By Rori Raye
I make things up.
I'm standing at the kitchen sink, a soapy
dish in my hand, and I'm enraged.
My face is screwed up in fury.
I want to hurl the dish at the window.
I've just imagined that my husband is doing
something awful that hurts me, and I've gone through the
entire scenario of discovery, pain and rage dash; all in
about two seconds.
I catch myself and stop cold.
What am I doing?
Why am I doing this?
I'm a Drama Queen on the loose, creating anger
instead of passion, grief instead of love.
What started me?
I sort of remember thinking about a client,
or a neighbor, or a friend who's tolerated a sub-par relationship
for way too long.
I remember empathizing.
Then I remember putting myself there.
Then I remember holding onto the dish hard
enough to crack it.
Makes no difference.
I go there because I go there.
Sometimes I go there to balance the scale
when things have been particularly grand in my marriage
and in my work, and I just can't tolerate so much goodness
coming to me.
Sometimes I go there to shake things up –
as if I've been asleep.
Sometimes I go there as a pre-emptive strike
against me, to punish me for some sin I've committed or
believed I've committed, or believe I will commit.
I could analyze for days, years, eons, this
life and the next and the next.
Or I could right things right now one moment
at a time.
If I cannot tolerate love, I will get angry
and push it away.
If I don't have a good reason – I'll
make one up.
If I cannot tolerate success, I will sabotage
it with carelessness.
If I don't have a good reason, I'll make
one up.
I always have a reason, an excuse, an idea.
Something I was taught long ago, in this life
or the last, or the lives before.
There are so many ways to make up real reasons
for everything.
There are statistics aplenty to support any
point of view I could come up with.
There are charts and examples and experiences
to quote for any statement I could make up about anything
in this world.
So I'll stop trying to figure it out. It doesn't
matter what I think.
It doesn't matter what I think about myself.
It doesn't matter who's right or what's right.
It only matters how it feels. If I feel bad
– yes, there's a reason, a source, a belief.
And who says feeling bad is bad, anyway?
Who says feeling rage and making stuff up
is so bad?
I just know I don't like the way it feels.
So I'm going to stop this right now.
Here's how:
We women process.
Our feelings morph.
We feel good, then we feel guilty, then we
feel bad, then we feel mad, then we feel lots of things.
By following those feelings around our bodies,
we get to experience feeling alive.
We get to experience pain, anger, joy –
the whole soup of love.
Can't feel one feeling without getting close
to another.
It's the way it works.
We're not all compartmentalized.
We can't only feel joy and never encounter
pain.
If we spend all our energy trying not to feel
pain, we can't ever get close to joy.
So if we focus on pain, all we'll ever feel
is Resistance to feeling pain, which is the same as Resistance
to feeling joy, which leaves us with a big, fat nothing.
Feeling numb, a void, cold, bored, overwhelmed.
All the small feelings are all that's left.
To feel passion, we have to be willing to feel pain.
The amazing thing is, being willing to experience
pain doesn't always mean you have to experience pain.
Quite the opposite.
Once I start to embrace the whole soup, the
scary feelings aren't so scary after all.
It's as if my ship was weighted down with
Resistance, sinking it backwards into yucky, painful feelings,
and once I lifted off the Resistance and said Okay –
I'm okay with the pain – the pain never showed up.
The shoe I was spending my waking hours waiting
to drop doesn't drop.
I take my hand off my ears and there's no
screaming. Instead, my ship rights itself.
It goes on ahead – something that feels
better is up ahead.
And if I do encounter pain, I find joy, bliss
and peace all mixed up with it.
If our man is standoffish, then we must be,
too.
We may think we're all ready and willing and
able, we may have our hearts open wide, and yet it doesn't
make sense.
To get close to a man, you have to let him
in.
If we're doing all the work and he's just
hanging out in his half of the relationship turf and not
venturing into our hearts, if we're with a man who doesn't
want to venture into our particular hearts, then all that
makes sense is that we're afraid to let a man – any
man - in.
If we're afraid to let him in because we're
afraid we'll be abandoned, afraid we'll share ourselves
totally and then watch helplessly as he takes off, taking
our whole selves with him, it's because we're afraid of
abandoning ourselves.
What does that look like?
Either we have a man, or are attracted to
men, who we know on some level will play us and leave us
- thereby efficiently abandoning ourselves without having
to do it ourselves (this is all about Boundaries, of course)
- or we have a lovely man who wants us and so we are faced
with the chore of abandoning ourselves.
Either way it's not pretty.
We go to abandonment often.
If he's not doing the job, we do.
We make it up.
We are all made up of so many parts and voices
and energies and thoughts and feelings.
We can identify some as wounded parts, some
as heroic.
When things are going wonderfully, we may
habitually bounce to the wounded part, then to the angry
part, then to the numb part before we feel okay back at
the wonderful part.
Most of the time we're doing this dance all
by ourselves.
Our men are standing around, totally fine
with us (sometimes even looking for direction to make us
happy), wondering what's come over us.
And we make it up.
Try this:
Be compassionate with yourself.
Be grateful to yourself.
Embrace yourself.
So much of why we make stuff up is that we
yearn to stay in touch with our deepest parts.
We want to access the pain, the wounded parts,
because that's where the joy is stuck too – in the
soup.
We want to be close to our deep feeling parts.
It makes us feel deep and profound, and spiritual.
The trick is to be able to go there, and everywhere
else too!
You can start easy, with inanimate objects.
Put your hand on something – the chair,
the sofa, the table.
Talk to it – out loud if you can.
Say Wood table, I know you were once a tree.
I feel bad that you were chopped down.
And sawed up and pounded.
I'm sorry.
I'm so glad to have you with me.
Thank you for your sacrifice.
I feel so grateful to be able to put food
and my work on you.
Thank you for supporting me, I love you.
I will not forget that you were once a tree.
Thank you.
Or a metal lamp, Lamp, I feel you all hard,
I know you were once in the ground, all cozy, where you
belong, and you were dug up, and put through the fire, and
hammered and poured. I'm so sorry.
I feel for you.
I bless you.
Thank You for being in my home and lighting
my home so I can see and read.
I won't forget how you serve me. Thank You.
You may feel silly doing this.
You may find yourself sobbing.
You are being compassionate and grateful to
the table and the lamp.
Do this for short periods – 10 to 20
seconds tops.
The moment you feel yourself in your head
instead of your feelings, stop.
Now move on to yourself.
This is the place many of us never get to.
We are compassionate with others, with animals,
with furniture, but not with ourselves.
Whether or not you believe you deserve this
exercise, please do it.
Just try it.
A few moments at a time.
Important note - If you're in the presence
of someone – your man, or a new man – do the
Rori Raye Mantra instead.
Deliver Feeling Messages.
Let your words speak what you feel.
If you're alone – if you're starting
to make stuff up, to feel down about yourself, if the Gremlin
rears up and you feel the process of going to pain, to anger,
to Resistance, to numb – no matter what happened or
what anyone did or said – go straight to Compassion.
Here's The Compassion Dialogue:
Say to that voice, that part that's speaking,
thinking, feeling yucky things I feel your sadness, your
doubt.
I won't abandon you.
Thank you for trying to protect me.
I'm here for you.
I'm so sorry for your pain, and for your
suffering, and I won't abandon you.
And now I'm going to go on with feeling better,
and doing what makes me feel good, and what makes me bigger
and happier so that I can share more compassion with you
and with the world.
I embrace you, and I won't leave you behind.
I promise.
Don't worry about who's who in the dialogue,
who you are as the part speaking, who you're talking too.
Just address the voice that's hurting or angry
and embrace it verbally.
Tell it you won't abandon it on your way up
the ladder of feeling good and being successful in business
and in love.
Tell it you love it, will take care of it,
forgive it, thank it, feel compassion for it. Just the way
you did with the table and the lamp.
Just 10-20 seconds at a time, throughout the
day.
And then just see what happens.
This is all very complex, and libraries are
filled with psychological and spiritual texts on how all
this works.
And being in your head about it will not help
you at all – because you are you, and you need to
know that you are on your side forever.
Loving Yourself is easy to talk about –
but what does that mean, and how do you do it?
Talk to yourself, feel what you feel, embrace
the soup, and use the words of the Rori Raye dialogues.
Literally, authentically Thank Yourself –
each body part, each feeling part, each voice that you notice
wants attention.
Literally, verbally express compassion to
each part, each voice.
As you do this, your Resistance to feeling
will soften.
Just a little softening is enough to get you
in the soup. And from there, you can sail your ship anywhere.
Love, here we come!
Let me show you all the ways in which you
can be happy and thrive in your relationship.
My FREE NEWSLETTER is packed with tools and
advice to help you connect to your man, inspire his love
and devotion, and finally have the relationship you want...starting
today!
Simply fill in your name and email at the
link below and start learning the tools that will show you
how to get MORE out of your relationship.
Your information is kept confidential and
there is no obligation... just valuable, free advice:
In her workshops, classes, private coaching
and new book, relationship coach Rori Raye teaches women
the completely original, simple-to-do and stunningly effective
techniques for communication, confidence, and connecting
with men that she used to turn her own now-glorious eighteen-year
marriage around.
