Healing Abuse
Abuse is doing something to a person without their consent or forcing a person to do something against their will. Certain types of abuse such as sexual abuse seem to attract all the attention whereas other types of abuse, like forcing children to study and perform at the expense of their developmental needs, for some, seem to be a norm. There are also abuses of the animal kingdom, the abuse of plants and the abuse of the land. Healing abuse requires attending not just the victim but the perpetrator too.
Healing abuse is about healing the abused and the abuser, our abused and abusive aspects through self knowledge and deep listening.
We need more awareness about abuse as living in a culture where abuse is so widespread influences each one of us and our planet at many different levels. This destruction of the Earth is ultimately a self-destructive process.
Ultimately, all abuse is self-abuse.
We created within ourselves a sick culture in which the masses are in a state of hypnosis so they can easily be controlled.
In a hypnotic sleep, disconnected from our soul’s wisdom we do not know how to face and transform our shadows and as a result we pay a collective price.
The Sufi mystics Haji Bektash Veli and Yunus Emre advise us :
‘Never hurt anyone, even if they hurt you.
‘Love the created because of the Creator.’
These words resonate within me. This impersonal love allows us to hold conflicting opposites together without judgment. How can you love a perpetrator? How can you grasp the concept that neither the abused nor the abuser, no one is to blame?
Yunus Emre comes to help again:
Whatever you think you are,
the opposite is also you.
In an Indian prison Vipassana meditation is practiced, the relatives of those who are killed are united in a healing relationship with the killers of their loved ones.
How is this possible?
Vipassana provides an opportunity to awaken to our interconnectivity.
It is impossible to harm someone without harming ourselves. We reap what we sew.
Those who abuse are already living in a private cauldron that includes the consequences of their actions.
In the deep listening space, through Vipassana, the inmates can reconnect back with a healthy psychology so their loving parts naturally becomes activated.
Deep Listening In Healing Abuse
In order to heal our abused and abusive parts we need to cultivate the long forgotten skill of deep listening.
Sounds carry intelligence.
If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, especially to the sounds of closest to you, you are likely to become disconnected from your environment.
We need to learn to listen to the Earth, to each other, and most importantly to all of our aspects both shadowy as well as loving ones.
Deep listening is moving beyond hearing to respond, to listening to understand. There are some qualities associated with deep listening:
- Focusing on understanding what the other is expressing
- Suspending judgments
- Letting go of the importance of wanting to be right
- Realisation that there is no need to agree to listen to understand
- Acceptance of different perspectives
- Awareness of the holographic nature of the universe
- Ability not feel offended or defensive whatever the message the other carries
In the space deep listening opens up, compassion for oneself and for another may enter.
Some say, we live in a holographic system where our overactive and inactive aspects create a reality that stimulates us into balance.
However damaged, perverted, abused and abusive our ways might ultimately be we all want to love and be loved for this is the nature of totality.
Yunus points out the importance of knowing oneself:
Knowledge of science is to know science.
Knowledge of science is self-knowledge.
If you fail to attain self-knowledge,
What good is there in your studies?
Haji Bektash Veli also says:
Whatever you seek, seek within.
Deep listening, whilst making our non judgmental focus the understanding of the other, in fact holographically shows us our ways from the other’s perspective.
This allows all participants of the process, both listened and the listener to go deeper in their self understanding; speak and listen from their souls.
Only through this self knowledge and witnessing for one another we can heal all our abusive and abused aspects of ourselves into impersonal love, that is our natural state of joyful existence.
Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)image:Gideon Wright
https://soundcloud.com/irem-bray/healing-abuse
