Embracing Separation
“Our true I is the sum of all our conscious and unconscious life experiences from conception onward.”
Franz Ruppert
Traditionally, this is the season of reflection, connection, and love. It’s a heart-warming time, yet it can also be heartbreaking, especially in our current environment.
Love is complicated; I‘m not going to pretend an attempt to explain it here. What I know, though, is that it is difficult for love to emerge, be held, and be maintained, when in separation. This reality is what brings me to the cost of splitting.
The theory of the psyche splitting is the premise of Identity Development (ID), the method I’m training in. Splits occur when we are confronted with experiences and associated emotions that feel unbearable at the time they occur.
In my experience, the cost of splitting can be summed up as a lifetime of energy and resources locked up in maintaining the split, that is, the disconnection from those strong feelings and experiences.
It has cost me the experience of myself as the precious and delicate unity of body, mind, and psyche that I truly am, instead leaving me compartmentalized, and leading to seemingly irreconcilable conflicts within and without.
This painful legacy has become more and more obvious since my daughter was born - further emphasized by our current societal circumstances - as strategies that kept me disconnected have started to fail.
A recent ID session was revealing in that context: it clearly showed me the tremendous stress and loneliness I experience by keeping seemingly conflicting parts of myself separated (i.e. not in dialogue, not honored), and by maintaining a survival mechanism that responds to the needs of other people rather than to my own.
I come to realize that separation from myself - my own experiences, feelings, response mechanisms - is too high a price to pay, and one that will make me permanently dependent on theories and assumptions of love and connection, rather than resting in my own felt experience of it.
Thus far, to me, love means the slow and gentle embrace of everything - the beautiful, the easy, the ugly, and the difficult - coming to feel joyful about my own imperfect being, and starting to embrace others in the same way.
There you go: I couldn’t resist attempting an explanation of love - simply because it’s at the heart of ID work to cherish and honor who we really are in all our nuances, and simply because the ID method (based on the resonance between human beings and their nervous systems) relies on the complexity and inherent intelligence of human connection, healing us from separation one session at a time, and one individual at a time.
I’m so inspired and disheartened to encounter all parts of myself, some of them obvious and readily available, some of them hidden for a long time. And then it is amazing to realize that love, unity, and connection are nothing that I can “simply” cognitively enforce. It needs to happen from the inside out, and by embracing and integrating separation and conflicts inside of me. That is true unity, love & connection to me.