Posts Tagged ‘grief’

 

A Patchwork Quote

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

Paulo Coelho wrote: “Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.”
Shakespeare wrote: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
And A.A. Milne wrote: “A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.”

So I meander here through a maze of other people’s wisdom and try to find my feet in tear-formed pools of grief where others have already trod. The eyot has sent me back to the garden where I turn my reflection to the spring sun and dive into Judith Anodea’s river of words, in Eastern Body, Western Mind, which I use to irrigate the weeds that are learning to grow amongst the flowers. “Those who are idealistic about love sometimes find the greatest pain. Wide-eyed they fall, giving their utmost to the beloved. Great is their dismay, when giving all they could and valuing this love above all things, they see their lover casually mistreat what they had regarded as sacred.” Just when I thought the gardening was all done, “… a painful situation triggers wounds from previous hurts that were never healed and we feel like we are re-experiencing every hurt that has ever happened to us.” Like driving a garden fork through your foot … and not just once!

“The emptiness of abandonment may be re-experienced every time it happens in adulthood, where the loss of a loved one leaves us feeling like we’re falling apart. The body itself may reflect this collapse, with the muscles chronically undercharged, the legs weak, and the upper back hunched over as if the spine cannot quite hold itself upright.” I don’t collapse and feel like dying anymore – well, not as frequently anyway – but my body has shut down. It’s had enough and no longer even heeds the call of my inner Forrest Gump. I can no longer fight it so I dose myself up with Tryptophan and I lie on the grass and find farm animals in the clouds, wondering if perhaps the dose is too high.

“When we fall in love, we strip ourselves of defences. We open to another and to the world. We expand and grow. When we are hurt in matters of love, we are hurt in our most vulnerable, trusting aspects. The purest form of self is wounded. It no longer feels safe to be authentic. Our system – wounded at the very core – shuts down and we lose not only our lover but ourselves as well. This is the deepest loss.” Each of our friends reflects a certain aspect of ourselves; they allow the different aspects of our personalities to breathe. When we lose a friend we lose that aspect of ourselves too. “The point of grief work is to regain connection with the self inside rather than increase our attachment to what was lost.” With a lover who you connect with on a cellular level, all those things he awakens in you are lost when he leaves and this is the part we truly grieve. “If the object of our worship should leave, fall from grace, or reject us, we are devastated. To heal, we must then reconnect responsibly to the self within, seeing it as an aspect of divinity in its own right, and much in need of love and understanding.” Ultimately we can get over anyone who leaves – even when it feels like an impossible goal – but we can’t get over the missing pieces of ourselves. My deficient heart has responded to the wounds by withdrawing and I find“… distance from others and defend against closeness and the risk of getting hurt again.”

I am reminded of a quote by Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that have been built against it.” He also wrote, “Lovers do not finally meet somewhere, they are in each other all along.” When my heart was broken I didn’t search for love. He was already in me. But I still had to put in the time, seeking out the barriers I had built against loving him, gradually breaking them down. And opening myself up. And allowing myself to love him. But as my heart opened like a lotus flower out of the cesspool, it was plucked by the knife of abandonment.

Rollo May wrote, “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfilment and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.” And in this heady mix of uppers and downers, and waking up in Vegas where the broken down barriers lead to love and the love leads to barriers, which get broken down to expose the love … and on and on, I suddenly sober up and see that all I’m left with is “… the hangover and the memory of love.”

But when I feel like stopping there, Brandi Carlisle’s voice strains down the headphones cord, “But these stories don’t mean anything if you’ve got no one to tell them to. It’s true, I was made for you.” and the barriers stand tall with the reminder of what an irrelevant sentiment that is when love pierced my abdomen and stuck me in a frame to display my beautiful wings; preserving me when I would far rather have died.

But, hey, “Relationship furthers the evolution of individual souls and the collective soul of our planet.” So I slurp down bowlfuls of bittersweet soup for the soul, take one for the planet, and trust that the cycle will continue, just as it should.

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The Marriage of Tolle and Bradshaw?

Friday, August 5th, 2011

“After we made love I knew it was over. Did I ever really love Big or was I addicted to the pain? The exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable?” – Carrie (Sex & the City)

So, in the interests of having a new blog post, I put myself on the couch yesterday to find this ‘Pain Body’ Eckhart Tolle and a friend of mine speak of … trying to figure out if indeed it has something to do with my attachments and my reluctance to let go.

The astrologer who last year predicted not only the demise of my marriage but also the end of my romance, suggested I document my grieving process photographically. But my rawness seems more appropriately exposed in my words rather than my image which, as my life takes a new shape, manages to conjure the joys of life even as those closest to me throw me safety ropes and pull me out of the gaping holes in the earth beneath my feet.

It took three years, a separation and a love affair before I could make a tiny bit of sense of why my marriage failed. It is only now, during this current grieving process over my Mr Big, that I have come remotely close to gaining clarity and a path back to the knowledge I was nowhere near ready to harness previously. It was only once I managed to disengage from my husband that I could access the parts of me that could grow from the experience … and it wasn’t so much the disengagement from the man that was so difficult as the disengagement from all the stuff that eighteen years naturally brings to a relationship.

As I now try and let go of my One, I see that there was nothing outside of the intense connection; the very core of knowing I was Destined to be with him. The purity of this attachment to only the Man somehow makes it feel harder. But I let go of him in the knowledge that there was nothing in the relationship other than a hope of a future that was never real and the fear of losing someone who was never mine. I have learned that being Destined to be Together does not automatically make it so, but comes with Choices that Enable it to happen. I fell in love with the unattainable. But, like Carrie, I was probably just addicted to the pain of not having the One thing I truly wanted. After all, I get to keep the love and just let go of the man.

But there’s something inside of me that just doesn’t want to. And this is perhaps the ‘Pain Body‘ I have been trying to figure out … that part of me that aches to feel the pain just a little bit more; that part that doesn’t want to forget how it felt to rest my head in that perfect place on his chest; the part that wants to remember the feeling of safety when wrapped in his arms; the part that hoped unrealistically that I would be his One too. As I torture myself over photos, emails and text messages, the pain speaks to me and feeds off the agony of not being chosen.

Would it be too easy to let go and move one? Or would moving on and letting go of the pain, also liberate me from the joy of having known such intense bliss? Can we even have the one without the other? Like the pendulum, the left is countered by the right … back and forth with moments of balance at the centre point. Grief and joy need not necessarily be opposites but conspirators to a fulfilled and balanced life.

I’m deleting photos and emails one by one. The journals and notes get gradually burned on the fire and I again sit down with Archangel Michael in his skimpy shorts, and seek the assistance of his big sword to sever those ties that connect my heart so steadily to that of my One. Once I have disengaged I will be in a better position to assess what this is all about. Who says you have to stay friends with ex-husbands and ex-lovers anyway?

Penelope van Maasdyk, you need to lie down on the couch again …

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Confessions of a Runner

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

You simply have to look at my feet to find out how I’m coping emotionally. After several months of pretty toes and sling-back shoes, the skin on the soles of my feet are starting to crack, the tips of a few of my toes are opaque with blisters and a couple of my toenails are lifting ever so noticeably. And, as I reawaken the Forrest Gump within me, my emotional state is most likely going to turn all of my toenails black. When that happens, go easy on me – I may have a huge smile on my face but somewhere on a deeper level I am falling apart and through widening cracks that are simply reappearing due to bad workmanship. And if I’m wearing black nail varnish on my toenails best thing to do is approach cautiously … preferably with a bottle of bubbly and the promise of an all night party.

But as for the confession … I have been protecting the identity of my lover, so I thought, because of the many complications involved with the relationships I choose to pursue. But, as I disengage (or try to), I can’t help but wonder if perhaps it is simply myself I have been protecting. The cryptic ways I refer to love in my blog and the even more cryptic Facebook status updates … and, of course, the delicious pseudonym he has on my phone … are possibly my way of shielding myself from the judgement I am not meant to even be afraid of anymore. So, in the name of testing that theory and in the name of testing (again) who my true friends and followers are … I’m going extreme on confessions.

The man I chose to fall in love with; the man who held up that mirror to the butterfly in me; the man who inadvertently became my One shortly before leaving the country – and my life – forever, with his world in tact; the one who helped me heal from a broken marriage and brought me full circle to the broken-hearted pain I was in a year ago is … well, he’s Married! There, it’s out. I’ll be very clear here, I’m no victim in this. I knew everything. All I can say is that the part inside me that was seeking the attachment (my ‘Pain Body’ perhaps) only heard what it wanted to hear. Being played for the fool in love has gone around in my head over and over, so whatever all this makes you think of me is really none of my business.

So, now I move beyond the unmentionable and return to the love that causes the attachment that ultimately causes the grief that turns me into Forrest Gump with black toes that reflect the deepening cynicism in my soul.

But the process is like unravelling the silk from my cocoon to make a scarf. So that’s enough for one day. More tomorrow … after my next consultation with Mr Gump.

For now I end with Paulo Coelho’s 1-minute reading:
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/08/11/manual-for-climbing-mountains-3/

I’m not going to tell you which mountains to climb but I will try and give you the courage to climb the ones you can’t avoid. So put on your Big Boots and get ready for an Adventure. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on between A and B.

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Keeping the Love you Find

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

I was leant a book, Keeping the Love you Find, but it remains untouched … the title taunts me as I go through the grieving process of having just lost a great love; my One. It feels like dying. It tears excruciatingly at every fibre of my being, drains the colour from my face and occasionally saps from me the desire to stand, causing me to sink to the floor where I stay immobilised for an indefinable length of time, contorted with sobbing.

But already I am beginning to question the quote in my previous post … I’m wondering if it really is the love that does this or whether we blame it on the love purely because the heart is the first organ to fail when someone chooses to no longer be in your life.

A friend of mine once told me that you don’t fall in love with a person but with love itself. Supposing then, when we are left alone, we have lost the person and not the love. Perhaps we fall in love with the things that person awakens in us … not the person we are with but the person we become when we are with that person. If that is the case, why do we still fear the loss of love so much?

Love awakens and expands until you look different and you feel different … and then you realise it’s because you’ve turned into that butterfly. And every time you fall in and out of love you go through a whole new metamorphosis until you find all the beauty you have wrapped up in yourself. And you realise it’s Yours To Keep. So we grieve … and then some … the loss of the person who stood like a mirror reflecting all that beauty and love, and then, hopefully, we manage one day to stand alone and hold onto all that they helped us find.

But my theory doesn’t account for the loss of the moments of exquisite bliss when you hold that person in your arms; when you engage with that person on levels beyond consciousness where nothing else matters but the feeling you have in every cell of your body that this could go on forever. And, unfortunately, past grieving doesn’t make present grieving one iota easier. What it does do, however, is help stay focused on the Other Side. It helps you realise that Grieving Will Eventually End and that Love Does Always Find A Way and that The Choices You Make Can Change.

I’d like to say I’m done with grabbing at ankles on the kitchen floor and I’d like to say I’m done with choosing people who don’t choose me. But I’ve learnt that things are never that simple with love. I’m going to go back into my cocoon now and when I emerge one day, transformed again, I will choose me. And that love will hopefully be enough.

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My Voice

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

I have been working on several blog posts lately, working and reworking but never quite completing them. It wasn’t difficult before … before people actually read my blog or before they de-friended me on Facebook or just de-friended me in general.

And then I read http://networkedblogs.com/enz7C by Cath Duncan and pulled out this line:
“Grief needs to be expressed in some way – either privately or with witnesses, in order to heal.”

I grew up in an environment of repression and hidden secrets, a home where sweeping was obligatory and the carpet was lumpy with unexpressed emotion. Food was always the blanket that smothered the fire. And I married a man who held the same sentiment … for the obvious reason that that was my comfort zone. But as I evolved into the free-spirited writer, traveler and mother my perspective changed.

I became isolated and part of my means to break through to the other side involved sending out these messages into the ether – I didn’t know where they were going, I just wrote and posted and in a sense that was the release my issues needed … a public airing with seemingly no consequences and no obvious recourse that usually comes with discussing things face-to-face with someone who could quite easily instantly judge me.

The more isolated I became, the more I worked on finding my voice and in the midst of paradox, my blog was born, anonymous at first … and then not so. I broke free from fear of embarrassment and in a sense I embraced the inevitable judgement, fearless of the repercussions that would come from my admission that the thought of throwing my baby against the wall crossed my mind … and more than just the one time.

You ask what place grief has on a baby blog? I believe that every time you walk through the fire of transformation, be it willingly or at the hand of the universe, there is a fair amount of healthy grieving that needs to be done in order to heal. Not everything can be fixed with a roast chicken and a chocolate bar. When I got married I had to grieve my singledom. When I had my child, I had to grieve the life I had lost to motherhood. Sure, many women continue as they were, employ nannies or harness the help of family and friends to support their existing lives. But I had changed too much. And when I left my husband, I had to grieve … well, I had to grieve and grieve and grieve for all that was lost.

I remember blurting out how crap it was that I had fallen pregnant, only to fall prey to a barrage of criticism for my insensitivity considering one of the women in the group had been suffering with fertility problems. “But I didn’t know!” I claimed. It didn’t help. Another friend had a miscarriage and told no one so issues to do with abortions, for example, became a taboo subject … impossible if you were not part of her closely guarded secret. I have noticed on so many occasions how easily people have judged me for getting divorced … until I realized it’s not so much the doing as it is the telling. The telling exposes people’s vulnerability around issues. The telling makes them take a closer look at their own fragile situation. And in my case, for 14 years my marriage was perceived as a union of the perfect couple and if such a tragedy could befall the prom royalty, then what chance did others have when their relationships were far more ‘of this world’.

I have had to deal with therapy sessions that paint me as a tough piece of work who is terrified of displaying any vulnerability, hence creating a host of relationship issues around neediness. I took that on and practiced really hard to be vulnerable … when all along my blog is the very proof that I wear my vulnerability on my sleeve and the fact that it doesn’t line up with how my partner is needed has little bearing.

But I digress in my explanation. My laptop screen is littered with a variety of Text and Word documents, all posts waiting to be born but, ironically, as my healing begins to feel like it is close to completion, I struggle to deal with my audience. I lost my voice for months and it only returned recently. The posts on my blog were written by a woman who now forms only a part of me and the fate of the unfinished documents scattered over my desktop lie sealed by the hand of their author who no longer exists.

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Here but lost

Monday, December 7th, 2009

I realised, during a training session for the KARABO grief-counseling program, that I have always suffered grief for the loss of my mother. This isn’t because my mother died but because I never had a mother – well, not in the sense of my belief of what a mother should be. Too much stuff to actually go into any kind of detail here but the over-riding taint is someone who critisised most and praised little. Add to this the corporal punishment that was so trusted by that generation and the result is inevitably a person with not much faith in her ability. I turned slightly psychotic when I had my own child – I became tearful at the very suggestion that I should discipline with smacking, I went into self-loathing every time I shouted at my child and I screamed at my husband if he didn’t treat our child with total respect.

I had to go back to the basics: praise the good, ignore the bad and dig deep for the love … basic guidance from puppy socializing classes. Fine, I don’t always ignore the bad – I’m flawed! – but, besides putting up boundaries, I reward with stars and tell him every night, as he is going to sleep, all the things I love about him. There has to be a way to confine the wild horses without breaking their spirits.

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