WHY AREN’T YOU MORE *#!@*~! EMOTIONAL

© 2009 Howard McQueen

I was with a friend the other night and she was recounting a story of her best friend, who’s son was having repeated difficulties in his long-term romantic relationship. It seems his long standing live-in girl friend would occasionally leave him to try on greener pastures. Thus far, she has always come back.

My friend became very enrapt in telling this tale. She was very emotionally involved and spoke on and on about the debilitating stress this placed on everyone in the family, especially the mom. Her friend, the mom, had just lost her husband.

I felt the echoes of my friend, again deeply absorbed in her past loss of her husband, through infidelity and the associated emotional insanities, and the hardships that she encountered bringing up two kids and starting all over again. That time, for my friend, was frightening, caught in an emotional quicksand that is still alive deep inside her.

Patterns of wounded-ness repeat themselves. We continue to walk past the locked-in-darkness rooms of the interior, where the torch of love has yet to shine brightly.

I spoke words to this effect and her sense of emotional connection to the situation heightened, then she accused me of not being emotional and of being cerebral. She said that she felt that she had to become more emotional to make up for my emotional "distance". I've personally met her friend as well as the mom's son and the girlfriend, at the funeral of the father, where I grieved with everyone else.

Mmmmmmm. Letting everything outside of me, be whatever it is and whatever it needs to be

My friend would wish everyone clear sailing and thus wants everyone in her life to go get counseling and shape up, so that her friend (and all of us) can be spared the additional burdens of dysfunctional family strife.

As I speak my own peace, I remember to sip deeply from the well.

When there is a wound in our emotional self,
This is carried forward into the pretentiousness of adult life.
We try and cover over our emotional, wounded immaturity
by acting out our contrived, manufactured behaviors,
The great big band-aid wrapped over our wounds.

Her son, like all of us
will continue to queue this inner held grief
until he goes inside and attends to the estrangement.
And, this willingness to dive within may require
an increase in living in this pressure cooker
heated by despair and depreciation.
We humans have such a propensity
for wrestling with our delusion and suffering,
before choosing to go inside.

So, for me, I see a sort of divine benefit to repeated Suffering.
It can bring us closer to the alter
Where we can willingly sacrifice our self
To a greater will and force called Life,
where we bring our brokenness and just let go of ego.

And in this revealing, should we focus our intention,
We can begin observing how choosing to
re-parent ourselves from the inside out,
brings a sacred healing.

So, without any doubt,
And with an ironic sense of satisfaction,
If it is repeated suffering
that is the sandpaper needed to wear us thin,
know that this is what brought me to
THE ALTER OF LOVE!