Allowing Joys and Sorrows
The journey with my hip has brought up everything inside of me that I haven’t been able to fully meet with my heart. At times, after living in a very uncomfortable body for 2½ months and not being able to sleep well, what comes up from the depth of me are stories of despair, frustration, anger, overwhelm and fear. But I know they are asking to be met in the spaciousness of my heart.
Yes, at times, I fall into those feelings. And yes, at times, I run away from them. But the joy of meeting them in my heart shows that when I resist or indulge them in any way, all it leads to is suffering. So my heart is becoming clearer and more engaged, and most of this time I can recognize what grace this is.
The following quote from Eleanor Roosevelt speaks directly to this:
“Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before.”
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There is also a line from one of Rainier Marie Rilke’s poems that says, “Oh, we wasters of sorrow.” Well, I am not wasting this healing opportunity. Sometimes I really don’t like it, but I keep on returning to two little mantras from my first book, Belonging To Life: ‘What is’ and ‘This too’. ‘What is’ is the invitation to use my mind to be curious about what is happening, rather than reacting to it. And ‘this too’ is the invitation to allow it to be here – for it is! It is also the invitation to not fight it, so what I am experiencing can float in the vast spaciousness of my own heart. How could you not be grateful for this depth of healing! (My struggling self just made a rude remark in my mind, but that’s okay. I understand its deeply conditioned belief that it must get as far away as it can from any discomfort.)
When the fog of your conditioned self begins to thin from the sunlight of your heart, you begin to see life again. You truly feel it, touch it, taste it, trust it and know it. This is when the ‘prodigal son’ comes home. This is experienced as a softening of all of that tightness you have carried around your whole life. It is an opening, an allowing life in with both its joys and it sorrows. It is learning how to not second-guess life so you can show up for it instead. It is recognition of the fleetingness of life – nothing lasts – and thus an honoring of the preciousness of everything. And even deeper than all of that, it is the joy of dancing with life from your heart rather than from your conditioned mind.
Be light,
Mary