Sometimes life is not joyful. Sometimes we have to work hard to re frame a situation in our lives. And even when we work hard at it, that new perspective may still take time to anchor itself in our consciousness and yield a new kind of experience. This was how it was for me with my son’s father.
The last phone call brought me to my knees. The finality of it and the reality of birthing and raising my son alone brought sobs of sorrow from my soul. I had known it was on its way. But some little part of me kept hoping I would not have to go down this path alone. Some small part of me kept hoping it would not be so final. But it was. And all the sorrow and pain and desperation of months of stress and fears for the future came forth from my soul in an unstoppable torrent of emotions.
In life changing moments we must first feel what we feel. We must first give ourselves the chance to process the emotions. If not, we get stuck. We paralyze ourselves with unprocessed emotions. Those unprocessed emotions keep us frozen in that point of view, or framework. We cannot see a brighter day or act because we are mired in the fog of unspent emotions. Maybe we are afraid of the emotions themselves. To go back to Cinderella’s dad, what if he had looked upon her long enough to process all the pain of losing her mother? Maybe then he could have lifted his head up high enough to see the abuse and misery the new wife was creating in his daughter’s life. If we don’t process the emotions of what transpires in our lives, then we stay stuck in the fog of those emotions. They rot. They cloud our thinking. We can’t see clearly.
Remember the song, “I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. Bright, bright sun shining day”?
That song tells us a very important lesson. It tells us to clear the emotions. If we have let the “rain” fall – tears of processed emotions, then we can see clearly. We can see a brighter day. We can see to make changes. But we’ve got to sit with our emotions long enough to even know what they have to tell us. In our society we aren’t trained to do this practice. Meditation helps us stay still long enough to let emotions come up and process through us.
Whatever way helps you clear old emotions so you can see the rainbow of a new day – do it now!
And keep doing it until you can forgive all involved including yourself.
Affirmation
Life is rich, full and not always joyful. I give myself permission to let go of the pain and see a brighter day.