Dying Unto Myself.
“You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.”
~ Maya Angelou
The Cold Moon in December signals the approach of my mother’s death. I have traveled four times around the sun of everything she shined on - atoned through 16 solar and lunar eclipses and emerged victoriously from 48 illuminations (of guilt and shame and all that stuff carried by most children on this earth after the passing of their parents or when confronted with their decline).
There’s a lot of (fearful) stuff that comes up when we come face to face with the reality of life and death! … like how anticipation swells out the aliveness of the moment and how we are kept from the wisdom of the pause.
I'm not saying that we all feel fear in the same “way” and for the same “reasons”. However, there’s no doubt that these memories, stories, and assumptions about our relationship with our parents trigger emotions that are encoded within the constitution of beliefs that run our world; and that the perception of that world is distorted by a reward system that taught us we needed to earn Love to belong to that world.
The irony is that when we did receive the adoration and praise from our parents, the momentary relief of this tension became imbued with a feeling of worthiness -rewired with our pleasure zone. The ego felt Born Again to this new possibility of forgiveness and love and created maladaptive beliefs and habits that sustained and prolonged this feeling.
But there was something alive inside that was denied.
That’s what these words are pointing toward -
the energy that fuels this “longing seeking motion” comes from a vibrational “place” of intention within that “feeling” or body of experience,
and what it’s trying to convey for the future needs to be free of any past emotional bias to promote understanding and growth.
Emotions are communicating, “See me as I am”.
Becoming my father’s caretaker for six weeks after his car accident felt way too similar to the events and feelings that led up to my mother’s death. I was possessed by suffering - lost in angry, unforgiving, lonely thoughts seeking to be “recognized and appreciated”.
And that inspired guilt (because I adore my dad) and shame (for all the times I disappointed him). Something deep inside wanted to simultaneously feel the power of crushing those uncomfortable feelings away like some boulder eater, using the strength of my jaw and the sound of my voice to get through the difficulty. But it left me unable to inhale a new possibility between words and too distressed to be soothed by the sound of the pain it caused. All I could “do” was surrender. That’s when a voice inside asked,
Who would you be without this angry, scared mob of thoughts?
And, so, I had to receive the “feeling” of the body of what I was carrying forward - lay down in the lap of a dead relationship reanimated through the spark of fear and hope - and rested in the “stillness” of my Heart.
I began to unpack the moments when I felt less than in the eyes of my mother, one by one without a word as if they were objects in a satchel discovered after a long journey. I pulled each one out with care and curiosity, and willingly inhaled its essence - breathed in the story and struggle, and swallowed the feeling as a witness to this sacrament. There was no judgment (chewing) or expectation (desire). I stepped “into” its halo and died “unto” myself, taking refuge and comfort in its unconditional love and acceptance. That’s when I noticed:
the less I judged anything about any thought or experience, the more emotions served this new relationship with myself!
and, the more I let this idea of what ‘should have’ been or ‘who’ I am or who ‘I was’ die, the less anxious I felt and the more I could face in the present.
I know you get this - it all feels so f**kn’ personal, which makes it harder to see that the habits that promote lasting change are also the ones that help heal underlying emotions. Emotions want to be free from an uncomfortable identity from the past, like being the “Black Sheep” or the “Good One”. Everything about us is seeking to be liberated from the past and when we resist this change, everything becomes work.
… and that pings us right back into guilt because taking care of our parents when we don’t do our emotional due diligence feels like work!
It's a vicious cycle. So we have to decide. You have to decide. The world is not going to change all on its own.