The full moon changed things.
I feel as if I have finally reached the end of this rather intense ten month grieving process, which has helped me make some significant inner changes.
This is often the way. Illness, break down in relationships, death, redundancy, children leaving home, all these major life challenges are not obstacles as such, but potentially powerful transformative processes.
Not easy though.
I now realise, I was not just grieving for Em, but grieving for all the life experiences that I had not yet digested and integrated, that still sat heavily within me, that was causing repeated stomach ache.
I have deep dived into my stories too, to understand how I keep sticking myself, how I keep repeating more of the same, the triggers coming up again and again.
It gets dull, heavy, exhausting.
I learned a lot from this process.
I learned that our stories get in the way of our processing. That we reinforce our scars, our traumas, our woundings, rather than allow their healing.
I recognised that our greatest suffering is the one we cause ourselves. That while we may have felt harmed by others, it is the way we turn this back on ourselves that actually causes the most harm.
I was reminded that we have a tendency to over personalise, to forget that life happens because life happens because life happens all the way back to the beginning of time and that more often than not, we are not consciously choosing - no one is.
Sometimes we like people, sometimes we don’t. We don’t get to choose this either. Sometimes people like us, sometimes they don’t. They don’t get to choose either. It’s just the way it is.
I am also increasingly conscious how our body never lies. How it keeps score of all we have experienced in our lifetime.
I have learned more about myself, about my tendencies, about my patterns, about my habits, and about my need for time to process.
I have recognised how our narrative can trap our emotions if we are not careful, and it is only when we drop the narrative that we can let the emotion move through the body naturally.
After all, thoughts and emotions are simply vibrations. When we experience an intense event but cannot sufficiently process or “digest” the emotion in that moment, that energy doesn’t disappear. Instead, it contracts and leaves an impression in our deep unconscious, called a samskāra (think ‘scar’)
When we are triggered, we know that we have hit up against an unhealed samskāra.
Effectively what has happened, is a current event vaguely resembles a past traumas and the dormant energy of the samskāra “wakes up”.
We might then find ourselves flooded with intense, seemingly disproportionate emotion. This excess emotional reactivity can be exhausting, robbing us of our vitality and peace.
The mind is of course uncomfortable with a triggered samskāra and so it manufactures a story (often with a narrative, a judgement and a blame) to make sense of the feeling.
The story becomes the trap, because it externalises what is happening. By focusing on the narrative, we can easily avoid facing the raw physical sensation of a wound.
My journey with grief caused me to challenge the stories I had created around the woundings I had experienced and the belief system and thinking patterns that had then arisen and the manner in which may body highlighted my discomfort,
I realised that my stories were not necessarily accurate, just a narrative I had accredited to an experience to try to make sense of it. When I was able to let go of the story and appreciate that there was more than one way to make sense of an experience, I was then able to process the emotion that had gotten trapped because of my story about it.
Now, increasingly, when I am triggered, I am better able to pause, and witness the part of my mind that reacts with the usual thought, before it becomes story. In doing so, I have been able to change the pattern.
When we simply believe the story, this leads to habitual and reactive behaviour, which merely reinforces the original scar.
I have become increasingly accepting that life unfolds as it does, because it does. That we will never truly know what causes what. And nor does it really matter.
I am conscious that understanding our mind, analysing and judging our experiences, is also unhelpful at times, becoming a habit that keeps us stuck in more of the same.
Our soul invites in experiences to know more of itself.
Our higher self has it covered, so to speak. And the more we can trust in this, the more our mind lets go of believing it has control over things. It doesn’t.
In the space that this has been left, something else is emerging now. Old dreams that I buried deep within, that were shattered but not properly let go of, that are now resurfacing; I am beginning to believe in them again.
This is exciting.
Life is changing, has changed.
Grief has broken me apart and brought me back together again, and I am grateful for the process however difficult it has been.
It is time to move on now, to begin again.
Thank you for the roses I was gifted today, beautiful and poignant.
Love Emma x
