"Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine. "
"Relationships carry the whole universe with them. They can be everything, nothing, here, then gone. One moment, loving someone makes you shine; the next it feels like matter and antimatter colliding. The glory of loving a person over many years is learning his or her individual phases - and blending together, watching who you both become." - Judith Orloff
I have been spending a lot of my time lately thinking about friendship, relationships, individual self, boundaries, and what happens when you stop sharing time and space with someone who was so important to you, someone who was part of you. How do you deal with that hole in your life? How do you reconcile who you are without this person? What happens when you get close? How do you maintain your self and space while surrendering yourself openly to another person? Why does this hurt? Why do we hurt each other in the process of learning to love, and how do we avoid this?
How do you put your joined life aside and walk in your own direction?
How do you unblend?
I started going to a therapist to help answer these questions, but I didn't like her. I left thinking "Why did I just pay that person $13 to talk about myself for an hour? I can do that with friends for free, and they have more invested in the discussion! They give interesting feedback." I think I just didn't connect well with her and am interested in finding someone else. I think I need some skills and an unbiased view point.
So instead of therapy, I am doing lots of yoga and listening* to Judith Orloff. Oh, she is great! Judith Orloff is an intuitive and a phsychiatrist. It doesn't get much better that that. I love her work because she is so grounded. She also has a very comforting way of speaking. She is warm, practical, and down to earth while talking about what could potentially be some really woo-woo stuff.
Judith talks about how everyone can access their intuition and that we can all use it to help guide us, make decisions, get over our personal shit, be our own leaders and doctors, and find our own path. Instead of looking to someone else for answers, she's into teaching people how to look inside themselves. How fabulous is that? She also talks about how we are all intuitive beings but are not taught how to deal with this while living in a linear world. She gives solutions. It's very interesting.
As far as the hole I mentioned above, I think some holes you can't ever fill. You have to learn to work around them. People are not replaceable. But how do you begin working around them, what does this look like? I think grief is an essential part of this.
I have been thinking a lot about this topic of grief. I bought the January edition of Sun Magazine, which coincidentally was all about grief. What great timing.
One of the articles talks about how in our society we don't give ourselves proper time to fully experience grief. When we do experience it, we are essentially told to buck up, push through it, and not feel it. But grief is a natural and essential part of the healing process, and to not experience is just pushing it away to fester. Being alive is feeling. Judith Orloff writes (about the death of her father):
"The portal stays open only so long, then the nature of grief changes. This was holy time. The waves of exhaustion I felt, my body coiling into itself, hibernating, my endless tears, were prerequisites for healing."
In dealing with grief recently, I sometimes feel like I need to be exorcised. This is not because the events related to the grief caused me great harm; this person was caring and loving to the best of their ability, as I was in return. It is a sadness at the absolute tragedy of the whole situation.
It comes in waves, this grief, sneaking up on me, and I feel like I need to just step aside and let it whoosh through me, to experience and release it. It has a mind of it's own, it's so interesting to watch.
What is love? I was cocky enough to think I kind of had it figured out. How silly is that? People spend lifetimes working on this stuff. I think love is too vast to be defined and contained within words. It's not something you can understand with words, it exists as an expansive, multifaceted feeling.
Even if love can't be defined, maybe I can just figure out how to disentangle myself from it's grip so I can move on.
My sister used to ask my mom if she still loved her. My mom would respond "Love is not like a light switch. You can just turn it of and on again." I don't want to turn the light off, but I wouldn't mind dimming the light so it's not so painful. Why is there pain in love? So we can have a more full experience of joy?
I was also comforted by this idea in the Judith Orloff book I am reading: "Love doesn't disappear, it multiplies." I love this idea that you take love you built in the past and carry it on with you, spreading it out so it is something larger than before that effects more people than just two, like the wind carrying seeds. This means you also carry all the people you've built it with within you. They are there, they are part of you.
I have been doing a bit of "Yin" yoga lately. With all this thinking and feeling going on, I don't seem to have the energy for much beyond a beginners class. Yin yoga is about relaxing, everything is done on the floor, you hold poses for five minutes, and there is a lot of hip opening, meditating, and stuff like that. They say you hold emotions in your hips. Yin yoga is about learning to surrender. It's about unearthing deep stuff in your body, smoothing and expanding the connective tissues.
I have been working on surrendering. It is not comfy stuff.
How do you say good bye? How do you reconcile longing for that missing piece? For now, my answer is to just let the longing be inside myself, even if it is howling loudly, and hold on (breathing very deeply, of course) through it.
*audio books are great.
