Can Disappointment Be A Good Sign?
Self-perceiving nature by ImaginativeDadaism
Disappointment, like all human emotions, is a part of love! … and is an indication you are still connected with your child-like innocence.
When I think about disappointment and how it runs through my system, I immediately see its marriage with excitement. Excitement is disappointment’s predecessor and it belongs to the domain of the luminous child. To be really excited about something, we must have at least some part of our inner-child’s innocence integrated, protected, and available to our present-time personality. This is a sign of health!
How many people do we see around us that cannot express excitement because they are afraid of its deflating shadow? Expressing excitement can feel dangerous when too many disappoints over time have created a coupling between joy and pain to the point where an unconscious defense strategy forms around the heart to prevent excitement’s organic child-like upwelling. Over time, when the pain of disappointment consistently follows joy like a curse, it makes sense that a child would learn to unconsciously suppress their joy to avoid the pain. An inner story is created: “When I feel excitement, I will inevitably be disappointed - and it’s not worth the pain.”
What a tragedy this is! Our biological children, inner-children and younger selves need not be limited by this erosive way of relating to our disappointment and pain. We must practice a new way!
Can we wrap our loving arms around the child-like body of our disappointment and hold it tenderly with unconditional love? Can we let our disappointment open our heart rather than close it?
This is alchemy!
Over the years of practicing Soul Alchemy™ and doing my own embodiment work, one of the greatest loci of my understanding centers around the idea that ALL emotion is a part of love - anger, joy, sadness, delight, awe, confusion, frustration, relaxation, rage, etc - all of it! And why wouldn’t they be if they are authentic and human?
When we can hold space for all of our emotions and sensations - all of our experience for that matter - with an attitude of unconditional welcoming and belonging - e.g. “these emotions belong to me, just like my inner-children belong to me” - we steep ourselves, like a human tea bag, more deeply into the generative principle of nature that longs to re-organize our inner psychic mandala towards wholeness. There is and always will be an organic and effortless magnetic force that orients us towards health here on Earth.
Can we practice relaxing into it and let the current of love effortlessly carry us home?