Heart Lotus Meditation

Lotus, by Marufish.

I have begun a new evening meditation in order to help me cope with the sadness I still carry with me each day.  As with most of my meditations, I kind of just made it up based on imagery and desired outcome.  I believe becoming more in touch with my heart as an entity to be protected, and more consciously working to heal it, will help yield the progress I seek.

Here is my process:

1. Fold a towel such that it is roughly the length of the area from your hips to your shoulders, and is not folded very thickly.  I fold a long beach towel into thirds from the short end, and then fold it in half lengthwise.
2. Sitting on the floor, position the towel directly behind you and lie back on it, so your spine is cushioned from the sacrum to the base of the neck.  This is a very basic, very gentle heart opening position.
3. Let your feet fall open and rest your arms about a foot from your sides, palms up, thumb and forefinger touching.
4. Become aware of your heart in your chest as you slow your breathing.
5. On an inhale, imagine your heart is a lotus flower: pink, healthy, pure, and vibrant.  Its petals are bright and soft.  For variations, I occasionally imagine I am holding my lotus-heart in my hands, admiring its beauty, or I am stroking its petals, or the air I am breathing in is causing it to open and spread itself wide.
6. On an exhale, let any sickly, withered, or black petals be borne away from your lotus-heart on your breath.  I watch them fade away into the distance.  Sometimes I whisper to myself, "Let the pain go" as my heart sheds some of its heavy darkness.
7. Repeat this process for your meditation.
8. When the timer bell rings, lie quietly, allowing your breath to return to normal, feeling and imagining the radiance in your chest.
9. When you're ready, slowly roll to your right side, cradling your head in your right arm, and pause for a moment, then come up to sit in a cross-legged position, palms together at your chest, to give thanks.

Freuden

The spring weather has been agreeing with me lately.  I derive no end of pleasure in fresh, breezy warmth cosseting my skin.  My bones have felt cold for far too long, and not simply because of winter's unpleasant lingering.

Our cats are enjoying the weather, too.  On any given sunny day, I can find Tabby parked in a spot of sunlight in the kitchen, even if that means lying on the tile floor when her soft fleece bed is a foot away in the shade, or in the square left on the attic carpet from the skylight.  Likewise for Calico; Little Thief is too busy zooming around and being irritating to snooze in one spot for long.

I've been quite sure since at least my undergraduate years that I suffer from some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder, owing to my restlessness and depression in struggling through the endless Massachusetts winters.  The sunlight, I know, is doing me good.  On Monday I sat on the porch for awhile, my nose stuck in my latest pleasure read, John Adams, and the experience was exceedingly pleasant.  Even the enormous and terrifying bee-like objects hovering around in the bushes in front of me seemed content to leave me be.

I hope to get myself outdoors more often now, although I am not entirely sure what to do with myself.  I don't really have a partner anymore who is willing to go for impromptu walks, or to a park.  This saddens me, but I suppose I must shift my ways and expectations.  Despite a nagging, years-old knee injury, I hope to run again to a limited degree soon, and have been doggedly working out in pursuit of substantially strengthening my legs so that my muscles can stabilize the knee joint.  I do love running, and through everything I have experienced, I consider its absence from my life to be one of the greatest losses I have endured in the past several years.

I have been staying busy in other ways, as I strive to pick up the pieces K left behind in his hasty departure.  I finished John Adams just this morning, all (large-type) 989 pages of it, and found it more inspiring than I would have assumed.  I feel I know the man intimately now -- a testament, certainly, to author David McCollough's talents.  It was only through my trip with K to Colonial Williamsburg last September, and the readings and research I have done in the time since, that I have realized the extent to which learning about and experiencing American history brings me joy.  I dusted my sister's copy of 1776 in about four days over spring break, completely enthralled by it, and that, of course was highly useful to me, distracting me as it did from my recent breakup and crushing loneliness.  I am all the more determined to move to Virginia someday, both to have a better quality of life and so that I may live closer to such important sites of American colonial history.  I can only imagine the rapturous pleasure of living within two hours of Williamsburg, Monticello, Jamestown, and Washington, D.C., among many other places.

As mentioned, I have been working out with wonderful regularity, and with the most determination I have had since before what I have now come to call "the horrible."  My arms are quite toned now, and one workout in particular that I have been dutifully working on for some months is slowly becoming easier.  I also have been eating very healthfully lately, which, of course, has much longer-term, less-noticeable benefits to me, but that I know very well is benefiting me nevertheless.  It is good to feel that, at least in this one aspect of my life, I am making progress and moving forward.  (I suppose I am in school, too; I continue to pull down excellent grades and am nearly completed with my first semester.)

I also have been giving consideration lately to the aftermaths of K and RJ, and how very different my experiences were.  With RJ, I did not so much allow myself to give in to hatred of him but, in fact, wholeheartedly embraced it.  Revenge fantasies dominated my thoughts for far longer than I care to admit, and it took me a very, very, very long time -- indeed, until the end of my relationship with K -- to just legitimately stop caring about anything to do with him.  Of course, my experiences with K were infinitely more positive and affirming, whereas those with RJ were destructive and toxic, so it is natural that the aftermaths would be different.  But I believe very strongly that a large part of the difference in my feelings after all was said and done with both can be explained by the different alignments of my attitude with either.

I have discussed several times here how I cannot and refuse to hate K, despite some legitimate grievances I have with the way he handled things before, during, and after the breakup.  "K is K," I remind myself when he has again disappointed or hurt me, "this is the way he is."  And, with those flaws, he is still someone I really care about and wish well.  I don't believe he is any less or less worthy of a person for his flaws than I am, and there are still many traits of his for which I have great admiration and respect.

In the midst of pain stemming from his words and actions, I have found it beneficial, in a very real way, to redirect those thoughts and instead imagine his face, his gentle mannerisms, the graceful strength of his being.  I cannot help but think tenderly upon him when such images hold court in my mind; feelings of resentment and pride melt away.  It is simply impossible to underscore how significant a development this is, when my modus operandi for the past decade and more has been to lash out in anger when experiencing pain, both, I suppose, as self-defense, to hide my vulnerability, and to strike down the source of my hurt so that they might know my nightmare, as well.

The path of my recovery remains littered with significant obstacles, and so very often I must backtrack, or take the long way around, in order to move forward.  This is a process, swelling with grief, that I would wish upon no one.  But still, I can take a small comfort from the knowledge that I am doing as I ought, that my thought patterns are serving me (and, by extension, K) well instead of poisoning me with impotent hatred.  I have changed so much since my time with RJ, and thankfully so.  I do not ever want to feel such rage against another person again.

My day-to-day existence is soaked with sadness, still, as I mourn what I've lost both in past and future.  But I am trying as hard as I can to find the small joys that exist all around me, even such simple things as boughs everywhere springing into verdancy, a classmate making me laugh, a solid and steady Tree Pose, a good book.

I do not yet know how much longer I will voluntarily stay here, but I do know that, for right now, I am managing.

Schwere

I have been muddling along.  Interspersed with moments of sunshine, optimism, and goodwill, are times of a heaviness and brokenness I cannot describe.  I long for a time when I can think about the adventures of the last year, the places I've been, the experiences I've had, the images burned forever into my mind's eye, without the physical sensation that my chest is cracking open.

I awoke this morning with the thought, Oh good, it's over, I made it, until I remembered that it wasn't over, it was tonight.  "It" is a Rammstein concert just west of the city that K and I were supposed to attend with his brother and sister-in-law.  I went with him to the last show, in December, and we had an amazing time.  I was with K as he bought the tickets for tonight's show, was there when he surprised his brother and sister-in-law with the knowledge that he had bought them tickets too, and had been eagerly looking forward to it for months; I had acquired and organized the band's entire discography on iTunes so that I could listen to them often and get myself very familiarized with the music.

At the December show, a band I really like, Combichrist, was opening for Rammstein.  Thanks to poor timing on our part, we got into the seating area of Madison Square Garden about an instant after Combichrist had left the stage.  I was bitterly disappointed.

Guess who's opening for Rammstein tonight, then?  And guess who's not going?

I had kind of expected K to invite me to the show tonight, regardless of what was happening between us.  While I didn't pay for anything, that was, after all, my ticket.  I don't know if he's just eating the cost of it or has found someone to replace me.  There is no ill will between us, just pain, so why would he deny me this?  It's just one more way he hurts me, whether he means to or not.  Our actions always have consequences, regardless of intentions.  I don't know if I would have accepted that offer from him if he had made it, but the kindness of such a gesture would have meant a great deal to me.  Truly, it was the least he could do.

I guess I just need to accept the loss of this amazing experience I should have been able to have tonight, just like I have to accept every other loss that is forced upon me.  I am doing my utmost not to harbor any bitterness against K over this and the many other ways he led me to believe that there was a future for us when he already knew there was not, but it is a struggle.  I cried, telling him I felt I was one mistake away from him abandoning me, and he told me that was not true.  I cried, physically unable to stand, from the thought of losing him, and he held me, saying I was not going to.  Mere weeks before he broke up with me, he was telling realtors during our open house expeditions that the house he was buying was going to be for both of us; when asked if we were going to be married, he replied, "Working on it."  Was he, by that time?  I think that it was around February when our fate was sealed and I had already lost him, although I did not know it then.  But surely he did, and he was buying us concert tickets and telling realtors about his plans and talking with me about what we would be doing later this year, and it was a lie.  All of it was a lie.  How that hurts.  If only I had known what was in store, what he was hiding in his heart.

I know I sound angry, and I suppose that I am.  After how close and serious our relationship had been, he couldn't even break up with me in person: it was over the phone.  Despite knowing of my suicidal intentions, he did nothing to ensure my safety, nor to follow up with me in the days following to see if I was alright, preferring instead to "disappear" for a time.  When informed of Mousie's passing and of the myriad other tragedies occurring in my family, his immediate response was to take issue with the admittedly awkward way I had prefaced the conversation, rather than to express sympathy and caring for all that I had been through since he'd left.  It's hard not to be angry when he is the sole reason why I am in so much pain, why my life has become borderline meaningless.  But I will not succumb to this anger.  I don't want to and I am not going to, but it is difficult, and I don't think he realizes that.  I think there are many things he does not realize.

I have begun countering any destructive emotions that arise by actively bringing to mind feelings of love, caring, sympathy, and well wishes for him -- all feelings that exist vibrantly within me still, despite what I have gone through.  He is again denying me happiness with the concert tonight, but I do genuinely hope he has a wonderful time, even if I need to be in one of my sunshine spots to realize that I feel this way.  I do want him to be happy; I want him to build and live a life where he feels stable, satisfied, fulfilled, and content.  The degree to which I care about him has not diminished even slightly in all of the time he has been in my life.  I think I will be ready soon to begin sending light to him during my daily meditations -- a task that will help heal me, as well.

Enjoy the concert for me tonight, K.

Losses

"Ted," a friend of mine since my first year of college, told me once that April is the worst month of the year, filled as it is with pain and losses.  She would know.  She is from Littleton, Colorado, and while she did not attend Columbine, she had many friends who did, and lost many of them.  As for me, I had my own experiences with April losses: my beloved cat Weezie had died April 19, 2000.  Weezie had been my constant companion for ten years; I picked her out at the town shelter only three months after my father passed away when I was six.

And now we come again to April, a month where K rapidly departed from my life, a month where LB is struggling severely with depression, a month where a grad school classmate I have befriended, "JR," is struggling with a personal tragedy of her own.  And now we have my cat, Mousie, who is in the end stages of renal failure and will be put to sleep tomorrow, by the same vet who cared for Weezie for so long.  "One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow."

Life has been passing along.  I do not cry each day anymore.  Last night was, I believe, the first night K did not come to me in my dreams.  In my dream, a young man I have never met in real life befriended me, flirted with me, made me feel special and wanted.  By the end of the dream, I had fallen into an easy rapport with him, and felt loved and protected.  When I awoke, feeling confused and an ache in my chest of experiencing another "loss," I realized that that dream served an important role for me: it allowed me to "try on" the concept of allowing another man to care for and about me, to let someone besides K into my heart.  It showed me, in such spectacularly realistic fashion that several times today I had to remind myself that I was still single, that when the time comes, I will be able to experience with someone else the closeness and love I felt with K.  That time is a ways off yet, but it has instilled a small bit of confidence in me that I will be able to recover from this pain and move on.

The moving on thing has caused me no small amount of grief.  Similar to what I will likely experience in the days to come, when I will feel guilty for smiling, as though I am dishonoring Mousie's memory in finding some small pleasure, I feel guilt at the thought of moving on.  Moving on seems to signal that I never cared for K at all, that my love for him was fleeting or shallow, that if I do not spend the rest of my life in mourning for what I have lost, then nothing I felt for him was real.  It's a destructive mindset, to be sure.  I believe that K wants me to be happy.  I believe that Mousie wants me to be happy.  When I am ready, I want to find another young man who will love and support me, share life with me, grow with me, grow old with me.  I still want that person to be K, but if he does not want that, then I have no choice but to let him go and wish him the best happiness life can offer.  He is and always will be very dear to me, priceless beyond all accounting, and I hope to the bottom of my heart that he will know nothing but joy and good health until the end of his days.  Even after everything, I know for sure that that is what he deserves.  He is a good man, the likes of which I will never meet again.

I have been meditating and practicing yoga with a fervor not seen since before I met K.  (These practices fell by the wayside once things with him became serious.)  For weeks now, I have meditated by lying in my bed, cozy under my blankets, and placing both palms over my heart.  As I breathe in, I feel light gathering in my hands.  As I breathe out, I let the light from my hands spill through my chest, like dye being fed into a glass of water with a dropper, and let the warmth and light surround my heart, nourishing and healing it.  My heart, you see, has been a sad, gasping, dying thing, black and lying lifelessly in a pool of blood.  K tore part of it away, and that part of it will never return: there is a gaping wound there now; there are many cuts and holes besides from the other losses I have endured.  My heart has not so much clung to life as watched the life ebb away, closing its eyes, awaiting death.  But death has not come, and I do not know why.  It is my job now to nurture my heart, give it strength, show it how to keep beating even when this big piece is now gone forever, held in K's hands, maybe tucked in his pocket, maybe sitting on a shelf to collect dust.  Amputees can perhaps learn to walk again; my heart can perhaps learn to carry on.  With this breathing, I felt the heat in my chest, except this time, it was a healing heat, not a destructive pain.  Every night I have meditated this way, laboring to bring color and life back to my wounded organ.  The cold grip of sorrow still holds court, but it will not always.  No; the light will conquer the darkness.  In time, I will have the strength to send my beams of light to K, to, perhaps, help him heal, too.  I do not know what he is experiencing right now, but I have nothing to lose in sending him my caring and love, even if it is not needed anymore or never was.  He, after all, will hold a piece of my heart unto the final end.

2010

In ten days, 2010 will draw to a close.  What a year it has been!  Developments which I could not possibly have foreseen in 2009, much less dared hope for, have come to pass.

As is natural at the end of a calendar year, I have been reflecting upon the events of 2010, and what the changes it wrought have meant to me.

At the most basic level, the passing of 2010 will push 2009 further into my past.  When I refer to the painful events of last year, I will no longer say "last year."  This in and of itself is liberating; I think I may have said "last year" more times in 2010 than I have in the rest of my life combined, in a seemingly endless circle of cross-referencing what has happened now with what happened then.

What happened then is over now, and has been for quite some time.  The life-altering events of last year -- nearly all of them revolving around my ex-boyfriend "RJ" and the dissolution of even the remnants of our friendship -- affect my life in many ways and will continue to do so for quite some time, but with every passing second, the influence of those events diminishes.  Although my path was diverted by the influence of the heartache and depression I experienced, I am forging my own path now, determining its direction independently.

If 2009 was a year of a broken heart, unending darkness, and a near-total loss of hope, 2010 was a year in which dreams were born or realized.  Through utter serendipity and probably the greatest stroke of luck I have ever been bestowed, I met a gentle, loving soul with whom I would be happy to be partnered for the rest of my days.  I also finally began planning a future in a new career; I have been unhappy, underpaid, and underutilized for five years in my current office job, and I at long last found myself ready for a change.  I found out yesterday that I was accepted into my chosen course of study at a local college, and will be pursuing a graduate degree beginning in a bit over a month.

I believe today, more than ever, in the common bit of wisdom about everything happening for a reason.  I believe now that I needed to struggle through 2009 in order to come out the other side, 2010.  I don't think I would have had the strength to initiate such a drastic change in my life at any other time, but now that I have gotten through 2009, I know that I can accomplish almost anything.  I don't think I would have had the maturity and wisdom to tend to my relationship with K as carefully as I have, but now that I have seen how terrible a bad relationship can be, I am able to truly appreciate who K is and what he means to me.

I still don't know what it was that stopped me from carrying out my suicide plans last year.  Fear of inflicting a loss on my mother and sister after we had all already experienced my father's unexpected death?  Wondering who could provide my cat, "Tabby," the same loving care as I could?  Considering the possibility that, perhaps, this too would pass?  It was probably a combination of these things.  And it is an understatement now to say that I'm glad I stuck around to see what the new year would bring.  It has brought healing, accomplishment, love, and hope for the future, things that taste all the sweeter now for how convinced I was that I would never taste them again.

There was always a glimmer of light nearby.  How wonderful that I held on to it in the darkness; how beautifully it shines now.

Namaste.