A psychospiritual context of our times – Love, separation, grief and the lungs: an invitation to listen compassionately to grief, and reconnect with Love.
This morning I woke up early with a sniffly nose.
I’m so grateful I know about Buteyko breathing, so that I could attend to the sniffles. As I started gentle breathing, I could initially feel a tightness and tension in my lungs, so I listened in lovingly to to the sensations.
As I sent love to the sensations, the memory of the Amazon rainforest burning came to me. I remembered seeing, so many times, “the lungs of the world.” And I thought too, about all the fires in Australia, and all the animals and humans who felt the smoke in their lungs.
Our lungs carry unexpressed grief, and I wondered if, collectively and individually, we are being invited to grieve the deep loss of connection that colonised cultures have been under the spell of.
Jeremy Lent talks about the first perception of a split between spirit and matter happening 3500 years ago, with Zoroastrinism. We can see the spread of the separation virus, such as happened in the ProtoIndoEuropean languages, and in ancient Greece and Rome, where mind was valued above all else, where our bodies and feelings were seen as inferior and unimportant.
This then spread via the Roman invasions, and with Catholicism and other religions that believed our true nature was sinful, that the body and feelings were evil. Rome invaded what is now Britain, and this emotional disconnection virus has been spreading like wildfire ever since, with colonisation.
In this culture, there is a profound sense of separation – from each other, from earth, from place, from our innate belongingness. I call this the deep Love-Hurts, that disconnect us from our true nature as Love.
This separation is continually recreated by our language and cultural set-up – the devaluing of elders, the distrust in women’s bodies to give birth, the separation of mothers and babies at birth, nuclear families, and schooling where children’s natural capacities around learning are denied.
This has been around a long time. The Catholic church set in motion the stopping of co-sleeping in the 13th Century.
This core belief in separation is deeply dangerous, because our unexpressed grief and sense of disconnection lead to all the behaviours that are destructive to life – all the repression and dissociation, the busy-ness, the distraction, the accumulation, the violence.
What if, this present virus of the lungs were here to bring homeostasis and healing to this planet? With deep compassion for all the grief and loss and fear.
What if all these themes we are seeing outwardly – ‘isolation’ and ‘social distancing,’ combined with all that we are seeing around community and support and gratitude and care and consideration, were all part of the psychospiritual invitation of these times:
To remember our true nature as Love – as deeply interconnected with each other and all of Life, from the most practical physiological nature, to the level of consciousness which Quantum physics has been talking about for a century.
What if we were being invited to:
Come Home to ourselves, mirrored in the being called to stay at home;
Hear the younger parts of us who have experienced such loss and separation as part of living in this culture (what I call listening to the Love-Hurts);
Honour our grief and our mourning, and the huge cost that has come from these cultural beliefs of separation;
Honour our elders again;
Honour the indigenous peoples and ways of being, and asking them to teach us how to return to the consciousness and practice of interconnected ways of living;
Feeling the gratitude for the food we receive from others and the earth;
Feel our deep interconnectedness with every other human on this beautiful planet we live on;
Feel our deep interconnectedness with all other-than-human beings;
Spend more time with family and community, including co-creating new families and communities;
Question the education system and co-create a new/old way that values natural learning and the capacity of children to learn through experience and embeddedness in daily life;
Shift away from old paradigms of birth and parenting that create Love-Hurts, to new/old ways that foster a deep sense of belonging, compassion and interconnection;
Shift away from old paradigms of working that create meaningless and disconnection, to new ways that foster a deep sense of purpose, meaning and contribution;
Deep compassion for all the parts of ourselves and all beings.
Does this resonate with you?
If so, do you feel called to send loving compassion to:
your own feelings of grief and loss;
to the younger parts of you that didn’t ever get to cry and be held in loving arms as you expressed and released those feelings;
to all the humans on the earth who are now experiencing loss and disconnection and grief, and the fear of loss;
to all the humans and other-than-humans who experience such loss due to the behaviour caused by humans’ disconnection, Love-Hurts and repression mechanisms;
to Gaia and her Wisdom.
Much love to you. xoxox