A Perspective on RC
We humans are perfectly fitted to this world. Think of the strongest image you can of a perfect fit. In my native Danish, we say “like the yolk in an egg” or “like a hand in a glove.” This earth is in every way our place, for each one of us. This planet and these people around us are a complete home to us. Evolutionarily this has to be so, or we wouldn’t exist. (In the earth we find remains of other species that were wonderful in their own right but that didn’t fit the world well enough.)
We come into the world with a deep knowledge of all this. We expect to live in this perfect fit, but unfortunately that is not what happens. We are only slowly realizing how enormous the difference is between what we expect and need and what we actually get. How truly miserable our early years are.
I think the difference between what we expect and what we meet leaves us feeling like strangers in the world, like we don’t fit in, and like the world is not really suited to us. Only in our deepest, sweetest dreams do we hope and long for the kind of connection with the world that is our birthright.
This lonely confusion of our early years persists for most of us. I think the feeling of estrangement, of not fitting in, is a root cause of much of the misery we see in the world, especially the exploitation and degradation of the environment. If we were in touch with, if we lived with, our perfect fit to this earth, we would treat it very differently.
In a sense, each one of us carries the accumulated undischarged distresses of all of our ancestors. When they had hurtful experiences and could not discharge, the distresses stuck and got passed on. In my mind’s eye, I see a long, long string of time stretching behind me with the garbage of distress attached along it. As I move through my life, I drag that chain with me. It slows me down, and hinders and confuses me.
When I think about this, each Co-Counseling session becomes much more important. I am not just working to feel better and free my own mind so that I can live a better life. Each piece of distress I scrape and peel off my mind loosens forever a small part of my family’s burden—and I mean family in the broadest sense. That distress may have roots thousands of years old, and I am the one to end it, here and now. My ancestors did not want to pass it on, they just didn’t have the resources to stop it. But now I do, and when I end it, all the people I am in touch with, and who come after me, will never be exposed to that distress again. It is like I am cutting the threads to the past so that they will never again weigh me, or anyone I am in contact with, down.
But it goes beyond that. When we free ourselves of distress we are, step by step, reclaiming our place in the world, as individuals and also as a species. We are rebuilding our understanding of how perfectly at home we are here. We are reclaiming our birthright and stepping into a perfect connection with everything around us.
When I can remember this perspective on RC, I remember how incredibly important our work is, and I am braver and more determined in my sessions.
Søren Holm
Stockholm, Sweden