Karl Munr
( The Gleaners by Francios Millet)
Munr Karl
Many years ago, I was talking with my Romanian friend at a little donut shop we would meet to talk about philosophy. That day he was unusually sad and he confided in me. His wife had just left him and he was contemplating leaving the country to find adventure and healing. I asked him what he thought brought the end of their relationship and he said, “she didn’t have the capacity to deal with the wounded parts inside of myself that I couldn’t mend yet”. That phrase has always stuck with me since then.
I have a tendency to love people a lot, but I also have a lot of quirks. I was terribly abused as a child: starved, beaten, and treated as a dog. I had very little joy when I was young and most of my memories are the stuff of nightmares. I have since learned to hold onto the happy memories for comfort and solace and I strive every day to make up for my childhood by making lots of happy memories now. I want to get to the end of my life and see my mind filled with loads of happiness and joy so I pursue joy.
In the past, I often was patient and loving with people, way more than they were for me. I had friends and lovers who I would “emotionally nurture” and I knew they could not nurture me the way I could them. I had a large capacity to deal with their pain. The problem that happened, is that I started to descend into my past…I became the bearer of everyone’s misery and I descended into a deep depression. In my 30’s, I was plagued with suicidal thoughts and was quite sad all the time. I started slowly crawling my way out of that pit, claiming my own space, carving out sacred spaces of joy for myself here and there and slowly I reclaimed friend and lovers who valued my happiness just as much as they valued theirs. I have been slowly learning boundaries and it’s been quite and adventure. When you love people unconditionally, people often think they own you and when you act unexpected, they freak out because it reveals to them their shadows. IT takes a lot of self-knowledge to have good boundaries in a romantic relationship. We have to face our fears of loss of love to stand up to our partners and say, “I’m here for you, but I’m not carrying the burden of your self-healing. I will be here waiting on the other side of this safety fence!”
Often what happens is we expect our partners to fix us or we expect to fix our partners, but the only person that can actually do self-healing is the self. No one else can do that. We are responsible for our growth and evolution and ultimately, our own healing.
So when we take full responsibility for our own healing, our relationships become a lot more about dancing with each other, instead of being absorbed or taking over one another. The road to find this kind of emotional freedom is a long one and can be very difficult (especially for those of us emotionally wounded so much in the past), but it’s a journey with countless rewards. Once we are emotional sovereign in our own minds, we are free to live and love how we choose. We are not enslaved to ideals or others. We are able to weave our own fate and create new things in our lives we could not have possibly done before.
In the Rigsthula, there are three stages of people that Heimdall helped. The Thralls, the Karls, and the Jarls. Becoming a Karl in our Munr, in our emotional self, requires us to face all the emotional threads that shackle us towards other's needs. We can still be accountable and not slave to one another, but that requires us to face all of ourselves (both our conscious and our subconscious.) We may think we are emotionally free, yet why do we still behave as if we are expecting others to be what we need them to be? Why do we still get wounded when people "disappoint" us? Why do we yearn for love outside of us? Why do we expect people to understand us? Why do we want people to do what we advise them to do?
These are just small threads that chain us to other people, instead of allowing us to choose them as a Karl... a freeman in this world of many competing needs.
