September 24, 2013

365...Part II

365 days. All I can think about is my father's death. He died just more than a year ago. And what a year it has been. I'm not missing him any more than I normally do nor I am I feeling overly sentimental. But something has been quite wrong. I've felt tightly wound, desperately running away from an overall feeling of....'yuck.' A feeling so odd, so foreign and disturbing I type and delete the words I long to use to describe it. All I can say is yuck. Discomfort. Death is yucky. It's final. It's disturbing. My father appeared uncomfortable during his last days. His body labored. It was horrible to witness. That's where my mind keeps leading me...

A year ago, after my Dad passed away, I was able to grieve and miss him and smile for him and cry for him. I wrote a eulogy that poured from my heart to the paper. I shared my love, my funny and my memories of my father with the wonderful, generous and loving friends and family that came to his funeral. I was in a spiritual place that kept me calm, grateful and present. This allowed me a quiet, cleansing, authentic grieving period. I felt the loss deeply, it sluiced through me and I felt closer to my dad during those first months after his death than I had previously during  his illness when he was alive.  I felt as if I could feel him with me, see him clearly smiling and laughing and driving me crazy with his obnoxious antics. I breathed him in.

365 days later. I have grown distant from authenticity, from presence, from calm. I lost my balance. My life rolled out of control collecting stress after stress. My husband's business had set backs, which caused our family some setbacks. My mother moved in with us and not long after her move in, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. My zen like spirituality wasn't strong enough to hold up to the new shit storm brewing around me. As I wrote this post, a few edits from publishing it, I stumbled upon this quote:



"There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself...The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings."   ~ Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building

Oh the inner work! The reading! The thought process! The discussions! The meditations! I did it all. Love it all. I do it daily.  When I was in a better place, I prayed every day, exercised every day, read every day, meditated every day and focused on ways to improve my relationships around me. My daily goal was to live in a state of gratitude and wonder, even on the most challenging of days.  Most days I achieved my goal, some days I did not.

365 days later. I'm looking back. I slowly stopped my consistency. Once again, some days were better than others, but many days were not. I stopped my meditation many days. Stopped my daily rituals, stopped living intentionally. And it was UNINTENTIONAL to stop my intentional living.  It's so easy to fall into old patterns when life's circumstances take you down. I focused on making lunches, answering  phone calls, doing the very best I could every day, but forgetting my intention. Exercise happened, but not with 100% focus. Meditation happened, but the distractions were high. Everything started to tilt sideways. Little by little. The scale tipped in favor of my ego, my racing mind, my anxious place.
striving for the balance...

I started losing my way due to my surroundings.  I was tired. The degenerative disc in my neck flared up. I lost a lot of strength and flexibility. My anxious way of thinking decided to make a huge comeback and wouldn't you know my relationships got knocked around too. I got angry. I got frustrated. I got really fucking tired.

365 days later and all I can think of is my father's labored breathing, his suffering and the permanence of death. It just fucking sucks. Where has my peace gone?

I long for the moments last year when I was alive enough to see death as a another chapter, a continuation of our expansion to another realm. An opportunity for growth. An opportunity to realize that our loved ones are never ever gone. They are not gone. We just can't communicate with them via the same channels we are used to. We need quiet calm minds to hear them and to feel them. This is such a preferred way of being. I'm not saying we aren't sad that we can't feel their human touch or hear their distinctive voice. Of course we are sad, but when we are clear, when we are living presently and authentically, we can feel them. We accept and live on and live well.

I think it is the awareness of the yuck, the finality and measure of time that has brought me back to myself. 365 days to reflect, to see, to feel, to notice. I handled some days with grace. I lived some days with mindfulness. Had I not been on a great path 365 days ago, I would have been much more graceless, much more...mindless. And there's the gratitude. I can't and won't beat myself up for the days that flew by when I ignored my self and got brain-cluttered.  I won't linger in the yuck any longer. I'm working through it one moment at a time. It's interesting how the yuck builds up in your heart, like plaque on your teeth. If you don't floss, if you forget to brush after a late night out or just swipe that toothbrush instead of properly cleaning those pearly whites - that 365 day check up is gonna be painful. A little bleeding, a little dental scolding, a promise to do better next check up.

I promise to strive for the balance. I'm spending intentional time doing what I know propels me forward. Intention. Balance. Presence. Awareness. Despite the yuck. Because of it.

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