Cut the Cord

When I began studying the Practice formally, my mother was moving in right around the same time. She was recently divorced, cutting ties with a man to whom she was married for almost 30 years. My mother and I hadn’t lived together since I was 11 years old, and this was a chance for us to bring closure a situation with a lot of emotional baggage attached.  There was a lot of healing that needed to be done on both sides and I thought that, given how well our conversations had gone the past year or so, it would be relatively smooth sailing. By things rarely ever go as smoothly as planned and with any kind of growth and healing, there is usually pain and work involved.

Fast forward 8 months later, my mother has now moved out and not on the best of terms. I won’t go into too much detail out of respect for all parties, but in the end I had a decision to make: continue to remain in contact with a side of the family that was toxic to me, or let them go. And that is a difficult decision to make. There are all those feelings of love and obligation on one side competing with feelings of being held back, pushed down, strung along, and, of course, shame. It felt like the more centered, the more peaceful and the more compassionate I became, the angrier my family got, the more negative they were about my changes, the more doubt they cast on me. Certain members of my family are very much motivated and controlled by money as well, so there is also a variable amount of manipulation and greed involved. When I put this down on paper, the negative aspects certainly outweigh the positive. When I think about shame, I think about one of the Principles of NextStage: Shame is a gift given by someone who fears you. I now fully understand what that feels like, and I want no part of it.

Making the decision to remove negative influences in your life is the same as actively committing to be better. To heal. To self-actualize. It’s like cutting the umbilical cord, as Joseph put it to me this weekend. I do not deserve negativity, and it gets in the way of all I want for my life. Cutting these people out of my life is Freedom. Cutting the cords of obligatory shame was much harder than I thought it would be. But several tools of The Practice helped me.

The following exercise required a decent amount of focus and imagination. For several days after my mother left my home on bad terms, a feeling of guilt and fear was almost overwhelming. I was carrying lots of negative energy transferred to me by the whole situation, and the above referenced members of my family. Aside from smudging and cleansing my home, I did the following:

• I lowered and centered my energy, paying close attention to my breathing.
• I “felt” for the negative energy, the anxiety, the guilt, the shame. I can recognize them because they act like obstacles to my centering, and are often carried higher in my physical body like my chest, my shoulders, and my head.
• I “gather” the energy with my focus, into a ball in my left hand held at about my navel.
• I slowly raise the ball of energy up to my mouth, take a deep breath, and blow the negative energy away from me, releasing it to the universe, trapping it in a jar, or ushering it out the door in conjunction with smudging.
• Rinse and repeat.

It takes creativity and imagination. I tend to do what “feels” right in the moment. I find that in the mornings with my back to the sun helps, or at night outside during a full moon. These are tools of the practice given to me by Joseph and Susan that have helped me significantly. I feel free now to be fully committed in my spiritual practice and completely devoted to my wife and children.