Learning To Leave Well Enough Alone

 

 

Once the pain of an ended friendship ebbs, you still have to remember the WHY of it all.  There will be times you have a secret wish to have your say, to make it right, to give them a chance to make it right.  Don’t.  If the cut was really deep, you cannot erase the scar.  There can be so much emotional baggage connected to the friendship, depending on the length of time as well, and you can find yourself hauling an extra load… compassion… even though they may not have shown it to you.  It depends, as well, if they are narcissistic and waiting for an apology from such will never happen.  Remember to have compassion for yourself and remake a solid resolution not to ever allow them back in your life to cause such pain again. 

It can be baffling, shocking, wounding, when you realize who they really were, what they really were, in the decades you may have known them…or thought you knew them.  Somehow we may ignore the red flags.  Later, you learn the lesson from it all.  You realize you wanted to preserve the friendship and overlooked those areas that should have warned you that such could happen.  This can leave you numb, angry, disappointed, truly saddened, and questioning who YOU really are.  How could you have drawn such to your life so deeply?  How could you not see the danger in over-sharing, as friends tend to do?  How could you not know they were not trustworthy?  This can spiral down to leaving you with severely hampered abilities to develop new friendships.  You can become wary, isolated, not trusting self in choice of friends.   But, if you really look at the friendship, after it has walked away, you can gain peace in understanding the complexity of relationships, whether they apologize, give you your say, or not.

Beware the friendship that has no clear boundaries and you sense needing to be wary of them.

Beware the friendship that shows a proclivity to NOT choose you, not celebrate you, and who tends to bring on a sense of competition.

Beware the friendship that requires you to put in time, effort, and there is a sense of needing to fix them…and that is a one-way neediness in them.

Beware the friendship that needs to fix YOU. That is negative towards you in some way, and you feel a sense of needing to defend yourself.

Beware the toxic friendship that requires more of you, that you sense a need to hide things from, that they do not celebrate with you but find negative things to insert into the friendship.

If you are grieving the loss of a friendship, know that you need to really be aware of the feelings that grief may cover.  Examine the relationship, deeply, until you get a sense of shared responsibility in the ending of the relationship.  No blame examination, simply understanding the actions and reactions that led to the ending. 

Take all the time and space required for you to understand why the relationship ended.  Do not be drawn back in to have the final word.

Everyone comes into our lives for a reason.  Seek out the lesson in the ending. 

Lastly, block and remove yourself from contact by them to you or you to them.  No ghosting, no making the loss part of your story and/or identity.  Close the door and walk away, do not look back further than understanding how it could have needed. 

Do not recall and circle round the final time over and over in your head.  Let the awareness come with time.   Bless your heart, bless your own heart, with the knowledge that many relationships will end… most without such drama.  Settle in and allow the lesson to become clearer.  Looking from afar can bring such great insights.  When you ask for an answer, be prepared to be patient until the answer comes.  Forgive yourself even if you can not ask for forgiveness from them.  We are all human and some friendships are not meant for forever. 

Hold on to the ones in which you celebrate each other, nurture each other, are compassionate, patient and tolerant of each other’s humanness.

©Carol Desjarlais 3.09.24

 

Pluto Reigns In The Storm Before Dawning

 

 

 

Pluto is the smallest, furthest planet that, after 220 years, has come to cause tremendous transformation in our lives.  And we will feel it in many diverse ways:  Physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. 

I wondered why I have been so clumsy, tripping over things, dropping things, spilling things…making myself a huge mess to clean up.  After my brain bleed in 1982, I did such things.  In fact, I could do triple gainers over desks and garbage cans.  I had a student, at the time, who could do the same and within a year we had both shown what tripping and doing triple gainers were.  Our clumsiness was pure cause for laughter amongst all.  I am like that again.  In fact, just a couple of months ago, The Bee Man turned and knocked me flying into the gate, breaking it, knocking down part of the fence and landed in the largest rocks I have in the little garden.  It took me a couple of months to have the twisted back stop aching.  Seriously, I am such a clutz.

Pluto’s influence reigns with high passions, causes us to question traditions and structures.  We sense rebellion and causes us to grow with progressively strengthening energy.  Pluto is so much a cause of change and transformation, causing us to dig deep into the taboos of our life, for us to explore endings, death, rebirth and our own transformation through this. 

2023 will forever be “The Year That JanaDee Died”.  Yes, right after she died, we went on a cruise to Alaska.  Yes, we went to Yuma and Mexico before Christmas.  Those are a blur of background to my immense grief.  As I grieved, alone, I felt a change happen in me.  An acceptance.  A surrender.  I awaited her visitation in a dream to tell me she has healed.  It has happened…she walked into a room where I was.  I was startled and fearful of what she would do next.  She had that glorious smile of hers, she laughed with that evocative giggle, she shone.  She was happy, finally, and she moved towards me, with great love and I felt her asking for me to forgive her.  I wakened the moment I felt myself tell her I did, of course.  Not all change is negative, but it will be powerful nonetheless. 

Pluto, the bringer of change, will bring dreams and thoughts that are deeply embedded in our psyche.  It will take this delving into the deep, dark, recesses of memory, for true transition to happen.  It will be unpleasant as we all have that deep dark space within where all or fears, sorrow, and anger reside along with experiences in life that brought such to us. We will find ourselves turning to mew ways to ease the suffering that negative thoughts can bring us.  Pluto brings necessary change to us to prepare us for the future.  Pluto’s influence is , again, intense and passionate so we may feel like life is harsh.  Expect a transformation to a better person, a deeper, more passionate, more empathetic person.  A complete breakdown of the known, the comfortable, the space of peace in our lives will feel, betimes, like a festering boil just before it breaks and there is relief. 

Once we get through to September, Pluto’s influence will wane.  We will come out of it all with a new sense of self, of our bravery, of our authenticity, and we will be positive encouragement for those around us.  We will thrive, finally, thrive and we will have a new, strong, sense of empowerment to do greater and good things.     

May we be strong, courageous and resilient during this time of tough love by the planet Pluto.  Emotional turmoil will make us more able to connect with others in a deep emotional way we have not known before. This time of chaotic change, take advantage of the heightened passionate response in our relationships.  When raising my kids, I always told them to love one another because one day the whole world might hate them and they would need each other. I have heard my children tell their children the same.  Perhaps this is that time.  It will be a time for us to make sure we build strong relationships, strong boundaries; know and live our values, know and live our beliefs.  We will be tested.  Make sure you and yours bond strong and hold strong.

©Carol Desjarlais 3.5.24  

That Guilt Hormone

 

 

Some of us are blessed with great guilt hormones.  There was a time in my life where I was nearly consumed with guilt for being alive.  Man, those were hard days and weeks..., yes, years.  My guilt hormones were turned on by a religion I grew up with/in that had “guilt” as a main factor.  I was not sweet, nor mindful, nor quietly sitting with hands folded in my lap.  I was not that girl.  I was not that woman.  To be alive was to be guilty, was deemed “not enough”, and this cultural, social, disrespect, that flooded my whole being, I had to work very hard to shed off myself.  It was terrifying.  I had to turn my back on a “God” who was, to me, a monster out to get us no matter how ‘good’ we tried to be.  I was guilty for merely being born.  The struggle to break free meant to go against every fibre of my being that had been conditioned.  It meant I could lose everything, including my children.  My children were my only thing in life worth living for.  In the ‘turning my back and walking away’, I took the chance that was a huge spiritual chance.  In the moment that I broke free, it was as if a huge mountain had been lifted off my soul.  I suddenly knew that I was in charge of my soul and needed no mediator between me and my Creator.  I dropped the word “God” as it was attached to my soul according to the conditioning.  I used “Creator” so as not to identify with that monster God.  Don’t think there was not sorrow.  There was.  And it is not like I have been able to completely unburden myself of the conditioning.  I have children who now see their mother as “the Other”, “the one “who could keep them from reaching the highest kingdom of God.  It caused, and causes still, them great sorrow, too.  But I had to save myself, save my own soul.  There is such peace, most times, in knowing I have a personal relationship with my Creator. If I am immersed with those of that conditioning... and, being a mother means there are times I have to be, I sense that guilt trying to winnow its way back into my psyche.   It takes great courage and being very Present, to not let it have me drown in that guilt again.  I do not let myself be bitter about it, angry and spiteful about it.  I have made peace with it as best I can.  I know what bravery and courage it took to be in this soulful spiritual space.  Once I thought I could not afford to walk away from it.  Today, I know I can not afford to let it draw me back in.  I am still learning to tamp down the guilt hormone.

 

The guilt hormone is cortisol.  I had not thought of this before.  Cortisol is a stress hormone that leads us to freeze, flight, or fight reactions.  It is an ancient reaction that kept our ancestors alive in perilous times.  Some of us get to a place where we feel persistent guilt over past things we cannot change.   We carry guilt like a heavy backpack of reasons we are ‘not enough’, not ‘good’ enough …never were, never can be.  It becomes our reason not to take responsibility, in the Present.  We stop feeling normal remorse and simply move it to that space of shame and do not have it move us to make things right as soon as possible.   Rather than learn from a mistake, we allow it to be a pronouncement of another reason we are not enough, not good enough, and we do not move forward with a positive lesson learned.  We refuse to move forward because it feels easier not to.  Our sense of self is crippled.  We use every ‘evidence’ of our failure to meet the mark as further pronouncement of what we come to see ourself as:  a failure.  We may have forgotten how to ‘pull up our big girl panties’ and make things right as best we can so that we can live out being a better person tomorrow than we were today.  Shame is part of the guilt response…a normal response.  What is not normal is that we become satisfied with it and guilt becomes the focal point of every decision, every reaction to every day life, and we would rather feel guilt than take responsibility and cleanse ourself by restitution and return to a knowing that we have done the best we can with the skills we have.  That does not mean that we accept that level of maturity. We are meant to be lifelong learners.  Every misstep is an opportunity to learn and grow.  I figure I have spent a lot of my time with ‘root rot’. We can become stagnant.  We almost feel our low self-acceptance is precious.  It becomes more precious than the cleansing feeling of making restitution and rising above our human frailties.  I do not want that any more.  I refuse to deny the lessons offered me.  I want peace in my life and I will never have that if I allow myself to live in constant shame…for everything… for even being born.  It is an insidious thing.  It is lying, at night, trying to go to sleep, but have the judgement of Peter at his pearly gates reading off a tome of our daily errors.    We allow it.  We ARE in charge of how we see ourselves. It matters not what others think of us.  To be happy, purposeful, serene souls, we have to know what we believe is good and right and productive.  If we deal with opinion of others as witness to who we are, we are way off the mark.  We are not who others think of us.  We are what we think of ourselves.  We choose to be positive or negative.  We choose to let guilt and shame be the center of what we think of ourselves sand we will act accordingly to all be evidence that we choose to accept.  Refuse it. 

We are meant to be joyful beings.  That tired response: “God doesn’t make garbage” really is true.  We are here as answer to some ancient ancestor’s prayers.  I am sacred.  I am necessary.  I matter as a part of creation.  I choose to think of myself in this light.   You choose that too.

 

©Carol Desjarlais 3.4.24