What discovering disappointment has taught me

“It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” – William Blake

In this article I am sharing my first person perspective on the healing process as I work through it from discovery, through observation, to healing. Disappointment comes out of attachment. If we aren’t attached to the outcomes of our experiences we would not end up disappointed. We can come up being disappointed with:

• life
• people
• animals
• planet
• experiences
• ourselves

Much of what I write in this article I’ve discovered over the past month since the topic was revealed to me in meditation. I have for a long time struggled with the feeling of gratitude and found that disappointment is, for me, the contrasting feeling. Hence, this feeling of disappointment that has been a looming large in my life since early childhood has prevented me from from fully experiencing gratitude. I thought I was just numb, but I simply hadn’t allowed myself to experience the feeling behind it. It has also been part of me being incongruent between my self-image and ideal self. I wanted to believe the best in people and experiences, but “knew” deep down that I was always going to be disappointed. 

Let me digress a bit to share with you my felt sense experience (a technique to allow your body to communicate with you, here’s a guided meditation to help you with felt sense). I am deep in meditation, observing my experiences from my awareness and suddenly I observe this colossal block of rock floating gently up through my inside. As I am observing this weight just lifting and releasing I get slammed with … “DISAPPOINTMENT”! Ok, clearly I was ready for this to come up this powerfully, but it unsettled me quite a bit, but I trust that what comes up I am ready for. In quick succession over the next couple of days, I have other key aspects surface:

• It blocked me from feeling gratitude and made me feel numb and flat
• Resistance against accepting what I can and can’t control and my path
• Resistance to learning the lessons I need to learn
• Blocking future visioning/manifestation visualisation
• I continuously judged from the perspective of people, places and experiences not measuring up

The source of this deep core wound was that when I was very young (2/2.5 years old) those who I was supposed to be able to rely on to protect me disappointed me in those tasks. I always thought that my resilience and independence came from that, which they do, but my expression of those have been from my core wound because I hadn’t resolved this “disappointment”. Hence, these expressions became defence mechanisms, but I called them resilience and independence. The incongruency described previously became a battle between hope and disappointment. It caused both patterns of anxiety and depression as there has always been so much I want to accomplish, but didn’t feel I could do because of disappointment. It caused me to run from, as opposed to towards, people, places and experiences. In my manifestation practice I would end up, instead of feeling the feeling I wanted to manifest, feeling disappointed that I wasn’t already experiencing that which I intended to experience. 

This process and the healing that follows is very much like quantum physics. Once I become aware of the block by it revealing itself to me, it then has to change. By virtue of having been observed it cannot remain the same. It hid in my blind spot for all these years, but now that it is in my awareness, I can allow it to shift and reveal its other qualities. I use this opportunity to continuously cycle through “compassion, acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude” to heal every layer of what is being brought to my awareness. I can also choose to flip the script on disappointment and choose a different perspective, which allows for gratitude to slowly emerge in its place. 

This process is gradual and I have to trust that, if I am self-aware and reflective and apply the tools I have, I will heal even this aspect of myself and further integrating my shadow and bringing my self-image, ideal self and organismic self into alignments. It takes time, but patience is necessary to not resist the experience; resistance will just make it take longer and require more patience. It is a beautiful destruction and release of aspects of myself that no longer serve me.