The importance of being with yourself

About a month ago, I broke up with my partner/boyfriend of three years.

Not knowing how to deal with the loss, I threw myself into my work.

I organised workshops, managed events, coached people, and operated with a manic intensity. I rushed from meeting to meeting, engagement to engagement, thinking that if I kept myself busy enough I could stave off the feelings of sadness and depression.

Only my strategy didn’t work.

I wasn’t able to deliver as a trainer and coach. I was so tired from fighting myself that I had even less energy than the participants I was supposed to be leading.

Inside, I was crumbling. I wondered if I would ever be loved again, if anyone else would ever accept me for who I was, and if I would ever be good enough for anyone else. I had lost a confidante, a friend, a partner, a home.

I finally acknowledged that I had reached my breaking point, and that I needed a break.

So I booked myself a holiday to Thailand where I would live on a boat and go scuba diving for four days straight. All the better to take my mind off things.

On the third day of diving, I suddenly started feeling seasick. A rash broke out on my legs. I judged myself for being weak. I considered continuing to dive despite all the pain and dizziness.

But I decided to stop.

Instead of diving, I retreated to my little cabin.

I wrapped myself up in a blanket and lay on my bed. As my body relaxed, all the emotions I had been avoiding flooded into my awareness. I wept for the love that I lost and for the pain of the loss. When my tears stopped flowing I just remained still, resting and being with myself.

It took courage to look directly at the pain and the loss instead of trying to distract myself with frantic activity.

Eventually the dark clouds parted. My energy started to return. The little pieces of my broken heart began to heal.

Courage to face the pain

We are all facing some kind of loss in our lives, whether it be the loss of a parent, a friend, a relationship, a career, a job, or a part of ourselves.

That is why we go on quests to find ourselves, to find our place in the world, to find our voice. In the human journey of healing, we are all broken in some way, and seeking to make ourselves whole again.

We each manage our pain and brokenness differently.

Generally, we choose one of the following options in dealing with the pain:

1. Denial / repression. There’s no pain, we tell ourselves. Everything is okay and everything is awesome.
2. Blame / victimhood. We feel the pain but we blame other people for it. We think we are victims and so we start to feel that other people are at fault, the world owes us something. We ask, “why me?”
3. Vengeance / avoidance. We try to pass off the pain onto someone else. It is like if somebody hits us, and then we try to hit them back or we hit somebody else.
4. Distraction / suppression. We keep ourselves busy doing work and more work. Maybe we also try to numb ourselves through drugs or alcohol. We get into some form of addiction.
5. Responsibility / transformation. We take the courage to feel the pain. As we feel the pain, the emotions and transformed and we gain whatever lessons we need to learn from the experience.

For most of us, when we feel negative emotions like anger, shame, or sadness, we try to avoid or deny them.

These un-felt emotions do not disappear; they are held somewhere in our bodies or consciousness, and manifest as diseases or forms of psychosis or neurosis. In my case, I had a rash and eczema coming out through my body telling me that I needed to take a break and express my emotions.

Emotions are like the flow of water through our consciousness. We need to feel them fully, let them pass through the skies of our awareness, and they will transform into something else – acceptance, lightness, compassion.

Trapped or blocked emotions weigh us down. Only by discharging our pain and letting our feelings express themselves through us do we learn and heal from our experiences.

The gift of our own presence

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the ability to simply be.

All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. 

Blaise Pascal

Indeed, if only we could face our own fear, loneliness, and emptiness, we would see what lies beyond pain. People, relationships, and jobs come and go. When we have the courage to face what remains, we discover our own strength and magnificence.

I realised through losing my relationship that I could no longer outsource my healing to others. I wanted someone to hug me and give me a safe space to emote. How silly I was to think that I needed another person to allow me to express myself emotionally, when I could just give myself this healing space by allowing myself to be.

We think that self-love and self-acceptance can be found outside ourselves, when really they can only be found within.

The more we seek externally, the more we find that our efforts are futile, the more desperate we become. So we find ourselves on a vicious cycle of running further and further away from ourselves. Until one day we realise that the only place we can find a home for our hearts is within.

Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men… One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs — not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can “be”, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.

Rollo May

To really love someone else andreally be there for someone else, I first have to be there for myself.

My job and greatest work of a lifetime is not to save the world and heal others, but to heal myself.

Before I can make a difference to anyone else, I need to make a difference to myself. Before I shine a light onto others, I must shine a light into my own darkness and fears – the fear of being alone, the fear of abandonment, the fear of rejection, the fear of not being good enough.

If I’m not seeking salvation through another person, I am in a better position to love them and help them and see them for who they truly are.

The journey continues

I still have down days and I still spend time grieving for the loss and processing the pain. But as I allow myself to mourn and cry, each day feels lighter and better than the last.

Each day I wake up with more energy than before, with more hope than before. In many ways I feel like I am discovering the world anew. There is a certain freshness to the way I perceive things, as though energy once locked away in heavy emotions are now free to be channeled into new discoveries.

When it all gets too much, I remember to give myself a break so that I can be with myself, and give myself the gift of my own presence, to be with my own pain.

If I can learn to really be with myself, then perhaps I can truly be with someone else too.