Braving – Dancing in the rain!

20170911_225011

The gift of our lives should be greater than pain and larger than fear, but when we are in the grip of grief, trauma, depression, heartache, loss or betrayal; fear can be immobilizing.

Pain can be a great teacher

Pain can be a great teacher if we are open to the lessons it brings, if we meet it with curiosity instead of alarm it will teach us and allow us to move through it with grace. One way or the other pain demands to be felt.

There is no promise of a pain free life, pain is inevitable, but if we resist, ignore or fear pain we initiate suffering. Suffering is not necessary.

I knew that the feeling of being enveloped in a dense dark fog was not going to lift overnight

I am not afraid of pain; I held the door wide open and welcomed it in. When my husband passed away in June, pain and plenty of it was more than expected. I knew there would be an abundance of tears and endless heartbreak and longing. I knew that in my pain that I would find strength I never knew I had and wisdom I never knew I needed. I knew that the feeling of being enveloped in a dense dark fog was not going to lift overnight.

The thing I didn’t count on was how much I would come to depend on the pain. It is my receipt of love after all and I would spend nights wrapped up in it like a blanket. In a previous post I talked about the luxury of hope and embracing and holding onto those moments, but as they started to emerge for me I caught myself chasing them away and holding onto my dark blanket of despair. I had found a new person in my grief and as much as I thought I longed to have the old Michelle back I found myself identifying with the new familiar one and holding space for her and keeping the light out. I found myself wondering who I was in the world without my husband and who would he be if I wasn’t here in this world holding vigil for him. The grief and the unimaginable pain was the proof that his life and his story mattered and I became afraid of letting any bit of it go. I lived in fear that if I softened to the pain and moved through it and allowed the light to shine on me that his memory would fade, the love we shared wouldn’t matter and his spirit that I felt so close to me, guiding me, would diminish bit by bit until it disappeared.

Or so I thought…

I told all our loved ones that we needed to honor him by being well and being happy, but somehow, even knowing what he would truly want, I was honoring him by holding tightly to my pain as that was the manifestation of the love we shared and the connection between my physical life with him and our lives now. Or so I thought…

So here I am with all of this love in my heart that I want to give him and I think I can’t so as a consolation I close off my heart and I sit in my misery somehow thinking I am honoring the person who meant the world to me, who wanted nothing more for me to feel happiness and love always. When I put it in black and white it seems incredibly strange that I would think that way. I certainly know better, I think we all do. We know that at the deepest level of our soul we are always safe, loved, grounded and connected. Fear may protect us temporarily but it is not a place to live.

Fear should not define us; everything we long for is on the other side of fear

Fear should not define us; everything we long for is on the other side of fear. I want desperately to continue to feel the love that my husband and I shared with each other and with our children; I will not achieve that if I keep draping myself in the agony. In fact, in some conversations with some very wise and inspiring people I have come to believe that as I continue to move through the pain and the grief and as I allow moments of light to energize me, and the cloak of despair to decline, my memories will be stronger and more beautiful than they are now, swathed in a dismal haze.

It is amazing how gratitude can elevate to our highest vibration possible

I was walking through the park the other day with my dog and all of the colorful flowers are still in the bloom but the air is changing, even the copious sunshine couldn’t mask the hint of autumn that blew through the trees. Periodically the wind would come up and swiftly blow through the trees, showering the earth with leaves that had already dried out and curled up. It was absolutely beautiful. It is amazing how gratitude can elevate us to our highest vibration possible and I have plenty to be grateful for. Though my life right now is not one I would have chosen for myself, I got to experience the depth of true love and the lessons I learned by loving and being loved by Kirk, during the good times and the bad, I will hold in my heart forever. For just a moment I let myself feel those winds of change and not be afraid, and in that moment I felt Kirk clearer than I had in weeks, cheering me on.

I have been so afraid of what is on the other side of my fear so I really had to decide what I wanted for me and my children. I want the winds of change to blow me in the direction of emotional freedom, gratitude, joy, health and love. I want to multiply that love Kirk and I shared as a couple and as a family and put it back into the world. This world could sure use a little more love and kindness.

My response to this fear that restrains me is to summon all of the courage I have to not jump over, resist or hold the pain, but to move through it keeping my heart open to the unique gifts of the universe.

Are you holding unto fear? What is it trying to tell you? What is on the other side of your fear.

Let it go-see what remains.

Every single day is a new opportunity, for you and for me. Today lets decide what it is we want to see in the world and lets project that.

xoxo-michelle1

giphy

Yesterday was the last day of summer and a beautiful one at that. I had very little sleep if any the previous night so I tried to manufacture a positive attitude that morning with two cups of the very worst coffee ever made. Tim Horton’s should hang their head in shame. What I produced was an annoying belly ache. However, at lunch I had a fantastic sandwich and I got a free slice of coconut cream pie that I ate at 3 am so I feel like the day somewhat swayed in my favor. I was mentally exhausted starting the day and at the end of the day I was physically spent as well. I was in bed and asleep by 8:45 p.m. and I woke up feeling angry at the world. Anger is a basic human emotion that helps defend us from attack and like pain it is a compelling warning that commands acknowledgement.

The last time I checked in here I had just read Glennon Doyle Melton’s Love Warrior and I had just started her course with the fabulous Brene Brown on the Wisdom of Story. I was listening to the intro of the course with Brene and Glennon (who by the way I have convinced myself are my friends) and they talk about wisdom, shame, pain and owning our stories so that we can write our own daring ending. I remember feeling so filled up with love and blessings. Thankful for the lessons that I had learned in my life and grateful that my story was a good one. Quite literally within 8 hours my life began to unravel. Everything that I believed my life to be was called into question. It is one of those moments where all of your fears and insecurities set in. You are momentarily enveloped in panic and you forget who you are, you forget that you are a warrior and that your spirit cannot be shattered.

In my last post I shared a quote about pain being a traveling professor. In our greatest moments of pain there is always a lesson. Sometimes our distress, our uneasiness and our misgivings are based on the unknown. The unknown creates a disquiet in our souls. We inch along suspiciously into the darkness where we would wade confidently in the light. There is a security in knowing what comes next. I have experienced pain before, I know that I cannot run from it because it will follow. As a society we use things like food, booze, drugs, shopping and sex to avoid feeling any real pain, even though we know from experience that pain is a prudent educator.

My friend has just recently embarked on a fabulous journey traveling to places all over the world that she has never been, she is doing a great deal of it solo and one of the things I said to her is that I hope she learns to find the comfort in discomfort. What I meant by that is that I hope she can learn to embrace the unknown, to find the beauty in it, to experience the lesson in things that may be hard and be better for it. I am at a place where I find myself struggling to yield my own advice. Often we cannot know what is going to happen next but we can take the lessons we have learned and recall that we have been here before and if we know anything we know that pain has a beginning, a middle and an end. It doesn’t last forever. We wage these huge battles with ourselves in attempt to avoid any sort of pain and in turn we can cause ourselves greater torment.

My whole purpose of the W.I.S.E. Project was to learn to live more mindfully, savoring the present moment without always thinking of the next one. Living in the past and stressing about the future was not helping me to create the joy that I wanted out of life. Crisis is a sign that change needs to happen and to facilitate change and growth I have to find some certainty in uncertainty. It is tough my friends.

Some time has passed and I am feeling clearer and stronger. Very rarely are we presented with a lemon that cannot produce some sort of lemonade.

I never look at feeling hurt and pain as a weakness, I know I am strong and I know I am enduring. I love fully and completely and though I may agonize and endure the scars that braving that type of loving can carry it is my tenacity and my courage that allows me to love fully in the face of fear.

Life is like a big road trip, sometimes you get a little lost, sometimes the road is a little bumpy, the best we can do is play good music and don’t carry to much baggage. Perhaps it is more about the story than the happy ending. Epic stories are wrought with pain, struggle, survival and love. Do your best, create a good story.

Maybe we like the pain. Maybe we’re wired that way. Because without it, I don’t know; maybe we just wouldn’t feel real. What’s that saying? Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop.” ~Meridith Grey, Grey’s Anatomy

Happy first day of Fall W.I.S.E. friends. May we someday learn to find the comfort in discomfort.