This is a photo from our 10 year college reunion. Three of my roommates are in the photo and I am linked with our friend Hank who died early this month. The photo moved me to tears. I am alternating between a new joy and moments of profound grief. For a decade I managed to shut down my emotions entirely and, like so many, I thought my emotions. “How do you feel? I think….” I often hear this, work with clients who are so cut off from their emotions that even sticking a toe in is more then they can bear.
So my recent commitment to holy relationship, wholehearted relationship, relationships where I am both 100% vulnerable and emotionally transparent and where I am 100% responsible for my own experience blaming no one including myself, seeing only innocence has ripped the remaining scab off the wounds of forgetting. I am remembering more and more and it has unleashed a yearning I am finally beginning to be able to contain. For years I, like so many, stuffed it down initially with busyness and activity, with men, travel, food, shopping, even briefly tried alcohol. Yet nothing nothing nothing meets the yearning except on thing, Love.
Love is a fire that burns away all that is unlike itself. It will take you to your knees, strip away all that is untruthful, take all your false idols and sweep them away.
For too long I felt I could not hold the force of that yearning, that desire to BE MYSELF. The mask is being removed and I greet myself as an honored guest in my own life. Everything moves me, the tulips at Ananda, the roar of the Yuba, the giggle of my beloved daughter, the eyes of the shuttle driver at Ananda which were it up with such aliveness, a man in our mindfulness group at the jail who seems so familiar and somehow touches me deeply, a client who always moves my heart. It is all so alive. Yet the price I have to pay is to feel it all, the beauty and the tragedy. I can not look away from what is before me. II have reached out in radical honesty and been rebuffed, seemingly “rejected,” not answered, not met. The temptation is to give up, give in. Yet that is no longer an option. It feels to me as though I am receiving constant bleed throughs of past lives where I lived in such community, such belonging, my soul nourished by the bonds of true friendships and knowing. It is beginning to show up in bits and piece of my life, colors of the tapestry woven into the fabric of my being. I have put it all on the line, and yes, sometimes I am terrified my longing will not be answered, I will be left suspended in mid air over the cliff I have leapt off. Yet finally the cost of saying no is too great and my yearning will not be silenced.
