Loving in the midst of trauma
By Garin Samuelsen
February 19, 2021
How do we love when we have been traumatized and hurt by someone? This is not an easy question. Each person must come to understand this for themselves. In our dialogue last night, we explored this as people opened up about their personal experiences around being abused - especially by someone they trusted, a love one, and the impact that had on their lives. Should they forgive them? What if the instigator of the trauma doesn’t recognize that their actions were abusive or understand the nature of their abuse?
What is love? From what I have come to understand, love has no bounds. Love is and includes all. Love is in presence. If one has never experienced this and is just focused on personal love, such as family or friends as the purpose of love, then this sort of love becomes myopic, fragmentary and conditional. Personal love is more inline with like and dislike, and what we have no choice in, such as with a family (I have to love my children, wife, etc.), conditional to what one receives in return. Personal love can become distorted and as we recognize, abusive. Which, if we can look directly at that, is not love. Personal love, is a programmed complicated self apparatus. Because it is conditional, it can very quickly snap and then become hurtful. This is not real love.
Here is a wonder and something I’m exploring; I wonder if the fullness of Love comes from a place that is the weaving of the impersonal and personal. The impersonal is the outpouring of love that is timeless and boundless. Yet, to navigate the world, we need our selves that are bound by time and space, and focused into the relationships that move with us in the places in which we reside. The whole is. The impermanent dance of forms that is the energetic expression of wholeness is also there, living with us moment to moment. Awake to both, I can then dance with both.
For example, lets say that the Universe is one grand river. At times, I am one with the whole river, and in that place that is beyond knowledge, there is no distinction or separation. Yet, at times, I notice my self, flowing with the river, a part of the river in this particular moment. Both are valid, just coming from different frames of reference. If I know this, then either way I flow with it.
Stuck in being just one with the river, I essentially will end up drowning and then being absorbed by the river. For example, this would mean that if I merge totally with the Universe, as my ego completely dissolves, I can therefore no longer go anywhere, or do anything, for there is nowhere and no-place in that timeless immeasurable state. I would die from starvation or thirst.
Or on the flip side, if I become completely stuck in the idea that I am separate from the river, I will fight against the current and believe that I have self autonomy, and will suffer as I will constantly be in conflict with what is. This is what we see in the world today. People in conflict with what is and in conflict with their true nature. We are constantly fighting against the flow and therefore are at war with the world.
Yet, if I can live in the dance and see that all is wholeness, and that all is interconnected, then I can dance with all of it, the total and the particular. Here love flows forth with ease in either perspective. If I engage with what is, and can flow and also be present in the moments lived, then when I interact with the personal; such as with family, friends, colleagues, work, animals, trees, etc., that love will be like a laser focused into the particular relationship. Here, the personal is tapping into the ever flowing love and using it within the relationship in the present. Here, one is taking care of the other and listening in order to understand and directly see what the relationship needs in the moment.
To come back full circle, I wonder if I can learn to dance with the impersonal and personal. Doing so would give space to see in fullness. In other words, being able to see with impersonal love with the people who have been abusive and violent, especially those that have deeply hurt us in our past. Instead of feeling like I should or shouldn’t have a personal relationship of love with this person, I can connect with the impersonal state of loving. The impersonal love illustrates an understanding that this person has a history, probably a history of being abused, and that they are deeply stuck in programs of sorrow or their role of power over. Here one doesn’t have to hug them, or have any sort of attachment with them. One understands that with these particular people, boundaries are important as well as distance. However, when I flow with the boundless impersonal love, I don’t need to fall into hate towards that person nor suffer from personalizing their choices as they no longer have a hold on me. I can let them go.
The quote below is by David Bohm. He is exploring the possibility of dialogue. The quote illustrated to me the very nature of what can happen when we can flow with each other in this dance as described above. Here is the possibility of what can shine through when we can dialogue in this way; when love is the common theme. I wonder if we bring this seeing into our day to day lives. What would happen??
After reading this, what do you think? Keep the dialogue going. :)
“It gradually emerged that something more important was actually involved - the awakening of the process of dialogue itself as a free flow of meaning among all the participants. In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the groups was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus begins to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise.””
