I did not come to teach you

I did not come to teach you.  I came to love you. Love will teach you. - unknown

This new learning started with a trauma I experienced.  Pretty high on the scale of sensitive things. I have a team of healers I work with - body, emotions, spirit…  And as I put myself together again I got to see more consciously this time (previous traumas were so piled on top of each other that I didn’t have the ground to really see the person I was working with).  I got to see where the people I work with got triggered. Where they seemed to lose their ground.

I observed that when they did they tended to give advice.  And in the situation advice was not what I needed. I needed to re-stitch.  I needed to put myself back together again. I needed the session to be about me.  When we get triggered we can lose ourselves and inadvertently (in fancy therapist language that can look helpful and sometimes is) make the session about ourselves.  

If I hear something horrible and I feel helpless and upset I might want to tell a person how they could have prevented this or what they should do to prevent it in the future or what there is to learn from this. 

I might talk a lot.

I might be difficult to connect with - a bit dissociated or schizoid.  

When I find myself teaching someone - and it happens more than I realized it did - I ask the question - do I have faith that love will teach them?

Not that all psycho-education is bad.  But the art of therapy as a therapist is to watch my impulses.  To understand my piece in this.  

I know in my bones, my natural self, that love is the teacher.

What do I mean by love?  I mean life force. I mean our desire to live and to love.  Everything we long for. The moment by moment wanting that takes us through our lives.  I mean the flowing river that is us.

Life teaches us.  We teach ourselves.  The flow of life teaches us.

I will teach my clients by who I am - the way I am - not through words hammering at them.

I don’t mean this in an “I should walk my talk” kind of way.  I mean I will teach them in the way that our energies interact.  The experiences we have together. And these are fully determined by what I myself am learning from love.  The ways I am changing in response to the flow of life. This happens completely naturally as an outflow of my energy and the client’s.

There are times when I feel the flow of a client’s life and I want to change the direction.  I feel myself banking up the shores and trying to shift things. These therapies are more exhausting.  The opportunity is to notice what I am doing and relax. This is the client’s river. I am there, watching it flow, feeling into it, making observations, changing it with my presence - like I am swimming in it for a bit.  And I don’t get to choose where it goes. Love will teach them.

I can certainly voice concern, wonder about things, sometimes take a certain kind of action.  But love will teach them. And love is grace not will. Mine and theirs.

I don’t think this is just about therapy either.  It is about all kinds of teaching, leading, parenting… loving in general.  We cannot make people into who we want them to be. Some information is important, our honest reflections are important.  The questions I am asking over and over again are:

Am I aligned with love?

Am I centered in my own self - grounded in my body?  

Feeling my longings of life and its natural flow?  

From there I love.

When I am scared, anxious, betraying myself - from there I try to change people, dominate.  It can be subtle. And it’s perceptible. 

Which all comes back to - ourselves.  The attention we pay to our own alignment.  Our own healing. Our own health. Our own hearts.

All the technique in the world can’t make up for a closed heart.  I don’t mean we can’t. have hurting hearts or jostled hearts - that’s what having an open heart takes - all the feelings.  

It does mean that we work to open our hearts.  To feel ourselves in our chairs, to be honest with ourselves about how we feel, and we do the work of mourning and repairing and aligning so that we can open our hearts as we work.

Love isn’t sweet, though it can be.  Love is strong. It is what takes us from moment to moment.

The force of love from another wakes up our own love.  

So back to the healing from trauma.  As I soothe my nervous system. Re-stitch it.  Heal it. I can stay with more. I can bear more.  I can cry alongside. I can love.

Love is what changes us.  Love will teach us.