The misunderstanding about love and the difference between love and care, and how we stress ourselves for lack of love.
As I am going through difficult times in this pandemic’s new normal, I realized that after some depressive times, my life has been having very little love. I notice by questioning that the reason I got depressed was that I was not in a deep relationship with myself and my feelings.
In the quest for freedom and love, I realized how difficult it was for me to ask for help and how I was trained habitually to isolate myself and believe that everything that I needed was to be able to survive.
As I started to come out of depression and looked for help, I began to work with my friend and brother-in-law as he started this new coachwork. In the beginning, it was just the desire to be helped and to have somebody tell me what to do. Soon I realized that I was continuing the same process that created my depression.
As I decide to take more responsibility for my life, my relationship with my brother-in-law changed and it help me to organize my life and create a vision and a plan to help myself.
As this process unfolds, I started understanding my priorities and putting into practice what needed to change in my work process, and my physical condition. I learned to have a more healthy diet as well as a more effective way to exercise and a new approach to my profession.
During many sessions, I realized that I was stuck. I couldn’t move on if I didn’t face the limitations and the wounds that I had suffered in my childhood.
It was difficult, and soon I realized that I needed therapy.
After so many years of teaching the Alexander Technique, I thought that this amazing process of mental, physical, and spiritual work was enough, and everything that I needed was already in me. But after sometime I realized that the Alexander Technique is best used when I look for all possibilities instead of closing myself to just one way.
I’ve learned so much from so many interesting people, for example, Antonio Damasio (in his book “Looking for Spinoza”) and his scientific studies about feelings and emotions. I’ve learned from Dr. Petter A. Levine Ph.D. (his book “In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restore Goodness”) about the somatic experience, Dr. Gabor Mate (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction), and the most important of all Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD (The Body Keeps The Score, Brain, mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma), and many others.
The problem that I found, wasn’t the lack of knowledge, because all these amazing people helped me a lot. The problem was my ego and the belief that I have nothing more to learn about myself.
In my quest to understand better who I am and how I was limiting my life, became the reason I was stuck.
I remember when I found Dr. Gabo Mate and it felt very strong when he explained that all addictive people are traumatized, but not all traumatized people are addicted. And how our first 7 years (more or less) of our lives, defines how our brains will respond to the environment.
We have very little say in this time from the mother’s womb to when we realize that we are separated from our parents. In these times, Dr. Mate says, “Things happened that were not supposed to happen and things that were supposed to happen didn’t happen. That is how trauma is created.”
My quest started to become more interesting when I saw the TED Talk with Brené Brown and her study about courage and how it is impossible to have courage without vulnerability. It was striking to realize that my whole life I connected vulnerability with weakness.
Duality was always a fundamental part of my life. My father usually said in Portuguese: “Calçá de veludo ou Bunda de fora.”. And he meant, either you have the best or nothing. And other things like, “men don’t cry” or “don’t bring your fights into my house”.
It was very difficult to live a life with somebody that never had love in his life and was trying hard to love me.
This week in my therapy session, it was clear to me that I can choose to be at the mercy of my trauma, or I can notice when I am choosing a new and unknown possibility. It isn’t easy, but becomes a habit and has a good feeling to be on the right path. I understand that love is a process and is defined as we act upon it.
Very often the love that we learn is just the tip of the iceberg, romantic love coming out of Hollywood. But in fact, the Greeks showed us by classifying love in different ways. Not just the romantic passionate love, but the friendship love, the self-love, and the love beyond ourselves or the love for God or universal love.
Recently listening to Oprah interviewing Brené Brown, she was saying that she is reading Bell Hooks books, and she talked about “All About Love, New Visions”. I started reading this book and started to realize that love is not just taking care of somebody. My parents took care of me but they didn’t necessarily love me.
It was a difficult thing to acknowledge and at the same time liberating. My therapist has been helping me to unfold and understand how to deal with it. Now, I understand that confrontation isn’t the only way to deal with problems. So because I don’t like confrontation, very often I retract and don’t ask for my needs. There are other ways to ask for your needs without confrontation.
I am learning that despite my automatic reactive conditioning, I have a choice and when I don’t react with rage, love takes over. So love is an action.
Again, quoting Bell’s Hooks book, there are two things that help me to understand love: the first is “The search for love continues even in the face of great odds,” and a definition of love that she found from the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck and his classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled, first published in 1978:“love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action.
She explains the use of the word “spiritual”, “Some folks have difficulty with Peck’s definition of love because he uses the word spiritual. He is referring to that dimension of our core reality where mind, body, and spirit are one. An individual does not need to be a believer in religion to embrace the idea that there is an animating principle in the self-a life force (some of us call it the soul) that when nurtured, enhances our capacity to be more fully self-actualized and able to engage in communion with the world around us.”
Now I understand that in my Alexander Technique learnings, love and spirituality never were the most important thing, that I need to be my own guide and discover my technique.
Alexander, like many humans, just found the tip of the iceberg, and now depends upon us to stretch further our understanding of how to help ourselves first, and then to be able to connect and help others.
When I had the belief that I knew everything that I need to be a good teacher, didn’t mean that I was ready to listen and understand my student’s needs and dilemmas; but now that I have experience distress and depression, I feel closer to them and better able to have compassion and the ability to really help.
Especially because trauma is in the body, not in the mind. Because of my work with the Alexander Technique, it was much easy to feel in my body the reality of my feelings.
Again Damasio has a very simple quote that defines human alienation: “The function of the mind is to take care of the body”. But we have been educated and conditioned to believe is the other way around. We believe that by thinking we can fix everything. We create a deep disconnection between the mind and the body by neglecting our emotions and feeling. So the spiritual part is completely erased from the equation.
Nobody teaches us to take into consideration how we are feeling. We are told to swallow our feelings and rationalize our way out.
We are wired to connect to belong and to be part of the whole. This is our true spirituality. We are wired to love. And this love manifests in every time you choose compassion and empathy for everyone. Not only the closest ones but all people in this world. From the simple act of accepting the traffic jam, or to understanding when somebody is rude to you, to the ability to listen more than try to fix other people.
Love is still the answer to everything. As we become aware of our limitations and our littleness, we became humble and love takes over.