Difficult feelings : finding a way to make my peace with the past

A lot of feelings have been coming up today about my ex husband. It was a weird case of synchronicity that when I listened to the Bracha Goldsmith video I posted in a post I wrote yesterday on Thursday night that she mentioned the town of Frome where my ex husband now lives in Somerset, UK.. she said what a wonderful alternative community there is there and as she started sharing that I started to cry and think of Jonathan.. I thought of he and his daughter living there now and how he is now separated and how tough it was for him when I started my therapy and we made the move back to the UK after 6 years of married life in Australia. I felt so sad for him when he would come back from holidays there visiting family and cry so that when we went over for our first visit together in 1998 we decided to move there the following year after both being so overcome with emotion upon our return..

When we moved over there in 1999 getting a new start for him was tougher than for me. I pretty quickly landed a job at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden in admin and it was where he would have loved to work with his horticultural qualifications, instead he had to take on a couple of tough jobs before finally finding one in plant sales.. I won’t go into all of the ins and outs of it. It’s in the past now but he did struggle when I started therapy in June that year and he did feel a bit shut out and it was he who decided after I had second thoughts that we would move back to Australia in 2001.. he thought it would be better for me to be closer to family but at that point so many defenses were in place and I could not move back to the same town where family were and where I had faced so so much trauma before leaving in 1985 just after Dad died..

I ended up leaving him for six months in 2002 to go back to the UK to do some more therapy and that was tough as he had to commute to another town miles away four days a week to get work and when he tried to tell me how much he was struggling I blew it all off..I did go back home but things rapidly fell apart in 2004 and he left me then.. It was a dark time, the next year I had the head injury trying, once again, to go back to the UK where I felt more at home in some ways due to ancestral roots..

Possibly the best view to take over all of this is that we both did our best because this weekend to be honest I have a lot of guilt and pain over what I put him through.. I am also on a therapy break for a week and we are in lock down. I know is best to ride these feelings out.. I was down on my knees crying earlier.. I talked some of this over with my sister yesterday as she knew and loved Jonathan… It was good to be able to express some of it.. I am also seeing that when we broke up it put stress on her and Mum as well, when she tried to be there I was still full of a lot of grief and anger and they both did not really know how to cope for after Dad died our family fragmented a bit and I went so far away, to the point it became hard to connect with her older son who moved here after Mum died.. we had that disagreement and she said so many nasty hurtful things but possibly she just did not know what I was going through.

Perhaps I just need to let all of these feelings burn up.. There is no point in resisting them, maybe its a sign of growth and maturation for me that I can see my part in things now. God knows life is not easy and possibly some of my intellectual defenses are melting away..after getting all of the anger out over the past few weeks.. One thing is for sure, I cannot change the past.. and I do want to live a better life in the present.. it just seems for me the past 17 years since Jonathan left me have been like one huge long backward glance to not only my personal past but the ancestral one as well trying to make some sense of it all.

I listened to a talk by Eckaht Tolle about not identifying with our sad or ‘victim’ ego stories, never the less some of us do carry great pain over the past.. It does not feel wrong to me to acknowledge this, but a sign of strength.. Yes I am human, I did make mistakes, there are some things I do regret and wish had worked out so differently but in the end, for me, right now it seems the better way is this : acceptance, honesty, willingness to feel bad for a time and to wrestle with and work through all of the feelings while trying my very best to find ways not to be stuck in the past for one more single day, but instead just to bring all the necessary lessons forward .

As Eckhart says we are here to awaken and evolve, we cannot get things right until possibly we get them wrong one too many times. Perhaps the more essential lesson is that we do not give up hope… and that we keep opening our hearts in honesty, humility, courage and open-mindedness to both our own and others human struggles and suffering..