Life Is Hard and Beautiful at the Same Time
It’s been another year since my last post and I’m now separated from my wife and we are going through the divorce process. Life has been rough this past year and will likely continue to be rough for awhile for me. In any case, I’m trying to look at everything through the lens of Divine Love and Loving Kindness. It’s hard work when you’re hurting. I recently read the book, How to Be Loving, by Danielle Laporte, and I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone who is going through a “dark night of the soul”, as I am. It is the light that is holding me and carrying me through this difficult time.
The part of me that hurts and wants to lash out is my ego side, and that hurt and wanting to lash out is giving me information about what I need – mostly Loving Kindness and Compassion, and I can only control getting it from myself. I am learning to pay attention to my ego but also to understand that it is only part of who I am, not all of me, and that I am also Divine Love and I can transform my thoughts and energy into loving thoughts and energy, which will attract more love into my life. When new age people talk about manifesting using your thoughts, they really mean manifesting through feeling how you want to feel and bringing that energy into you, not waiting for it to come from elsewhere, although it will be attracted to the energy we create – which, if we want to feel loved, we need to create that loving feeling inside ourselves. This is why it’s so hard – if you do not feel loved, then it’s hard to create that feeling, right? But we all have and are made of love, so it’s always there – it’s just a matter of unblocking ourselves from it. This “unblocking” usually means being able to see the ego, care for it, yet also setting it aside or holding aside in order to engage more with your “higher self” and Divine Love. I’m definitely working at this and it is hard. There’s no way around it – the more pain your ego is in, the harder it is to feel that Divine Love, while at the same time, the more critical it is to figure out how to feel it or you’ll be in that pain for longer.
I’m currently not able to do much talk therapy, but I am still doing neurocounseling/neurofeedback where the focus is on brain health to treat all brain-related challenges, including mental health challenges. I can share my experience as that may relate and help my clients, but I am not really much of a talk therapist – I am more about finding strategies to improve the brain health. We learned in grad school that the primary reason people come into counseling is for self-disclosure, meaning that they really just want to get things off their chest. This is why a lot of talk therapists just listen and have minimal feedback, while others have more feedback and guidance, which, depending on the therapist and the therapeutic relationship, can be extremely helpful or not so helpful. I am not confident in my guidance at this time as my own life is in shambles (again). I’m in a process of spiritual transformation, however, and there’s a good possibility that this will significantly improve my ability to do talk therapy if that’s what my clients want. However, many clients come to us because they have done a lot of talk therapy and they feel like they need something more because they’re still feeling stuck or like they’ve hit a plateau in talk therapy – this is when neurocounseling really shines as a great adjunct to talk therapy. It’s also particularly helpful for children who do not really engage in talk therapy – they get to watch videos on YouTube or Netflix or play video games for about an hour and that their therapy (well, as it’s connected to the neurofeedback software and EEG sensors on their head).
For anyone else out there going through this type of turmoil, I see you. You see me. We can do this. Find love and beauty in everything and you will grow your capacity to love and feel loved.
