forgiving myself

Posted on September 5, 2017 by Sarla Nichols

Lying in bed last night, waiting for the blanket of sleep to wrap its comfort around me, I noticed an almost rigid tension engulfing my body. This was a feeling I did not want to carry forward into my future. With each new exhalation, I envisioned my rigid being melting, releasing all holding, surrendering and letting go of all fear. Even now, as I write, I can feel my shoulders drop, my arms lengthen and my heart lift. The next thing I remember is waking up this morning amazed that I was able to fall into the darkness.

In today’s meditation, I recognized a similar holding pattern, a pushing against the tragedy of reality, a desire to pretend that a perfect life is possible, that it just such a life only requires a gallant effort. In her interview with the poet and philosopher, John O’Donohue, Krista Tippett explored the meaning life, of love and beauty. John reflected on times he had sitting at the bedside of they dying and in particular with those who had lived staunch, unrelenting lives. John said that after two or three days he noticed these people literally softened and became visibly more radiant. When Krista asked how he would explain this phenomenon, John said the dying person realized the way he/she had been living could not serve them now – that holding on and pushing away from the darkness only served to separate them from the light.

Annie Dillard describes just such a realization: “In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

Today I set an intention to notice when I am holding tension, when I am pushing away from the harshness of reality. I choose to forgive myself and all others and most especially I forgive life for all its incongruences, its injustices, and its inherenttragedies. I surrender into the unified field of love, “the house of belonging” -David Whyte

Unknown

haunted

Posted on August 5, 2017 by Sarla Nichols

Convalescing – to recover one’s health and strength over a period of time after an illness or operation. this verb assumes there was health and strength prior to the illness or operation, but what it that were not the case. What if said patient had spent a lifetime undermining her body’s ability to be healthy, drinking, smoking, provoking depression by brooding on the past? What then? Would not convalescing then be the discovery of health an strength, the creation of a new life, one that does not deny prior difficulties but which instead uses them to bolster the desire to live more fully now.

If I am no longer haunted by the past can I now risk living in the unknown, in a life free of fear and resentment, while waiting for the new me to emerge? What will I do? How will I think now that I have stopped running away? Seems that every moment of my life, prior to the onset of the disease that has ruled these past 12 months, was pregnant with waiting and wanting…wanting a different life…waiting for the life I had been living to end, perhaps even in death. What now? Now that I want more than anything to live. What does this future hold? Que sera, sera?

At least we know there has been an end to one haunting. I am no longer nor will I ever again be pursued by my past. Now I must learn to release ghosts that hold me hostage to a disease I will never again have. I release my diagnosis, my doctors, my treatments, my diagnostic tests, the operations, the weeks of recovery, the time away from work, apart from the world, and the time spent in fear of dying. I now claim my life, going forward with an intention to live fully no matter what the risk, to live into not away from the new life I have been given.

unnamed .