(Written in February 2003)
\nOK.\u00a0 My heart just aches with disappointment.\u00a0 Can I be with my disappointment with mercy?\u00a0 My heart softens.\u00a0 O dear Little Jenny, you really weren\u2019t able to look at house plans and see ways of working with them.\u00a0 You have been living with post-traumatic stress, you were severely disabled by anxiety last summer, and you could not see how badly \u2014 you were in denial.\u00a0 You were trapped in your pattern of \u201chave to do it all myself\u201d and didn\u2019t even think to ask for help.\u00a0\u00a0 Let go into the process.\u00a0 You are where you are now, and the most important thing is your relationship with yourself.<\/p>\n
So to the practice of being with myself in my disappointment.\u00a0 Bring mercy to my aching heart.\u00a0 Bring forgiveness to my anger.\u00a0 Let go of \u201chow it should have been\u201d and open to how it is now.\u00a0 Thinking of the house as a symbol of my life, how the original foundation was faulty \u2014 so tear it down & start over?\u00a0 Alternately accept that I can\u2019t change the past, that my childhood was not what I would have wanted, but I can still build a happy life for myself.<\/p>\n
Reading Stephen Levine, Healing into Life and Death, the chapter on grief.\u00a0 What it brought up was all my fears \u2014 he describes opening to the pain and then discovering a spaciousness that the pain can float in.\u00a0 But then I start to think: I can\u2019t do that! It\u2019s all too much for me.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to open to the pain, I\u2019m afraid \u2014 it would be never ending, it could kill me \u2014 and the idea of \u201cspaciousness\u201d sounds cold and lonely.\u00a0 I see that I\u2019d rather stay in my little room, with the illusion of protection and warmth, than go out onto the mountainside and be naked to the cold wind.\u00a0 That\u2019s what it looks like.\u00a0 I know this is distortion, but that doesn\u2019t help.\u00a0 I see that I want to fling myself out the door into the cold wind, knowing that it is more true than the place I hide \u2014 but what if there\u2019s a gentler, more compassionate way to treat myself?\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t throw a child out into the cold wind, without somewhere safe to retreat to.\u00a0 I need an intermediate zone, a place where I can feel safe and rest from the work of facing the difficult truths: that I am not, and never have been in control, that the mystery of life is more huge and strange than I could ever have imagined, that I am responsible for my choices.\u00a0 I think of the line about not being up to \u201cthe magnitude of the pain entrusted to us.\u201d I may be responsible for my choices, but I\u2019m not responsible for the cards I was dealt (except in some much larger version of the universe that\u2019s beyond me at the moment.) I\u2019m not responsible for the shape my life has taken, but I\u2019m responsible to my life for what I do with it.\u00a0 Can\u2019t quite find the right analogy: I\u2019m not responsible for the landscape, I am responsible for the path I take through it?\u00a0 There\u2019s some sense of isolation about my life in these descriptions that probably reflects the isolation of my childhood.\u00a0 Not having a sense of belonging to a community of co-creators.\u00a0 Because probably the \u201clandscape\u201d in which I find myself is a collaborative venture in which all of us play a part, and as I find my path through it I interact with others and actually change the landscape as I work my way through it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Written in February 2003) OK.\u00a0 My heart just aches with disappointment.\u00a0 Can I be with my disappointment with mercy?\u00a0 My heart softens.\u00a0 O dear Little Jenny, you really weren\u2019t able to look at house plans and see ways of working … Continue reading