What do I feel bad about? What do I need to forgive myself for?
invited me to talk about self forgiveness and I have been thinking about it all week. You can read about her self-forgiveness and dog self here. Then it occurred to me: I had always felt that I was wrong, somehow, in this duality divided existence. Here was I, and there was everyone else: smarter, funnier, sexier, more loveable. And if everyone was more, then I was less.
Yet I felt, as I got older, a sense of black sheepness, as if I was the odd one out in the family. I felt that everything I did was out of whack, somehow. 'Why are you so emotional?' Dad would ask, mostly in jest, but clearly in puzzlement. How could I answer that? It wasn't anyone's fault, but I started feeling as if I had a basic flaw. This was hard when my emotional self drove my entire life. I remember being excited, for example, about food. My first word, even, was 'more', a snippet my family loved to tell to demonstrate my tendency to over-love. It was cute, sure. Dad jested that I couldn't get love food that much: 'you can't marry it'. Let me assure you, it was all good natured - by no means am I blaming Dad for how I felt. It was just the little kid me taking it irrationally 'to heart', as they say.
Like any teenager, I was 'rather emotional' and I was conscious of it too, hearing the adult conversations that nodded sagely and speculated that I was going through a tough time right now. Was I? I wanted to throw myself headlong at life - to suck the marrow from it, as it were. Trapped in my room, I lived life vicariously through books and music and in a house of literature, developed a poetic heart. I dreamed endlessly of surfing and horses, and my heart would be fit to explode when I thought of all the things I loved and desired. And in the way teenagers do when their love is misdirected, I snuck out of my bedroom window and did BAD THINGS that teenagers do as they search for love and belonging and life.
In the desire to fill myself up, all I ended up doing was emptying myself a little more. As I desired what others seemed to have - smaller breasts, thicker hair, thinner bodies, wittier conversational skills - my true self began to vanish. I remember being in art class at school and someone had walked past and began to effuse at my friends work beside me. I wasn't jealous - just diminished. I had poured my heart into the art I had created, and felt utterly rejected and invisible - a feeling that would have me doubt my creative abilities at all for many years. To my young self, here was more proof that I wasn't good. Of course, that makes no sense, but it would be part of a narrative of comparison that would drive me for a long time. All of these parts of my identity - that loving, effusive, excitable girl - began to retreat inward as I wrapped gossamer threads of protection around my heart space.
Yet I would still thrust myself headlong into what I wanted to do, refusing to follow the maps others followed. I didn't want the life others had anyway, though I envied them. I took off around Australia and had a child -young, unexpectedly. I took off around Europe backpacking as a single mum, with barely a penny to my name and a lot of criticism from small town folk who, I realised many years later, were jealous of my gypsyness. I moved to the other side of the world for a man I had known for 3 days, and married him a year later, because my heart beat in time with his. And in between, I drank too much (amongst other things I consumed in those hedonistic days) and did stuff I wasn't proud of.
It was when I finally sat a Vippassana meditation course that I began to realise that I had conditioned myself to believe in my oddness and out of placeness. Every single rejection had just affirmed my beliefs, or lack of belief, in myself.
Then, I had a killer stress breakdown.
I was teaching high school in a really prestigious school and I didn't know I could say no to all these ridiculous demands that were placed on me. I was torn between desperately trying to prove I could fit in and be brilliant and doubting I was capable at all. I felt too much. I loved those kids and wanted them to succeed, and felt so much pressure to carry them through and get good results. I suffered when they did - the final year of school can be a tumultuous time and if they cried, my heart cried.
No one helped me, though, despite all these clear signs I was giving out. I guess no one really knows much about what's going on in other people's heads as they are pre-occupied with their own. All I could see was the fact I wasn't good enough, and I was failing miserably. Then one day, my mind just broke. I couldn't get out of bed and could not stop crying. Literally. Could. Not. Stop. I had weeks off work whilst I put myself determinedly back together. The work psychologist told me what I knew, but hadn't put into words. She said: 'you have a very harsh inner critic, you know'.
We judge ourselves far too harshly for being us, don't we? We would never say to our friends the things we say to ourselves on a daily basis. With this in mind, I began to change how.I felt about me. 'It's okay', I would say, both hands on my heartspace. 'You are doing the best you can, and you have the best of loving intentions'. I'd treat myself tenderly and gently, like I would a friend going through similar shit.
Bit by bit I realised that if this was my true self - this loving, compassionate and well intentioned being - how could I be bad? How could I be not good enough? How could I even be flawed if I was acting from this heartspace? How could that be?
Thus I vowed to live with an open heart:
"Always live with an open heart. This means being available to both the outer and the inner worlds. The openness of the heart is nothing else but the vastness of Pure Awareness, the eternity of the present moment" Sahajananda.
And if I hadn't always acted well over the years, or hadn't fulfilled my own expectations of being good, that didnt matter anymore - the present moment to moment did. There were a lot of good, loving friends and family around me that loved me for me. I realised, finally, that the reason they loved me was because I was ME, and no one else. What a fucking 'der' moment that was.
“YOU ARE A FLOWER Every child is born in the garden of humanity as a flower. Each flower differs from every other flower. There are many messages in our society that tell us, even when we’re young people, that there’s something wrong with us and that if we just buy the right product, or look a certain way, or have the right partner, that will fix it. As grown-ups, we can remind young people that they’re already beautiful as they are; they don’t have to be someone else.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love
It would still take a while for the cocoon around my heart to fully rip open, though. I had to step into a place of fully feeling again when I hadn't in years. Not properly. How could I let my emotions fully unleash when they were what made me feel so different in the first place? How could I allow my emotions to let rip when it hurt so fucking much? Besides, it was equally important to operate from a place of non-reaction, because attachment to joy was suffering and hiding from pain was suffering and no way could I find the middle ground. I was doing okay though - don't get me wrong. It's just I still wildly vacillated from one state to the other - depression and anxiety, or wild unbounded joy.
Then, two things happened: I did my yoga teacher training over the course of a year and Dad had a heart attack half way through. And I'm in the studio with early morning light pouring through the windows and chanting Hanuman Bolo:
Hanuman Bolo Hanuman Bolo
Jay Sita Ram Jay Jay Sita Ram
Jay Sita Ram Jay Jay Hanuman
The power of mantra to access your heart space is incredible. Maybe as you chant, all the other layers flake away as if the words are meditative paint stripper. It's a similiar sensation to what I used to feel on the dance floor at raves or surfing - you are so caught up in the present moment that some aspect of truth is revealed in perfect awareness, perfect consciousness. I sat there with tears rolling down my face like a fool. Life was painful and beautiful in perfect duality.
Krishna Das spoke of this devotional yoga as 'love. It means falling in love. Eventually, recognizing the beauty of your own Self. Falling in love with your Self, which is God". The Hanuman mantra is said to be the flow that takes us into our true self - a powerful heart opening mantra.
This mantra asked us:
To forgive myself, I had to fully open my heart and sing, celebrating life and all that was in it - all suffering, all joy, all my badness and all my goodness. I had to cry and sing through it all. There was no other way.
Am.
My beating, loving, compassionate heart.
And if I was - there was nothing to forgive myself for. I was good because I was true.
My tribe rallied around me as I worried about my father. Here I was suffering the pain of his possible death (he is still kicking, in case you didn't know) and all this utter joy of breathing into emotion and knowing it meant that I was alive, really alive in the most wondrous way. And then there was the knowing people cared. They did.
In a moment of implusiveness, as is my way, I dropped in to get some ink. I was going to wear my heart on my sleeve:
I was okay. My beating, emotional heart was the truth of me, and that was okay. I was forgiven.
It's funny how when you learn your lessons, you don't need any approval or outside help anymore. The lesson is right there as truth in your heart. Nonetheless, there is an addendum to this post, where a few weeks ago, my Dad felt the need to tell me how much he loved me - he's pretty sick at the moment as he is living through a pretty aggressive cancer treatment, and I guess he's sorting out his life in his head, as we all do. There was no need - I know how much Dad loves me, because he has shown it in the things he has done all his life.
The gem that made me cry, however, was this confession from Dad: 'Gorgeous,' he began (which made me laugh, as he's never been one for demonstrative pet names, but clearly he was grappling with the language of love, unfamiliar on his tongue) - 'you know, without you being excited and loud about life, this family would be a very different family'. I'm pretty sure he meant that as a compliment. It made me realise how I had longed to hear that acknowledgement - I wasn't a black sheep after all, and never was.
It feels a little raw, sharing this, but once I started it was hard to stop. Thanks for bearing with me, if you have read this far. Thanks to
I think this is my favourite poem by Rumi, and I've probably shared it before. But they are nice words to finish with, and so here 'tis:
Remember the lips where wind-breath
originated, and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.
Be your note.
I'll show you how it's enough.
Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.
Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes.
Sing loud!
What can you forgive yourself for? How can you be kinder to yourself? How can you give yourself a little compassion? There are so many of you I'd love to hear from about this - a gentle nudge to explore this part of you, and see where it leads... I'm listening, with all my heart. xx
If you're up for it, I'd love to listen to the hearts of you guys:
I'm pretty sure the challenge asked for 5, but I can't count - and I forgive myself for that, too :)
