Chapter 4
Chapter II: Love – I Get to Know Myself by Getting to Know My Own Values
Before we go further, I'm leaving you one thought about love, so that you can keep it in your pocket for the rest of this journey.
Love is a continuous getting to know oneself. Surrendering to who I really am and what values I have: this surrender leads me to a life of excitement and joy. Not to a peace understood as the absence of movement, but to a lively, pulsating joy that comes from being at home, in my body, in my truth. This joy of life is, in my opinion, the most attractive quality a person can have: more than success, more than prestige, more than any applause from the outside.
I began by getting to know my psychological structure. I began to listen to what I need. I felt that nobody needed me, that nobody wanted me. Not even myself. To help myself, I began to listen to myself. I felt a defenseless child within me, with different, sometimes conflicting needs. Now I feel myself differently. I feel my voice, which guides me, the same voice of the essence of self that I will describe at the end of this book.
The love I give myself is, above all, attentiveness. Attentiveness to which values are important to me. What I feel I want and what I feel I don't want. Also attentiveness to enthusiasm. What gives me joy, what lifts me higher.
Before we go further, a short word about the vial. Its bottom is creative energy: anger, aggression and sex. The strength to act is born from it. The side walls are the boundaries I build with anger, experience by experience, in every situation in which I say: this is mine, and this is not mine. What are they for? So that the energy from the bottom does not spill all over my body and over the people close to me, but stays within me and can strengthen me. So that I can withstand pressure from the outside and not lose my own values. And so that there is a space I can fill with myself. I will describe the upper boundary later.
There is anger in love, too. Thanks to anger I set and hold my boundaries. Thanks to boundaries I fill myself with my own values. The love I give myself is following my own, integrated values, and then, when I experience something that is truly important to me, my vial of energy grows. The body reacts at that moment with a deeper breath, in order to hold this good within itself. When we fill ourselves with love, we share it unconsciously, simply because we are already filled with it to the brim.
It is easier for us not to build ourselves. Especially when we cannot express anger, outside pressure shapes us.
Then we can remain in the construction we learned in childhood. We take the fullness of life only from other people's experiences and from the emotions our mind creates.
These deep-rooted thinking models and traumas create our personality. We react to reality. We have fullness within us if we fill ourselves with our own values. If we don't, we have emptiness within us. An emptiness that our ego protects us from. The ego will create a set of behaviors, a hollow shell of ourselves. A husk made of familiar social behaviors that give us emotions. That is why the sign that we are living our own life is joy, not pleasure.
I met two men. I saw myself in them. Running away from myself led me to live only inside a structure of positive emotions from the past. I did not enjoy the fact that I am here and now. The only positive feelings I had came from past achievements or from situations that had happened to me. To enjoy myself, I had to remember things I had done, or things that had once concerned me. My sense of my own worth was contained in them. But there were none of my values in it. Only social validation. It was a hollow shell of pleasure, not joy of life.
I will tell you about this meeting in more detail, because it is exactly where the difference between pleasure and joy is most visible. Two Men in Mystique
In a small place called Mystique, I met two men in very different states, but with the same quiet problem. The first was playing the piano. The music drew me in. He was drunk, but he played nicely, with a kind of nostalgic precision. He lived nearby. He was with a dog. I had recently arrived here and was walking around the market square. I liked that I could listen to a pleasant melody played on the piano. I talked to him. He told me about the time when he lived in Gdańsk. He told me about the neighborhoods where he grew up. About the dangerous guys who ruled the neighborhood. I saw how he puffed himself up with it, but positively, not aggressively. For a moment I saw strength and power in him. Later he seemed to be looking for interaction, confirmation and permission, that what he had been in contact with in his youth was important. I did not react. I did not see him. I could not support someone who was invisible. He was in the past. What was here was only a drunk figure with a dog. His awareness lived in memory, in the past, searching for information connected with specific emotions: strong, aggressive friends from the old days, successes of his former life. "I was that one, I was that person who had success," he said. But he, at this moment, at this table, was really not there.
After a while a second drunk man came. Both were in their fifties or sixties. The second one talked about his friend, a virtuoso of the organ. He was playing the same performance. Look what amazing things happened to me. Look what worth I have. Tell me, react, give me the feeling that it makes sense.
The second one wasn't there either. He lived with an awareness anchored in the past of the ego, where social position and superiority over others were intertwined with specific emotions, with that chemistry thanks to which we feel good, even if the source of that good feeling has long since passed.
Both men were looking for meaning and love in something external, in memories, in other people's stories, because they did not know how to give it to themselves, in the present. I spent many years learning how to give myself love, slowly, by trial and error.
Giving myself joy now depends on being in harmony with my values. Thinking models installed by society are good in a given time and place. The task of verifying these thinking models is up to me. I learn which values are important to me through experience. Experience is pain.
The next chapter gives guidance on how to find the emotions stored in your body, live through them, integrate them and draw conclusions.
