Co-Dependance

I want to write a brief post today based on something that happened to me the other day. It will hopefully highlight a great benefit we get from working on our emotional selves.

My teacher has always said, when it comes to emotions, “Don’t make it someone else's problem!”. But gosh it’s tempting isn’t it?

I have written a small amount about a major relationship I had with someone who I believed was a soul connection. I spent about five years with this person and we ran a business together in Canada. Long story (which I’ll definitely write more about). She owed me a fair bit of money which was due when the business finally sold, which took another painful five years. Now this was my entire life savings and all the money that I managed not to spend on partying while I was working at sea!! So it was a long time of wondering whether I’d get this money back. At one point I even got as far as calling a lawyer to see where I stood in this matter, It’s a route that I’m glad I never took.

Over the years I have managed to keep a reasonable relationship with this woman, we speak occasionally, and now and again the subject of the money comes up and she has always promised me that it would be paid back. Recently as the business sold a few weeks ago, it has been seemingly more likely that I would get this money back. My point is, without waffling too much, that I have been on tenderhooks about it for a long time. I have often expressed my feelings about it as I have been instructed. While this has been healthy, and a relief, it never actually changed the situation.

This was another thing that used to get my monster up in arms and also something that I had to work through regularly. You see, my monster started seeing all this spiritual work I was doing as some sort of reasoning that my life should be stress free and rosy and it got irritated when challenge after challenge came. It is very tempting to see the spiritual path as some sort of way to an easier life, but I’m increasingly unsure as to whether it works that way.

Back to the other night now, and I received a message with a photo of a cheque with my name on it, about to go to the bank. It was a fair bit short of the agreed amount which was just enough to take the edge of the moment. It came with an apology but that is all she can manage at the moment, the rest of the amount is still in question.

All the stress of this situation which has been felt at various levels over the last five years has been great. When the balance finally showed in my account my reaction was quite strange and underwhelming. I had been hoping that I’d dance with joy, but this was sadly not the reaction.

I felt completely energetically stuck. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The monster weighed in heavily with it’s judgments, of myself and her for not paying the full amount. I would say I felt a little bit numb.

And THIS is the crux of the matter, the subject of co-dependance… My partner and I had just settled down to watch a movie. It was paused as these events were unfolding to the point where my energy became stuck. This is a most frustrating feeling. I would say it happens to most of us, we literally don’t know how we feel about something. And this is the critical point where discipline and energy work come in. I needed to feel into that moment.

I did not do that straight away. Two things happened…. I wanted a drink first off. Now I have a difficult relationship with alcohol which I will also write about. If I had gone to get a drink I would no doubt have numbed the emotion that I was feeling. This is certainly a dependency and it is taking work to break this habit. It was quite a moment for me when I managed to ignore the need for a drink, but here I was still with this raft of emotions and not knowing what to do with them…

Next I decided that my partner would help me by talking through the situation (or maybe my monster decided that). God bless the poor woman, she has been an amazing partner through all of this energy work stuff, and it has been challenging for her also. It is extremely hard when our partners appear to need something from us and we can’t provide, but here’s the thing, maybe we shouldn’t?!?

I was starting to get frustrated with her because she couldn’t say anything that made me happy or that would help me out of my feeling of “stuckness”. Now at these points in the past I may have become angry, and unleashed all that pent up rage in her direction. A classic tale of making your emotions someone elses problem. How many of us have been guilty of that I wonder?

In that moment I didn’t do that though. It was a clarity within me that said “No, these are your emotions, it’s up to you to sort them out.”

So I did. I snatched my coat and keys and said to my GF, I gotta go deal with this. It’s fortunate because she has done this work also so she understood. Off I went into the gloomy rainy night. I am most fortunate where I live because it’s close to a forest and a private lane where no one really walks at night.

And I just started raging and screaming…. It was all the stuff I had bottled up about the situation/money/relationship. It was epic and I shouted and cursed until my throat was sore. I walked for a little while longer to keep the energy moving and returned home. It was only then that my body had the physical reaction. I have already spoken about burping up air as an emotional release…. Well this time it was air and an awful lot of phlegm, to a point where I was dry heaving for about five minutes, occasionally coughing and spitting up nasty clumps of mucus. It was not unlike the purging effects I have felt when under the influence of a powerful psychedelic substance.

I have a few take aways from this experience:

• The body can and will bring up emotional stuff in a physical manner if we know how to work with the energetic principles

• This is healthy and natural

• There are many things we can do to push it all back down, especially the abuse of drugs or alcohol

• If I had just chatted with my partner or made the emotion her problem then likelihood is I would not have had the release

I am pleased I had these insights the other night. Unfortunately, it’s all very well rambling on about it in my blog but we really do need to experience these moments for ourselves before the teachings really stick with us.

I hope my point is clear about co-dependence. They are OUR mucky emotions and no one else's problem. We must FEEL them in order to DEAL with them. Using our friends/partners/substances to deal with them puts us into a state of co-dependency and it is NOT where we want to be, as that brings with it a whole new set of problems.

I should go on to mention that after these events passed my partner and I had lost interest in the movie and decided to go to bed instead. We have just started exploring into tantric sex and the above events actually led us to quite an interesting and deep sexual healing experience for her. This will be the subject of my next post “Healing the Yoni”.

I can say without a doubt that if I hadn’t have realised the need to deal with those emotions at that point in time our evening would have definitely taken a different and less enjoyable path. I’m realising as I write that there are indeed great rewards for following this spiritual path, subtle though they may be!