Life's wild ride....

Holy Moly - what a ride this past few months has been for me. As is the case for everyone at certain times, life throws you a curve ball and you seem to get your butt kicked. And I have sufficiently had my butt kicked, let me tell you. Its not necessarily in a bad way. Its been kicked in the way it does when you weren't anticipating certain things, happenings or feelings arising, and when they do they hit you like a steam train. The catalyst for this for me was finally stopping everything. Perhaps, somewhat naively, I thought that I would stop, create space in my life, then just happily move forward into the next phase. But if I think about everything I have been through in the last 3 or so years, its no surprise really that once I stopped, every emotion, thought or feeling that had been suppressed by the chaos of every day life bubbled to the surface. I know that this was completely necessary, so that I could work through any un-resolved issues and drop excess baggage in order to move into a better place in my life. But knowing that hasn't made it any easier. Its very humbling though to go through these phases, where everything is turned upside down and where you feel as though you are strapped into an out of control ride. All you can do is close your eyes and hold on, trusting that the end of this ride or phase will come (even though in your darkest moments you can't fathom that it ever will).

In the short term, I could have just run away from the pain or feelings (and believe me there were many times when I wanted to). But I knew that they would simply re-surface later and that no matter how hard it was, I needed to deal with what was in front of me. As Mark Nepo says in his Book of Awakening, 'It seems that whatever the door, whatever our fear - be it love or truth or even the prospect of death - we all have this choice, again and again: avoiding that part of our house or opening the door and finding out more about ourselves by waiting until what is dark becomes seeable.'

Whilst I still have a lot of work to do in clearing out the old ways of being and thinking that no longer serve me, I do at least feel like the wild ride is slowing down somewhat. Its still dark but I'm catching more and more glimmers of light and can see that what is dark will become seeable.......