Needy Needy

Wow, so I just listened to an incredible call with Mark Silver and the Heart of Business.  Mark is a Master Teacher in his lineage of Sufism, i.e. super spiritual, zen-like (or eh, Sufi-like) guy who teaches us lay-folk about marketing.  In the event that you don’t have a business to market, I recommend you get one just so that you can enroll in one of his classes.  Divine.  Literally.

But… I will not be talking about marketing today.  I will leave that to Mark.  What I’d like to talk about is neediness.  The mother-load of ick, in my prior opinion.  After starting to meditate about three years ago now, a strange thing happened.  I became needy.  Like crazy needy.  In fact my neediness peaked while living at a meditation center in France for 4ish months.  What?!  I thought meditation would bring enlightenment, or at least the ability to chill out a little more.  Very type-A over here.

In fact, it gave me almost the opposite effects of what I was looking for, initially.  Eventually it kinda sorta helped me calm down, but when I got good at it (whatever that is), I started to see all sorts of things I did not want to see.  During a one-month meditation retreat at the meditation center, because you know, I couldn’t get enough, I felt like a complete leach to everyone and everything.  NOTHING was enough.  Not enough attention, not enough comfort, not enough from the now ex-boyfriend.  I felt like a human vacuum of neediness.  Where did that come from?

Looking back, I see that the neediness was there all along.  Well before the meditating.  But my new-found awareness – - hate you – - brought it all front and center.  It’s been about a year since leaving my meditation mecca and the neediness remains, although less so.  And you know, in a way I’ve been fighting it ever since.  I shouldn’t be needy.  I am totally lame and pathetic for being so needy.  No one else is as needy as I am.  Okay okay, you get the point.

What I started to learn with a new and amazing book I just read, Nonviolent Communication, is that neediness is what makes us human.  Oh.  Okay.  Really, I’m allowed to be needy?  This was then confirmed by my therapist.  Yes I have a therapist because evidently blogging is just not enough.  And then tonight, Mark Silver (mentioned above) talked about the gift of neediness.  What?!  Seriously people.  You have my attention.

Essentially he reiterated the same sentiment as all the other folks, who claim that neediness is part of being human.  He says we’re like lamps – we’ve got everything we need to work, but nothing happens unless we’re plugged in.  You know, to the “source”.  Okay, maybe too woo-woo, but actually  not for me.  The gist is that we do “need” to connect with each other, with whatever we call God, if we call something God, or whatever it is that energizes us (call that God, or don’t, I don’t care).  In fact, the emptier we are, i.e. the more open we are to life, the more open we are to getting filled up.

Okay, in actual human-speak.  It’s cool to be needy, it’s just our cue that we need to take some care.  To do whatever it is we need to do to feel reconnected (whatever that is for you).  Maybe that’s pray, take a walk in the woods, pet your cat, meditate.  But it’s the body’s way of letting us know.  Also, the whole open-ness thing.  In human-speak.  My perspective is that sometimes stuff in life hurts us.  People say stuff, things don’t go our way, people move on.  Life, basically.  It can be easy to shut down during that stuff in a way to avoid feeling it.  But it turns out, you feel it anyway and then there’s no way to let the good back in, because you’ve shut down.

Hence my sort-of new blog title, Open Heart Adventure.  It’s hard to stay open when things get tough, but it’s a way to stay in touch with our human-ness.  To soften around the edges.  Neediness is just the thing for softening.