Touching Love of Self

Soon after my last post and just before going to bed, I had the realization that my guardedness was a habit. A habit of thought, reaction, posturing. What was different with this realization was that I didn't beat myself up for this inbred habit, but down to my toes believed that through my practice I could change this habit. The positive spin Carolyn had put on my understanding of fear-that my sense of fear was really awareness with a guarded quality- again set in motion my yearning to want to learn to change. I went to bed wondering how I could relax this guardedness.

I awoke a bit before 3 am. Awoke myself with a start, I was in the midst of a lesson. This will be my third such lesson I have received from the dream state. I was being taken back, remembering when my mother had died and the guilty feelings I had realizing that in fact mom had died miserable and lonely and this sense of rage I had with God for letting this happen. I had known all my life that if my mom didn't get what she needed she would die before her time. I knew it. I had tried everything in my power to take care of her, but short of moving in to be her care taker and provider, this would not happen. So what I had feared probably from infancy had indeed happened.

And then I was pushed to a remembering of when Crystal died. From the moment we had learned of her terminal prognosis, I knew she would be afraid of death. Every week I would ask her if she was afraid and for almost nine months she would adamantly reiterate that she was not afraid. This insistence on her part had me fully coming to believe and admire her heroic journey through the death process. But a week before she died she lay in bed and I beside her. She turned to me and said "Patty I don't feel a thing, I don't feel God" My heart broke. I tried to console her but I had no words for I myself had lost that connection with God. I put my arm around her and we quietly cried. From that point on she suffered from what Hospice called "Terminal Agitation". It had gotten to the point where she asked me to kill her with an overdose of morphine. I was so empathetic with her suffering that I told her I would help. Hospice figured this out and was swift with intervention. They drugged her up, brought the chaplain in, and took me to the side to say that this was not the way. Crystal died but the thought of the fear she felt remained burning with me.

In the span of about five minutes, these rememberings put me smack dab in the middle of my most intense fears which in turn made me realize the guarded nature I had felt for most of my life. The sense of suffering we go through when we contemplate our mortality. I had even realized how this knowledge or groundlessness of not really knowing what happens after we die and the fear of losing our (ego) self was the basis of drive in my life. I had written a small poem about it.

Heaven may close my eyes

So I need to build my bridges

I got out of bed and had to go cry hard. I cried deeply at the arising of this old pain but as I cried and stayed with the pain I became gradually aware of my own beautifully deep sensitivity for others pain. And for a moment I felt my buddhanature, my bodhisattva and that indeed fear and love where two sides of the same coin. I experienced for the first time ever in my life a profound sense of love for who I was as a person.

For the next hour I sat, in and out of meditation riding the realizations I was having. I felt an acceptance of my intuitive self. I no longer saw myself as an emotional basket case. I began to get a sense of purpose and understanding about the happenings of my life and the dots began to connect and take shape as my path within the dharma of this my life time.

I became acutely aware I needed to share with my father the love I felt from him as a young infant when he would come home from work and hold me over his heart and rock me in the rocking chair for an hour each night. How he had saved me from my postpartum alcoholic mother who refused to hold me and give me love the first months of my life. I knew that my father felt really really bad for abandoning my brother and me. I needed to let him know that that love was his redemption. That he no longer needed to feel the guilt. That love he shared with me then was in fact who he is now. I could forgive him for leaving us with her, my mother, the raging, abusive, alcoholic, nightmare. As I sat I felt his suffering and knew it to be real and now. I needed to break through my fear and uncomfortableness and share this with him now. On February 1, he turned 72. I need to spend time with my daddy.

Finally, I felt the suffering and fear my partner feels about being alone. And I knew the burn of anxiety that races through her body when she senses her aloneness. I did not know what to do but to continue to meet her, to be with her in the moment and make her feel that I am her with her now.

I crawled back to bed about 4:30 and half dozed until the alarm went off at 5. I arose exhausted but relaxed. For the rest of the day I was teary eyed at this acceptance of self and love I had found beneath the waves of fear. That even though I have been ice, my nature is water. That even though I have been frozen with fear and guardedness my nature is of the Buddha... buddhanature. I am beginning to melt.