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Hi Jill,
Your story reminds me of something I just heard today on my daily hike. I usually listen to something on CD. I bought Marianne Williamson's book The Age of Miracles - Embracing the New Midlife. There is quite a bit of metaphysical thinking it in and it is also based quite a bit around a Course in Miracles. I also bought the audiobook on CD and I do find it easier to listen to her reading her book, than I found actually reading it - for reasons that I can't quite define.
Here is the story your post reminded me of. It comes from the actress Ellen Burstyn's memoir Lessons in Becoming Myself. She took a 25 yr break from love and sex; after a decades long string of husbands and lovers. She didn't even date during her romantic hiatus because she was so sure that any liaison would be just another reflection of the same painful patterns she'd played out in her relationships up until then.
While people make up all kinds of explanations for such a lull in their love life, Williamson believes this occurs because the person has declared a halt to romance on a subconscious level - regardless of how much their conscious mind might protest that idea.
In every relationship, you encounter the same demon - your own. You have to deal with that demon or you'll never find true love because the demon will block it. The arsenal of self-sabotage includes - insecurity, lack of boundaries, jealousy, dishonesty, anger, control, neediness and other forms of personal inauthenticity. These traits attract to you, time after time, the same bad types or will blow it with any good types you find.
In order to have a good love relationship, you have to realize that no human being can erase your pain for you. Ellen Burstyn came to understand that her negative relationship patterns were reflections of her childhood wounds, which she'd have to reenact until she healed them. Until that work is done on some level, there is no getting off the wheel of suffering. The work has to be done deeply and absorbed.
Burstyn writes that she remembered feeling “Now that I know I am ready at last to love well, I fear it is too late”. However, once your mind and heart are realigned, when the broken self you may have become in childhood is no longer manifesting broken relationships, then you're ready to love again. Compassion, integrity, truthfulness, generosity and graciousness become key elements in your new romantic skill set.
You see what you have done wrong in the past, forgive yourself, now understand other people's actions and forgive them too. You are humbled. When Williamson asked Burstyn what if was like when she finally met the man of her dreams, she “There is much more respect and much less judgment. Conversations don't escalate into arguments, and arguments don't escalate into violence. I now know how to let a man be.”
I can't claim any of the above is my original thinking. I just heard it today and then read your post. And when I openned Williamson's book to find it, I landed right on the exact page this story begins, in the chapter called I Will Survive (pgs 107-112) which I have excerpted or borrowed here with my own 2cents here and there. I think someone in your pod is meant to read this. These are too many coincidences, clustered together, to have been less than that. You know I visit you here so infrequently, though you are just the sweetest person, it is all I can do to keep pace with my own Living Metaphysics pod. I don't believe in accidental happenings and so, I share this here with you and whoever.
Wishing you years and years of happiness. I met my husband after my self-esteem was raised a bit at a Jack Canfield seminar, thanks to reduced admission offered by my Science of Mind church in St Louis, where I lived at the time. I remember thinking “if the right man really existed, I would marry again”. Now I have 2 young children with him in a second life (I also have a grown daughter and 2 grandchildren).
Deborah
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