We are almost constantly bombarded by changes, losses, and separations. If these changes go against the outcomes we are attached to, we will be facing feelings of abandonment.Because feelings of loss can seem uncomfortable to face we might look for ways to avoid them. For many of us that means stockpiling layers of unexpressed grief. In our subconscious we may still be holding grief over lost friends, lost family members, lost loves, lost jobs, lost belongings, lost health, lost arguments etc.
Some say that God is all. Those of us who remember the experience of being one with all (one with God) are likely to attempt to describe it with words like unconditional love, blissfulness, deep peacefulness, an emptiness that is totally full, a total unity, or total fulfillment with no desires or wants for anything else because there is nothing outside the wholeness.
I would suggest that the deepest most primal sense of separation or abandonment comes when we forget that oneness. It's like stepping out of the Garden of Eden back into an experience of separation. It can set up a longing to return to the beauty of remembering the oneness. The experience is so fulfilling that it is very tempting to get attached to getting back to it. The depth of attachment sets up a depth of grief about not remembering the oneness. If the grief seems too immense to handle we may attempt to forget that a state of oneness even exists, hoping that we can deny the grief by denying there is anything to grieve for. (Similar to losing a past relationship and then trying to deny that we ever had any wonderful loving times, but instead only focusing on the "bad" or "mediocre" times.)
Whenever we join intimately with someone or something it can be a taste that triggers a memory of oneness with all. Whenever that intimacy ends it can be a taste that triggers a memory of leaving that Garden of Eden.
It can be hard to recognize how much grief we have stored in ourselves because we get so sophisticated at denying and covering it. (You know - keep a stiff upper lip - don't let it tremble with grief.) One clue to discovering our suppression is to look at where we are attached to controlling outcomes.
Even goal setting and so-called "positive affirmations" if practiced with an attachment to results are just thinly disguised techniques to try to control life's flow. (Yes, if done without attachment they may represent our willingness to join with life's flow by playfully adding our free floating preferences into the co-creative mix, but let's honestly look at when we use goals and positivity because of our attachment to getting somewhere else, or getting away from something we dislike.) If instead we relaxed into the present moment what would we have to face?
Our attempts to control can be based in our primal fear that uncontrolled events may trigger us into feeling our built-up layers of unexpressed grief.
One way to control it is to deny ourselves the opportunity to get deeply intimate with anyone or anything for fear that our loving will lead to attachment. We know that if we are attached and then we lose that which we are attached to we will be facing more grief and loss.
It has been said, and may be true, that every fear, at its roots, is a fear of loss. It would follow that if we attempted to avoid fear, we would attempt to grasp and control things and situations in a way to avoid loss.
What if instead we made it a practice to face fear, to face our losses and to face our senses of abandonment?
What I've experienced and seen while exploring grief is that at times it can seem like the backlog of grief is endless. This gives the illusion that it is pointless to face and feel it. Yet with practice, feeling loss becomes less and less intimidating, the fear becomes less and less debilitating. It seems that the way to liberate ourselves is to face all of who we are including the grief. We may find that once we have totally grieved a particular loss that our old attachment dissolves and we are left with more freedom.
We may find that our losses were all based in an idea of separation. We may find that the roots of the idea of separation are based in our forgetting that we have the ability to energetically stay connected to all things, whether or not it seems like it at the level of form. For instance, we may have lost a parent or friend to death. The more fully we grieve through our attachments to wanting them to still be available to us in form (in their bodies), the more fully we can open to see that energetically we are never separate from them. We may even start to experience the oneness; the connection to the totality of the whole universe. The connection can shift from a theory we hold in our head or an idea we read about, into a real taste of oneness.
If, instead of experiencing the fullness of who we are emotionally and physically, we instead attempt to deny, to make wrong, or to bypass the richness of our emotional and physical beingness, how can we ever feel whole? Is not the very act of attempting to avoid our emotions or our physicality a way of increasing our sense of separation?
I would suggest that we could experience that separation and abandonment are an illusion, not by theorizing about it in our minds, but by a willingness to face and feel through our emotions. We can honor that our emotions and bodies are part of the oneness. In joining with all aspects of our being we dissolve the illusion of separation. We bust the abandonment myth.
