“I might be living on tequila and hate but I’m living!” Dan Cummings comedian.
Having gone through 2 years of marriage counseling prior to our divorce. I can tell you that it almost seemed like I learned more about me and my former wife than it seems living with her for 12 and a half years did. Because we each change along the way from not having children to having them to job changes, etc. etc. the person you were at the beginning of the marriage will be very different years later.
It seems we get so busy with everything in our lives that we slowly lose the reason we came to be together in the first place.
One of the most profound things that the marriage counselor said to us early on was that going through the process of counseling would let each of us know if we wanted to stay in the marriage or get divorced….and it was true. The question to ask yourself is do you want the marriage to work or not?
Maybe it the idea of being divorced that keeps you fighting for your marriage. But you have to remember that it takes two committed people to want to be in a relationship and having only one person wanting to stay while the other person is also trying to make it work, but in the end just can’t, makes you realize that as hard as it is…. divorce may be the only option.
One of my journal entries I wrote during the marriage counseling;
God, we work so hard to impress our fathers and make our mothers proud as children. We compete to make the grade and suffer the humiliation of not being outstanding in academics or athletics or a career that we think we will excel in and for what… to be stressed to the nines and dream of a relationship that will save us from ourselves or maybe someone that will help ease the pain and support us even with all of our miss giving’s and yes even love us till death do us part.
What is the flip side of this… successful and outstanding academic and athletic experiences? Perhaps.
But maybe the demons only stay away until the thrill of success or fame or just the newness has gone and then what. We find that we were not prepared for what curve balls life would throw at us? So, we ease the pain by maybe getting high and drunk and becoming irresponsible, and for what? To keep searching for something outside ourselves that will heal us from the pain or at least give us that feeling of the thrill again. The need for security and the illusion that we could ever really have it is what keeps us fighting and doing what we think are the right things, but we soon find out it was all for the wrong reasons. Remember that no feeling is ever the last and thank god for that. Just keep on keeping on.
“What hooks you emotionally are your sign posts to freedom” W.A.S
This path you are on takes courage, but know that you are built and hardwired for this. You are at the right place and time to move to a higher knowing and consciousness. You must do the work to process the pain and face the emotions that keep showing up for you at this time. Do it for your children, do it for the planet and most importantly do it for yourself!
Again, just observe emotional thoughts as they come and go. Don’t try to “fix it” to feel better in the moment. Just be in this space and observe and feel, this can be the hardest part, but hang in there! Feelings will come and go, so just let them. What you need to do is observe the emotions that keep showing up and see after a while if there is a pattern to the thoughts. Just feel it for what it is, don’t attach to it and go for the minds roller-coaster ride of pain again.
This awareness will help clear you and lighten you as you move through this. This is how you get to love without killing someone. I will admit at first the emotions hook you repeatedly. Take a deep breath and feel where in the body you feel it most? The trick is to do this when you are alone and feeling the ache, so that when you are at work and get hit by your emotional triggers you can pause and shift through it.
With any major changes in our life it is inevitable that time and time again we will find ourselves alone and only with our memories of what was or thoughts of what should have been all of which make us unhappy, depressed and just plain sad, and yet we go through the motions of a life because we just have too.
Know that this time with just yourself alone is sacred. It is a time of unfolding and seeing the layers that keep you from your true essence of moving to a place of love. Yes, it is an uneasy place to be in fact it sucks and you do not want to have to go through it. So, you may avoid the inner work by going from one relationship to another again, and again only to find loneness in your heart even when lying next to someone.
Many go to extremes in their search to ease the pain & loneliness with the goal of just wanting to find a woman or a man, just someone looking for the same Mr. or Mrs. perfect that will save them from being alone.
However, you can’t run from yourself, because even after finding someone playing the part of the ideal partner for years you wake up in the middle of the night and think is this all there is to relationships? Is this what the dream is all about?
What you will hopefully come to learn sooner than later is, that if we are always searching outside ourselves for this love, what you will find is that the love we think we have found is fleeting never really giving us the peace of mind and comfort of being in our own skin that we yearn for.
Each of us toil in the stuff of life from car payments, mortgages, kids and extended family and friends all working really hard to be that perfect or ideal husband or wife only to realize that there is no such thing! This can be depressing in itself. Funny how they teach everything in school except how to be in a freaking relationship! Most importantly how to be in a relationship with yourself. This work of knowing our nature is one that scholars and holy men and women have been discussing for millennia. Mystics have known that this searching can be done in one of two ways; inside or outside with the inside work the only course to take to get you to the tranquility you seek.
James Allen wrote in his timeless classic, as a Man Thinketh: “The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good. Calmness of mind is one of the beautiful jewels of wisdom”.
There is no calmness when we seek perfection because perfection is a thing we tell ourselves to be not knowing that in a divine sense we already are perfect.
The author Julia Cameron in her book the Artists Way says that “perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop – an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole” (pg 119).
How easy it is for most of us to lose sight of the whole and deal with the minutia and the day to day circumstances of life acting as if they were life and death itself and the truth is they are not. Worry about things you cannot control and resist change and you will suffer. It’s guaranteed.
What we need to realize if you wish to stop the suffering is that you have to remake yourself in this process at let it change you and shift your old habitual thinking. You have a choice either make an active decision or let things just unfold and wait to see what happens. What every choice you make you will be different. I believe the key is to proactively decide to change for the positive with specific markers & goals in mind and then take action, so that you can come to a place of loving yourself and others in a whole new way. Inevitably it is almost like making a new you since the person you where before your divorce will see the world differently after it.
When you feel the groundlessness, anger and fear of it all, know that this is your point of power and your ability to change for the better is but an instant away. So, what are the choices, 1st you can go unaware get hooked by the emotions and stay on the pain course or you can step back and view it for what it really is breathing through the feelings and watching them pass through you. This awareness I call the shift frequency, which is your point of power in a painful situation. Trust that what you are going through will make you more aware of other and feel compassion for them. Everyone at times is fearful, but when you tune into this trust it frees you from fear allowing you to see and face it head on by not doing what the fear wants you to do.
If only for a moment create this space within to give you a chance to breath. It will help you and those around you whom you love. We try so hard to get some form of security in our lives, some ground under our feet to feel that we are in control only to find that it is all an illusion and that living in the moment the free-falling moment is where our power lies. If we will only allow it and not try to continually seek the future and control every aspect of our lives then the outcome is that life opens us up for us and that being in the moment experiencing the joy of life itself is where we want to be. Try to create a little space between the feeling and heavy emotion in your body by going to that place and feel the sensations. This is one way, I will show you others as you read
