Framing the Meaning

We all have these life experiences, these stories. As time goes by, as I have sought to find the highest possible meaning and gifts that heartbreak and hardship have offered, the meaning of events shifts. There is a way in which stories can be told and retold and serve to keep me in an autopilot knee jerk reactive state or I can remain in curiosity around the meanings.

How I frame what has occurred makes all the difference in how my emotional state moves. Someone close to me  has often told me I am a victim. I am not naming who they are in order to respect them. Well, when things have been done to me I am actually a victim of those actions. But staying a victim is different. Leaning in to find the meaning around events, the deepest possible meaning and learning available, this takes conscious cultivation. This particular person does not like to dig around in events. "Why can't you just get over it?" has been one of their continual refrains. I have wondered why I don't just get over it, whatever the various its have been.

Anyone who has endured great difficulties at the hands of another knows you don't just get over it. Through it. Yes. Recover? Not possible to return to a place before things happened. But the elegant art of finding the treasures buried in the tragedy is something that takes a conscious decision, the ability to look clear eyed at all that arises as a result of hardship, a large measure of grace and courage.

The person in my life who does not like to dig around is somehow able to shut the door on things. I don't know how this will all work out in the end. There have been times when I have been deeply jealous of this compartmentalization. In my younger years events could easily swamp me. I am now finding I have become much more skilled at being a big wave rider.

The refinement of the way in which I am framing the meaning of life events is growing. In these last few years I have had opportunity to share some of the gifts with those much younger than I am. The fruit of having sorted through the debris to the gold is beginning to become clear.

I think, at least for the moment, the framing I now have is that life is a healing path. I am moving more profoundly in to this path because I am not masking or covering. I am present. What lights me up inside is being of service to others in their healing. So the meaning I give to hardship is as opportunity to be in not knowing and to open my sails to be carried away in taking the risks of being powerfully present, vulnerability and surrendering, cultivating fields of trust in myself and others.

Curiosity or Judgment

I have begun to feel that curiosity and judgment are the flip sides of a coin. The coin is how I approach anything that comes up in my life or in relationships to other people. And the way I land on one or the other has to do with another coin. This one has either love or fear. When I land in love I can also be in curiosity. Fear brings on judgment.

All of this is the inside job....self loving allows other loving...

Curiosity around myself or another makes room for all possibility. Judgment slams the door to growth.

Moving with grief.

I walked into the forest yesterday. Shooting Stars are opening. I've also heard them called Love Darts. These teeny bits of vibrant magenta color in an otherwise dry forest floor are thrilling. I went to the forest to sit quietly. A perfect spring day, warm afternoon, I wander until I find the warm spots and then settle down into the duff. My giant Anatolian, Mo, still a puppy, sits next to me at my back, touching me and towers above me.

It might be that the time sitting in the forest is when I feel the most inner peace. There has been so much pressure in my chest, like an active electrical current of emotion pulsing through. My throat has held a lump for days. I understand this to be grief and I am grateful the spaciousness of the forest can absorb this bit by bit without me having to tell a story around what it means. The very act of going out into the woods is the invitation to my body to release.

Some tears come each day.

Grief. One word....a river of experience....grateful to have time to sit and watch it, feel it, let it flow.

Living with Fullness

I wish it were possible to openly wail in grief with others without this being scary or disturbing. When did we become a society in which exhibiting the deepest sense of loss is not considered polite?

When did we put a lid on ourselves?

When my mother died, a death we knew was coming, a wise hospice worker suggested that death is not an emergency. No need to call 911 or move the body out rapidly. We had 24 hours. All of her many and varied friends came and went all through the day and an informal wake just happened. Her political friends sat and talked over the latest news. Some played cards, mom's favorite pastime in the months before she died. And her two friends that were nuns came and wept at her bedside. The day came and went. I went to sleep and when I woke and came downstairs to see her body a long deep involuntary wailing began that woke my brothers. I threw myself on her body and let it come, the tears, the deep guttural uncontrollable sound. Oh did that feel good....a river long dammed moving once again. Since that happened nearly ten years ago all of my emotions move more freely.

I now notice the nuances of our culture and how many signals we give to shut down the free flow of emotion. Do you think our health might be affected?

Surrendering my attachment to how I might look to others for the sake of my emotional well being has been a practice. One well worth the work to move into more fullness of being alive.

Grieving Well

Learning to grieve well in a grief phobic culture is challenging. My best friend from childhood died when we were both 35 years old. She trusted me, as her long time friend, with the discussions around ending her own life. She had terminal ovarian cancer and had been whisked away from home to the ER a few times when her health became precarious. On one occasion I was with her when the doctor was pulling fluid from her lungs so Tia would not drown in her own secretions. The procedure was excruciating and Tia begged the doctor to stop. I think this particular doctor from Stanford was one of the most competent and compassionate I have ever know. But her training would not allow her to stop mid way through the process. I reached over and pinched the tube and told her to stop, to listen to Tia. Thankfully the doctor was respectful. And this experience is what propelled Tia into her own reconciliation with dying. We stayed up all night not long afterwards talking, laughing, reminiscing about our shared life together and wrestling through our religious upbringing which called suicide a sin. Tia came to the conclusion that she was not going to die in a crisis. She would die on her own terms, knowing death was inevitable and coming soon. The next night she ended her life after a very sweet time with each member of her family who did not know her plan.

For a time I was quite high from the very rarefied atmosphere of uncharacteristically vulnerable and transparent conversation Tia and I had shared over the months preceding her death. It was returning to my everyday life that felt as if I had come to another planet. It was business as usual with no place to really be with the fullness of all that I had experienced with Tia in life as well as her departure. Even the Memorial Service was contained, no one freely weeping. It is like we have this invisible agreement to hold it together, stiff upper lip and all. Everyone racing around doing what they always did and no forum for being with loss. So I slowly sank into depression and got lost in grief. It was a slow return to aliveness, a tale all in itself. But the key piece was learning to feel deeply and be safe with myself, to trust myself. Several new friendships came into my life at that time (did Tia orchestrate from the other side?) which had the capacity to allow the intensity of feelings I had to come out. To this day I credit those friends with holding the space for the grief to be safe and seen.

I have lost many dear people since that time. In these subsequent losses I have come to trust the process of feeling the depths and knowing I will return. Each one becomes easier to navigate.  Grief is no longer a stranger and I do not resist her gifts. Each loss has been traversed with the help of being witnessed and shared with others. I do not believe we are meant to grieve alone. Not that I feel the losses any less, no, maybe more.The death of my cousin has brought an entirely new dimension to grief. I find myself simultaneously in mourning with an easy return to laughter and noticing the delectable beauty of being alive. I have become fluid with the dance of emotions grief calls forth. When grief was new it was terrifying. It is hard territory to navigate.  The gifts are rare and totally worth the dive. Remembering how to be fully human and alive is what is at stake. Having the support of others is key. Finding those others who can allow the fullness is essential.

Thankfully there are now many more resources for being with grief than when I lost Tia. Francis Weller and Sobonfu Some are two I have recently learned about. They are worth seeking out if there is not support in your own life for feeling grief.

Attachment

It is possible to grow entirely new ways to create relationships with others. For me, right now, the biggest has to do with surrendering the idea that I need to defend myself. I am seeing that to defend myself is not actually self loving behavior. When I truly and deeply live in loving myself I am taking care of myself and defense is not necessary.

Now this does not mean that when things happen that I don't like that I say and do nothing. But how I take action shifts. My own security comes from loving myself so well that I KNOW I am safe and well cared for, regardless of how another behaves.

The attachment I surrender is that of perfection. Perfection that thinks that relationships have no bumps and bruises or aches and pains. That any of those thing are the need to back away. I mean, they might signal something that is a true red flag. But often times my own internal red flags have more to do with my fear instead of what is actually and truly real time. This then limits me from finding more connection if I yield to fear.

In the case of the friend I spoke to yesterday, he was entirely willing to lean in to our connection. What caused me to be triggered was something I was able to speak with him about in a way that revealed how I am vulnerable, how what happened moved me, the unique individual that I am. The solution was simple in our case. He was entirely willing.

Surrendering my attachment to holding on to triggers as being all about the outside world is key. Triggers are my internal guidance system truly and lovingly guiding me to gentle inquiry around whatever it is that has come up. Those triggers are the opportunity to love myself.

Making Assumptions

Amazing opportunity today to practice choosing the love of other even in  the face of what was, for me, a difficult conversation. There are inevitably times that people trigger something in me. I have grown enough to know, generally, to sit with something for a while before I speak with another. I sit with whatever the trigger has activated in me and attempt to let the emotions sink to the deepest possible meaning in my own life. Sometimes it is not necessary to even talk to the other person, I gain enough insight on my own to grow through the trigger.

But there are times when things must be discussed. And there are times when the triggers are really big. The growth has to do with making assumptions about the other person. Rather than seeing the fact that I am triggered as meaning something bad, dangerous, hurtful or other equally dark imaginings, about the other, I am learning to create a little space. The space is about curiosity. In this curious place I breathe some room for a loving and peaceful outcome to occur.

Taking time to create spaciousness allows me to open up to being interested in the other person and what is happening in their world. I can put aside the anxious desire to talk about what I need and be open to them.

So today I had an exchange in which some deeply tender things surfaced from my friend and some sweet shared profound talk around what is alive and moving in the life of this person emerged. What I wanted to talk about came around and was so small and easily resolved in comparison to the depths they shared I am humbled to say that it might actually be possible that using triggers to be THE mechanism by which new possibilities in intimacy occur is very real and exciting.

Surrendering my assumptions that what had happened to trigger me had ANY ill will attached was key to finding a way into more richness in friendship.