Here and Now. I notice the desire for the familiar. I make toast and enjoy the smell. Old songs too. What is this heart ache?! Loss of some kind.
And reunion. ‘I’m here for you, you’re loved, I see you, I feel you, you’re safe’…I say to a part inside that feels afraid and lonely, I speak kindly as if to a little child. Saying it with a hand on the chest now. I breathe deeply. It’s a beautiful experience. Love, acceptance and ‘good enough’ not rejection, not seeking, not self improvement…a turning towards just as it all is. Healing the breach caused by doubt.
I keep wandering off into thought, then coming back to the present, over and over. The present is full of sensation and aliveness, the real felt experience.
Yesterday I go to walk a feeling of disorientation off in the woods in the afternoon after seeing 2 therapy clients. Feeling a blockage, some resistance perhaps. Nature and some steady gentle motion along the river, under a big umbrella and aided by some Eckhart Tolle coming into my ears softly. Much lingering around, a sit here and a lean on an old fence there…and a little water playing, unblocking the clay outlet into the old curling rink.
I hang out with the cows, absorbing their grounded acceptance of everything as it is, and enjoy the bold curiosity of the young ones. Soft rain is like a caress. Beautiful smells, very still.
Then I’m sitting on the tree over the river and turn around and a large one has arrived beside us from behind unexpectedly. I’m cool, the dog is cool, the cow too, all relaxed and easy.
Had a soup lunch outside. Dog ice cream for Elsa and real ice cream for me. Fed the birds. Threw a square of butter for a crow I’m getting to know, it landed in some fine gravel and got covered in grit. It takes the butter to a puddle and cleans it before eating it. I throw another and it did it again.
The feeling of emptiness seems to have dissolved after turning towards it with love and acceptance and with all the help. ‘Hello there voidy emptiness, how’s it going there, it’s okay you can stay.’
I arrived at a place of peace, with no resistance to exactly how life is being experienced in this moment. So I’m feeling disorientated, that’s okay. I’m noticing resistance to all this present moment intimacy, the desire for distraction. I sense the part that wants to escape, wants action, company, drama, anything but this quietness. Is devastated by this stripped away so simple place, there’s nothing for the mind to think here.
“Deep sorrow comes with realizing that everything we previously took to be lasting and real is actually just about to disappear—and it never even existed in the first place. Such sadness and disillusionment have a wonderful effect. Sorrow makes us let go.”
— Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche
Learning to Rest with it All 