You brought love my way...
It feels urgent that I tell you something today. When I was deep into treatment for ptsd, I sought many forms of help. At my therapist’s suggestion, I started studying meditation at Spirit Rock, a mindfulness retreat center in Marin, California. It was there that I began trying to sit with suffering. On my first retreat, I learned that a beneficial, physiological change occurs in our bodies when we place one hand on our cheek or heart and say out loud, “I care about your suffering.”
Learning the practice of offering kindness and compassion to myself began the melting of an ancient iceberg within me. A place where I was frozen. I don’t know if this part of me was frozen in fright, or pain, or shame. Maybe it was a combination of all three. I do know that I felt frozen behind a wall where I did not feel worthy enough to receive love from others.
I could give love to others. In fact, I over-gave, often forgetting where I stood in the relationship.
Receiving love for me, how to do this, to be able to soak it in, feel it, believe it, allow it, has been a journey of over 10,000 miles. Or more. I don’t know how to explain why except to say that I believe when we experience or witness horrific abuse, especially when we are young, some beautiful, innocent part of me got walled in, closed in and tied to the cruelty.
This is how I found myself driving on the winding roads of west Marin to Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
I was lying on a blanket they had supplied in a room full of strangers.
I tried to follow the teacher’s instructions.
Eyes closed, hand on my heart, breathing into the pain, I said slowly, again and again, “I care about your suffering.”
Tears began to flow down my face. I tried to keep breathing. I could hear other people’s quiet crying.
My ears filled with tears. If I could hear the song in the tears, what would I hear?
What would I hear?
Love. I think. I would hear love for a child who internalized so much that wasn’t hers. Carried so much, too much. And in the tears, I hear relief. Relief that someone finally came and extended a gesture of kindness.
“I care about your suffering.”
“I care.”
I am a mother of three and I know how to hold a child who is hurting. How do I hold myself the same way, with the same warmth and love?
“I’m here. I care.”
One meditation teacher described watching a block of ice while the temperature rises slowly, up, up, up, towards 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And nothing happens. And then, finally, at 32 degrees, the ice melts.
This is what learning how to offer kindness to myself felt like.
Over the years, I sat with pain and learned to breathe and offer compassion and love to my self. I felt comforted and seen in ways that I never was. I learned to offer myself what I was never offered as a child. I learned to hold sacred space for my tears.
And each tear was movement.
In the places where I felt too alone with myself, I invited in the love of our Creator and learned how to sit with pain and not feel alone.
Again, I heard, “I care about your suffering,” and the voice was not my own. It was the voice of an Eternal Love, the One Who Cares the Most, a Mother Love that is profound, a Sanctuary of Kindness.
I learned not to run from pain. I learned how to hold it, be with it, feel it, breathe into it adding a gentleness. Pain is an ingredient in the soup of life and we can add to it acceptance, compassion, presence and an awareness of a Divine Love that is in the soup, holding the soup, before the soup and after the soup.
Somewhere on this journey, the wall that kept me from myself, from those who love me dearest, from beauty, from living joyfully, fully, the wall around my heart melted.
The wall that kept me from receiving love came down.
Thank God.
Receiving kindness and compassion, again and again, has, thankfully, freed my heart to be able to receive love from others.
For this, I am truly thankful.
May Peace be with you.
Kathleen
To hear MissyAnn’s song of gratitude, hope and love, please click here.
To hear MissyAnn singing “No Words Can Say” on Youtube, click here.