Start again….start again….Fuck me! How many times am I going to start my blog with that statement?
It’s the whole point of it isn’t it? Nothing is permanent, everything changes…constantly and always. When things are great you want to hold onto them…because it feels so great! But holding on turns to pain, and then all that pain seems to do is hang on! A vicious cycle of non-attachment, to attachment, to detachment (BUGGAR and BLAST!)….start again.
I’m trying, ever-so-hard, to stay present, and to allow myself to feel the rise and fall of all the emotions we go through when our hearts are broken. You seek reasoning and answers in every place – but where it matters.
I’ve traipsed destructively down the all too well-trodden path of “what is wrong with me?”; investigated, contemplated, hypothesised the cause, the reason….coming out empty-handed of course. You can’t find answers in any experience, other than your own.
So all of the things I projected onto him, I turn on myself. I set my alarm for 5.30 am. I make my way across the garden to the shed, where the morning light washes through the glass doors, and squirrels and cats patter across the roof. I light my incense, roll out my mat, wrap myself in a nice cosy blanket and sit very still. My Vipassana training has stayed with me, despite prolonged neglect, and it isn’t long before I can feel the subtle sensations of cool, and then warm air brushing against my upper lip. My mind wanders of course. Revisiting emotionally hostile scenes in a darkened room and I’m drawn to the burning sensation in my chest, before refocusing on the cool, then warm air on my upper lip. I observe the pace of my breath, and how it is quickened under stress. I’ll stay there a while. Breathing in, breathing out. Quieter and quieter…soon the sensation has reached a more subtle state, and it is then that I begin to scan my body. Part by part, I feel and I observe.
Every time I rededicate myself to my meditation, it is another part of my body that aches. In Thailand it was my hips, in Hereford it was my back, and here in the garden shed of Oxford, it is my chest. In Vipassana the why’s and the how’s disappear. They don’t matter. You just observe and feel and eventually the pain in that particular part of your body disappears, and with it the root of something that has had a destructive influence on your life….and relationships tend to be deeply destructive.
For me, these are early days, and without the intensity of a Vipassana retreat of noble silence and adherence to strict precepts, I imagine this particular ache will hang about for a while…and that’s ok. Some of the things I’ve learnt from this are that there are people out there who will love you just as you are, and that opening up and being vulnerable to the very end is what falling in love is all about. You have to take risks and you have to surrender if you are going to really connect with someone and share some of the most beautiful moments.
Yeah, this feeling changes, just like everything else. I’ll put my guard up again soon, or feel a wash of sadness and confusion…but every morning that I’ve woken I have felt a great sense of inner peace and warmth. It seems to me that through the chaos of ricocheted emotions and a disgruntled ego, lies an answer. And that’s something I’m willing to really work for.
