On moving on
It is a non-specific annoyance, really. But left unobserved, it finds a target and intensifies. I don’t know if it’s anger or fear of both. I’m angry and hurt about the disintegration of my relationship, about my final grade in senior seminar, about having to do all this grown up stuff like paying bills, about stuff that happened in the past, about the cat and dog hair all over my bed…I’m annoyed to have to deal with the seeming trivialities of life when all I want to do is be and sing and write and be happy. Something negative happens and we are hurt. It is said that time heals. Does it? Or does it blur memories so that we no longer consciously bring up the suffering in the present? We suffer and life of course moves on inexorably. We take on new experiences, new people, new goals and new memories. The suffering hasn’t really been vanquished, after all it did happen, but it has been forgotten. The suffering and the memory of it merges into our unconscious conditioning, becoming part of already embodied patterns, what many scholars have called the “pain-body,” to come up in a massive perambulation in ways that may not be clearly recognizable to us. So of course we turn to positive belief systems. We chase money and relationships and diversions. We blame our genetics and upbringing and our childhood and external circumstances. There is nothing necessarily right or wrong about any of this, but at some point we decide to take complete responsibility and realize that this pattern can reverse itself. Yes, we are afraid of pain. But when we know how to release it, the fear of pain goes away. Then we feel painful feelings appropriately in the present. The grief of missing a loved one in whatever manner, the sorrowful compassion at the suffering of others, the anger of injustice, the bittersweet feeling when something comes to an end—these painful emotions wonderfully fill out the spectrum of human experience, of the human condition; it fills out our existence. If one learns—actually I should say ‘remember’ and not ‘learn’ because one has always known—if one remembers how to release again, he or she will have this experience. As they release, old matters, painful memories will return. They do for me daily. It’s good to know this, though, because when I know that my mind is being scrubbed; it is being cleansed. That top layer of dead nastiness and pain is being slowly peeled off. I will not resist. These emotions have turned into bearable feelings—they are simply messages, just an incidental effect of my brain discarding old junk, and growing because of it. I am feeling anger and some fear. I don’t analyze, label or resist. I allow it and I welcome it. I love it, and you should too, because it is trying to help us. I don’t react negatively to it any longer. I could just let it go, but I won’t. I want to understand the message. S
