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When I was a little kid, I was always happy. When I was in college and law school, people thought I was the most carefree, happy person they have ever met. Somehow, along the years of hard work, marriage, divorce and dating, I have lost touch with that carefree child that has always lived within me, but have discovered a stronger, wiser being within myself that keeps me in balance. Most of the time, nothing upsets me. However, certain things offend me. Three of such offenses are: Hypocrisy, Deceit, and Disrespect. I deal with each behavior differently, but I get equally offended by all. Yet, it takes a lot to make me angry and throw me off balance. When lied to, deceived or disrespected, I get offended, but always seem to find the will to set my pride aside, evaluate the situation from the perspective of the offender, accept the offense, forgive and let go. Sometimes, however, I get very mad and refuse to let go.
last week was once of such times. I was deeply insulted by someone I cared about deeply and thought of as my friend. Actually, more than a friend. An ex boyfriend, with whom I have tried to smooth things out. We did not attempt to be friends. Friendship is impossible after a break-up, but we did agree to put a label on our relationship as 'friends" and we did agree to be cordial, sweet, caring and respectful to each other. of course, doing all these things is hard when feelings of heartache are involved, but I held my side of the deal. He did not.
Just when I thought things were going well, he demonstrated complete and utter disregard for my feelings, for my emotional well being and for me overall. The insult was so unexpected, so incomprehensible and so hurtful, that not only did I get mad, but I actually acted out of anger by throwing water and slapping my ex on the face. This reaction came out naturally and at the moment of offense, it actually felt good to slap him in demonstration of my wounded pride and utter disgust for the way he treated me. Only, it did not seem real. Instead, it was as though I was reenacting a scene of a movie, maybe something from Moonstruck when a young woman throws water on the old professor.
Letting out my anger this way did not make me feel better. I drove off with the words of my offender ringing in my head, mixed in with other words, weaving a deep and long pattern of lies. I should say that my ex boyfriend apologized for his behavior and that I have accepted his apology. I simply had to forgive him in order to let go of the hurt.
So, I let go of the offense, but I could not forget or ignore the pain lodged deep inside my chest. Later, I stood in front of the mirror and looked at the hurt and insulted being staring back at me. I saw a puffy face, swollen eyes, furrowed brows and I heard it say: "you must do something to never again be so rudely and violently shaken by someone you used to love".
"Someone I used to love", I repeated. Those were the key words. That was the cause of my pain. Had the insult been inflicted by someone I did not care about, I would have shuddered and promptly forgotten about it. The fact that the offense came from "someone I used to love" made the situation much worse. I asked myself then, what were my motives for keeping "someone I used to love" in my life? And what were his for keeping me in his life?
I knew the answer to both questions. I also realized that it was impossible to be "friends" or to stay in contact with my ex boyfriend without me hurting him or him hurting me, be it inadvertently, intentionally or subconsciously. And, as much as I hoped that he could be mindful of my feelings, with each new contact, I realized that I was fooling myself by dreaming that he could be the man I wanted him to be after we broke up. Instead, he was becoming more and more a person with whom I never wanted to be associated. And it made me sad. It also made me angry at myself for allowing this person to stay in my life and hurt me.
I knew that the incident would have never taken place, had I stuck yo my guns after the initial mourning period. But I did not. I allowed myself to look back on this broken relationship with hope that we could mend things by talking them through. Yet, every time we talked seriously, we both became more and more agitated. I will not speak for him, but for me, looking back brought nothing but stress.
Standing in from of the mirror and thinking rationally, for a change, with my head instead of my heart, I made a difficult but much needed decision to cast this negative force out of my life. Doing so was simple - a few e-mails and it was finished. Dealing with the loss was much harder.
A strong sense of discontentment from my failure to achieve the best from this lost relationship weighed me down. For the last two years, I worked on our relationship out of fear that, perhaps, it was my fault for not inspiring the man I loved to become all that he could be. Only now, after a two-year struggle, I finally understood that it is not my place to make the other person whole. No amount of good will and motivation from my side could ever help a man heal the wounds in his core. I am not the cure or the magic potion for past losses eating away at his heart . My love, care and devotion could never fill the void left by another. The man had to heal on his own, yet he refused to heal and jumped from one relationship to the next without taking the time to fully mourn the last one. I was just another victim of his bruised ego, who has sentenced herself to witness this heart wrenching process. I realized, with much sadness, that it was not my battle to fight and stepped aside, leaving him alone with the new object of his affliction. I felt sorry for this new girl. I wanted to warn her of what was to come, yet it was not my place to do so. She needed to learn the weaknesses of her new man by herself. And who knows, perhaps lessons taught by me would help him in this new relationship. It is not my place to say what the future will bring to them, nor is in my place to care.
From this point forward, my focus has shifted to my inner self. Left alone with my sadness, I reflected on the loss of a dream. I sat in silence reflecting on the past, the present and the future, until the following words emerged in my head: "In your infinite sadness, you have ignored the door to a brighter and much happier world. This door has been open for a long time and has been patiently waiting for you to enter."
It was true. I got dressed, put on my best clothes, along with my best poker face and went towards the door. As I approached it, a incandescent light blinded me, concealing from view the figure behind the door. All I could see was the hand outstretched through the entrance in a jest of warm welcome. Closing my eyes to shield them from the scintillating flare behind the the gaping door, I took the hand, which held mine firmly, assuring that it was safe to enter and, at that instant, I knew that many delightful discoveries await inside. The hand also presented me with a lovely gift as a token of what's to come. Touched, and without any further reservations, I opened my eyes and walked in, smiling and happy to step out of my sad past and into the happy future.
Now, that I have dared to venture into this new world, the wonders of which I have yet to discover, I realize that I may not be completely ready for it. Sure, I have morned the loss for many months, but I still feel that dull sensation inside my chest from time to time. It reminds me that I am not completely healed and certain emotional baggage is weighing me down. This baggage simply does not belong in my new bright world and I must leave it behind. To help me with this task, a dear friend gave me a book:
"Here, Vika", she said. "You need to read this book, it will help you understand what you are going through." And with these words, she presented me with a marvel of one woman's journey of self discovery:
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert.
I began reading it and fell in love with it instantly. I had to go away to Austin for a few days, but did not want to part with the book, so I bought another version of it, on CDs and listened to it on the road. The CD version is narrated by the author herself, whose gentle, wise and silky voice envelopes my ears with love and tenderness as it proclaims simple truths. As she slowly reveals the details of her past, her travels and her life experiences echo my own so closely that tears inadvertently drop from my already tired eyes.
The author's trip to Italy especially wakes many memories in my heart. Yet, it is not the story of pleasure seeking in Italy that speaks to me most at this moment. Instead, I am most happy to hear the author reaching India, where she begins to practice yoga, sheds the shreds of her past, and finds her inner self. Here is what she has to say about finding one's secret self:
"The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists called it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that the unhappiness in the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs.
The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere in us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.
Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from the endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you."
And listening to her, I decide that it is also time for me to return to the practice of yoga.
On that thought, I smile. And now, I shall leave writing to another day for I must get back to my journey and head for yet another delightful adventure.
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ajideas
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