The idea for this post was motivated in part by Heather Plett's "What it Really Means to Hold Space for Someone"– after reading it, ask yourself how the concept of holding space might apply to yourself? And be sure to read the article on UpliftConnect.com
Conflicts of Caring Interfere with Creating and Developing
I have been silent for awhile with blog articles. I have been experiencing in not one but a number of peaking ways what I've called a "conflict of caring".
It has diverted me from being in a space to create and to "go beyond" in my work and my life. I've known I've needed to find energy which I haven't been able to access while in the midst of these struggles to "get beyond".
The Core Therapeutic and Survival Challenges of Our Time
These struggles, as everything eventually comes "full circle", ended up forcing me to discover how to more greatly understand what really created and sustained these conflicts of caring through, of course, being greatly pushed to "dive" more deeply within. I've further realized through my experience that much of my therapeutic and spiritual work through Centering Tools fundamentally involves resolving conflicts of caring.
I see in our world conflicts of caring as the most intense and important struggles and challenges of our time, our country, our politics, our economics, our systems. What comes to me is that this is the real definition, and the gift of healing and growth, of what we call karma.
The Real Elements of Conflicts of Caring
Love, anger and fear, I've discovered, catalyze wherever real sense of lack exists, which, through precipitating a core stress response, leads us to "cast", or project this state onto people, places and things as conflicts of caring. The real conflict, however, is caring/love versus unresolved anger, fear and persistent lack.
When are we not in our lives more greatly challenged to love? When are we not in our lives in some way experiencing lack and its products of anger, despair and fear?
These elements form the foundation, or structure, of faulty belief systems as an attempt to manage or "fix" unfinished trauma. The faulty belief systems, then, create a more superficial and acting out layer of avoidance, even immobilization, aggression, hopelessness/helplessness, projection, assumption…the list goes on.
How Can We Get Beyond Conflicts of Caring?
Here are my 6 key steps:
Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about how you feel; and allow whatever the presenting feelings are to fully, freely express themselves. Imagine them as particular waves, like waves in the "ocean of being" that is the Greater You, allowing yourself to be completely enveloped in these waves and carried, through the wave's expression (versus your dictate as to how and whether or not to feel) through their expression to "their" sense of completion. Record your experiences.
- Then observe whatever insights seem to occur afterward, and record your impressions.
- Ask yourself how freely you feel to care for and about yourself? Now settle back for a few minutes and imagine you can "dive into" your impressions and sensations. When you feel complete in this inner exploration, record/draw your experience.
- Imagine you can travel so deeply inward that you can enter your heart, which freely and unconditionally, in endless love, opens to receive you. Ask your heart how you can more fully care for and about yourself, and then once more record your impressions.
- Repeat #2 and 3 with this focus: caring about the designated Other(s), and see what happens – again, record your impressions.
- Consider your heart's guidance as your "how to" transcend, or move beyond the conflict of caring; and translate this as specifically and greatly as possible as your actual "call to action". Be as "out of the box" as possible, and challenge yourself to take what you honestly feel are great steps of integrity and authentic vision to support the (always means everyone's) greater good.
Our True Prime Spiritual Directive for Lasting Transformation
I believe this is our prime directive that is the core desire of our Free(d) Will, and how we actualize, heal and develop. It provides the real impact to truly serve ourselves and others, particularly those we care about the most – and therefore have the most intense relationships with!
Finally, the impact grows and spreads…anywhere…everywhere…to heal, empower, develop our world in these troubling, unstable, challenging- and most opportune times. Ancient spiritual traditions teach through "wrestling" with our divine/greater and baser/lesser selves, we become and create higher beings – and universes.