Tag: worthiness

Love and Shadow Work

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

– James Baldwin

If I love you, I don’t want you to be stuck, I want you to grow. If I love you, I don’t want to get stuck, I want to grow with you, for you, for all of us. To me the very purpose of being in a relationship is to grow with someone. I have no interest in tranquility if it is housed on a gurgling cesspool of unconscious dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Such tranquility is a farce, it is not real, it is not peaceful. Peace can only ever arise from making conscious that which hides in the shadows of our being. Carl G. Jung referred to this as shadow work. And it is precisely in (conscious, self-reflective) partnership with another person that such work is particularly feasible. Why? Because when I see you – truly see you – day in day out, and if I am the slightest bit aware, those shadows of yours are going to announce themselves to me sooner or later. We all have them. In this inevitable process I will feel those shadows hurled at me with sharp clarity, at which point I can say: “Hey, you! Look at this. Here’s something to dig into because it hurts me and others”. And you, dear one, can do the same for me: “Your behavior is painful to me, let’s address what is happening here”.

And guess what happens through this type of relational labor? Peace happens. Peace happens within the awareness of the chaos. Peace happens within the acknowledgment of the pain. The moment we are conscious of our destructive and dysfunctional behavior, is the moment we can heal it, is the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what it means to me to be in a loving relationship; to trust someone to respectfully call out my bullshit because that person cares about me enough to see me do better. If we can lovingly do that for each other, Love will continue to grow, intimacy will continue to deepen, life will expand in richness and in meaning. To Love you is to see you and to support you in becoming the best possible version of yourself, which in turn helps me become the best possible version of myself. Such Love is evolutionarily, reciprocal, and regenerative.

Unfortunately, we are collectively pretty terrified of being uncomfortable. And if one thing can be said about shadow work: It is ridiculously uncomfortable. However, dismissing discomfort is much like closing the curtains to life. We have been duped by the sugary platitude of “Happily Ever After” to buy into the false idea that relationships are there to make us happy. As if it’s even possible to affix a transitory emotional state to a lifetime of perpetual changes. Philosophically we can likely agree that it is questionable whether it’s even possible to gain happiness through external acquisition. There is surely a correlation between wellbeing and having our basic human needs met, but there is a limit to how much joy can be derived from external goods and services. If happiness is an inside job, it should come to no surprise your new fling isn’t gonna give it to you. Yet in the realm of relationship we seem so addicted to this infantile storyline: “Godspeed ye innocent lovebirds carried into the distance on a sparkling carriage just smiling happily and chugging along ad infinitum towards an elusive horizon! Your coupling grants you entrance to the ranks of well-adjusted extras in a lifelong Colgate commercial!” Not only does it sound boring AF, it’s delusional as all hell. This is not fucking Pleasant Ville, you’ve got a life to live, buddy.

We are humans, we die, we lose loved ones, we meet sickness, misfortune, we grieve, we fail, we fall apart, we are wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are wrong a lot. Try to smile through that. Happy yet? What’s that? You are telling me you can’t sustain that radiant smile of yours for all of eternity? Is the denial starting to hurt? Is it beginning to feel weird? You see, I am not in this life to witness a staged performance of perpetual happiness. To be clear, I have nothing against ‘happy’ as an experience. Bless ‘happy’. I just believe we have been misguided to measure our success in life, as well as our sense of worth, on how long we can sustain a state of happiness. But happiness is not an achievement you lock into for life, it is a gift, and it arrives on our doorstep naturally when we align with our essence and learn against all odds to love ourselves fiercely and deeply. The only way we can love ourselves deeply is through a systematic dismantling of all of the places where we are in denial and full of shit. And yes, indeed, we can lovingly see each other through such a process*.

So, in lieu of a feigned smile, please give me your pain, your struggles, and your mistakes. Let’s work through the reality, the grit, the rawness, the really disturbing shadow of it all. Allow me to love you entirely and let’s be real about all the places where we have more work to do. Let’s dance through the truth of our humanness together. Let’s marvel at the messes we’ve made. Let’s shake our heads really hard. Let’s sit for a moment in how much it hurts. Breathe through it. That’s where freedom and laughter simply come to greet us on their own accord. It is such a glorious relief to surrender to the realness of it all. I am in this life for the remarkable joy of “Evolving Ever After,” instead.

* For the record, I am speaking from a perspective of personal relationships here, but this very same process holds true for our collective struggles as well. From the micro to the macro – everything is connected. James Baldwin has written extensively on the role of truth-telling in relation to racism and other injustices in our societies. True patriotism – the love for a country – thus resides in the people who dare to shine light on the horrible shadows of our nations, because only through such labor can we even start to imagine peace. Healing can only begin when we uncover the festering wounds of our collective past and present and start scooping the puss out. No, it isn’t pretty, but it is what Love does when it cares about something.

Guesthouses

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

For 14 months I have slept in spare bedrooms and on couches, in hostels, in tents and on the occasional bus or balcony – relying on the hospitality of others, unable, still, to recreate what I lost, and establish a new home for myself. I know it seems strange to some people, but I also suppose most people don’t know what it feels like, so it doesn’t really matter what they think. I write this last sentence with relative ease now, but this understanding hasn’t come easy. We have to unlearn so much of our cultural and psychological programming to truly care less about other people’s judgements of us… I am still diligently working through it.

Since having been involuntarily uprooted and catapulted from one continent to another, I’ve struggled with a need for my own space, and I have wrestled with my dependency on others. It’s been a challenging time on many levels. But I have also felt a strong resistance at the thought of living in a new permanent residence by myself while pretending to be a well-adjusted independent single woman in her early thirties. As if I could lose home and hearth one minute and, without blinking an eye, feign having my shit together while painting the walls emerald green and millennial pink in some other house for me to occupy. As if it doesn’t hurt like hell. As if it hasn’t fucked me up. As if I am not still grieving a loss that extends from the material into the emotional and spiritual aspects of my being.

For years I had poured myself into the creation of a home-space and it got suddenly ripped away from me. My identity as a spouse, a stepmom, a homemaker, a caretaker of cats and plants, a maker of family meals, a collector of eclectic furniture; it all vanished one moment to the next. My hands left empty, entirely unsure of who exactly to BE now. To truly learn the lessons from this predicament, there was one message overruling all other sentiments in my mind and it sounded like this: STOP.

Stop. Stand still. Wait. Sit in this astounding agony. Be broken down for as long as it takes. Resist all external pressures towards “normalcy” – be wholly, repulsively, irritatingly, frustratingly “abnormal”. Not because you want to be recalcitrant, but because it is the healthiest thing you can do at the moment. However long it takes?

Yes. However long it takes.

The second message of equal weight has been ringing through the hallways of my heart repeatedly during this time: TRUST. Whatever this is, trust that it will bring you closer to yourself. Trust you are supported even in times of relentless turmoil. Trust the light will return. Trust your love and your vision and your intuition. Trust this path. You don’t have to know exactly where it leads.

And so I have been defying norms and convention, a full-grown adult, homeless, single and childless, without even a damned coffeemaker or vacuum cleaner or piece of furniture to call my own anymore. If life has a reset button, someone took a small pin to mine and relentlessly pressed it until the whole system was rebooted. Back at the factory settings. It’s confusing and torturous at times, yet when I look in the mirror I can look myself in the eye and say: “I Love you. I am so unbelievably proud of you, you sensitive, courageous spirit. You are doing so well with all of this”.

There’s a learning curve to losing everything. There’s a learning curve to accepting support. There’s a learning curve to living in proverbial guesthouses for a while. We are all guests, I guess. It’s just easy to forget when we crown ourselves rulers of our insulated Queen and Kingdoms of Domesticity. But do we truly own anything? The planet we get to live on? The bodies we move around in? These roofs, these couches, these cups of tea, these blankets? Take nothing for granted.

We are all reliant upon each other. We have just been taught that we can and ought to be in complete control of our own little private corners of reality, and that if we lose that control, we have somehow failed at life. We judge ourselves and feel the judgement of others. “I didn’t plan for this.” “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Turns out we don’t really have that much control, not as much as we think we do by a long shot. Control is a rigidity that feels like strength at first, until it reveals itself as a barrier to a life blossoming.

I am, for the time being, experiencing life as a transient guest in other people’s houses, relying on the goodwill of those around me, family, friends, hospitable strangers and hostel hosts. I am floating through a vast stretch of liminal space, which I presume I have to learn to soar through freely now. To live with something I can only describe as a fluidity of presence. To receive gifts, over and over. Receiving is a difficult task for many of us self-reliant, control-freakish, independent creatures of habit. But it’s a powerful exercise. To say “thank you” again and again and again, until all uncomfortable fear-based-pride is pulverized, THANK YOU.

I know deep in my heart, there will be a time I will occupy a home-space to call my own again, with a coffeemaker, millennial pink walls, and a bunch of amazing rugs. I know that I will open that space for others who are then where I am now. To pay it forward. To give what I have learned to receive. To support others on similar journeys. I find solace in that knowing. And I trust it will happen in exactly the right place and in exactly the right time.

Evolving Consciousness

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

I am not perfect. I get stuck and hooked and I trip over myself plenty. I don’t know everything. I do not have all the answers. There have been times I’ve felt shame around this. How can I be whole without being perfect? There are still moments where I think I should not speak my truth before it is perfected. Who am I to use my voice? To write about the Sacred? To point out the wounds of our world?

Then something in me goes: Wait a minute, that sounds like a tune that you picked up from our cultural command of unworthiness: “Don’t you dare think yourself worthy because it will mess with a system predicated on your perpetual sense of insecurity!”

But, dear one, worthiness already lives inside of us. It is a birthright, no matter how much our societies have tried to oppress or obscure it. Our work is to re-claim our worth, to stop hiding from it, to stop rejecting it, to stop repressing it. What are we so afraid of?

We are evolutionary creatures. Everything we do is a path, not towards a perfect destination, but towards growth. Beyond what we can now imagine as some type of destination lies still more path and still more possibilities for expansion of consciousness. My only job here is to commit to that path with reverence, gratitude and conscious presence as an evolutionary being who is always learning. That is how I serve the whole. That is the place from where I can legitimately speak. Not because I claim to have all the answers, but because we are all in this together, like links in a chain, connected. We grow towards healing together and we evolve together. When I stretch out my hand to reach for you and pull you up, you may accept it, just like I rely on the pointed finger of someone else to guide the way onward. We build ladders and throw out ropes and make signposts along the way because we need each other, and, quite frankly, this whole experience is a lot more fun with loving company.