When the past pulls on me (the best is yet to come!)

Grateful to have had therapy this afternoon.. I recognise being pulled back into a lot of regret over the past doesnt always speak to the truth of things as well as evolutionary intent for our soul. That said I also recognised over past days the coming into my life of my husband from 1993 to 2004 bought so much new life to both me and my familyc.. After we met our families came together for the celebration and continued to connect many times.. Jonathan’s Mum visited twice and Mum visited us in the UK where she shared happy times with us and his family as well as my sister’s son who did a gap year at a school not far from us.

Both Jonathan and I lost our Dads around the same age (23) and had love partners break it off with us within a few month.. J went travelling to Greece where he met good friends Pip and Brian who later came to live in Australia. I went overseas and in another 8 years or so we met.

I remember having a psychic reading a few years before we got together and the reader said to me, that the years 1993 to 1996 would be some of the happiest in my life. I was newly sober in those years, newly married, in time we both got good jobs and had happy times both together and with friends, we also saw a lot of my God parents who were the ones to offer me the most support after Dad passed away.

Within three years of 1996 we were in many ways pulled back into the dark in the UK although I loved my time working at the Botanic Garden with an ecclectic group of 5 women and two men, one of whom was the world expert on Lavenders.. When my first depressive episode hit in 2000 they were so supportive to me, they validated me and they let me start later and gave me an extra days work sorting out the little Botanic library that adjoined our small office on site in the middle of the gardens.. It was a happy time but things blew apart in 2001 when Saturn opposed Pluto and low and behold we found ourselves back ‘home’ in Australia.. my older sister hit the skids being beaten around by her partner and landed up in a home far far away. . it took some years for Mum to get her, through a lot of hard work into home set up by the charity Koomari for those suffering from acquired brain injury. There in time she came to have the support of a group of 4 lovely ladies from a nearby Anglican church, yes she was over medicated, died with a lot of her own sadness and pain and regret locked away deep inside but in the end she died surrounded by the love of family.

Talking today in therapy I said to Kat how Jonathan longed to go back to the UK when we arrived back here at the end of 2001. It was I who left him for 6 months before coming back, getting stuck and being unable to move forward. Now I see it was all working out as it needed to, why do I have to see everything as so ‘wrong’ and with such a negative bias? Yes i deeply missed the UK still cry tears over longing for the land of my ancestors but I know the UK also has its negatives.

Jonathan is now home with his family which is where i felt he needed to be back in 1998 having left them to marry me.. and I had those final years with Mum and Jude, and hard as it feels sometimes to be with my sister who struggles I AM DOING THAT NOW… so she is less alone than she would be if I was so very very far away.

Today I thought of a friend in AA who recently said to me that getting sober meant God wanted two things for him, 1) to be happy, 2) to help others when he could.. The truth is that when I help others I help myself.. There is a saying in AA that we only get to keep sobriety when we share and give it away, through our experience, strength and hope and even trials and struggles we help to let others know they are not alone and can also pursue this path of healing which may SEEM like it heads into a darkness humanity must now acknowledge fully and commit to moving on from IN LOVE..

I now acknowledge the Complex history of trauma and unresolved grief over separations that dogged my family and take full responsibility for changing that pattern. Scott always reminds me the best is yet to come and I love best these words of hope from the song Goodbye to Love I shared earlier in the “what lies in the future is a mystery to us all, no one can predict the wheel of fortune as it falls” the best we can do is front up and not lose hope.

Today before therapy I found myself again in a negative self judging space and lacked the energy to get in the car, but when I moved with life energy and said ‘Yes’, when I got moving I felt a shift, I also felt so much old sediment leaving me.. I don’t know when it was lately I started to lose hope but I think my sis going down pulls me down, Kat said to me this afternoon that she feels when Sue loses her power in the world I feel like I am the only one left to care, but the truth is she has her son and Betty, our family friend as well as so many others who would love to support her if only she opened up and overcame the negative voices telling her she is a pain.

My sister is not a pain but she struggles with a negative view and pain over having been left and struggling so hard to be a good person she so often ended up exhausted by it.. I long for her to find the love within and without she truly deserves and much as I acknowledged I cannot do that for her, the best I can do is be there for her and be a positive voice.

I understand in the time of Covid how powerful the forces of isolation can become but I also know there is love there.. I believe in the power of love I truly do. It truly is the force that connects rather than separates and divides and gives birth to stars.. True deep embodied love also it comes from facing our shadow both personally and collectively….we only attack in others what we cannot bear to see in ourselves. And I am one with Jesus teachings from The Course In Miracles that say we only judge our neighbor as guilty if we judge ourselves that way too… today I know I am not guilty.. I know I did my best and I thank God for 26 sober years, holding out hope that THE BEST IS YET TO COME.

And I take responsibility for managing my own choices of how I spend my time and energy and as well as investing them in things that bring joy and happiness to my life as well as feelings of peace.. sometimes I will have to face pain and suffering, many times I will feel great sorrow looking at the true state of things, including powerful forces of self rejection, but only to learn the essential lessons that cannot be learned if I refuse to face what it is they came to teach me.