I am being loved

(~3 minute read)

I am being loved.

I like that wording more than, “I am loved,” or, “I am loved by God.”

And, “God loves me,” feels like God — as a third-person subject — is an idealization, or objectification, external to me, out there, elsewhere; and I’m just a passive object. Doesn’t feel right.

“I am being loved,” feels more intimate, warm, breathing with aliveness. “Am being.” More present. Has more action. Evokes a sense of arms actively enfolding me, or my head being drawn to rest in a bosom. Passionate, at this moment, in the present.

When joy or gratitude swell up from my heart as a lump in my throat, I am being loved by God.

When I feel uncertain, or am running late, frustrated, I am being loved.

When I feel judged and rejected, I am being loved.

When I want to weep, or am sobbing, I am being loved.

When my ruminations can’t transcend my human frailty, and self-talk overloads my thoughts, or I feel ashamed, abandoned, depressed, or I feel resentment, or regret, I am being loved by God.

It reeks of tender relentlessness. The pursuit never stops, yet never is there chasing. No guilt, no haunting. I am being loved.

My Pursuer is not — when I stop to turn — standing too closely or threatening or exerting a reminder.
The face is not a scowl of disapproval.

Brows are not raised, expecting or awaiting self-indictment.

Eyes are not downcast to spare my shame.

I am being loved by God.

If I turned to face my Lover, I most often wouldn’t sense a face, but subtly outstretched arms, below horizontal, not reaching for me. Meekly calling. Inviting.

Longing.

Palms outward, fingers relaxed, not grasping. But there is no question that those hands will catch me. Not wrestle to hold me up and keep me from falling. Just a perfectly gentle, weightless catch naturally matched to my collapse. A melting into.

My only impulse is to curl up into that bosom, surrendered to a non-conquerer.

If I am feeling gratitude or joy, it is a shared happiness for me.

When I am weak for any reason, it’s an embrace of comforting, warm stillness. No words. Just compassionate presence.

I am being loved.

Not, “I will be loved by God,” with some “if…” attached.

AM BEING.

Not, “if” I just believe, if I surrender, if I work at this, if I stop that, if I meditate more, if I pray and ask… Already am being loved. Then and now. But ‘then’ no longer matters, or matters less until it matters not at all as I rest in that bosom, being loved.

I am being loved.

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-Neil D. 2019-11-13

Sequel: I am being loved (2). You. Your Power. A Christface

Anger. Addiction warning

[1.5 minute read]

“What is your anger enabling, protecting against, or symptomatic of?”

Anger protects, bodily and emotionally. From what? It so immediately follows a preceding feeling that we don’t usually recognize its precursor: Anxiety/fear. Of bodily or emotional injury.

Two hormones involved in anger are like amphetamines and painkillers. Instant energy to alertly respond to the threat, and fear suppression (numbing) to function better under its overwhelm. Reread that as you think about being cut off while driving. It all happens in a flash. Thinking takes too long, so we could die literally.

Anger defends threats to ego in intimate relationships. If a loved one touches a raw nerve, we get angry to defend that weakness—that sense of Self that we aren’t perfect or enough. Energized, and numbed to the fear and its shame, we lash out defensively. We do regretful things under the irresistibly powerful influence of amphetamine and painkiller.

Cocaine is an amphetamine. Opioids are pain killers. It is no metaphor or analogy to say that anger acts by involuntarily addictive circuits that are evolutionarily deep necessities to survival. There is no controversy: Anger is addictive.

If you’re angry at God, how is fear involved? Leave a comment…

Read more in this Psychology Today article.
Highlights

[2.5 minute read]

“Anger is not a primary emotion. It arises from some other feeling which it contrived to camouflage or control.

“The internal dynamic is the same for a host of emotions that, as soon as they begin to surface, can be effectively masked, squelched, or preempted through secondary anger.

“Anger is a double-edged sword: terribly detrimental to relationships but crucial in enabling vulnerable people to emotionally survive in them.

“…anger covers up the pain of our ‘core hurts,’ like feeling ignored, unimportant, accused, guilty, untrustworthy, devalued, rejected, powerless, unlovable, shameful.

“Anger helps us soothe ourselves by potently invalidating whoever or whatever led us to feel invalidated.

“We self-righteously proclaim our superiority. After all, we’re not wrong, or bad, or selfish; it’s our spouse, child, neighbor, coworker.

“Transforming helpless feelings into anger instantly provides us with a heightened sense of control.

“If anger can make us feel powerful, able to address our deepest doubts about ourselves, no wonder it can end up controlling us. It’s every bit as much a drug as alcohol or cocaine.

“Contrary to feeling weak or out of control, anger fosters a sense of invulnerability—even invincibility (particularly in the realm of relationships).

“…anger ensures safety in close relationships by regulating distance.

“…we are wary of openly expressing such needs and desires to a partner who might invalidate them and reopen wounds:
Distancing through protective anger feels essential.

“Anger pushes a partner away, and *also* gets them to withdraw.

“Feeling disconnection from a partner revivifies old attachment wounds and fears, so at times the dance changes and the distancer becomes the pursuer.

“Anger can be unconsciously employed in a variety of ways to regulate vulnerability in committed relationships.

“Anger can also, ironically, be a tactic for engaging the other—but at a safe distance.

“To corrupt Descartes, the assumption here might be: ‘We fight, therefore we exist [as a couple].’

“…anger as a tip-of-the-iceberg emotion can conceal so very much below it:

“What is your anger enabling, protecting against, or symptomatic of?

[At the end of the linked article are links to excellent. additional related articles.]

Love Is Not a Noun (4). Fear of rejection is belief-based. Only.

[3 minute read]

Do you believe in love, or imitation?

Albeit an oversimplification, don’t you think the understood Self and the expressed Self is a balance between fears? The balance between fear of rejection and fear of fiercely loving our Selves?

What can hurt more than having rejected a uniquely original creation out of nothingness, by a sheerly willful act of the heart (loving)?

Sometimes it is our imitation of loving that is rejected. That’s probably good. No one likes dishonesty. But when it’s authentically our own creation, it’s as if our whole being is rejected. What’s perhaps most deeply tragic about that is our own belief:

How can we believe that something we create out of the depths of our own individual being is even *subject* to acceptance or rejection?

How does that belief and dread creep into your thinking? By your largely repressed shame telling you that imitating loving acts for the sake of acceptance is dishonest?

When your loving is authentic, and not imitation, it is not open to judgment. It’s infinitely outside realms of comparison because it’s utterly unique. Unique things are incomparable. This is why judging any person in their fullness is so perditiously horrific.

That which — in any person, or by any person — is authentic, is original and unique in all creation. Your acts of authentic love are sacred. The image and likeness of the divine. Their acceptance or rejection by any other person is irrelevantly impossible.

Your authentic acts of love are uniquely original, so stand as undeniable acts of creating, flowing from a divine source, which is YOU. Don’t believe their value stands on acceptance or rejection. Their value stands on their source—which is YOU. And that is why not a one of us doesn’t have authenticity at the top of our value hierarchy. Authentic acts of love stand on their own. Authentic IS divine.

When you act sheerly out of love, you are expressing the fullest of you. The deepest beauty in this is that there is no shame in loving what you create. In loving your loving. That’s not egotistical at all. You do not love authentically for the sake of the ego; you do so for the sake of your full Self. It’s an expression of your nature. Which is your soul. Entirely natural. No shame. Loving comes from and feeds souls, not egos—except accidentally, consequentially. Authentic love is shame’s utter opposite. God isn’t shamed by loving God’s creations.

Let your ego feel wonderful about your authentic loving. Your soul already does, before you even know it. And all of creation depends on your part in creating. Divine. Sacred.
Love that.
Love you.

So, love.
Create.
Bring into being.

That which is authentically created canNOT be uncreated (by rejection).

Don’t imitate love for the sake of acceptance or positive judgment.

Love fiercely for its own sake. Yours.

To hell with judgment and rejection!

Leave a comment below, wording your own resolve to love your lovingness today, at least a few times.
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Neil D. 2020-05-21

Related:
Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love? (“Acts of love are so profound because they are utterly original. They arise from a purely unique creator. YOU are unique. YOU are a creator.”)

Love Is Not a Noun (3). To Love Is To Be Curious

[4 minute read]

What might we *do* to nurture lovingness?

Be curious.

Humbly curious. Not comparatively curious. We think that’s hard because it’s impossible not to filter through our own experience that which another person shares. So don’t resist that. Curiosity about another also yields self knowledge.

“Humbly” curious means not judging. As you take in what another does or says, don’t *judge* it. Judgment is terminal. It stops the receiving and the loving. Don’t compare what you are hearing or feeling against any artificial ideal or standard of goodness, right, or wrong. Just receive.

Listen with exquisite attention. It is an act of loving. And it is a unique act. In that moment, a condition never to happen again, and which has never happened before. That moment is sacred. Be in it with intense curiosity.

When the beloved gives a seeming conclusive answer, don’t accept it easily as terminal. Let your loving curiosity continue to flow in, through, and around that answer. Ask more. More curiosity. This is a sacred moment, and sacred means deep, tense, dense, heavy. The fullness of who and what we are.

If/when you are being humbly curious and loving, it won’t feel comfortable for you and the beloved, but it won’t be resented or regretted either. Trust your heart to know when your beloved needs you to stop your curious inquiry. If/when you are being curious and loving with enough humility, your heart will do that calculus without requiring your conscious mind. It is our nature. More than anything else is our nature.

Curiosity is what the best of therapists practice. When we think of the phrase “Divine Physician,” we think of Yeshua healing physical maladies. Those kinds of dis-eases are easiest for us to grasp by our conscious minds. They are a sort of first step into the invisible and mysterious. They are sacramental—visible signs of reality unseeable. Inside the body. Surgery. Medicine that acts on our insides. Mysterious.
[If you believe that we understand how most medicines work, you are largely mistaken. We don’t. We can explain some bits of that, but I would contend that in no case do we understand all the bits. If we did, designer drugs would be everywhere.]

The Divine Physician heals the least visible parts of a person. The most mysterious. Be most curious about that. That’s how you can be a healer too. In the image and likeness. The mind of Christ.

Combat and shed any notions of God as omniscient and omnipotent. Those notions speak to your ego, not to your soul. You may think they are notions of glory and praise to God. I don’t. They terminate curiosity. Our curiosity about how God loves us, and our curiosity about how we can love God. They terminate those curious possibilities.

If we are made in God’s image and likeness, then we should look inside for what fuels loving. Curiosity and mystery. Not conclusions. Being. Not having-been.

If you want to ascribe some infinite attributes to God, I suggest infinite curiosity.

How could an all-knowing God be infinitely curious about us?

Well, to me, that answer lies in why we are created in God’s image and likeness.

I believe God to be furiously and passionately and INFINITELY curious about every single one of God’s creatures. I believe God revels in the mystery of every thing that God creates.

Curiosity and mystery always come with some disruptive, disturbing tension that is also a liberating excitement about being. To be disturbed is to be awakened from sleep.

I don’t think God ever sleeps.

Rise up and walk.

Awaken to your intrinsic curiosity.

Be. And you can love.

Walk, and you will love.
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Neil D. 2020-05-20

Related: Love Is Not a Noun (2). What IS Love?