Hi Vineeto,
I am currently abroad in Singapore and staying in a hotel with access only to my mobile, also there has been a lot going on around the wedding (various social protocols :P) so my reply was probably not as thorough as I would like it to be.
I will say that I have been considering all this thoroughly however.
As per the above I’ll stick with the main bits that have come up so far… You are correct that this distancing is/was related to elitism and resentment. Me and Sonya went out for some dinner today and this word - elitism - was actively on my mind, there was certainly something there.
I remember Richard describing the enlightened master as being sat in aloneness, that the higher up the hierarchical ladder one climbs the more poignant the loneliness becomes. And I could see the flavour of the same thing happening, that of course it’s no fun at all for others to interact with an elitist but the elitist suffers too. This distance separating me from others when looking down from a pedestal, it is a painful distance, painful because deep down I yearn for intimacy.
And something else that Richard wrote came up too, which is that without equity one cannot have intimacy. I could see that only from a position of parity I can experience a genuine fellowship regard.
So I allowed myself to step off the pedestal / to remove the distance, I actually had a very wonderful time at dinner with Sonya, a very precious evening because I saw that equity and parity also set the scene for many other wonderful things, such as tenderness which seemed to come naturally. And these things when they are happening, they are so very precious, in fact they are actually priceless.
And so it seems (at least for now) this elitism and resentment is gone, however there is something that has become apparent underneath that. And it is related to what you wrote here :
I noticed that there is something like a cap, to how much intimacy I am willing to allow. And it is related to this fear of being seen for the emotional being that I am. Because if I am so concerned with others seeing my good and bad feelings then I will also habitually censor when the felicitous and innocuous feelings are happening.
That fear of being seen to have good and bad feelings it has spilled over to a fear of being seen to want and to enjoy intimacy. Like I have made it taboo for myself to explicitly show to another that I want to be close to them, somehow being “calm, cool and collected” aka distanced is taken as a priority instead.