BECOMING AWARE OF MY OWN BELIEFS…you can go so far, that one day you get lost in the truth.
My name is Iris, I was born in Germany, now I live in Marbella. My reflection arises from a question: CAN I BECOME SOMETHING NEW COMPARED TO WHAT I KNOW WITHOUT ALLOWING ANY INSECURITY IN MY LIFE?
Since I started my inner journey, and especially since I started collaborating in the organization Inner Mastery, I have discovered many lies that I have been telling myself about myself. The most recent one is this: I have a safety net.
Since more than 15 years I have constantly been involved with a man; either on the way into a relationship, in a relationship, or on the way out of a relationship. I started this behaviour when my father died. I didn’t know him very well, we had a weird relationship from the distance; my parents got divorced when I was two years old, my father had repeatedly cheated on my mother. He only showed interest in me and my siblings when he was asking for our school certificates once per year, until even that contact stopped. There was no other man in my mothers life until many years later, so I learned that men are supposed to be far away, and somehow they are scary and cannot be trusted. My father died shortly after I started making contact again after many years of silence, about 15 years ago.
Since then, and maybe even before, my relationships with men have always been a mixture of trying to keep them in distance and trying to make sure they won’t leave me.
I needed to stay in the comfort-zone, since from this place I could affirm: „If I stay here, I know what I have“. I started to see that it wasn’t working, but only ever a small glimpse here and there. I was always somehow trying to make it work, trying hard, sacrificing myself, trying to change myself to fit into a pattern that was not even mine. And by attempting that, I was making it mine. It ended up becoming a mechanism of self-demand and obligation in relation to men.
I started to see this pattern a few years ago, but I never knew how to get out. Or if I even could. I felt like the victim of my behaviour, I felt „this is who I am“ and there is no solution.
Especially my last partner, he endured many break-ups, cheating, promise of getting back together, „maybe’s“… always from the distance and indifference.
At the same time I was finding other men for short-term adventures, precisely always picking guys that only wanted sex – I always thought „this time it’s different“, but after some time I could clearly see how the pattern applied, how they were always closed, in general, and especially towards me. „Allowing“ sex in the attempt to find love helped me to feel safe, but I was always running away from love. Maintaining that preventive safety distance defined the superficiality of my relationships
I played this game until very recently, I got to master it so well that I didn’t even realize that every man I was involved with met the pattern in any way, and that I was still manipulating my ex to stay relatively close. but just far enough, even many months after the last break. An unexplainable torture.
Living with this started to become more intense after the module 3 of the conscious school in which we address the issue of trust. I comprehended things about love and trust that I had never seen before. I started to see and feel things that I have never allowed myself before.
I saw how much I was still identified with my mothers fears and believes; I felt how much that part of me distrusted men in general, and I became conscious about how I have incorporated the idea that love makes people suffer; that I will be hurt or punished every time I say “no“ to a man.
My ex-partner is hurting and doesn’t want to speak to me anymore. He has been hoping until recently that I will break with the pattern and that I could love him and be with him. After what we have been through, he still tells me he will be there for me if I stop following the pattern. For a long time, I tried to let go of the part of me that rejects him. Knowing how perfect it would be if I could just love him. Knowing that, in theory, I should be able to love anyone, and be with anyone, if I would just overcome the struggle of the character that is trapped in the past.
I would be. But it’s not. And just in this moment, when self-demand could arise once again, the miracle of comprehension occurred…suddenly, just a few days ago, I realized that I was rejecting myself. I was rejecting the part of me that does not want to be with him – the part that does not want to be close to a man in general, out of fear to hurt myself or to hurt them. I was always rejecting the part of me that creates the pattern.
I was trying to be something that I am not. And I decided to accept that part, and to accept that I am rejecting this man and everyone, knowing that everything would have been possible, if things were different. But they are not.
The part of me that loves him grieves. I am crying while I am writing these lines. I hate to see him suffer, but I have accepted that I cannot do anything about it. I accepted the fact that we cannot be together if I accept myself for what I am in this moment. And this morning, suddenly the fear arrived. For the first time I saw clearly that I had always tried to keep this safety net somehow.
The cruelty of my behaviour hit me. Seeing it has been my medicine. Now there is emptiness. There is no safety net. My mind is trying to grasp something, trying to hold on to something or someone. But at the same time I know it’s not going to work. I am afraid, so afraid. At the same time I feel silly: it’s so obvious, now that I see it.
I know that the safety has always been an illusion, so why am I so afraid, now that I discover it was never there? Perhaps because I have to recognize that I had been cheating myself to be living in a security that does not exist.
I shared this text with Laura, my close friend, mentor and housemate. The next morning, when we were sitting together in the living room with the other house mates, each of us with our laptop and starting to work, she looked at me and said „It’s brilliant. But there is one thing missing.“ From the way she looked at me, I was feeling cold in my stomach, because I knew what she had seen would be important. She said: „In the text you don’t talk about how you are idealizing your father. If you accept to be accepted, you are being disloyal to rejection, and therefore to the fake love of your parents.“
I froze. We both had goose bumps. We continued, there was no turning back. „If you accept acceptance, the remainder of self-deceit would be destroyed when any man shows any interest in you.
It was a typical moment of comprehension that is being produced in the Conscious School, the magic of those moments in which you know that you are remembering a truth, a basic truth about yourself.
I had seen this before, how my relationship with my father had impacted all my relationships with men. I had seen the pattern, but I had never comprehended it in depth. It had been trapped in the mind. I needed Laura to point it out to me, in this very moment at the living room table.
I was staring at her, while she casually turned around to discuss the marketing strategy with the director of I.T. of the company, it was a normal and day-to-day situation, but what she told me
I felt it in my heart, in my whole body. I had never realized how I had idealized my father. I didn’t even know him very well. Somehow the protection mechanism I had built around him was so strong, that I would always rationalize: how he didn’t play a role in my life, how he wasn’t close to me, and how I supposedly „had already comprehended and forgiven“. I believed that my relationship with him was not interfering with my relationships and my life, but I was wrong without knowing it.
I had passed through a phase where I believed that I hated men, and somehow I thought that was enough to heal…Whenever we talked about parents and conditioning, I had only applied it to my mother, my father was untouchable. I was even idealizing my mother without realizing it. She has never said a bad word about my father. Now Laura pointed out to me how my mother, by trying to protect me from the rejection of our father, my mother had fallen into the trap, and by that she was supporting the believe that abandonment was the only option. I left my laptop and sat outside, breathing in the significance of this comprehension. What I received from my father was not love, but rejection. In other words, I lived rejection as love. So by rejecting acceptance of love in my relationships, I was being loyal to my father, and to his rejection towards me, keeping the illusion alive that he loved me.
During the day, I shared about this with my other housemates, these type of dialogues are common in our communas, and in the evening I wrote to another close friend and mentor, Erik.
I explained to him how I perceived the significance was of what had happened, and how I saw that I was still creating a similar pattern with every man I relate to, including him.
With my mind, I was still trying to explain something that my heart had already comprehended. Erik listened to me with patience, and then he said this: „I think that apart from whether this comes from mum or dad, there is something hidden … wanting to live in love, and the resistance to being loved. Receiving trust leads to love, and the loving, being unconditional is complex, because more pretexts or problems arise … you cannot avoid it, and everything is compressed until you explode inside and out … because you are only fit to love, and the more you want to hate, you know that your heart is already open. ”
It was important to stay here, in these words. And now, it was important to step out and breathe the fresh air. And then a voice told me: please, find someone to open up to, to share your deepest fears and feelings. Stop hiding behind the illusion of rejection, the illusion that no one wants to listen to you, that no one understands you. That no one will love you. It’s up to you.
I feel that something deep has shifted inside of me. I am not the same.
But there is still a voice in my mind, doubtful: Will I ever be able to relate to a man without the pattern of manipulation? Will anything even change, now that I am starting to accept myself? Supposedly acceptance of rejection is the first step towards acceptance of love, and for that, I have taken the first step towards true self-love.
I am now feeling the sensation of “this time it’s different” from so many times before.
I don’t know what will come, but I know that there is no safety net anymore. There never even was. I am looking the fear in the eyes. Finally, for the first time. Well then, here I am.
Embrace me, as I embrace you.
Iris
COME AND LIVE WITH US IN MARBELLA:
If you are still wondering whether you want to join one of our communas all over the world, or wondering whether you should move in with some friends into a bigger place – stop wondering. This moment, here in Marbella, these last days, with Laura, this is what makes all the difference in the world. The coffee in the morning, the lunch breaks, the dinner at night, going to the market in the weekend. In all of these moments, we sharing about what’s moving inside each of us, all of them are moments of profound integration. The sharing brings us deeper into ourselves.
Everyday, in every moment, we have the chance to go deeper. Maybe you can also do it alone, meditating, but to see the self-deceit, you need that someone looks at you from the outside. I am surrounded by teachers everywhere.
When I received Iris’s article, being in another community in Madrid, I called all those who could come to my office to read with me what our mate and friend had written. this led to a 2 hour meeting… this is a marvellous thing, to live like this. When we finished they said to go out for dinner, but Ramón said: NO we stay here, we order pizza so we can continue working, there are a lot of people to respond to.
