Can I Make You Feel Safe?

Sometimes, I hear folks speak of their safety or lack of it. The most frequent expression is, "I don't feel safe," often spoken in reference to being in the presence of a particular person or a group/venue, as in, "I don't feel safe around J____." I wonder about these words and what they really mean.

If I don't feel safe, then I must feel myself to be in danger. If so, in danger from what? I am lucky to live in a part of the world where I am not in immediate physical danger. No overt war is being waged inside my country's borders. My neighborhood is without visible criminal elements and the dangers that follow their illegal enterprises. There aren't even any vicious looking dogs on my block. Even J_____, that person around whom "I don't feel safe," is not waving a weapon at me or advancing upon me with menace.

Many of those from whom I have heard this sentiment -- "I don't feel safe" -- live in similar circumstances of apparent safety. This mismatch of reality and perception begs the question, then: What is the source of danger? I look around and ask myself, is there someone lurking nearby ready to do this person harm? Is there an impending natural or man-made disaster roaring toward us? Every time, the answer is no. But the implied plea is for someone else to take some action to remove or reduce the threat. "I don't feel safe" seems to often be a request that someone do something about that lack of safety. Maybe we should make J_____ go away? Or maybe we just need him/her to act differently?

If there is no imminent threat of physical harm, then the fearsome danger must be from less tangible harms -- emotional or psychological damages. Fine. Valid. I appreciate that this damage can be as great, greater even, than physical harm. But how can you be made safe when your fear is of humanity's human-ness? Yes, there are a few individuals out there who seem to be on a mission to be mean but my experience is that, mostly, this kind of damage happens when well-intentioned, even loving, friends or family members "act out" of their own wounds. When I am emotionally or psychologically hurt by someone's behavior, it is most often when that person is reacting from a subconscious fear, rather than acting with conscious intent to hurt me.

Can I make you, me, or anyone else feel safe from that kind of harm? Can I stop every person in the world from acting out their internal dramas in ways that affect others? Well....in a word, no.

The 7 Childhood Treasures offers an alternative to this impossibility. You can make yourself safe from that kind of harm. Never again do you need to feel that you are not safe, if you have two wondrous tools. First, you need an awareness that you always have choice about your behavior (another blog post, another day). Second, you need boundaries.

Loving you as you need to be loved

I feel so clearly this morning how love is an act of patience and presence. Love asks not to be pushed or hurried. It says, "I am a river that flows," and I cannot force the river to flow faster. By the same token, if I  surrender to the river, I may be spun in a whirlpool, battered upon rocky rapids, tossed over the edge of a waterfall, or floated gently into a pocket of stagnation. Love requires awareness of and eyes-wide navigation of Her currents. The act of loving is one of focused learning, not of A-B-Cs and 1-2-3s, but of the contours of another's heart, mind, and soul.

In the marvelous book, All About Love, bell hooks quotes M. Scott Peck's

definition of love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." This definition of love appeals to me, as it requires choice and intention. These words describe love as my own directed action, rather than as something I "fall" into. These words require me to be conscious of -- and present to -- both myself and you, as my beloved. Loving each other as adults requires the same focused attention as parenting a newborn. I must see each subtle clue and cue that communicates what you need. I need to learn, thoroughly, how you need to be loved.

bell hooks goes on to write, "To truly love we must mix various ingredients -- care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication."This view of love explains why Love is not one of the 7 Childhood Treasures. Love requires that ALL the Treasures be developed -- gemstones cut just so and polished to a lustrous glow -- to reveal every possible facet of their beauty. It is the integration of the capacities for Trust, Independence, Faith, Negotiation, Vision, Compromise and Acceptance that enable me to intentionally love you, to love you with recognition and respect for who you are, not with affection, only. I can easily be affectionate with anyone. Truly seeing and respecting someone requires focused and joyful effort.

Consciously seeking and creating

Yes. I freely admit it. I am an extremely sporadic blogger right now. Don't look; I'll fess up: I last posted on February 15th, almost 7 weeks ago. I have many quite excellent reasons to explain my absence but know that none of them is truly important right now. I also have much to say that will be MUCH more interesting and enlivening! Please don't judge me. :)

This morning I listened to a video sent to me by a friend -- a heady little exploration of the intersections between spirituality and quantum physics. One of the scientists in the piece said, "The act of consciousness searching is the creative force that puts something in place."

Fascinating. That statement exactly describes how I feel about Leaps (and smaller movements) of Faith. When I truly believe -- heart, mind, and soul -- that I have a
purpose beyond my daily mundane life, then I become that "consciousness searching." I say to the universe, to life, to the Divine: "I see this possibility that has not yet become reality. I believe in it and I will give my time, energy and focus to make it so."

This gift of belief in and conscious searching for a Big Dream is how I define the Childhood Treasure of Faith. Real commitment to a life purpose is, indeed, a creative force that puts many things in place. For what are you consciously searching? And no, I don't mean the shiny new car or house you want. What is the change you wish to see in the world? What is your conscious searching creating, right now? What is being put in place that was not there before?

Is There Love Enough for Me?

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. Remember how you experienced this day in childhood? My own childhood was, perhaps, longer ago that some of yours, so my experience may be different from yours. In my middle class elementary school, each child decorated a shoe box with tissue and construction paper hearts in red, pink, lavender and white, adding touches of lace-like paper doilies, if we were lucky enough to have some.Through a slot in the box's lid, our classmates dropped small white envelopes containing their offerings of love and friendship. Inside each envelope, an image of a cowboy, princess, space ranger or ballerina asked, "Will you be my valentine?"

Back then, teachers did not require that every child give a valentine to every other child, as I believe most do today. Perhaps adults in the late 1950s and early 60s were not so concerned that a child's self-esteem is fragile and must be protected from all negative experience. What I remember is that there was always a moment of noticing that some child in my class had not given me a valentine. There was that momentary heartache of thinking, "S/he doesn't like me."

Moments like this were just one source of confirmation of a "Truth" I thought I knew: there is not enough love for me to have my share. What was your childhood belief about love and its availability to you? What is your belief today? Is there love enough for you?

The Childhood Treasure of Independence calls to me on this day after Valentine's Day, to share what it knows of love's availability. I've decided to give Independence its voice today and hope you enjoy this interview....

What Babies Know

This week, I was blessed by the opportunity to hold a young infant. I always love that first sensation of fragility, as a parent or grandparent transfers into my arms that precious little miracle who has only recently entered the world. How do they let go?

Then the tiny sensory bundle that is a baby is there; back curving along the inside of my arm, bobbing head cradled in my palm. The complex scent that is a newborn creates a little bubble around the two of us. I am swept into the voice of this new child, learning about him or her as I smell freshly washed skin and hair, or a diaper that needs changing, or stale cigarette smoke. I feel the way he moves in my arms and I hear they way she "speaks," making long vowel sounds or strings of little "eh-eh-eh-eh" sounds. At the same time, my eyes take in hair and skin, movement, and facial expressions, and I learn more about this babe.

This is how babies experience us: pure sensory input (but without all the language to describe it as I have). For a newborn, each of us adults is nothing but a single sensory image. Everything about us that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt with the skin/body, streams into the infant like threads onto a hi-speed loom. In the shortest space of time imaginable -- SNAP! -- like that, but a million times faster -- those individual sensory threads are braided together into a whole. You, the adult holding the baby, are a sensory experience for Baby but you don't yet have a name.

This way of apprehending reality is the rich vein of ore from which this little being can mine the Childhood Treasure of Trust, if we adults know how to help.

Creating the Art of the Possible

January is almost over and this is my first post this month. Like many of you, I have been struggling with physical dis-ease. My body has been painfully congested, infected with bacteria.... As I fought for health, I often pushed my body for more hours of wakeful activity than it wanted to give. In a month of busy schedule and frequent travel, my desire to heal my physical self was at odds with my calendar and my desire to do my job with excellence.

I strove for balance between these two realities; I used many tools, some from the world of science and some from the world of Spirit. I neither "gave in" to the illusion that physical symptoms are all that I am, nor ignored the reality of those symptoms' persistence. Some days I was more successful in that balance than others; others days I was the lone guest at a truly boring pity party.



You may be wondering: What does this tale have to do with the 7 Childhood Treasures? I didn't make the connection myself until yesterday, as I sat in an airport waiting area, coughing like a tubercular patient from the early 1900s, watching a four-year-old boy practice his capacity for Negotiation with his father.

Learning to negotiate is a developmental imperative at four years of age but Negotiation's manifestations look nothing like the refined art exhibited in the adult world by skilled diplomats and business leaders. In fact, in tends to look at lot like this kid on the right.

Paying Attention: A Good Investment

Years ago, I wrote, "As much as I love you and as important as your love is to me, I hate you for the central tragedy of our relationship:  that you don't know me at all." This statement was contained within a letter I wrote to my mother but never delivered. When I wrote it, I was feeling the despair of the little girl I once was, who needed her mother to truly see her, to realize the pain she was bearing alone.

There I was, in my 30s, still wanting the mother who could see that her daughter's heart and soul were sick, shriveling, dying. When I was a young child, I was lost, afraid, and overwhelmed by a nightmare life full of dark secrets...and I felt motherless. Facing those childhood secrets as an adult, I was feeling motherless all over again, still yearning for the nurturing, protection, and healing I had longed for as a child. I wanted a mother who cared more about my emotional life than about my career success or how my clothes looked.

Here I am now, decades later, knowing this truth:  I can never go back to get the mothering I needed as a child, but I can get it now. It's never too late to mother ourselves; we have only to begin.