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Every Part Of You Longs To Be Healed By Your Heart

faithWith no warning, a friend of mine, who is in middle age, had a major stroke. He was fine one day and very quickly found himself in hospice. We never know what life is going to bring. This is the reason it is so important to remember the preciousness of every moment and to trust that the challenges in your life, including loss and death, are for you. They open you up to who you truly are beyond your struggling self. 

Death and loss, especially big losses, are difficult to cope with. If you are like most people, you avoid experiencing the pain by going up into your head, trying to figure out or manage what you are experiencing. Thus, you live in stories about life rather than living life. Author Stephen Levine says that it all boils down to grief. To me, grief is even too small a word for it. It is that endless ache inside of you that you wish would just go way. On the journey back home to yourself, grief will eventually come out of hiding because it so desperately wants to be seen. You, like most people, have experienced many, many losses in your life and you buried the grief deep inside of you. But, your grief just wants to be touched by your heart. 

If you are experiencing death or loss in your life right now, I invite you to put your hand on your heart and say to your grief and pain, “I see you. I see you have been here a long time. I am here with you and if I leave you again by running away to my mind, I will come back as soon as I can.” When you are willing to be with the grief of an immediate loss, you meet the grief you have carried with you your entire life, including what you experienced as a child. I wish I could create a time machine and you could live inside of yourself when you were very little. You would see that you were free-flowing aliveness when you were very, very young. You were completely connected to life and you didn’t have any thoughts in your head. Then slowly you took on the conditioning of the adults around you, and the spells of fear, despair, dread, confusion, shame and anxiety became frozen inside of you. The only way you could survive while growing up was to leave your body, get lost in your head, and disconnect from your feelings. Living in this world of disconnection is so painful. But, moving in the opposite direction and going toward what you are experiencing by bringing it your attention and mercy is s so freeing.

As the grief of a lifetime begins to show itself to you, be gentle and very kind, not only to the experience of grief but also with the part of yourself that wants to keep on turning away. It is important to remember that you are on a journey back to yourself and back to life. And sometimes on that journey, it feels like nothing is happening. But it is. Every moment of curiosity and compassion for your immediate experience counts, even if it lasts for only a few seconds. If we say that your conditioning is like a big boulder inside of you that blocks your immediate experience of life, sometimes awakening feels like having a tiny hammer and pick and you are chipping away, thinking that the boulder is just too big. But one day, you hit a tiny fissure and the whole rock opens up. Baby steps, not leaps, are what will bring you home. 

Image of “Lingering Red” by Artist Faith Harrison  http://www.faithharrisonart.com/

  1. Thank you for your words again today Mary…just exactly the key I needed to unlock my heart this morning.
    love & light- Kim