Today I am feeling overwhelmed by the difficulty I have in establishing deep and meaningful relationships with people. It is probably an exaggeration to say that I feel immersed in some kind of relationship poverty, but I am aware that anything beyond a casual interaction seems very difficult.
Even in my Sangha, where there could be penetrating interactions, people seem so reluctant to go beyond much more than cerebral exchanges. That presumes that they even bother to show up.
I am taking an on-line course on deep concentration, “Focused and Fearless”, and the exchanges between students seem anything but fearless. At least 80 percent of the comments are totally in the cerebral area and sadly not at all revealing of where people live and breathe. Two comments I’ve made, which I considered rather revealing, received no response .
I don’t understand it. I feel like I am drifting on some alternate plane, and most everyone else is some where just beyond. I think I often extend opportunities to connect with others, even to plunge into those places where we really live. But others seem so reluctant to reciprocate. I wonder what I am doing that keeps me in this impoverished arena.
Am I alone in wanting and working for deep and meaningful exchanges? Are other people also taking steps to make that kind of connection happen, but I’m not picking up on the clues? Maybe I’m simply being too obtuse in what I say. I have this feeling of being in a relatively stable place, but stable and isolated.
I have this sense that my showing open vulnerability, those places where I really live, receives such an impoverished, faint response. Reciprocity is only occasionally part of the interaction. I’ve just about given up on men being able to sustain a conversation on anything but a surface level. I’m sadly finding that most women also seem to interact in a cerebral arena and not so much on a feeling, more revealing level.
Neither men or women seem able to get beyond the few of showing where they really live. There is such a reluctance to be really present. The caution over their vulnerability is so distancing, stifling and disappointing. I hear so little of their inner workings, their inner struggles. And so we do not connect.
The poverty of this situation is leaving me sad.