Poetic Revelations: SelfMore, not SelfLess
Finding new love equations
"No matter what path we choose to honor, there will always be conflict to negotiate."
— Mark Nepo, “The Friction of Being Visible”
This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called life. Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting.
Selected Poems:
rebirth, Alex Elle
Have you Prayed, Li-Young Lee
Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,
Change doesn’t always feel good and yet (apparently) its the only constant. Sometimes I don’t like…people I enjoy leaving, systems I rely on dissolving, or strange new demands. This letter picks up on last week’s, exploring Love and power in our relationships. (Dance Chapel is ON tonight.)
SelfMore, not SelfLess. I saw an instagram reel play on my phone screen. I hadn’t chosen it, it just happen to pop into my display. It showed two young people planning a wedding receiving advice from another young person about marriage. Fine and well, until he ran through a long list of what Love is. One of the words was “selfless.”
It ticked me off. “Less?” I wanted to shout. “The world needs more of us, not less.”
Yes, Love sacrifices. But even in this, there is a choice and a want. Such as, I want my husband to experience his ineffable happiness with cats more than my desire for hairless furniture. Or, I want my mother to have this joy more than I want sleep. Or, a child to have protection, happiness or pleasure more than something for myself.
And so it goes. Power comes from choosing what we want to give (and receive) for ourselves. Assessing those trade-offs is only something each of us can do for ourselves.
Case in Point. For four months, if not six, my husband and I were ramming heads. It got so horrible that we often began bickering and arguing within a minute of being together in a room. I never wanted to be in this type of marriage and could not figure out how we got here. At least twice, I wanted to find an eject button.
But…there were little respites. In these spaces, we found a way to communicate about what was happening. It isn’t easy when grievances pile up. But as soon as I felt a piece of me was heard and accepted, I could make room for a piece of him. Like this, we cleared out old invisible agreements and made new ones. Its like we are a new equation now. Rebalanced. Its kind of like this quote from an NPR article on marriages and conflict:
Conflict really has a purpose," says John Gottman, "and the purpose is mutual understanding.
I might add, greater harmony. There was a purpose in our conflict. Our relationship has more room for the other person now. There is more of me in it, and more of him. There is mutual respect and caring and affection and laughter. We have more room to dance with each other. Being honest about our feelings, we both found a real well of Love in the center of it all. I am relieved to find we can return to simply enjoying and loving each other again.
Yes, sometimes Love asks us to breakdown old walls so we can grow side by side. All of this takes honest communication —giving it and receiving it. Its this return to self-honesty that is a saving grace in our conflicts. Mark Nepo writes this:
It's taken me 30 of my 49 years to realize that not being who I am is more deadly, and it has taken the last 19 years to try to make a practice of this. What this means, in a daily way, is that I have to be conscientious about being truthful and resist the urge to accommodate my truth away. ~ Mark Nepo
Don’t get me wrong. There are many ways to speak our truth; direct conflict is not always needed. But finding pathways to speak to honestly in our relationships goes from merely useful to necessary as we age.
Agreements. All I know is, Big Love just is. Big Love wants you to be whole-ly yourself as the natural Love and Light you already are. When you step into this level of inner leadership, nearly everything else becomes about communication and making agreements. Most of us automatically give of ourselves, especially to those younger and older. But there is a place where we can step into making new agreements based on what’s right for us. My sense is…when we model this authenticity, we secretly allow others to step into their inner Leadership and find whats true for themselves also. This is how we walk arond, like little relational equations, with each other.
With so much Love for you, your journey and your unfolding.
Stay #heartwoke.
Monisha
NOTES:
Dance Chapel is ON tonight, 3/05/2024