Have you ever had the experience of someone apologizing to you, an experience of healing, or an experience of awakening, when something that had hurt, confused or frustrated you suddenly becomes clear?
And did you feel surprised when, along with the gratitude, relief, understanding, and love that flooded your heart – how shyness, rage, anger, hurt, and pain also came pouring out?
When love shines – when we’re deeply seen, and when there’s the safety and space for love to flow – every emotion of the spectrum can appear.
The boil of pain gets lanced, and whoosh, out it flows. Sometimes in tears. Something in shaking. Sometimes in words.
This is how Kristin Neff and Chris Germer, the founders of the Mindful Self Compassion Project, say it: “Love reveals anything unlike itself.”
I’ve found this to be true. In the presence of love, everything that longs for love, that hasn’t been seen, that longs to be seen, that feels unloved, “that has not yet known love” arises, and speaks.
Sometimes these places growl ferociously, like wild animals. Sometimes they shake in shame. Sometimes they wail in protest as all that’s been bound in fear, anger, and pain starts to unbind.
It can create a very rich and confusing experience.
In my own life, I was shocked at how often I would binge when I journeyed through a significant gate of healing. How can I be bingeing, today, when I’m feeling this deep wave of healing?
But I imagine it’s part of this mystery.
Over time, I learned not to fear these binges, to see them as part of, and not separate from, the healing process. To see them as a part of “love bringing out everything.”
I learned to sit at their feet, to be a good host to the guests in my guest host, as Rumi invites us to do.
As their host, this is what I learned:
- I learned that sometimes I needed to weep and shake and go for a walk in the dark under the moon and cry and pour my rage into the earth.
- I learned that I needed, as Isek Dinesen once said, either the salt of sweat, the salt of tears or the salt of the ocean.
- I learned that my binges were a cry for help, a sign that I was trying to do too much on my own, the precious soul that I am, the precious souls that we all are, how we learned to rely on ourselves.
Over time, I began to understand that I needed loving support to be with me in these crucibles.
I learned that it was only with others that I could be with the intensity of healing without bingeing. Or perhaps said another way – it’s when we’re with others, and this sweetheart, is how you and I are beautifully made – that our window of tolerance can widen and we can be with what longs to be held.
From the perspective of relational psychology, our capacity to be over-whelmed at the emotions that arise within us – especially the emotions that lie underneath patterns of soothing with sugar, or food – isn’t a personal failing.
Rather, it’s an acknowledgment: we weren’t meant to do this alone. When we feel overwhelmed, we need support.
I learned these things by being with these binges – by getting to know them. It’s a counterintuitive approach, but when we get to know these places in ourselves that’s when we start to hear why they hurt, what they need, and what can help them.
So I wonder about you, friend. I wonder what comes to meet you, as love speaks? I wonder what comes to meet you as you sit with the places in you that binge or eat?
I wonder what wonders await in your own guest house, and what you’ll learn there?