Surrendering to feeling

I am aware more and more lately of how much suffering I can bring on myself when I get pulled back into past difficulties and wounds or bad experiences now long gone.  It’s probably no wonder that I found myself back in the black, dark territory following my dental extraction yesterday.  It triggered a lot of pain from my last relationship when I had a beautiful bridge construction done that is now shot and had to be removed due to a crack in my eye tooth.  I think the crack came when I bit down angrily because I abandoned myself in all sorts of ways in that last relationship, driven my someone very clear on his own rules and agenda and only willing to accept me as long as I went along with everything he did and expected of me, subjecting me to a lot of emotional cruelty along the way.  We embarked on travels just days after I completed the long stretch of dental reconstruction I had done in 2010.

Last night between 1 and 3 am all of this was replaying in my mind. At any point I could have stepped out of and away from revolving myself around someone else’s ego, but at that time I lacked the necessary positive ego strength.  And the truth is now I will live the rest of my life without three functioning teeth, instead am now stuck with this denture which is so difficult eat and chew with.  I just have to keep reminding myself that in time I will get used to it.

I listened to the entire Coldplay Ghost Stories album today crying and crying, wishing I could just shift off this painful mortal coil and go home to spirit to be with my sister and my Dad. I kept thinking how aware I often am that I feel I am from somewhere else and when I see or experience the suffering, pain, cruelty and dishonesty and compromises of this mortal earthly world, often I feel such a longing to go ‘home’, at times it just feels too bloody difficult and painful here.

This morning I just gave way to the feelings of deep grief and amidst them were lots of images of my sister as she lay dying in the hospital, those final few days before we decided the kindest thing was to take her off life support and let her go home, to a place where she would finally be free of the physical emotional and mental suffering and trauma she lived with for over 30 years.   I had the strongest sense while crying of how powerful loving attachments really are and how its such a fallacy that they ever end with death.  In many ways at times I am still the 3 year old little girl whose sister one day married and boarded a boat to live in another country.  And yet, even as I write that I know the 3 year old is only one part of me, even if she is the deepest part.  Today there is adult me here too who can feel and understand her pain and mother her in the midst of it.  What amazing progress.

I decided after this time listening to music, to press on and try and eat breakfast even though it was hard going with the new denture and now I am not feeling suicidal any more.  I surrendered all those painful feelings earlier in prayer and meditation to God or Goddess and he or she has transformed them for me in some miraculous way and then I had the realisation of how important it is for me to live in this present moment. That is not so say that what happened in the past is long gone. It will always be a part of my life as those experiences have shaped who I am.  At times it is with me in memories and feelings most often when those are triggered by current events, however knowing I can feel all those things and release them means that soon I WILL be able to go on with day even though this morning I didn’t know how I was going to get out of bed after a really rocky night’s sleep.

I am reading more and more of Marianne Williamson lately. She uses a lot of prayer in her own life and I find some of her prayers so powerful and moving.   I know that in my life to live a sound spiritual and emotional existence and as a person in recovery that I have to reach for spiritual solutions and to something outside of my own person will, for there are layers and layers to experience and evolution that I can’t always understand with my own limited view and asking for help to bear and ride through my feelings to resolution is a sign of sanity and humility, at least for me.  Also it seems, by some miracle, to work!!

Surrendering to my true feelings without glossing over them is also necessary for its only when I do surrender, rather than resist that I move through.  How and why it happens I don’t really know, I only know that unconditional loving presence to my wounded self is the only way to heal for me, the proof of the pudding is in the experience of eating it!