Growing Pains
For the last four years, I have been on a grief journey that has felt like a roller coaster ride with numerous highs and lows, twist and turns, a real thriller. Fear of the unknown was the big scary giant that greeted me on the road to a new life. During the infancy of my grief, I felt like a little helpless baby totally unsure of myself in this new skin. The second year, I was a toddler creeping around on all fours exploring this new place within myself that was now home. The third year I was like a teenager rebelling against this new life. Now I am adult learning how to live, be, and function in this new world with this new me as I make room to grow into who I am becoming.
Grief was my season of my discontent, everything felt uneasy, difficult, tight. Everything was miserable. It was miserable because I missed him and the life we were building together. I didn’t know how to move on or forward. I felt stuck in my mind and body. Being uncomfortable with constant anxiety left me exhausted to the point where I had no choice but to investigate the nature of that discontent. In this dry season, I learned the true cause of my unhappiness. It wasn’t just the death of my beloved, or the change in my life, my role from wife to widow, to eventually empty nester. It was the fact that I saw, the loves of my life as the root cause of my happiness. And now that they have all moved on, through death and college, I am left with myself.
This awareness pointed me to ask the question “is my happiness dependent on the people and things in my life?” The answer was a sharp yes. I’d built my identity around being a wife, a mother, and a host of other things that I felt made me who I am. The razor-sharp truth, none of those things made me who I am and none of those things can bring me everlasting happiness. This awareness gave me that glazed donut look in my eyes, when you realized that you’ve just been hit with a whammy that has the potential to change how you see your whole life.
The grief journey made me realize that at some point everyone I love, all the things I possess, are all temporary. I was going to lose them and be left with sorrow and grief knocking at my door once again. Everything was impermanent. This thought made my anxiety increase even more. If everything was impermanent, including myself, then would I ever be happy. I was in the middle of an existential crisis. I realized that grief itself isn’t the culprit, it’s a natural condition to loving someone deeply and purely. The real culprit is fear and our level of attachment. Let me pause here and say that I don’t profess to be beyond my attachments, but I am aware of my attachments. That is the difference now. I am aware of what causes me distress, unhappiness, and discontent. When these feelings come, I can fully be with them but not be ruled by them. I can acknowledge the presence of what is without being corrupted by the story. I can simply be and accept what is, and even that is hard sometimes.
It’s taken me four years to come to this place of understanding on a deeper level the nature of my unhappiness and it is a surprise gift I never imagined I would receive on this journey. As a yoga teacher for well over twelve years, I always taught the basic tenet of yoga which is liberation from the Maya (chaos). What I didn’t get then was how that applied to my own personal life and how very imprisoned I was, made so by my programming that told me I won’t be happy unless… you can fill in the blanks.
There are different levels of awareness based on where we might be on our human journey and there’s not a wrong or right on where that place is. We’re all waking up in our own way and time, what matters, is that we begin to practice being aware of ourselves. As you get started on being more present and aware, here are some tips to guide you on your awareness practice:
Be gentle with yourself as you begin. You won’t get there overnight.
Begin a stillness practice (what’s that you say?) It’s simply spending time in silence so you can listen to the internal movements within yourself.
Notice and observe your thoughts without clinging to them. Simply observe and let go.
When you notice a space between the thoughts, be there without the need to fill that space with more thoughts. This is the sweet spot.
Don’t identify with your thoughts, simply watch them come and go.
It’s all about being present. The more you are present with right now, the more fully alive you are. Real life can never be “back there” or “over there”, only right here. And the more we can honor this now reality, the more we can live fully and experience the presence of God with us.
Don’t take yourself too seriously. Normally, we become too over focused, too tight, we want to control how “it” is happening. Loosen up and become more like a child at play. The softer you become the easier it gets.
The hardest thing as we grow into our humanity is to slow down, listen, and be present enough to notice ourselves in the full. We live in a culture that promotes doing and busyness. The more we are able to evolve through awareness, the freer we become on the inside, and our external life becomes more alive, our relationships more vibrant not because they have changed, or the outside world has changed but because the change has happened within us.