The time I didn't speak with my mother for ten years

Greetings and Salutations!

I’ve shared a lot about how my time as a monk ended after my cafe fiasco. At that time, I discovered that I hadn’t transcended emotions as well as I repressed them. What I haven’t shared yet is that the lesson about suppressing emotions is one that I learned much earlier in life.

When I was about twenty, I began to see an Episcopal priest named Jim Davis for counseling. After a few sessions he said to me, so tell me something about your mother, I’ve never heard you mention her.

I told him I hadn’t had any real contact with her for ten years but assured him that it wasn’t a big deal because I was over it.

He said, oh really?

I can still remember the way he said those words because I kept hearing them my mind after that and it annoyed the hell out of me—it was obvious that he didn’t believe me.

I even did this twisted logic about priests not lying where I thought, he’s a priest, isn’t he obliged to believe me? It really got to me.

Such was my awakening to the truth of how we repress our feelings.

The challenge we all face

Of course, I had a TON of things to resolve about the fact that my relationship with my mother was severed when I was ten. The thing is, we’re amazingly good at convincing ourselves that everything is fine when, in fact, it’s not.

That’s a big example but we all struggle with a smaller form of the same problem—and we do so almost everyday. We convince ourselves that we’re not upset. We say, we’re not going to let something bother us. We tell ourselves we’ll deal it that later. And so we shove negative feelings down into our subconscious and out of sight.

But feelings don’t go away on their own.

The process of repressing feelings happens so quickly and is so seamless that it’s incredibly easy to have negative feelings lodged in your heart that you don’t recognize.

It’s understandable. We have a ton of great reasons to avoid negative emotions. I’ll share a number of these in another post but for now I want to focus on the solution.

The essence of transformation

In all the healing work I’ve done since my cafe fiasco, I’ve come to one grand overarching realization that is at the root of the Self Salutation: The secret of transformation is to stop trying to change yourself and to focus instead on changing your relationship with yourself.

So far in this newsletter I’ve focused on one component of this change—becoming your own best friend. Learning to love and accept yourself.

Self acceptance is the critical first stage, the foundation from which all other growth in possible. We all have an inner, Imposter Judge who is hard on us in exactly the places where we need to give ourselves love and acceptance.

At the same time, we are also too soft on ourselves. But we’re soft in a way most of us have never even considered. Namely, we let ourselves continue in our evasion of the negative emotions buried in our hearts.

The secret power of summoning your courage

Fr. Jim changed my life by helping me reconnect with my mother—and now I have a great relationship with her—but first he helped me to recognize and sort through a host of feelings.

You see, in order to get me to cut off my relationship with my mother, my father and stepmother convinced me that my mother was not just wrong or unhealthy or even bad, but that she was evil—and the thing she wanted most was to manipulate and control me.

Because these ideas got lodged within my heart at the age of ten, reconnecting with her took more courage than anything I’ve had to do in life since.

Okay, true, I’m not a combat vet, or a cop, or a fireman. I haven’t been through a ton of situations that have called for heaps of courage, but still, I think you get my point.

And I’m using a big example here because such examples help to show the principles clearly, but my point is that the key ingredient in the kind of self confrontation that I am speaking of is courage.

The shift that results from courage

When you gather up your courage to feel whatever is within you and to see whatever it is you need to see, a shift happens. You enter into a heightened state of strength and that signals to your unconscious that it’s okay, you’re strong enough to contend with whatever is going on inside of you.

I call this the Lion meditation for obvious reasons.

You may not think you have the courage you need but what I have seen is that life is gracious in the way she calls us forward step by step in the transformation process. You may not have the courage you need right now for everything, but you have the courage you need to take the next step that life is asking of you.

What’s amazing about this whole dynamic is that the resistance we all have towards experiencing negative feelings is like the boogeyman under the bed. It’s a holdover from childhood when we didn’t have the ability to contend with our emotions.

Now that you’re an adult, you can see that experiencing a negative feeling for a few minutes may be no fun—but it beats the price you pay when you run from it.

Peace,

Simon

P.S. Have you learned which of the Animal Mindfulness Teachers is the best for your current biggest form of stress? Click the link here for my stress survey. After answering a few questions, we’ll email you a booklet with info about the best animal teacher for you right now.