Loving eyes

Today I had a difficult morning.  I had a very deep sleep last night after two days of celebration for my birthday.  Last night a friend and I went to see Diana Krall perform, and the performance came at the end of a long and very busy day, driving from appointment to appointment.  Earlier in the day a friend I had not heard from in a long time reached out across the miles after hearing about my breast cancer diagnosis.  I felt really sad, as I had an appointment with a body worker I could not speak to her for long and I felt very, very torn.

Today when I awoke to find myself so spun about I questioned how much the different therapies I am engaged with at the moment are healing me, and how much quiet time may heal me even more, allowing me to enter into a dialogue with my own heart and be in quiet and silence with my beautiful little dog Jasper.

Quiet time soothes me.  It gives me a place of peace.  Being able to look into the soulful loving eyes of my dog, Jasper fills me with love.  I think of what a loving and trusting heart he has, how he bounds with unrestrained excitement at the prospect of seeing the doggy and human companions he loves, how he holds nothing back.  I think of the wise and knowing look he gives me sometimes when I am about to do something or go somewhere that might not be best for me.  Then I am not sure if at times I am not transferring onto him, my own sad feelings from the past at being left alone.

The truth is that alone time can be healing but being alone for a long time when you are in a place of deep emotional isolation and disconnection can really hurt most especially if you trust has been broken and you have been worn down by living with someone who can never rest, be quiet and settled and distrusts or shames you for your need for quiet time.  There is nothing quite so lovely as opening your heart and feelings to another and being received completely, touched with love and understood, though and perhaps the experience of this teaches us how to be kinder to and more loving with ourselves.

Lately I have been thinking of the many ways in which I have had to defend my heart against hurt.  Of the painful ways of being treated or ignored over the years of my childhood and adolescence as well as how the experience of great loneliness has shaped me into the person I am today.  I see others reaching out with open hearts and trusting and I notice my own deep wound in that area.  I think of how lately when I have been touched gently and with kindness it has just opened up an avalanche of gratitude and grief.  I think of the inner and outer critic that has had to barricade the fortress of my heart against further injury and how letting in love and support has been very difficult for me.  I have the question … “Will I be supported in the way I need to be?”

Since my cancer diagnosis and birthday so much love has been shown to me, friends have reached out to offer support.  I would like to open to it, but sometimes I am not sure how.  The other night I had a dream in it I was told that that man I had been in relationship many years ago and had left now really, really missed me.  Then I was in a room with my nephew (who rarely contacts me) and his family.   His wife was going through some kind of deep ordeal.  I comforted her and said to her “if you are feeling really sad and lonely, why don’t you reach out to your friends and say I am feeling lonely”, she shook her head and cried and said to me “I am not sure I can do that.”

Perhaps my dream niece-in-law is a part of me.  Perhaps a part of me that is not so damaged knows what is needed, knows how to ask and reach out, and maybe there is still a part of me that is wary of doing so, wary of being hurt again.

As I face this recent healthy challenge the long, lonely years following the separation from my husband have been on my mind.  I have seen the ways he tried to support and the pain I carried when he did not really understand my need for therapy and fully support that.  It seems so sad to have gone through this deep alone time, but in many ways I have learned more essential truths about me and my past from this path way into my soul than I may have if we have stayed together.  Yesterday in my body work session I felt a great sadness for the way things ended up and I thought of the beautiful parts of my ex husband, of his love of gardens the chocolate brown Labrador that he loved that belonged to one of his clients.  In time the sadness passed.  I know he has moved on and so have I.  So much that has been taken from me can never be replaced.  Choices I made that had painful consequences cannot be healed.  I had to go down a certain path and through those experiences to learn about life and love and most importantly about my true self.

At my birthday dinner the other night my sister and I were talking about the wounds we both carry, of the soft sore spot in the heart that may go on hurting and most needs to be touched with tenderness and love.  I felt a growing closeness after our years of disconnection.  I think of the dream I had where we were both walking on the beach and came across a beached whale that had died, we both looked at it and my sister said “the whales are such sad creatures”, to me the whale represented that pain which emerges from the deep unconscious and has some kind of deeper ancestral connection.  This pain we have both been through and may have played some part in both of us developing breast cancer in the same breast may be connected in some mysterious way.

As I reflect on my busy day travelling between different therapists lately I think also of how in many respects so much of my deep work of uncovering has been done, what is left is the sore spot and the prospect of an operation on my breast to remove the cancer.  Is this some kind of metaphor for the diseased part of me that needs to be cut away, of the anger I buried and could not express, of the pain over wasted years of not really fully living, fully awake and embodied? Is it a chance for healing on some level? Is it a cry of my body that I could not quiet vocalise and so had to express through cancer?

I think of the astrology reading I had with English astrologer, Melanie Reinhardt after my bike accident in 2005. Of how she recommended meditation and spiritual work such as is used by Steven Levine in helping cancer patients and those who are dying.  This meditation is heart centred and it gives healing to the wound.  In essence I guess it is about adopting an attitude of love and compassion towards ourselves.

For now I am seeing this is the next phase of my own work, that and times spent looking into my lovely dogs eyes and taking joy in way watching him play and connect, which connects me to a way of being I lost as I grew and became more trapped and isolated by unconscious pain, fear, grief and shame.   I am learning to listen with my heart when he looks at me with those pleading eyes and asks me to leave my safe cocoon of solitude to engage with life and open my heart in love.