Jill : Heartful Service

Dropping the Illusions

Jill said Dec 21, 2006, 5:18 AM:
 

 

Over the years, I've discovered that I embrace the stage in a relationship when disillusionment sets in.  It is the beginning of a deepening in intimacy in all relationships.  To friends, family, lovers, work, ideas, spirit.  Allowing the illusions to slip and the reality to anchor us, is a normal, natural and blessed moment.  And most folks ditch it at that point.

We have such a throw away society and rarely are people up for the challenge of working through things that do not feel comfortable or are shifting and changing our perspective.

I watch droves of people arrive for the summer to work where I work.  It is instant love for the people and the nature that surrounds them.  Until the bloom fades from the rose.  Then it is the disillusionment phase and all faults must be ferreted out.  The part of us that is afraid, seeks to find what is grotesquely wrong with the situation.  We pick and pick and pick at it, until it feels so bad we want to leave.  Or we feel the process of the other picking at our connection until we doubt it.  Which invites us to pick and pick and pick….. you get the idea!

I feel really blessed, because I've stuck it through that process enough times, that I know it is the beginning of something more spectacular than we can imagine.  It is when the veils drop and the truth is revealed and our option to truly go deeply in becomes a full-fledged invitation.

It takes heart and soul and courage unimagined.  But, it is so worth it.  I've met more people I know that have been married for years and have never dropped to that level of intimacy.  I've known sisters and brothers and parents with their children who have been unwilling to drop to a level of emotional honesty and intimacy. They've found ways to disengage and keep running and block it all out.  Or they reject all but the illusion of what they wish to be true, and refuse to actually examine what is (politics, anyone?)

I believe the more significant the relationship is, the more intense this opportunity becomes.  Maybe because there is a heightened sense of vulnerability, it becomes easier to toss out the panic flares, like there is an accident waiting to happen.  I feel it in me, and I force myself to take a lot of big breaths and acknowledge that fear, and move on.  To know that the disillusionment phase is truly and honestly the beginning of something more magnificent if we simply embrace the opportunity and allow a greater vulnerability to settle in.

The option?  To keep running from person to thing to belief to idea.  I said this many years ago and believed it to be true at the time.  Now, I would say I hold it as one of my core beliefs.  Relationships are not hard.  They are not work.  They are, however, a reflection of our relationship with ourselves.  And that is what feels hard, or like work.  It is a return to the place of self-accountability, acceptance and love. 

When we look outside ourselves for definition (a job, a relationship, a circumstance) we are holding illusions.  They all crumble.  It is a blessed event and an invitation to let us sink into a place of being more intimate and real with the people around us and the person that we are.

I have been offered sacred opportunities to go much more deeply into a place of vulnerability and intimacy and I have stepped up to the plate with it.  My sister and I have the most incredible, beautiful, wholly spectacular relationship because we both went there.  And it was immense work on letting go of projected images and simply attending to my stuff.  When I did that, lo and behold, I saw Jana for who she is.  I would gleefully choose to go through that weekly in order to have the relationship I have with her.  One of my best friends and I hit a place nine years ago or maybe longer… where we went through our own sticky readjustment.  Invitation was accepted and I've been blessed ever since.  My understanding and my relationship to God has gone through tremendous growth in my life.  Much deeper.  Much more intimate.  And always required a period of disillusionment to burn away the things that simply were a projected vision.

I work very hard on having an open heart.  It is actually rather simple after all this time on a superficial and detached level.  When it matters deeply to me… I find myself handed an engraved invitation to step into the land of disillusionment and allow myself to simply become more vulnerable, more real, and see that other person in the light of something more magnificent than my hope of who they are.  I see that delightful creature AS IS.  And that is where the miracle lives for me!