We’re composed of so many layers, and live our lives within them.
If you care for something long term – like a chronic illness or disability, addiction, or a challenging relationship with food – there’s that top layer.
Underneath that layer you may find places of judgment, frustration, criticism or worry about the ways you’ve coped, how you’ve adapted to the painful experiences and environments in your life.
And then there are the layers underneath that: our exiles, the outcast ones, the pockets of fear, pain, and trauma – all the places that have ‘not yet known love,’ as Francis Weller so beautifully says.
It’s easy to ‘come at’ the top layer of our lives – the place where our distress is most evident – with our guns blazing, with all our will and determination. This can be true even with well meaning, helpful tools like mindfulness or compassion. Of course – we hurt and want to ease our suffering.
But the top layer is merely the symptom bearer. Yes, this place needs love, care and support. And it’s also a very helpful and perhaps beneficent messenger, pointing to the other places inside of us that also need love and care.
It’s and, and and, and and.
This is the deeper journey for all of us. The good news is that this journey can open us to extraordinary humility, tenderness and compassion for ourselves, others, and all living things. This can transform how we see and relate to ourselves, and to the difficult circumstances of our lives.
One of the things that helps me to ‘live in the layers,’ as the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote, is an image of unplaiting a braid. Sometimes it’s helpful to parse out the many layers, not from an analytical or mechanistic point of view, but from a place of intimacy – to get to know each plait of the braid.
This ‘separating out’ can be so helpful, as trauma, by its fractured nature, can be so confusing and disorienting. When our insides feel like a roiling stew of anxiety, fear, anger, confusion, and frozenness, it can be helpful to look at one piece at a time.
I think of so many times in my own journey when I felt hopeless and overwhelmed, frightened by what my inner experience said about me. I’d pray for clarity, “Please show how me how to see. Please show me how to make sense of what I’m feeling.” I’d also ask, “Show me how to see myself.”
Those prayers became and remain good friends.
Learning a bit about trauma and how our nervous systems work can help settle us, help us see, and help us see our layers with more compassion.
And healing images can help, too.
I love facilitating The Book of Love class because it’s a very helpful source of support as we unplait the braid. It helps us move through the layers – the top layer of an eating disorder, addiction, or health diagnosis; the underlayers of emotional pain, and the layer of love, compassion and mercy that holds it all together.
This mercy and compassion, thank goodness, holds us, and doesn’t let go.