Category Archives: Motherhood

March 28, 2013

What next…?

By Alice

Bertie (a whopping 6 years old) is… well… I guess boisterous is the best word to describe him. A little like Bagpuss (do you remember that kids’ programme?), when Bertie’s awake, the rest of the house is awake. He wakes up hollering, goes to bed hollering and does a fair bit of hollering in between. There’s no volume switch, no brakes. Bertie hurtles, headlong, through life, stopping only when he meets resistance, and even then only if he has to. And his demeanour is almost invariably one of noisy cheerfulness.

But just of late, as so often happens at around this age, he’s pondering the bigger questions. I guess Easter throws this up a little for children – they’ve been talking about it at school – death and resurrection. And it got me thinking about how confusing, and a bit scary, these big questions can be for our smallfolk.

“Can you ask god to give you a new body, when you die, so I can see you again?”

You see, one of his favourite bedtime stories just now is “The Mountains of Tibet” which is a rather surprising choice for one so apparently oblivious to the deeper potentials of his surroundings. “Gumboot’s Chocolatey Day” is far more up his street, you’d think. But the Mountains has obviously struck a chord somewhere. Resurrection at school, reincarnation at home… It’s beautifully written and illustrated, and provokes rumination on all sorts of levels… for an adult at any rate, I’d thought.

After all, his previous command had been far more in keeping with one his age:

“Be a boy. Then you won’t have to lay babies.” ;)

I’m not afraid of death. I don’t want to die, you understand. But I’m not afraid of it. For myself. (My feelings around pain are much more ambiguous…) I have young children, so naturally I have concerns about their well-being were their mummy not around to look out for them. And I see and feel compassion for their fears when they talk about it themselves. I want to tell them not to be afraid. That it’s just a transition. That it’s all part of the design. But I know they’re a little young for all that, and that they’ll have to work it out for themselves a bit…

“I don’t want you to die, Mummy” said my 8 year-old at breakfast this morning. One introduces a theme, another runs with it…

“I don’t want to die either, darling.” I tried to explain that these days people tend to live a good long time, although we can’t rule out accidents or illness. We can’t know when we’re going to shuffle off. And I tried to tell him that if I did, I hoped he would be thankful for the time we had together, and would show me what a good job I’d done being his mummy by living as full and happy a life as he could. At that he nodded, and smiled again for the first time since the conversation had begun.

But by now I was worrying. I had this terrible vision of a young man slogging his guts out trying to be happy, to prove to his dead mother that he could be, that she had been a ‘good mummy’! :)

It’s a minefield, death, life, happiness, spirituality, purpose… And it’s a sticky wicket when it comes to sharing it, too. I don’t subscribe to the theory that I have the right to tell my children what to believe. I can tell them what I believe, but to my mind they have no obligation at all to feel the same way. What they do believe, they will work out in their own good time. When they are ready and the time is right. They will, most likely, embrace, reject, struggle, and make peace with all kinds of channels of thought.

And that, as it is for the rest of us, is simply their journey.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Buddhism, Love, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Right Motherhood, Rites of Passage

October 26, 2012

Self-Protection and Healthy Boundaries

By Alice
I apologise for the radio silence on the meditation challenge. Life events have overtaken the priority to document. But it is ongoing and mostly very successful ;)

I have just had another very powerful lesson. Or wake-up call, if you will.

It always amazes (and, after the event, sometimes a long time after the event, amuses) me, the way the universe throws at you precisely the lesson you need.

The lesson today is healthy boundaries.

I have endured yet another  round of bullying by email. This one has been sustained for three days so far. Now, if this were someone with whom I had a mere passing acquaintance, I would not have allowed it to drag out for as long as it has or to affect me as emotionally as it has. I would simply have walked away. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, on any subject, including me. However, I do not have to endure those opinions being foisted upon me. As I have said before, and more than once, if the person next to you keeps punching you in the face… walk away! (Of course, there will then be plenty of conjecture and judgement about your motivations for walking away, but this, again, is opinion. It need affect you no more than the original attempt at  abuse).

Okay, that’s clear, then? Receive abuse – walk away.

Simple.

But what if the abuser is someone you love? Someone who for a long time was close to you, whose opinion you used to hold in high regard, whose love for you was an important part of your own life? This is where the real test lies. And this is not a coincidence either. In the same way that it is very easy to be a person of integrity if you never move from your armchair, it is easy to walk away from someone who holds no personal importance to you. An abusive acquaintance is easy to shake off. An abusive loved one can have you hanging on far longer than you should, allowing yourself to be subjected to far more than you should – it feels too much like giving up, and anyway, shouldn’t love conquer all? – with the ultimate danger of being emotionally, spiritually and physically exhausted and damaged. Your spirit requires protection, and your human being clings to an unreality. The human part of you finds it enormously difficult to detach from the dream. Because hoping that systematic abuse will change with words is pie-in-the-sky. An inability to accept reality can only bring suffering. We all know it deep down.

(And on top of that, as an important aside, where dehumanisation occurs, there can be no hope.)

There are several lessons I have been gifted over the past few years, and when I use the word gifted, I mean it sincerely. The process of learning has been inordinately difficult, and painful, but the lesson itself has set me free. Every time.

These are they (and regular readers of this blog will already be familiar with them):

1. What you think of me is none of my business.

Opinion.

It means nothing.

Nothing at all.

Whether the opinion is good or bad. After all, isn’t it a little ridiculous to attach importance to bad opinion and disbelieve good opinion? Or vice versa? It is not important what others think of you. What is important is what you know of yourself. If that is firmly rooted in truth and reality, then all other opinion is utterly irrelevant.

2. Nobody can protect you but yourself.

Your boundaries are important. They must be strong enough to keep the negativity out, but porous enough to let the love in. It is important to examine them carefully:

Are your boundaries so weak that you will let anyone who chooses walk all over you? Then you need to redraw them. And self-love is the only way. If you love and respect yourself enough, you will disallow the abuse. A useful exercise here is to ask yourself how you would feel if someone were behaving this way towards a child, perhaps your own child. You would not allow it to happen, would you? So why would you let it happen to you? You – your precious spirit, your gentle inner core – are just as in need of looking after as anyone else. Don’t just say it, believe it. Feel it.

Are your boundaries so strong that you will not let anyone or anything in? You do not let negativity into your life, but you do not let love in either? Then you need to tackle your fear. Why are you afraid to let anyone in? Only you can answer that, but until you do, you will continue to feel lonely, afraid and joyless.  It is not easy. It takes faith. And the first requirement is faith in yourself and your ability to protect yourself if the walls are more permeable.

Healthy boundaries can help end unhappiness and suffering.

Sometimes, asserting a healthy boundary can be terribly simple. It can take a conversation, during which you (calmly and without evaluation) explain that you are uncomfortable with a situation or behaviour. It is not acceptable to you. With luck, you will be heard, the relationship adjusted and the healthier for it.

“I don’t like it that you keep punching me in the face.”
“Oh god! Sorry! I didn’t think. I’ll stop.”

Everybody happy.

But sometimes, it isn’t that simple. You can put the puppy back on the mat a thousand times, but to no avail. This kind of exchange usually ends something like this:

“I don’t like it that you keep punching me in the face.”
*punch*
“But I’m doing it because I love you.”
*punch*

I have quoted Wayne Dyer before, and he is by no means the only person to have voiced this belief, to which I adhere strongly and with personal experience to support it. If you cannot say no *within* a relationship, you may have to say no *to* the relationship. It is not failure. It is putting yourself before the abuse. Put like that, it’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

Sometimes, with deep regret and sadness, the only option is to walk away.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Integrity, Love, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood, Wayne Dyer

October 11, 2012

Day 15… Creativity to soothe the savage…?

By Alice

Number two son: “I’m just… I dunno… I’m not happy… but I’m not unhappy…”

I got it.

Restless soul syndrome.

He was looking for an outlet.

I was sitting on the sofa knitting (a rather alarmingly frequent sight at the moment, much to the dismay of the hoover, casting me doleful glances from the corner of the room) and it occurred to me.

“Do you want to try knitting?”

I had tried to teach him a couple of years ago, but he was still a bit young, impatient and frustrated. Now, though, he’s 10, and I remember my lovely grandma teaching me at just his age. She took me to the wool shop in her town, helped me pick out a fluffy blue yarn and a pattern, and I started knitting a jumper. She extracted a faithful promise from me that I would finish it. Thirty years later with not a stitch knitted in three decades, I found a plastic bag with the needles, balls of wool and half a jumper in it. I’m sure grandma would forgive me, especially since I turned that half a jumper into a pixie hat with integrated scarf for a *very* grateful 8-year old. It wasn’t wasted…

“I’ve got a new routine,” he said to me before he went to bed tonight. “I get home from school, walk the dog, and get knitting.” He’s making himself a scarf, and he’s already on the 7th row! ;)

Focus, concentration, creativity, channeling the energy into something positive…

In the meantime, I heard this today:

“Only to the extent that a person exposes themselves again and again to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lies dignity and the spirit of true awakening.”
~ Karlfried von Durckheim

Aka the long, dark night of the soul?

Food for the next meditation, methinks.

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Meditation, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility

October 10, 2012

Day 14: Fear

By Alice

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
― Marie Curie

It would appear that no sooner has one insight come and punched you in the nose than another, while your hands are cupped around your face, swipes you around the back of the head… I speak, mostly, with my tongue in my cheek.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been pretty anxious for as long as I can remember. Anxiety takes so many forms, there are so many things we are afraid of in our daily lives, but today it was put to me that it is pretty much the biggest obstacle to peace and happiness (along with forgiveness, of course, as previously discussed).

What are you afraid of?

Disapproval?
Rejection?
Running out of money?
Ill health?
Death?
Hidden costs?
Your children’s safety?
Being hurt?
The unknown?

Every day, every minute of every day, there lurks potential fear. What if you did run out of money? What if you do meet disapproval? I mean, really, what if? Won’t you just find a way through it? Clearly some fears are of things far more beyond our control than others, and we have to face them anyway. But so much is just a ‘what if’?

Jack Kornfield (yes, I’m still with him, though I’m onto his “Your Buddha Nature” talks just now) made this following very good point. I sat stunned. Literally. Well… you know.. no one actually hit me over the head, but they might just as well have done.

You’re walking in the woods and you’re afraid of being chased by a bear (the fear is not of walking in the woods, so your fear is not realised now)
You’re being chased by a bear and you’re afraid it’ll catch you (the fear is not of being chased, but of being caught, so your fear is not realised now)
The bear has caught you and you’re afraid of being mauled (the fear is not of being caught, but of being mauled, so your fear is not realised now)…

… you see the point? The fear is never in the moment, it is always based on a potential future reality…

But more than that – the things we fear sometimes do come to pass (though they often don’t), and we fear them until they happen, until they are the now, at which point we survive them, and somewhere the other side of them, we’re fine. It’s still now. And, ironically, we have found something new to fear.

So, as radical as it may seem, what about giving up fear?

I’ve lived through some experiences I would never have imagined possible. But it’s now. Right now, and here I sit writing this with nothing to fear. I know I could give you a long list of things I could fear, but what’s the point? If now is all we have, if the future is a total unknown, why waste now fearing then?

What if we just made the most of now?

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
― Nelson Mandela

Or, I suppose, feel the fear and do it anyway?

On a lighter note, knitting has been keeping me sane. I believe it was Reverend Kusala who first switched me on  to the idea that even doing the washing up could be meditative. Well… knitting really is. :)

Winter is in the air over here, and I’ve put a few handmade snugglies in my shop. Pop over and have a look if you feel like it.

With knitting therapy in full flow, there’s bound to be more!

 

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Jack Kornfield, Meditation, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility, Products, Reverend Kusala, Right Motherhood

October 9, 2012

Day 13: Eurgh…!

By Alice

The less said about yesterday, the better.

Total collapse in consciousness. :(

I think, perhaps, a highly stressful few months (or years) took their toll and it all just got a bit too much. It was a day of meltdown.

But in everything there lurks a lesson.

And I found several in yesterday’s trials. First, I’m human. I fall. I get up. I try again. Trying to follow this path doesn’t make you superhuman. Doesn’t mean you are perfect. Far from it. It is the acceptance of your imperfection that makes it possible at all. If you can forgive other people, you have to be able to forgive yourself, too, eh? :)

Secondly, the meditation has had profound effects. Even in the pits of it all, I knew it was what I wanted to do. I knew it was a surefire way out of the depths; a means to re-balancing, to finding equilibrium once more. My day no longer feels quite right if I haven’t done it.

And finally, for now, the very happy conclusion I have reached that if you keep on this road, even your meltdowns are less dramatic, far-reaching and enduring than they once might have been.

That’s got to be a good thing, eh?

Tomorrow, when yesterday is still further behind me, I might just tell you about knitting meditation ;)

2 comments | posted in Integrity, Meditation, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood, Victim Consciousness

October 7, 2012

Day 12: Shoulder-Shaking

By Alice

Forgiveness seems to be the order of the day.

I can’t escape it.

Everywhere I turn, everything I listen to, every book I pick up, every unbidden thought: all keep coming back to the same thing…

It’s Sunday. I have five boys enjoying a day of rest, of watching movies, eating home-cooked food, playing with their toys, and together, and on their computers. It’s a chilling-at-home kind of day.

So it’s not very quiet either.

And I resorted to listening to Jack again.

Guess what?

Yup.

Forgiveness meditation.

Two prisoners of war, talking.

Prisoner 1: “Have you forgiven your captors yet?”
Prisoner 2: “No! Never!”
Prisoner 1: “Then they still have you in prison, don’t they?”

This is what I was trying to get at the other day. This is the problem with the idea of forgiveness.

Do you suppose that either of those prisoners will be seeking out their captors? Will they be looking to find them, to tell them they forgive them, to try to be ‘friends’? I mean, I am aware that Nelson Mandela did, but… he’s kind of an exceptional case, isn’t he?

This is it! This is where I have, in the past, so very often come unstuck. If I have been hurt by somebody, baffled by their actions, and I want to move on… the first port of call is: “I must forgive them”. Because forgiveness means letting go of the pain, the anger, the resentment, the hurt, that keep you tied to the past. But what has always kept me teetering on the brink of this idea, of achieving this forgiveness, is the assumption that forgiveness means allowing those people back into my life in some way.

But today I learned something different.

As Mr Kornfield says:

Forgiveness does not in any way justify or condone harmful actions…
Forgiveness does not mean you have to seek out or speak to those who’ve caused you harm. You may choose never to see them again…
You can do whatever is necessary to prevent further harm.

And suddenly, the whole idea of forgiveness becomes a release, doesn’t it? I can let go of the hurt, the resentment, the grief. I can move forward. But, crucially, I can learn from it, too. I can choose not to put myself back in the firing line. I can remove myself from the situation without anger or judgement. I can replace those negative feelings with a universal love for my fellow human beings. And I can move on.

Hatred, he says, never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.

Put simply, and as implausible as it may at first appear, I can love my aggressors from a safe distance. Because when the realisation is fully absorbed that we all make mistakes, that we are all flawed human beings, that we all hurt, that we can learn from both the hurting and the being hurt, that from all these experiences we can grow… where is there room for hatred? How are we different? Simply through our choices. Through how we choose to act or react. Whether we choose to remain locked into the negative and growth-inhibiting cycle of blame, recrimination, victimhood and hurt, or to face it head on, feel it in its awful, amazing, painful, essential entirety; learn…

… and grow.

;

3 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Integrity, Jack Kornfield, Love, Meditation, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood, Victim Consciousness

October 5, 2012

Day 10: Harvest Festival and Giving Thanks.

By Alice

After the usual flurry of preparing packed lunches, stuffing porridge into small people, making sure everyone had the appropriate equipment for the day’s school activities, and shooing them out of the door, today began ‘properly’ with Harvest Festival assembly at the primary school. My children are new at the school this term, and they have been welcomed with open arms. But I think that what impressed me most this morning was that everyone, every single one, of the school’s pupils was involved. Every single one had a part to play. (I confess that I shed a tear when they sang Edelweiss. In spite of the fact that the solos were, for the most part, painfully out of tune, it was sung with enthusiasm, gusto, and when they all sang the last verse together it was, actually, beautiful… *sniff*)

Still tired after the emotional wringer that was yesterday, I took it easy this morning. I found a book that I started about three years ago. I know this because I found a ‘to-do’ list in it as a marker, referring to rooms I no longer have :) and I took a leisurely bath and started it again.

It talks of the inner voice. Or the inner monologue. Or, actually, the inner dialogue. “I like those shoes. No, I don’t. I don’t? No. They’re too clunky. They are? But they’re so pretty. Yes, but I’ll never walk in them…”

I exhaled heavily.

I have an inner dialogue all the time. For the past week, I have been holding conversations in the early hours of the morning with people from all walks of my life. But they were all me, of course. I also, just as an aside, have an inner juke box. It’s most peculiar. I’ll find that I’ve been thinking about something – say, for example, I’ve received an email following a tired old pattern, trying to draw me into a tired old power-play – and I’ll become aware that it has all been happening to the soundtrack of “There she goes again” by the La’s… just for example. It is constant. And, frankly, maddening.

This book suggests that stepping back from that inner voice and recognising its patterns and, crucially, that it is not you since, after all, you are the one hearing and witnessing it, so how can it be? is the only way to learn to tame it.

Before I go any further, the book I am referring to (and I haven’t finished it yet, so don’t spoil the end for me ;) ) is The Untethered Soul by Michael A Singer.

There was one line that knocked my socks off, though. One line that contained so much in so few words… It was this:

True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.

There is so much beneath the apparent simplicity of that sentence… The layers and layers of ‘protection’ we build up over ourselves in order not to have to face reality. But in not facing reality, we cannot grow. So whilst unconsciously what we are doing is in the name of self-preservation, it is in fact self-sabotage. It can only keep us locked in those same tired old patterns that end up baffling and frustrating us. Why is this situation not improving? Because rather than face the pain and allow it to teach us, we try to kill it, to smother it, to cover it over with something else, other and out there.

I have a lot more thinking to do about this.

Before my children came home, I performed a simple breath meditation. Calming, soothing, in and out. Breathing in… Breathing out… Breathing in… Breathing out… Clearing my mind… Wandering mind… Bringing it back to the breathing in… Breathing out… You know? I don’t want to speak too soon, but in the face of past and gathering storms, I have an equilibrium just now that, without this meditation, simply wouldn’t make sense to me. I am grateful for it.

And it isn’t coming from out there.

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October 4, 2012

Day 9: In the Face of Adversity

By Alice

I had been dreading today.

At two this morning, my littlest woke up crying. I dragged myself from bed and gave him a bottle of water. He went straight back to sleep.

I didn’t.

I watched dawn breaking with increasing anxiety.

And most of today’s meditation took place before I got up. It is Sod’s Law that you don’t sleep the night before a big day, isn’t it? Last night was no exception.

I lay in bed focusing on the breath. And inviting sleep. And being given the slip.

So I decided to try my new meditation: lovingkindness. Sending it out into the world, hoping some of it found its mark.

Today was challenging to say the least, and I had to do something I really didn’t want to do. The kind of day that threatens equilibrium and demands enormous levels of self-control. And tired is not the best condition in which to face it.

And had I not begun this new regime, I suspect I would have been far less equipped to cope. I have used it all day. And if any of the experiences I have had so far on this challenge were to convince me of the power of meditation, today is the day.

I am converted.

And exhausted.

So, more tomorrow.

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October 3, 2012

Day 8: The Game of Life

By Alice

Following on from yesterday’s discussion on forgiveness, today (after tea and before bathtime) I delved a little deeper into lovingkindness meditation (with Jack Kornfield again).

There is a formula. It isn’t just a case of sitting there and feeling fuzzy ;) And as with so many great perspective-shifting practices, you start small and work your way up.

I remember a couple of years ago listening to Reverend Kusala talking about the Five Precepts – the Buddhist ‘Code of Ethics’, if you like – and he started, logically, with the first: I will not take life. He was speaking, I believe, at a university and he suggested to his students that they should start with the easy stuff.

“Today,” he said “Just today. Make the decision to try not to kill any lions, tigers or bears”…

Naturally, he got a laugh. But you get the point. Start with the easy stuff.

Well, the idea with lovingkindness is that you start with yourself. If you can’t love yourself, you will really struggle to love anyone else properly.

Okay, on second thoughts, maybe that’s not so ‘easy’. Loving yourself, for some of us, is no mean feat. But it is something we can all do. And why wouldn’t you? Why are you worse (or better, for that matter) than anyone else? Why should they deserve your love and not you? So… if that’s where you come unstuck, then that’s something to work on, isn’t it? Examine, honestly, why you struggle to love you. And work on accepting yourself. And then on loving yourself. Just as you are. Perfect and imperfect, all at once. A fabulous paradox.

It could take time. It could take moments. But it won’t happen at all if you don’t try.

In your sitting position, you repeat these phrases:

“May I be filled with lovingkindness
May I be well in body, and in mind
May I be safe from inner and outer dangers
May I be truly happy. And free.”

All great (and achievable) aspirations. And while you are repeating these mantras, focus on the heart. Picture, and feel, it opening. Letting you in. Looking after and loving you.

Then, you move on to the people you love. People who are positive and happy influences in your everyday life. And, with them in your mind, you begin your mantra again:

“May you be filled with lovingkindness
May you be well in body, and in mind
May you be safe from inner and outer dangers
May you be truly happy. And free.”

The circle of influence moves ever wider as you then encompass all those around you, to include them in your lovingkindness. And the words, of course, can be adapted to sit more comfortably with you. As long as they are loving!

But then… Oh, then! Then… you hit the tricky stuff. Which is where Day 7 comes in. Then, you extend your lovingkindness to your ‘enemies’. And, I guess, the trick is to keep your heart open when you think of them, to keep it open as you repeat your mantra, to keep it open without allowing it to close up in self-protection, as it is instinctively inclined to do… And if you have truly forgiven, it isn’t so difficult. And if you haven’t, then forgiveness meditation is next :)

Forgiveness is letting go, after all, isn’t it? Don’t let the hurt snag you any longer. Don’t let the anger hold you back. Look forward, because that is the direction you are headed.

Bertie made me laugh today. He put into innocent five-year old words what, at forty-one, I struggle to articulate adequately.

“It’s like a game, isn’t it mum?
I control my arms and my legs and my mouth.
I point the way I’m going.
But I can’t see my face!”

This body is borrowed for the duration of the game.

And at the end of this level, points accrued or lost, you’ll get a new one.

As Bertie would say: How cool is that?!

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Buddhism, Integrity, Jack Kornfield, Love, Meditation, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility, Reverend Kusala, Right Motherhood, The First Precept, The Five Precepts, Wayne Dyer

October 2, 2012

Day 7: Forgiveness and Personal Responsbility

By Alice

Periodically, I come back to forgiveness. And each time I do, and prod it a little, gingerly, just at the edges at first, to see if it’s still tender, the quality is subtly different.

With time, growth, life, love, trust, things change…

We all have a story.

We all have someone to forgive.

But why do we find it so damned *hard*?

I have a suspicion that it all comes down to victim consciousness again. Whilst, I think we can all agree that we want to forgive and move on with our lives, that harbouring resentment is at best unhelpful, something keeps us there, locked into the battle, holding onto that resentment which stops us really forgiving…

We don’t want to let them off the hook

It becomes easy to say “I’m over it. I’ve moved on.” But have we really moved on if it still resurfaces when we think or talk about the object of our potential forgiveness? If thinking about them brings difficult feelings surging to the surface, there is still work to do.

Allow me to share a little of my own experience. After all, I feel I’ve rather run the gauntlet of the victim consciousness – anger and resentment – impotence – acceptance – compassion – forgiveness spectrum over the last half decade (almost)… Well, actually, if I am to be brutally honest, I think I’ve probably been a victim my entire life, until quite recently. I very clearly remember telling ‘my story’ to an older ‘mature’ student friend at university. A lot. And feeling very sorry for myself. And that was half my lifetime ago… She was a kind listener, sympathetic, and I was grateful, but looking back now I cringe rather. I wonder, a little, if it might not have been better for me to tell me to start looking forward, to stop dwelling on the past, to focus on what I do have in my life and release the fantasy experience I felt I should have had… But maybe that, too, is ungenerous. If everything happens when it is supposed to…

As I said, we all have a story. And those stories evolve and transmute over time. Mine involves pretty much every member of my immediate family, and I think that forgiveness is especially difficult if you feel ‘wronged’ by people you feel ‘are supposed’ to love you. (It is perhaps the subject for another day, the belief in the story… Why are they supposed to love you? Why was it wrong? And with deep examination of even these questions, presumptions about our entire lives, our whole worldview, it all begins to unravel). Over the last years I have really struggled with the concept of forgiveness. I had always understood (without giving it much examination) that if you follow a spiritual path, then surely forgiveness shouldn’t be difficult? Well… that was what I thought. But I don’t any more. I don’t think it is something you can just do. I don’t think it comes until you are ready. Until you have processed your life experience, until you have raged, grieved and let it go. In other words, I think that forgiveness is a kind of organic by-product of working through victim consciousness. When you stop blaming everyone else for the way you feel…

…Hang on. Let me stop there and examine that. What I didn‘t say was
“When you stop blaming everyone else for what they have done“, but
“When you stop blaming everyone else for the way you feel“…

Because these two things, I suspect, tend to meld in our minds into one. But they are so distinct. You cannot control what other people do. They may set out to hurt you on purpose, or simply hurt you incidentally. How it is done is secondary. What is important is your hurt. Because only you can control that part. You can choose to let it hurt you, or you can choose not to. It is fine to be flummoxed by someone else’s behaviour, words or actions. Every day, in this world, I witness things, the motivation for which I simply cannot fathom. Being confused or baffled by other people is almost an inevitable part of life. Taking their actions personally is the part that we can control.

The simple truth is that deliberately setting out to hurt someone else can only really hurt you. The buck stops with you. Your behaviour is under your control and no one else’s. So blaming your actions on extraneous circumstances simply doesn’t wash, does it? And if you hurt someone else because you acted without thinking, or insensitively, the buck still stops with you.

But we are talking about both sides of the coin here, aren’t we? Hurting and being hurt. If you act out of genuine compassion and love, without judgment, with integrity, mindfully, it would be enormously difficult to hurt someone (I’d like to say impossible…) And if you believe that everyone is following their own path, that everyone has their own lessons to learn, and that those lessons necessarily take them on routes that give them choices; that you might not like those choices (which are choices that they make for their own lessons, after all), but you don’t take their choices personally, then you can’t be hurt either… Does that make sense?

I tested my theory today, during my meditation. I prodded that hurt part of me very gently to see if it still hurt. I summoned into my mind the person with whom I have the longest history of hurt, whose victim I have allowed myself to be for the greatest time, and I found love. Not affection or fondness, I should add. I think that may be a bridge too far. Too personal. More a universal love for a fellow flawed human being. But more pertinently to this point today, not hurt or anger. Nothing difficult or edgy.

Nothing.

I have let it go.

And if I, a victim for almost four decades, a mummy, a daughter, a partner, an ex-wife, a sister, a friend, can do it…

What are you waiting for?

Start now.

It’s time to live. :)

2 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Acceptance, Buddhism, Integrity, Lynne Forrest, Meditation, Mindfulness, Motherhood, Personal Responsibility, Right Motherhood, Victim Consciousness

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