I kept living

Even though over the past 16 years so much outer living has been cut off from me I still should be kind in the way I talk to myself.. I just got tagged in a post related to Greece by my good friend who shared those happy times there when we were only 23.. This was just after my Dad died in 1985 so a lot of feeling was repressed and we were drinking and partying a lot but we got to live, we got to experience things and we also got the chance to travel all over Europe in the days before email and cell phones.. In fact our connecting in those days required word of mouth not phones and often I think angelic guidance.. I was saved so many times over those years coming out of so many years of trauma for me not to believe the angels and maybe even my dead father were there somewhere protecting me and guiding me towards those who were to become a big part of my soul journey.

I went through a lot of pain 1985 to 1986, there was a termination of pregnancy to someone I did not know well in Switzerland on the first anniversary of Dad dying. There was my ex pulling me in in Greece only to abandon me again by sleeping with someone else.. There were the painful years with my next boyfriend Simon who was a commitment phobe and always had the next girl lined up when things got too ‘hot’ with someone he was seeing.. In fact we used to write in each other’s journals all of the time and when he abandoned me close to the second anniversary of my father’s death in 1986 he also wrote of all his girlfriends I had shown him the most love even as I had bursts of rage at times when we would draw close. I often think of Simon and wonder what happened to him, my good friend Sue said a few weeks ago she thinks relationships may not have gone well for him with his history but who knows?

I loved and lost a lot of times, but in the end did the losses give me something? Despite all of the pain and self flagellation?

In his wonderful little book on mourning becoming dancing Henri Nouwen explores how opening to our grief and viewing it as a soul deepening experience may also help us to expand spiritually in many ways.. We go down deep or in James Hillman’s words ‘grown down’ into life through embracing to and opening and feeling instead of numbing and rejecting our grief and other complex emotions.

Often others will sideline us in grief, our pain scares them, in any case mos of these people never lost as we did and so they do not know that deep abyss in which, in the powerful words of the AA Big Book we find ourselves ‘beyond human aid” which is where so many of us end up after years and years of accumulated attachment trauma and/or addiction.. And yet is that expression yet another form of an avoidant’s illusion I often ask?..

For it was only when my good therapists could connect to me in my anger or pain rather than toss or shut me out that I could become human again… This is akin to how I wrote in a post a while back that Gestapo torture survivor, Max said that torture had made him a stranger to life… We are tortured and then others’ misunderstanding and lack of depth may torture or exile us more when what we really need to survive not die is to be embraced by a loving community.. and most of all by our (so often rejected) True Self..

Must we take other’s ignorant rejection on? Why not be a soul warrior and embrace the pain, not in a masochistic way but using it to make us expand and incarnate more fully across all levels?.. Rejecting our pain means we reject wisdom, depth, empathy growth, emerging clarity, deepening love and life.. In a narcissistic culture defenses against pain rule. The signs of it are everywhere here in Canberra I cannot go anywhere without being asked to sign in on an app.. I just rebel at times and do not do it.. I will die one day..I have nearly died.. but all of this protectionism and defensiveness against being alive gets to me at times..

Sorry this has turned into a bit of a rant. I got off tangent in that last paragraph… the point I am making here is that even today whatever life throws at me I am choosing to front up and face it.. I am trying to open doors sometimes closed.. Who cares if they get slammed shut in my face again?.. Maybe they will! In any case I will survive, even after I die as my soul is eternal.

Just remember that whenever fear or other soul deep emotions society reject encourage you to shrink and play small while denying the amount of painful living you had to do to find yourself here today still trying where ever on earth you are to keep opening to life, living and (hopefully) loving?.