When some one dies we can bring to life in ourselves the essence of what their relationship has been bringing to us. Previously we had received from them the energy of their own personality - enjoying their gifts with thanksgiving - now it has gone - the only thing we can do is bring into our own possession that which we know we needed from them. Did they give us courage? Now we must find in ourselves the source of courage that their gift unleashed for us. In so doing we can become bigger and stronger within the grief. It can become productive as we allow the departed one to come to life in us. Perhaps now it is their memory that can urge us to be transformed in their image - a memory that is charged with the energy that grief brings (a product of the anger at our own helplessness) but this can work to our advantage as we pick up the mantle of their legacy. Their absence still offers us something if we are ready to do the soul-work hidden in the depths of the grief.

You (I'm referring to me!) must beat your passivity. You were brought up to be a carer and so to be passive about your own needs. Your satisfaction was acceptable only when it came to you unsought. You chose your form of evangelical christianity because in it there is formula of being good: earning rewards, but you stay the passive one in regard to your own fulfilment, and the active one only insofar as you're being compliant to a given behavior system in order to attain the reward. This is a perpetuation of the childish state, instead of chosing adulthood you chose to have God as a parent figure operating a please>reward system.

Leave that behind and learn to be active, not passive, consciously choose your own satisfaction, don't wait for it to come as reward for being good. Teach Cara the same.

Learn to bring to your consciousness your highest ideal / thought in any situation and take the action that would bring it about.

You know when you are most regressing into first-learning needs because you experience the more affective / visceral disorientation emotions that you previously saw as vital emotional messages from your psyche. These undermine your conscious volition and are the hardest areas to overcome in that they are powerful emotional resonances that have their own allure. But love found in this place will always have an element of dependency because it is your 'wanting' self that is in the ascendency. Your wanting in this respect is large, and your habits are ingrained - but you don't need them. You now have the option to choose life in all its fulfillment although the door to that choice will appear unfamiliar until its choice is your sustaining habit.

People who search out the 'rules' in christianity are those most likely to have experienced conditional love. They deeply want free acceptance but find it hardest to believe. A framework of justification allows them to feel secure because those around them are under a duty to love and accept them as they have no excuse not to. They will find each other out of their need and they will form like-minded sects. Perhaps they most need to hear the voice of god ridiculing their rules as jesus did the pharisees as they are those most likely to be proprietorial about god in order to protect their need to know themselves as lovable by creating a system of rules.

It's a particularly adolescent thing to see the word 'freedom' and read 'the freedom to do all those things I wasn't previously allowed to do'. It relates to the nurture process of restriction leading to autonomy. To adults who already feel they're able to do whatever they want the word 'freedom' must mean something else. To those caught up in any kind of oppression - the word is the inverse of that bondage. Shows how poor Western nurture is that grown people still think "Freedom" means living without restrictions.

When you look into people's eyes

You See how far back they go

And -when the buffers are visible

they are Characters

Holding you at bay

Sometimes entertainingly

Sometimes fiercely

So you go no further than is wanted or permissable

Who is behind tne buffers ?

Who dare push them away?

Only those invited

Who look beyond the buffer

And love the one in the shadows

And even then they are seldom Wanted

But remember this,

God has always lived in your foreground

And your shadows

And meeting the God in others

Will always involve meeting

The one who struggles in

The shadows

The one who waits for the barriers to be broken

So that life might flood them

In its fulness.

So look carefully into the eyes

Of those that you love

The buffers that you sense are waiting

To be loved out of existence -

Usually at your cost, until

Harmony emerges and you

Have expanded God's realm

Because you denied the denial

And dared the darkness

Which vanished under your tender light