The Growing Capacity to
Embrace Ambivalence and Modulate Desires
As our inner life develops, we can begin to modulate our contradictory desires to remain the same and to become different. Or the contradictory desires to hold on or let go. Or to know how to have a good laugh and a good cry over the same thing. Or to love and hate the same person.
The first step is to dive into the dilemma of ambivalence or valuing opposites and holding opposing values. I love the Holy Nights and I love the challenge of writing the messages but there is also the feeling that I wish I could just forget them and not have to struggle with the messages. Each year I get more comfortable with embracing the ambivalence - I am growing this soul capacity.
We all face ambivalence in many areas of our lives. (Intimate relationships, anyone?) What are your ambivalent feelings around the Holy Nights and the Inner Christmas messages? Do you want to work with the questions? Or do you just want to ignore them? Ambivalence usually keeps us in the lower realms of pain or pleasure and profit or loss. It's that little word "or." Spiritual development is not the overcoming of ambivalence. It is the self-compassionate embrace of ambivalence which leads us to the morally awake presence of joy and suffering. Notice "and."
Once we find a more spiritually mature relationship to ambivalence, we can then modulate our desires. We can vary the frequency, the intensity and the duration of our hungers and our satisfactions. We don't feel greed or the need to avoid. We can bear inner growing pains calmly. We can persevere in our inner development.
The Holy Nights offer us the two portals of innocence and wisdom. Innocence is free of ambivalence and desire. Wisdom is the result of our struggles with both.
Feeling the spirit behind you and beneath you, move toward wisdom.
In your soul's Holy Night, observe your struggles. Forgive your ambivalences and play with the frequency, intensity and duration of your desires. Wonder first, then focus, then name.
With desires, how often can you imagine having a desire fulfilled (a hundred times in a day or once in your lifetime); how intensely can you imagine experiencing your desire being fulfilled (as if you could die from the intensity or as if you were lightly brushed by an angel's wing); and how long could you endure the experience (forever, years, months, days, hours, the blink of your eye). Play with your wicked desires and your saintly ones.
With ambivalence, imagine light without shadow? What could you see? Would it seem significant? If love did not need to overcome hate, would it be love?
If the Holy Nights, didn't ask us difficult questions, would they be holy? Think of the Babe in the manger and how he grew to carry the ambivalence and desires of the world and we only need to embrace and modulate our own.
You mention the Babe in the manger. Reaching for the back side of yesterday's meditation I was struggling last night driving home in the dark. I considered the way that Jesus desired and had passion for the physical life. I am remembering what I have heard athletes describe as "leaving it on the field." Forgive the imagery, but I pictured leaving blood on the ground because of my desires, holy and unholy. There is a risk of becoming lost in my attachments and desires. I'm trying to feel this as one side of the opposites.
ReplyDeleteThe meditations on the Holy Nights also leave me ambivalent- reveling and relishing in the challenge and the wisdom (cognitive, spiritual), and wanting to get out there and do something- live it right away! It seems like at times I'm stuffed with so much rich wisdom that I just want to exercise it out of my body!
ReplyDeleteThe picture of Abraxas, the bare fact that a world has to be destroyed, the world of illusions, the world of the horses, the polarity I encounter in everyday life and that is inviting me to surrender, to be. Hesse's story of Demian came into my mind reading your blog. Knowing that I am connected with all and everything, is helping me to let go of the guards
ReplyDelete"Innocence is free of ambivalence and desire. Wisdom is the result of our struggles with both."
ReplyDeleteSuch a wonderous and profound statement and so very meaningful for me! Thank you!
Frank Chester, artist and geometrician, explores the relation between form and spirit. His research has led him to work with the sacred geometry of the heart. He has said, ". . . the human heart rejoices when life is experienced as a rhythmic weaving between peripheral and centric polarities."
ReplyDeleteLynn, I wrote this poem this morning in response to your message and to what is living in my soul in these days.
ReplyDeleteThis Winter View
I’m half-hearted today, wanting nothing and everything.
The pecan branches, having let go their leaves,
grasp at air. The empty husks are left
to look needy after opening and letting go.
The tree is a wreck, hurricane-damaged.
Leaves hide the misshapen limbs in summer rustle.
Now all the abrupt ends, their gentle tapering
ripped away long ago, are laid bare.
The tree will never recover
its beauty or strength,
but squirrels will race,
scrabbling, tumbling through green again
until the cycle turns, and though I suppose
this winter view is no more true,
it feels so, the broken limbs, the grasping husks,
the roughness we’d wish not to have, but do.
Thanks, Lyn, for the message about ambivalence, and for taking on the harder parts of life in this holy season. I was experiencing ambivalence, things I want to do, think I want to do, feel too tired to do, wonder if I really want to do... just before reading this message, so it was beautifully serendipitous (sp?). In fact, I was feeling ambivalent about opening the email right now. This is a valuable message for me, as I'm being more conscious about ambivalence in many important aspects of my life. So, again, thanks.
ReplyDeleteWhen my children are begging for crackers half-an-hour before dinner is ready, I tell them, "It's a good thing to be hungry! Sit with your hunger for a while, then be grateful for the meal you will soon more thoroughly appreciate, than if I spoil your appetite now."
ReplyDeleteHmmm, kind of like what I tell myself as a grown-up in reflection. Delayed gratification always sounds like no gratification at all, and it isn't. It turns out to be deeper, of course, more like a fulfillment, a ripening that simply requires the time it takes.
Self-restraint seems required to even discern what Highest Good might be. And in practicing various self-restraints, tempering indulgence, I discover not only a more accurate discernment of Highest Good, but the existence of Right Timing as well.
Not from a Christmas Carol:
When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter
far beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed
that with the sun's love
in the spring
becomes the rose
ABOUT AMBIVALENCE
ReplyDeleteThis is probably one of the best kept secrets in religion. Religious institutions preach far too often about sin and repentance. I’m sure a lot of it is because they have a vested interest in the power to forgive sins and hanging on to people in the process. Almost the opposite of what Jesus stood for I would say. But it’s amazing how old habits die hard!
Graham Greene fascinated me with how his great characters wrestled with ambivalence and conscience. The greater that struggle was in them the deeper they dipped into their humanity.
Then sometimes because of abuse in childhood we don’t grow up straight, and ambivalence is our daily stock in trade. We need therapy at some stage before we seriously hurt ourselves or others; but when we can truly respond to the beauty and dignity of the other even if it be a bee, then we become free indeed! It’s then I can laugh at my foibles listen to my reluctance to commence some serious inner work, or just ring a friend to be warmed by their greeting!