I want to melt into things; do you?

Connection, belonging, communication, and melting

I would suggest this experiment indicates that it is time as individuals to begin looking inward, to sense what it really means to be a Conscious Being and to begin to understand the part of our self that exists beyond matter and time reconnecting with the spark of awareness within self that is one with everyone and everything in the universe.—Gavin Mounsey

Photo by Eli DeFaria on Unsplash

I read the above quote in a post from Gavin, here on Substack, and it caught my attention. It sounds great. But how to you DO it? How do you feel that spark within yourself that is one with everyone and everything in the universe?

The truth is, I haven’t been feeling it. What I have been doing is a detox diet of fresh fruit and juices (mostly) and blaming the recent full moon for my once-again feeling that I want to crawl out of my skin. That my life plans are not following the most recent agenda my mind devised. That I am going to go back to the US soon and that my life does not have enough of something yet. So why not get that detox diet in I have been meaning to do since I arrived here?

Right now, it is 5:19 am in the morning here in El Zonte. I can hear the ocean waves and I could, a few minutes ago, before I put on my soothing blue-light-blocking glasses, see some shadows on my wooden deck. Shadows made from the leaves of the almond tree outside. Almond tree leaves that are bigger than my hand, and a deep, thick, sensuous and strong tropical green. The shadows are made of moonlight as at 5:19 am in the morning in El Zonte, the sun is still sleeping. But the full moon is not. She is making silver shadows. She is waking me. She is torturing me in the best of ways as I do feel this full moon has shown her silver light into the hidden corners of my soul and I am trying to figure out what I see in there, when I squint hard. Mostly, I feel like I need a little more light. I want to know what these feelings are that are arising and how I can best be with them?

You can imagine how that is going for me and you would be right. A detox diet just makes things worse, or better, depending on your point of view. I believe it speeds up the process of change and that can be less-than-comfortable.

If you are uncomfortable, you might just be healing, and that helps with melting

My teacher, John Barnes, used to tell his students to warn clients who came for myofascial treatments that it was likely they would feel worse before they would get better. That the treatment itself could bring on what he called “a healing crisis.” So it was important to warn them to be ready for it. If you didn’t warn them and educate them, you wouldn’t have many clients. People want to feel better, not worse.

And the thing is, sometimes, you have to feel worse to feel better. I believe when we detox from energetic patterns, we feel them moving through us on their way out. We purge. You know how purging can be. It is less than comfortable and in the end, it is a relief.

So, I want to own that today, despite how hard I try to be concise, clear, and helpful, I feel all-over-the-place and have both too much and not enough to say.

For the first time, I made an outline to help me. I have already gone off track with the outline.

I’ll get back to it.

Because what I want to do here today with you is to talk about melting into things in the best possible way.

I want to talk about what it is like to feel a sense of true connection, so you and I can both recognize it and welcome more of it into our lives. So we feel more like part of everything. You are not a spiritual loser if you do not feel you are part of an interconnected universe. You are not a loser at all. I don’t care what you are saying in your head right now. I am here to tell you that THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU. So there. I have cried it out to the heavens and shouted it to the world. You are beautiful and you are worthy of love. So am I. And I do feel that. I know I am loved. We all are.

And, I am here on the planet on an Indiana Jones quest for a sense of connection and belonging. And yes, all this has to do with melting. We are getting to that.

Connection and belonging

Here is what my quest looked like yesterday.

I did not find it in a church. I did not find it in the groups of people in my hotel that I feel sort of part of and sort of not.

I found it while I was interviewing an insurance agent.

My friends gave me a ride to the city so I could get a hair cut and meet a potential health insurance agent in person. He even offered to see me at his home, to accommodate my schedule, as he would not yet be at his office.

That is how I found myself sitting at a lovely new dining room table with José, Doris, and Antonella. José works with his wife, Doris, and they also asked their college-age daughter, Antonella, to attend our meeting to interpret as necessary. Antonella just graduated from a local, private British school and her English was impeccable. The thing was, theirs was too and I had to remind myself to glance at Antonella once in while so she wouldn’t feel left out. But I was glad she was there because every time I remembered to peek at her, she smiled at me kindly.

At the table, I found myself telling them why I was leaving the US and why I wanted health insurance even though I don’t go to doctors. I looked at each of them and they looked back at me, deeply, into my eyes. They listened with kindness. They were feeling me as I spoke. I could tell. They were not just listening, waiting to tell me the next thing. They were listening like three angels, as I sat confessing my pain of missing so much of exactly what they were doing, so very naturally.

Simply listening and feeling. Feeling me.

That is connection.

That is care.

Most people, including me, are still learning to do it.

Connection

First, lets talk for a moment about what I mean by connection. Lots of people have taken communication classes. Well, maybe not lots. Lets say the small subset of people who have taken communication classes, from what I see, still lack the ability to connect. They think they are connecting with you because they are using a technique.

When they are listening to you, they are checking off the boxes in their mind of the technique they have learned and mostly are preparing what feels to them like their wise, and spiritual response. It is likely when you finish speaking they will say these words: “Thank you for sharing.” Then they might offer a suggestion to you from something they learned in their latest class, from their most recent spiritual teacher.

I know this place.

I have done this.

I was trying.

I remember my family rebelling when I was learning non-violent communication and rolling their eyes at me when I tried to use it on them, or at them. I was trying my best and I had not mastered connecting or understood how to do it energetically.

Now, years later, here I was at a table in a very peaceful, quiet home in a suburb of San Salvador, gazing into three sets of kind, liquid, brown eyes. Six eyes, all gazing at me with compassion and love, feeling my words, and feeling me.

That is connection.

It doesn’t require a communication class. It does require time and slowing oneself down enough to hear and truly feel, the person in front of you. And it requires care.

I think that learning to do this with yourself first, is necessary to be able to do it with others.

There are stages to connection

As you are rising out of a traumatic past, the first stage is learning to give yourself care and feel how you are. That is so key. How are you feeling? Right now? Really? How are you doing? It is really ok for you to stop reading if you want to. It is ok to get that cup of tea or go for a walk. It is ok to keep reading too. How are you right now? What does your body tell you it wants?

That is the first stage.

But it is not the end.

As humans, it is natural to want to have other people with eyes we can melt into. We want to be held and loved. We are designed for that.

As unique soul-prayers emerging from the divine, how could it be any other way?

You don’t have to do everything yourself; melting means allowing people to care for you

So a sense of needing to do everything alone is a stage. You don’t have to only rely on yourself or beautiful moments in nature to feel seen and held. There are insurance agents with brown eyes and loving families just waiting for you to show up.

These things don’t just happen to me.

And maybe you want a technique…?

I do have something to offer you, something I have learned from others and not from an official training. But the people I have learned this from know how to connect in just the way I am describing. They are trained in something called Focusing. But I don’t want to call what I am describing to you, Focusing, as I have met Focusers who miss the mark just as much as any other people using Focusing as a communication technique.

So, let me tell you what I have learned from sitting in a group for years with these friends.

A communication technique

Here is what you can try if you like:

When someone speaks to you, feel yourself and feel the energy of what they say to you at the same time. Then, when they are done expressing themselves (and you leave a little moment for quiet to be sure—which is harder than you might imagine—), you let them know what you heard. This does not mean you “reflect” them and repeat back what they said in the closest copy of their words that you can come up with. What you do is tell them, through the energy in your words, what you heard in theirs. I often use my hands to show the energy that I felt for this along with my voice.

One of my teachers told me once to watch people’s hands move as they speak. There is a lot of additional energy conveyed in the movements of hands along with one’s voice.

Over time, I learned to watch for this and it is quite interesting and fun. But then someone pointed out to me that I was doing it as well when I spoke and that hand gestures improved the delivery of my message. So, now I use this more intentionally. But really, only when I am communicating with someone in a deeply connected, energetic space.

But that is an example of the sort of listening and communication I am talking about.

The insurance agent and his family didn’t use their hands. They didn’t need to.

As I said, it is not about a technique. It is about really connecting with someone. In the end, it is about care. You really care about what they are saying. You care about how they are feeling. You care about them. You are connecting as human-BeIngs.

It is very, very easy to miss this. Don’t fault yourself if you do. We all do.

It is so easy to want to just say something back. Or to want to “fix” things or offer words of wisdom.

But truly connecting is different from that. It is about listening and feeling.

When it happens, and someone does this with you, there is a little bit of energetic melting. It is like you are falling into the softest bed ever, filled with fluffy down feathers and you are held. You can relax fully. You melt.

Belonging

I will circle back to belonging again because that also has to do so deeply, with melting into things.

You know that person who you would hug and feel yourself melting? For me, it was my grandfather. There are other people like this in my life, but one is more avoidant of melty hugging. But he is a person that offers me a sense of belonging as well. I melt into things like breakfast, or sofa-sitting TV-watching, or going to the movies.

The key to this is that melting feels easy. You can let your guard down. You are with someone who cares about you.

That is melting.

I was standing outside the blue, wooden gate of my new friend, Suez’s house last night, on the main street of El Zonte. At 8:30 pm, the pupuseria next door still quietly hummed with the tail end of the dinner crowd. But mostly, El Zonte was going to sleep. The blue street light buzzed a little, and beyond it, was the moon. Suez gasped as she saw it peak out from behind the clouds. We took a moment to soak in moonlight through our eyes. It seemed much more radiant than just reflected light from an invisible sun.

I held a jar half full of coconut oil she had shared with me as I am leaving soon for a few months. I need just enough coconut oil to get me through the rest of the week. I use it as a natural lotion and sunscreen.

I told Suez how much I felt I could be myself with her and how much I valued her new friendship. This led us back to the topic I have written about, regarding circles of belonging. Suez said you have to find a sense of belonging within yourself. I think that is true.

You do that by asking yourself what you need. You do that by saying, “How can I love myself more in this situation?”

What do you need?

How can you love yourself more in your situation right now?

Can you really take a moment to stop reading and pause to feel it?

Melting with others

But there is also such comfort in having a person, or a friend, who you feel you can be yourself with and feel seen. Where you don’t have to worry so much about judgement or controversy if you share your heart.

That is what I felt in that moment with the insurance people and what I was feeling with Suez.

That is what had drawn me to travel and look for a place to be for the past 18 months.

I have been on a quest to find more melting.

Connection and belonging start with yourself and don’t end there

I have been looking for friendship, community, and connection…but differently, I imagine, than most people think of those things. Most “communities” struggle with the same issues of communication in general society. Most connection is more superficial and requires one to fit into a group’s value system to be part of their “circle of belonging”. I think it is ok to want more.

And I am also learning, very slowly, that I don’t have to only be my own circle of belonging. I am learning that I do not have to do everything on my own.

I am learning to trust myself and from there, to find my way into trusting others, or not trusting.

Discomfort

I am learning that it is ok that I both fit in and don’t fit in with the people here at my hotel.

There is a lot of drinking. They do a lot of surfing. There is a lot of cannabis and cigarette smoking.

Sometimes, I think they are drinking because they are lonely, or uncomfortable about something. And sometimes they tell me that they don’t want to be drinking. They just don’t know how to stop, or aren’t quite ready for a different coping strategy. And they drink together downstairs in the restaurant and I don’t try to join them and try to fit in.

I like the people here. I could write stories about them. I have had lovely moments with them and times that I am incredibly grateful for.

So we hang out a bit and they don’t invite me to everything they do together. Because I really don’t want to fully fit in.

I am learning that it is ok. I can’t fully melt with them.

Avoidant attachment styles

There are different styles of attachment people have. One I struggle with is called the Avoidant style. People like this will be friendly, and then not. They will respond to you a tiny bit and then lean away from you and not respond again, until you almost give up hope and then suddenly they call. It is confusing and painful for me. But I see it more now as a coping strategy people use that they learned in childhood, which makes it a tiny bit easier to take it less personally.

If you have avoidant people in your life, it is easy to take their behavior personally and to feel like there is something wrong with you. But there isn’t. And people with those kinds of behavior patterns are hard to feel melty with.

So, it is good to see this. It doesn’t mean you have to exclude them from your life. But it does mean you can look for other people and things that can offer you what would feel like care and give you a sense of belonging.

It is ok to do that.

You do not have to keep trying to melt into people and things that have avoidant ways of being. It won’t go well.

So, I guess I have come up with a mathematical formula here for you, which feels solid and is filled with certainty in a strange way. I pretend math, with it patterns and balance, works like that. To me in this moment, math is made up of fractal patterns all exploding in an orgasmic state of being. Like Romanesco broccoli floretes.

Photo by VENUS MAJOR on Unsplash

So here, for you, is a little formula if you, like me, are interested in melting.

Connection + Belonging = Melting

You need all three.

And they all start first with you.

But it doesn’t have to end there.

I will continue my quest. I found the residency requirements are different here than I was told and that now, I am required to live in El Salvador for nine months a year for three years. I am not sure if that will work for me or not. I have family in the US and adventures that beacon to me in other corners of the world. And maybe…maybe it would be a gift for me and a container for three years, to snuggle in here for nine months. Kind of like a baby in a womb.

I leave Monday for two months. I will visit family in the US and Mexico, and go to Costa Rica to stay at a retreat center.

This morning I learned my land here in El Salvador has closed. I go to sign the deed on Saturday for two acres in a tiny surf town near the beach.

And the main thing for me is to find my way to these things:

Connection + Belonging = Melting

Place matters. What I decide to do matters. And I am being guided to learn how to do it. Even with the change in my residency requirements here. I will feel into what I want to do over these next two months and do my best to live a life of melting.

That feels like it matters most of all, wherever you are. I hope you can find some way to melt and in that, feel that you matter just as you are. That you can rest a bit, if only for a moment. That you do not have to be a human DoIng but can simply be, maybe even with other humans with whom you feel a sense of relaxation and ease. I hope you can find moments to feely melty.