Where have you parked your source of happiness?
Who or what have you made your singular object of affection?
These were the questions that arose in three different conversations within a few days of each other. That is always a sign that I should write about it 🙂
A friend was describing her sacred connection with an ancestral temple in a remote village on the coast. She remains perplexed at her deep attachment to a place she has no rational connection with. The culture is unfamiliar, she does not like the sea, that entire life is alien to what she is accustomed to. But her pull there was so strong that she actually considered buying a house there. She says she could spend endless hours in that space. So every year, when she visits India, she makes it a point to visit this sacred site.
The same yearning and attachment showed up in a session with a depressed client. As a youngster, she was inordinately fond of singing, convinced that only when she was singing could she experience a state of bliss. Subsequent life changes of career and marriage put an end to her singing. It was only during our session that she came to realize that she held a lot of anger and bitterness over this, blaming her father and then her husband, for the lack of music in her life. She felt disconnected from Source and felt there was no sweetness left in life. Without her singing, she was lost.
Another client came struggling with a romantic-spiritual relationship. I find these are even more entangled and confusing than the more common infatuations or popular, (fictional) ‘picture-perfect-romance’ yearnings. The reason becomes apparent as you hear one of the ways in which it is described: “I feel like I have returned Home. I feel safe and loved and there is some magical connection that I cannot explain. My sense of self dissolves and there is overwhelming love. The moment we met, we knew there was a soul connection.” After such a peak experience, there arises a desire and yearning to remain in that space and recreate that feeling. It is now uniquely associated with the said person.
Call it love, bliss, oneness or anything else. It essentially describes that same state – of feeling Home. In all the three instances, knowingly or unknowingly, the entire onus of experiencing this state is now parked at a single doorstep. This leads to neediness, attachment and dependency. Any separation becomes deeply painful, perhaps because it re-stimulates the original wound – of individuation or separation from Source. A part of us also knows that this is turning into a form of addiction and unhealthy entanglements prevent the free, spontaneous connection that was originally experienced.
Why do we associate a single object of affection with re-connection to Source? These moments of being at Home are continually available to us. The glimpses of feeling whole and complete, seeing the perfection in the moment, the overwhelming awe, love and gratitude for everyone and everything – these moments grace us all the time. However, we fail to recognize them. I feel that the first time that we cognitively notice this shift is an incomparable experience for us and it comes to be associated with the person, space or activity that we happened to be around in that moment.
We thus place the Source outside of us – in one of these externals and then fall into the abyss of longing and belief of being incomplete. They are perceived as exclusively responsible and capable of our return to our Being.
How do we return Home? By realizing that the external simply triggered what was always within you. The experience does not happen outside, but is what you reconnect with – within yourself. There are no external factors that you must have for this state to happen. Start noticing how, by focusing your attention inside of you, you can shift your experience of what is going on outside. When you are centered in your own heart, no matter where you roam – you are truly home.
Then there is nothing to demand of any space, person or activity.
But a lot to celebrate, as the sacredness becomes apparent everywhere.
Related Post: Poems: Home Free
Serene Reflection 
Dearest Sangeeta,
Thank you so much for writing this post. Like the people you have described, I have also felt these connects accompanied by longing for the experience again. One example of this is living in Pune. I cherish that time so much that I long to move back there.. and every time I visit, I feel depressed when I need to go back. For a long time, I struggled with this till I realised that it was the moments of connection I experienced with the people there that makes me want to live there, but in craving for it all the time, I forget to experience the same connects with people that I work with or live with here (my home, Hyderabad).
I would also like to have a deeper conversation with you about some other experiences in my life recently. I wonder when that can be…
Until then, lots of love and deep gratitude.
Thanks for sharing that Deepti… another relevant example that may help some other reader find his or her freedom. What you described is exactly the way we sabotage our self, by not appreciating what is always with us… Present to here and now – there is always Presence 🙂
I am sure the conversation will happen when the time is right 🙂
Lots of love!
Sangeeta
Reblogged this on Flowering of eternity and commented:
I woke up today morning and re-read this article. Since the past few days I have been working on shifting my focus inward and have begun noticing how I have “parked” so many things at so many doors.
I see now, how the beginning and the end of a feeling is within me. I do not own the triggers of those feelings and so need not go around to bell the cat who triggered that feeling in me. Mostly it is easy for me to recognise the beginning and end of feelings like anger, hatred, jealousy, etc. and be with them. I’ve learnt to see how I project these – I will set up a person like a projector to trigger these feelings within me whereas the truth was, these feelings were already there in me, but I refused to see them or accept them!
However, over the past few days, I am realizing that even the ‘good’ feelings, like oneness, kindness, generosity, lovefulness (don’t know how to explain this one) are just like the others – they begin and end within us. It is futile and burdensome to hold on to people/moments who trigger those in us. Again the projector is set up for someone to hold the space for me to project the kindness, the oneness that I refuse to accept/see/acknowledge within me.
Deeper still I ask myself if this thought that I am holding on to you true? You are just a thought and in this moment I don’t even know if ‘you’ are alive or not. Where is this ‘you’? I am staying with this question. Often answers have arrived before the questions. There is no ‘other’. Only thoughts with a subject called ‘other’. But our thoughts only.
I shall keep reading this article by Sangeeta like a farmer tilling the soil everyday until I experience the understanding that there is no other. It brings up the leftover dirt in the form of these questions and cleans up the mind-soil.
I think you are right: when we feel an intense connection to someone or something, it is that we’ve rediscovered something of ourselves.
Thank you, yes we have recognised ourself in the mirror before us 🙂
This really comes home to me whenever I find myself being critical of others —->> it’s usually something I don’t like in myself:)
Sangeeta,
reached this through something else you wrote recently. You have said everything so well….thanks and keep writing….
Thank you for the visit and encouragement Anil 🙂