, the cracks within our structured personalities are exposed clearly for us to see and experience. Now that we are made to live with our longings, we soon discover that our minds are often judgemental toward these urges. We frequently view these longings as bad, a sign that there is something wrong with us, a sign of our neediness, especially in our culture that stresses independence, invulnerability, strength and control. This is why we so quickly, often unconsciously, remove these urges by covering them up. But, what would happen if we approached these longings with a totally different attitude? Rather than one of judgement, we perceived our longings as an invitation, an opportunity to take a healing journey toward greater spiritual wholeness. As Cohen sings, these longings and associated cracks are how the light gets into those areas that are asking for spiritual and psychological healing. In the quote below from the famous Sufi mystic Rumi, these longings are really the Divine reaching out to us. If so, are not these cracks the doorway to spiritual growth? These longings, from a Diamond Approach perspective, arise from the holes that have formed in our soul during our early years of life. For us to find what we truly want, we need to understand where these longings come from. It is here that I have found the theory of holes, taught within the Diamond Approach, so useful. The theory of holes is based on major theories of psychology related to human development and attachment but integrates them within a spiritual framework. When we are born, our soul is born in an infant state with the potential to develop into a mature whole soul. All of the qualities of spirit are already present in our baby's soul waiting to sprout and develop, qualities like love, guidance, compassion, strength, courage, peace, inner support, trust, grace, connection, etc. There are no holes in an infant's soul. However, by the time we enter our teen years, the foundational aspects of our personality structure are already in place. Some aspects of our personality are free and reflective of our true nature and essence of Being but there are many other personality aspects that are structured, protective, reactive and restrict how we express ourselves so that we can cope with life. These coping patterns were developed to keep us from feeling the negative feelings found within the holes within our soul. Within the Diamond Approach, these coping patterns are known as ego structures. In the Christian tradition, they make up our fallen or sinful nature. How does this fall from grace, as it is known in the Christian tradition, happen? For us, as a child, to develop toward full spiritual wholeness, we needed a "perfect holding environment" from parents, family, and life that allowed our soul to mature in these ways. After many years of reflecting about what a perfect holding environment might look like, I confess that it is not as obvious as it sounds. I don't think it is possible to pass through our childhood years without us developing coping patterns and ego structures that make up our fallen nature. We come out of our childhood with life strategies that avoid pain or seek pleasure, or include a combination of both. Furthermore, there is no such thing as perfect parents or a perfect family, or even a perfect life, for the reality is that life, itself, is not perfect as COVID-19 is showing us again. Suffering, pain, and challenges are a part of life. This means that an important part of an ideal holding environment is not creating a setting where we, as children, never experience hardship but rather become a safe place where we develop skills and insights that allow us to work through and grow from these difficult experiences when they arise. We also need to integrate pleasurable life experiences in beneficial ways. If our developmental years are full of only pleasurable experiences, we will still enter our adult years with a significant fallen nature. It is only in those moments of challenge that the qualites of Spirit like strength, power, resilience and determination arise and develop within us. It seems that a "perfect holding environment" involves helping us integrate, in advantageous ways, both pleasurable and challenging times in our life. However, none of us grew up in perfect holding environments. Instead, we, as young children, experienced many moments in our lives when life was too painful, too scary, or we didn’t get enough of certain experiences like love, grace, encouragement, etc. To cope with these difficult times, we developed coping strategies that basically numbed us or took us away from these painful realities creating many holes or deficiencies in our soul. To live with these deficiencies, we quickly developed many other coping strategies that were our child’s best attempts at living with these limitations. Or, our life was too easy and pleasurable due to us being blessed too much by doting parents or by the many privileges that life can provide for us. Due to these many blessings, we, as children, came to expect others, God, even life itself, to spoil us. Having such beliefs and expectations, we developed another set of life strategies that caused us to look to others and life itself to cater us. As a result, another set of holes formed in our soul around the divine qualites of strength, power, determination, and resilience, even faulty concepts of love, truth, and confidence. By the time many of us become age 6 or 7, most of these holes in our soul are in placed, which is when our self reflection and logical thinking begin to develop. This is why these holes, and the coping strategies around them, feel like they are part of our personality, who we think we are, our identity. These holes or deficiencies are at the base of our longings in life. Since we feel these qualities missing in our lives, we look to the outside physical world to get these experiences. This is exactly the reason the prodigal son, in the well-known parable in the Bible (Luke 15: 11-24), left home. He believed the outside world had everything that he longed for. We too find ourselves, pulled by our longings, in many external directions. We believe the outside world has all that we are missing inside. This means, however, that our healing spiritual journey involves going in the opposite direction that we are tempted to go. Instead of looking outside for the solution to our longings, we are to turn inward. As we learn to contemplate our longings, and what is at the root of them, we become aware of all our coping patterns, our patterns of thinking, our patterns of feelings, our patterns of doing, all patterns designed to take us away from the painful or unhelpful experiences and beliefs at the root of our urgings. These ego patterns function like bandages that have no healing properties for the goal of these ego structures is to take us away from the painful or unhelpful experiences and issues in our life, not transform them. The thought of taking off some of these bandages is a way too scary for most people. This is why we seek out a spiritual director or a psychospiritual therapist or some member of our faith community or friendship circle so that we can be with people who know how to support us as we begin to explore the painful wounds beneath our coping bandages. As we do so, we will discover what Cohen meant when he sung, “the crack lets the light in.” What the theory of holes teaches us is that these qualities of Being are not found outside us in the physical world, and thus we will never find them there. Rather, they are found within us, within our very soul, often buried within the very holes and memories of our past that we have sought to avoid all our life. This inward journey home means revisiting those longings and deficiencies with the hope of discovering the very qualities and experiences of life that we are missing. As we permit ourselves to feel the negative emotions and unhelpful beliefs at the base of our longings, we will eventually experience a compassionate loving tender energy flow within our soul toward us, the first signs of Divine light getting in through the crack. This soothing energy, having a similar quality to sadness, is known as essential compassion within the Diamond Approach or the spirit of God’s compassion within the Christian tradition. The soothing energy of tenderness softens our soul making it more vulnerable allowing us to enter more deeply into our painful memory. As this happens, new, previously buried, experiences and insights arise from remembering those times, an indication of more Divine light breaking in. As we receive these new truths, we may feel anger, even hatred, emerge toward the injustice or unfairness or unhelpfulness that has happened to us. These energies of strength and hatred are evidence of Divine strength and Divine power arising, more signs of God’s light getting in. These more powerful energies from God are often needed to give us what we need to bring about change in our problematic behavior or our unhelpful environment. Now, our human ego, with its many coping patterns, either hates these energies of sadness, anger, and hatred and shuts them down for safety reasons (these feelings are too dangerous). Or it loves these energies and seeks to hijack them for its own purposes to make sure no one ever hurts us again. When this happens, the cracks of vulnerability are quickly covered up by our coping patterns and the transformation process comes to a dead halt. This is why a supportive companion or faith community is essential so that these times of light coming through the cracks of our egoic personality are experienced as healing moments, not re-traumatizing incidents. When we permit the Divine light of compassion, truth, strength, and power to shine through the cracks within our personality shell, these spiritual energies penetrate and transform the painful wounds and unhelpful experiences of our past. Part of the transformation process involves first releasing all the negative emotions trapped underneath the egoic bandages of our personality through these opened cracks. This is often the role of Divine Compassion at first, to allow us to freely vent all of our emotions within a gracious tender field of grace, free of judgement. Until that emotional energy is released, there is often little space for the essential qualities of compassion, truth, strength or power to emerge with any depth into our experience. Once that pent-up emotion is freed, the crack opens more and there is now spaciousness for the different aspects of God’s spirit to minister to the wound at the root of those powerful trapped emotions, leading to much spiritual healing.
In this blog, I have explored how our longings that we are experiencing due to COVID-19 are really a doorway into profound spiritual healing. I invited you to see this time of waiting for the pandemic to pass as an opportunity, an oportunity to look deeper and discover how your longings are really a crack that makes it possible for God's spirit to enter more deeply into your soul. As you allow God's light to enter the cracks within your personality shell, you will discover God's spirit ministering to your deepest longings. In doing so, you will learn that your sense of wholeness cannot be found in the external world as you thought, or as our culture often teaches. No, your true spiritual home is right here, in the present moment, within yourself. As you explore your sense of Being (God's spirit) within yourself, you will soon discover that your experience of Being expands to include everyone and every living thing in the world, that you and I and all of life are part of a Greater Being, what the Christian tradition calls God. Questions to ponder: 1. During this time of COVID-19, what longings have you become aware of? 2. What are you missing in your life right now that is causing you to be aware of each of these longings? What aspects of Being or God's spirit are you missing in life that is causing you to experience these longings (compassion, grace, truth/knowing, strength, feeling valued, feeling loved, confidence, determination, resilience, joy, pleasure, etc.)? 3. What coping strategies have you discovered that cover-up your holes in your soul? How do these holes/longings connect to your experiences during your childhood? Which ones are due to painful experiences in your childhood? Which ones are due to life being too easy for you in your childhood? 4. What are your hopes as you turn inward and begin your journey home?
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