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My  2 1/2 yr old granddaughter says, “I can’t want it” and shakes her head obstinately when you offer her something good to eat that she has no intention of tasting. She says the same when she is ill and you attempt to give her a spoonful of medicine to make her feel better.

This makes me wonder how often we all say to ourselves, “I can’t want it”.

We retain some automatic thoughts like these from our childhoods and from negative things we have endured as adults too.  Some of the thoughts have  planted themselves firmly, due to past disappointment and hurt.  Such thoughts linger in the shadows, waiting to pounce if we don’t recognize them quickly enough. When we don’t challenge them, and when we permit them to take over, they influence our adult behavior.  If they stick around for a long time, there is evidence that they actually change the chemistry of our brains.  It is important to be alert to these, but they are not always easy to overcome, especially when the words, “I can’t want it“  keep replaying in our heads like a sub-conscious invalidating incantation. We are mesmerized and trapped by the negativity of the messages we keep giving ourselves. When we revert to our inner two-year-old, we tell ourselves things like:

          “I can’t help myself.  I can’t feel better. I can’t want my soul to awaken and with it, my hope for the future.  I can’t want to get over my loss (whatever it was).  I can’t want to be over my pain.”

     When we send ourselves such messages, it is usually because we don’t feel we deserve to be better.  We stubbornly hang on to feeling bad, somehow validating our sense of self, even when it is not a productive or mature sense of self.  We don’t always know this is what we are doing because we won’t take a good, hard look at what keeps us in hell. So we remain in a hell that may not have been self created, but that we continue to furnish with misery, demons, fire and brimstone to punish ourselves, far better than the furnishings any Satanic interior decorator could ever dream up for us.

There will be still some days when we wake up in the morning and feel a gentle swelling of unfamiliar  excitement, almost like a bud ready to open. The mind and heart begin to spin out ideas and possibilities. Excitement and hope start to form little bubbles, fragile, filled with iridescence and a bit elusive.  They float over us. We try to pin them down, to catch and turn them into something concrete that we can hold and better understand, before they break and dissolve. We are usually afraid that these bubbles will be gone before we can determine that they are truly present, and not simply figments of our wishful imaginations, longing to feel whole and happy once again . 

We identify a surge of energy that we may have not have experienced for a time. We gingerly climb out of bed and with some trepidation, we contemplate the feelings of hope and possibility that have been absent if life hasn’t been going well for us lately. Hopefully we can ban the “I can’t want it” from shouting out, even if we are fearful.

 A French proverb says, “Hope is the dream of a soul awake”. If you have been sitting like moldy, stale tea leaves, steeping yourself for a very long time in a cup of despair, you may believe your soul has fogotten how it feels to be awake.  You may resist the stirring you feel as a new day dawns and as hope struggles to take shape.  If your soul has been wrapped tightly in grief, shame, fear, loneliness and even self-loathing, mummified by pain and circumstances that have befallen you, or even that you have created for yourself, it isn’t easy to wake up one day and find the soul fully present and ready to be whole again.

You try to do all the correct things. You get help. You listen to advice that sticks to your head as though it were flypaper, but the advice never penetrates or lights the way to feeling different, or to making changes.  You ask all of the questions that mankind has ever asked. You know that struggles such as yours, with conflict, guilt, desire, loss and death, are age-old ones and not yours to bear alone. Yet you suffer and you ask repeatedly why you must do so.

I can’t answer your question.  I can’t tell you how to make things better instantaneously.  I can’t demonstrate with a how-to video, the way to shake off the fitful sleep of anguish from the back of your being, flinging it into a far-away pit from which it can never again crawl out to haunt you. I truly wish I could tell you how to do that, and how to wake up your soul, finally letting the sun back into an existence that  has felt cold and rayless.  I have lived through things I believed at the time to have been “the worst that could possibly happen”.  Unfortunately, there have been multiple “worst things”, but thankfully I did not know it during the dark times when I was certain I had reached the nadir of my existence.  I have somehow found my way out of deep pits, using whatever internal and external tools and magic I could  access.  I know that within each of us exists the ability to do so.  Even if there are no guarantees that life won’t pour on us more bitter potions to try to kill our  joy and souls,  I know that in the cracks and crevices of  the most formidable and terrifying mountains, there is undiscovered joy waiting for each of us and perhaps the trickle of a fresh, clear mountain stream.

If you find yourself thinking or saying, “I can’t want it”, please keep on asking yourself why you can’t. Then write down ten things you really do want with all your heart. Don’t be afraid. Until you claim them, there is little chance of your soul awakening.  It’s time to get out of hell.  The Indian Buddhist monk, Vasubandhu, said that “the wardens of the hells merely proceed from the minds of the ones who are there suffering in torment.  They are projections, just like many other features of existence.  Hell is a kind of hallucination.”