Meeting ourselves where we break ...

Day 303 / 365: Broken friend
Originally uploaded by blog.jmc.bz

After my prayers this morning, I was struck by the last line of the Prayer of St. Francis: "It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal life."

Letting those words settle in, they took me into my impersonal movement (IM) practice shortly afterwards, where I was equally struck by the lines in the manual of my teacher, J : "But to my eyes and heart this work holds a deep promise. It lets us be here. It lets us walk one foot after the other. It lets us live and it lets us die for Life's sake. It lets us look over the fence and stare at Infinity."

Last night into today is the Scorpio New Moon, whose emphasis is on letting what is dark in us die, so that we may transform.

We break. We shatter. We mend. We live again. Differently. More awake to our true selves and to reality. We become more whole than we were. We can hold and expand and stretch beyond what we were capable of before. We can be in the stream of life rather than against it. We resist less and allow more. These are the promises of healing, of recovery, of simply being willing to be in life as it is.

Last week, my client who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer died quite suddenly and much earlier than expected. And yet, as the line goes in a poem my healer adapted, "the day and month of her death... for her, just right." As I take in more of the reality of her death, I can feel, rather vividly, a myriad of things - particularly as a by-product of my IM practice. There is an undercurrent of grief that ebbs and flows in me. It sometimes feels like a huge wave that will knock me over-- like a barrage of tears and, at other times, it feels like a gentle tug that pulls me backwards ever so slightly and reminds me that is here. I have felt these changing tides for the past 5 days. And I am aware that the grief is both personal and impersonal. It is the missing of my client and the healing in our relationship AND it is the more panoramic void of all those who passed before me and the understanding that I too will die someday.
I understand a statement my healer made in a talk 2 years ago even more clearly now: "The future self is sad." I feel myself taking a peek or two over "the fence" that my teacher J speaks of to look at "Infinity".

And while I know that sadness is here, it is not consuming nor will it annhilate me as I once believed it could -- from a place of fear, specifically fear of the unknown. There is a calm that is here too that I've not known before and I'm not going to question it.

I am beginning to understand in all of this work that there are little deaths throughout our lifetime as well as significant, impactful ones and the greatest of all being our own departure. Not picking up a drink, one day at a time, is a series of little deaths. And, there was a grieving process that accompanied not having my "old friend" to rely and depend upon any longer, to soothe me, to get me out of my head or to relieve my anxiety. And, with the passage of time, I found new life. This is true with any habit or pattern or behavior change I make. Every relationship that comes to an end or that shifts direction experiences a death of some sort. I used to try to control and impose my will on anything that I sensed would enter a place of unknown, so that I could make it "known". I have resisted deaths of every size and shape for most of my life.

There is something so alive for me today in the desire to meet myself where I break and where I am broken. I'm learning that this can be a beautiful, tender experience when I open my heart to it. These past few days of watching and feeling and moving about in the changing forms of my grief have brought me in closer relationship with myself and that, in turn, has allowed me to be more here with others. The part of me that used to be terrified of dying is also dying. The closer I am in my relationship with death, the more intimate I am with life.