I was parented and disciplined largely by “the look.”
If you were too you will know what I mean. If you are one of the rare exceptions no amount of description will let you in on the experience.
The look was always enough. Piercing, intense, unwavering, the look would stop me in my tracks more than any words, promised punishment or withheld privileges. If I was pushing the boundary of acceptable behavior, the look was all that was necessary to put me in my place. I melted.
It has been decades since I have been of an age where literal outer discipline has been enforced. And yet I still find myself at times buckling under the energetic frequency of the look. Projections of the look can still at times stop me in my tracks and melt me in the moment. Intellectually knowing that it is a projection does not stop the experience from happening, though it does lessen the duration of the impact. Realizing where this imprint came from and who the originating eyes belonged to has also not stopped the look from occurring. And so I know there must be additional blessings to be had from occasionally finding myself in a scrutinizing stare.
I have lived much of my life experience within the intensity of my own critical evaluation. I have spent a vast amount of time living within the look, and I have come to realize that the eyes now belong to me and only me. Though my childhood emotional imprinting includes the grief, fear, and shame that were triggered by the intensity of the look, my liberation is in how I come to relate to those feelings in the here and now.
An enormous factor in the overall quality of our lives is the quality of our own attention. Twenty-plus years of counseling others has confirmed my own experience that living life in a critical, condemning, punitive look is common among those here in the western world. Self opinion and evaluation is crucial to keeping the ego thought system in authority. Theology has been pitifully effective at amplifying this sense of living within a scrutinizing stare. There is a largely unconscious sense that some Outer God is looking down both literally and figuratively. We then create spiritual systems that seek to compensate for this damning lens. We so often stay and hide in our heads to avoid the enduring pain within our hearts; the pain that comes from thinking that we are judged by our very Source. Parental images of the Creator often contribute to this sense of being watched and found wanting.
If we do indeed live now within a Look it is not one of criticism, judgment, scrutiny, and condemnation. I have come to know experientially that though I still can sometimes fall into the trance of the look I am always living within a Loving Gaze that surrounds me in unconditional Wisdom, Compassion, Mercy, Guidance, and a Love far greater than the mind can perceive. I live much of my life experience now in the felt-sense glow of that Vision. My heart soars as I realize that I am living within the literal look of Love. If I find myself within the emotional feel of the evaluative stare, I step back behind that look and align in the Vision that sees the totality of who I am, and never judges what It sees. Life flourishes when we begin to live in an affirmative gaze. That look then informs our own focus, and we begin to see a self and a world alive in love. And so I practice now re-parenting myself with that Look. It melts me in a radically different way. It melts away my own habitual scrutiny and self aversion, and entrains me with a Higher, Broader, Truer vision of who and what I am.
As is so brilliantly stated in the motion picture Avatar, I see you. I feel like the Universe is always whispering that to us, “I see you. I see all of you, and I love you as you are. Live within my Loving gaze, and unfold easily in the Light of my look. Surrender your needless scrutiny, and live in my Look of Unconditional Love.”
And that is a Look that is 20/20 Vision for sure.
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