Observation.
Recently , during a daime weekend at Casa da Luz , there was a moment when I realized, sad and snivelling, that ‘for so long there is time she goes too fast for me always’ .
It was the sudden sharp realization that in communication with people often things happen that makes being together unreal to me, while I see happening exactly why that is , and I also would like to put this into words so the arisen misunderstanding can be resolved but the other (s ) have no idea what I’m talking about ( if I mention it to begin with) , and certainly not the time and interest to stand still, let alone for quite some time, in something they didn’t notice to begin with.
Observation and memory.
During that same weekend , there was a session during which one of the participants was seen as a pretty impressive beautiful by me. In a way that brought up the desire to crawl on the floor and go kiss her on a cheek.
The memory surfaced that long ago in a retreat with Isaac Shapiro I had such an amorous desire before and admitted it.
That time there was a lot of uproar after the satsang : this woman came up to me , completely upset . How dared I do that!!!
In short , my rather spontaneous and gentle friendly action had triggered in her a major traumatic reaction in her . It took a lot of work to clarify that again.
We have become friends later though.
Yet the memory kept me there from spontaneously follow my feeling.
I just kept looking, feeling, perceiving.
And suddenly there was the discovery, the insight: what is being overlooked is that the distance between this woman and me is an essential part of what is happening , of what is taking place .
In fact it is more than likely that she did not even notice what was going on inside me. And so what I perceive / experience has nothing to do with her, with us, has just something to do with me .
The desire is in fact the desire to undo the distance by bridging it.
If you, like I did ten years ago, does quickly start to happen unnoticed several things: there is no rapprochement, no observing the effect of coming closer, no announcement of the swiftly coming closer caress, no time to show the other that you are on your way, it was a kind of soft raid . One that hit like a bomb .
And in that sense a by me in someone else caused misunderstanding where the time moved too fast for the other because there was no announcement of the wish to bridge the distance, so the kindest intentions struck like lightning.
Looking back on my life, I can see that I often have been hiding my insecurity in the speed of so-called spontaneous action.
And then your heart -shaped island suddenly comes across as a bunch of nettles .
I keep learning.
