HESITATION / PANIC

People whose lives feel saturated with moments of hesitation are often people who find in thoughtfulness like a second nature. Their difficulty in caring, because to care might invite PANIC, drives them away from straightforward kindness and tenderness even though they seem capable of it. If this feels like you, don’t PANIC. You do care, but it’s terrifying. Think of your emotional life like a series of ski-runs (I don’t ski but I did watch something called Ski Sunday on television a lot when I was a child: it was like dreaming.)

Thoughtfulness might look deadly to some people but not to you. You’ll have thoughts about most things. The hardest slope for you, the kind of thing that seems to end up in a cloud of snow and disaster is the one leading to genuine tenderness: kindness and gentleness together. When you hold someone or something tenderly you are as vulnerable as they, all of your attention with them. For you, however, there will always be a lot of thoughtfulness going on at the same time … a bit like an engine starting to smoke as it gets overloaded.

The difficulty about a connection grounded in extreme thoughtfulness is that you can relatively easily change your mind.  Do you ever ask: why do I keep changing my mind? Those connections will be much easier to move on from than ones where you have truly let the other in. All the way in. And people who you say you love will notice this. A certain self-centredness will become clear to them over time, however much you don’t want that to be the case. They may be in your thoughts, or they may not be. You’ll feel guilty when they are not and maybe hate yourself for what you blame on your thoughtlessness. It’s anything but that.

There is a solution. In fact there are many.  Make up your own ones once you see the idea. Get some EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) to get you moving if you feel double-stuck. EMDR jump starts your psychological power of self-healing.

Try this exercise as often as you can.

Practice being connected to the world from your heart not your head. It’s called a head to heart movement. Try it.

HEAD TO HEART

If you move between regarding the world out of somewhere near your forehead, maybe between your eyes, and then slowly drop your attention down to feeling something like a ray of light between your heart and whatever you are regarding you’ll find yourself starting to feel something. I’ve chosen a tree in these amateurish scribbles because they tend not to move and are in fact lovely things we can’t do without. Try it. If you don’t feel anything, try it again. This is not about anything mystical, but something extraordinary: you imagining something differently … from a place where you might imagine you feel love (trust those songs) rather than the sentinel who is your cortex.

And then try with another tree, or a flower, and build your way up to a person. Can you see why you hesitate?