As a small girl, I felt very alone. I was a late-life pregnancy for a mother who worked as a hospital nurse. My brothers were already pre-teens when I arrived and my father was busy trying to take care of a small ranch and juggle three other jobs in order to keep the family afloat. At a very young age, I remember laying in the feed trough and feeding the cows one piece of straw at a time and feeling that they and the barn kitties were the only ones that kept me from drowning in loneliness.As an adult, I revisited some of these old childhood haunts with my middle brother who was almost nine when I arrived on the planet. As I talked about the feelings of loneliness and vulnerability that I had experienced as a child, he was shocked. He had a totally different perception of our childhood. He saw me as the spoiled baby sister whom everyone doted over while he saw himself as the awkward, overweight pre-teen who couldn't compete with me for adult attention. As we continued to talk, I discovered that I felt angry at our father for being so absent while working so many jobs. My brother, on the other hand, felt angry at our mother for driving our father to work so hard. It was like we had grown up in totally different realities - and indeed we had.
Birth order, gender, societal conditioning, parental conditioning, religious conditioning all heavily influence how we perceive the world. As we look out of our eyes at the world, we look through our physical needs and pain, our emotional needs and pain, our mental belief systems and conditioning. It is like looking at a psychiatrist's inkblot - we project our stuff out onto the world and then perceive what we have projected. Because of this, we all live in our own realities to a greater or lesser extent.
I watched an interesting movie lately called, The Shipping News. The main actor, Kevin Spacey had grown up with a fairly abusive father who had attempted to teach him to swim by pushing him into the lake and then yelling at him. Throughout the movie, which depicted a significantly difficult passage of his adult life, he viewed everything that was happening to him through the eyes of the little boy who was drowning because he had failed to dog-paddle. His reality, therefore, was all about failure, not being lovable and not being worthy.
Embracing this idea of skewed perceptions and living in one's own reality, I ask myself, "What do I do about this?" My first realization is that I need to be aware that my perceptions are skewed as I move through the world. I need to realize that the realities of others are not the reality that I live in. . . therefore I need to be very careful of any judgement or any advice. When I attempt to help someone, I must attempt to get out of my own "stuff" and pass over to "the standpoint of the other" in order to be helpful in any way.
Secondly, I realize that I need to do all that I can to clear my space as much as possible in order to clear my perception as much as possible. Getting my physical body as healthy as possible, making sure that I have had the therapy and healing work that I need, and working with a Spiritual director who can help me see what needs to be cleared - are all helpful. But the most important thing that I can do is to spend time in spiritual practice. Prayer, inspirational reading and especially practicing silence and connecting to the Divine all develop our ability to perceive more clearly.
We have all experienced looking down through water and trying to see what is below the surface. The clear ocean water in the South Pacific allows us to see the fish and coral below us quite clearly, while the muddy water of a large river such as the Columbia or the Mississippi keeps what lies below completely hidden. How clearly do you perceive the world?
(Photo thanks to photosearch.com)
