sick of peeling back the onion layers?
I had been peeling away for years. I used to believe it was a normal part of life and it would be ongoing until one day I reached ‘enlightenment’. I remember once going to a weekend workshop and a participant proudly said to me he’d accepted the fact that in this lifetime, he would be healing, and so was dedicating the rest of his life to ‘peeling off onion layers’.
I’ve never forgotten that comment. At the time, that statement landed on me with a resounding inner ‘thwang’ and I sensed there was something missing. Something I didn’t have the life experience to be able to verbalise. Today I see things differently. Tomorrow I may have even more insight. But right here and now, I would use the following words to describe my experiences.
Just imagine…
There are two worlds you could inhabit at any one time (not quite Jung!)… In one world, I’m living within a frame that has been built based on my ‘wound’. By wound I mean, the pivotal moment a life experience landed with considerable emotional impact and I, in my innocence, gave meaning to that moment – a meaning which separated me from my true self and had me looking outwards to fix the discomfort I felt inside. For myself and many of my clients, this pivotal moment happened in utero, or soon after birth and the feeling ‘patterns’ of this moment can even be traced back to previous generations. Fascinating!
Once upon a timE
There was a little baby girl born in the time when a male child was revered and coveted as first born. She is preverbal and her brain is undeveloped, so she ‘feels’ the world around her and in those moments after birth she feels the disappointment of her mother. Even though, only moments later, joy and love flooded over her, the initial imprint had been recorded in her unconscious. Over the years, each time she is told “No!” or scolded by a parent, the feeling memory of being not enough, is re-activated and strengthened. The unconscious has created an ‘identity’, which is reinforced as the child looks at the world through the glasses of ‘not good enough’. When she can’t do a cartwheel the first time, she affirms she is not good enough. When her parents are too busy, it’s because she’s not good enough. As an adult, each time she peels off another layer of the onion peel, she has new insights into every experience that landed as a feeling of not good enough. Her inner work shows her that her perception is not true, it helps her to shine a light on the truth of certain situations and forgive. These experiences create a feeling of inner empowerment. What gets confusing for her is why the empowerment doesn’t last when she returns home to her husband and children.
She is still living within the world of her wound. In this world, she is separate from her true nature because of that unconscious frame constructed in her unconscious at a very young age. The discomfort she feels drives her to do more work, learn more, strive for new levels of awareness and insight – she is forever being shown how much more work she has to do, because, you guessed it… she’s not good enough.
Remember? There are two worlds.
As Rumi poetically expresses “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field…” This field is the other world. The natural world, beyond separation. Beyond ideas of ‘not enough’, ‘unlovable’, or ‘unacceptable’.
The way I see it is, we can remain in the ‘world’ of the wounded state – where I am striving to heal, to address my hurts and childhood pains, to fix my relationships, to uplevel, upskill, and upgrade. Or I can apply a natural process that uses the activations brought to me by my life to flip into my natural state – beyond the separation unconsciously held in place by my wound. There’s huge value in understanding ourselves, our wounds and integrating our past. However, I feel the greatest value, comes by moving beyond the unconscious frame of separation and living in a state of natural flow. The bridge that takes me to this ‘field’ is my feelings. The keeper I have had to discipline to keep the gate open so I can cross, is my mind. In the field, I use life experiences to deepen the connection to those around me and the co-dependent or dis-connective behaviours I once used, no longer hold any power over me.
Peel the onion layers back to find more onion, or apply a simple system that flips you into your natural state so you can use the onion to create the most awesome dish you’ve ever eaten.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other’ doesn’t make any sense.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.” Rumi
Sending love,
Lisa
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