After the last post I felt very sad for a day, still mourning. But a day after that I enjoyed a movie with a friend and did some shopping and felt peaceful. It is so important to get to the root of pain and sadness and simply acknowledge it. To explore why the sadness is felt, to let myself really feel the pain, mourn the loss, then breathe it out. Otherwise I get caught up in the pain cycle - in pain but not knowing why, so that I just keep hurting myself over and over. But when I recognize the root, when I let myself feel the pain it is at first overwhelming, but the pain passes and there is a kind of peace in letting go. Letting go of holding on to the past. I will always miss my grandparents in some way. But now I can let that pain go, to see those Christmas pasts and love the memories of them without longing so terribly for them to come again.
I am beginning to understand the yogic and Buddhism wisdom of letting go. I could not move on with Christmas and my life, I could not enjoy the Christmas of now, because I was holding on so tightly to the past. When I was able to look inside, acknowledge the pain, I was able to let go of it. This week I feel energized and ready to enjoy what this Christmas brings. The future is not static; it is ever changing. Trying to freeze the present, to mold it into beloved past memories only freezes ourselves, because time ticks onward with alarming variety. We cannot move forward and enjoy the wondrous change going around us if we are so desperately trying to recreate past memories. Trying to hold onto people is even worse; it freezes both them and ourselves. I can't let you change and become a better person if I'm holding you to your past behaviors and forcing you back into patterns of behavior that you may have outgrown. People are as varied and changing as the future - the person who holds too tightly onto her friends ends up friendless or with friends who resent her. Letting go of a friend in the yogic sense means allowing that friend to grow and change and loving dispassionately what she becomes.
Letting go is a good thing for me to understand and practice as a new year approaches and I bemoan that it'll probably be just like the old. Yep, it will be if I can't let go of the old year, if I can't let the past stay there and look with an open heart to the swirling change that is the new one.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
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1 comment:
Ips, I have been negligent in coming by, and now that it's 2010 I am glad I caught up a little. What revelations you've enjoyed -- though it may not seem very enjoyable, they are immensely important. It's funny how it seemed like the "Christmas Spirit" really caught some of us by surprise this year. For the first time in many years, I'm sorry to see the tree go, to put things away, to go back to normal, even as "normal" promises to be much better all around in this new year. I think there is a place for the past in honoring it somehow, much the way we bake a cookie from a grandmother's recipe box.
I hope we can get together more often in 2010. Meeting you and Mr. Ips was for sure of the neatest things about this passing decade!
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