 There’s nothing as sure in life as death, yet it is one of the hardest things we tussle with. Regardless of what you believe, we all share the inevitability of facing life as we knew it without someone here who had a significant impact in our lives at some point or another.
Since I left the UK eleven years ago I have said silent goodbyes to two uncles, an aunt, an old school friend and, very recently, a great aunt. When my great aunt died it was – perhaps – in a way many of us picture to be an ideal exit. She was in her nineties, at home in bed (the first day in her life she hadn’t got up) and her immediate family all visited and said their goodbyes. When I sent my condolences to her son, I reflected on how bittersweet it must be to, on one hand, have the opportunity to say farewell, yet on the other to know it’s a final goodbye. The words I read long ago in a Sara Donati book about a fictional character, who had led a long and satisfying life came to mind. She had written a letter to her family conveying she was not in the least bit afraid of death, in fact she welcomed it in the way that one welcomes a good night’s sleep after a long day of hard work. But what about all the myriad of other scenarios? Our exit from the world comes in so many guises, and for most it is not a conscious choosing. If there is a period of knowing beforehand, it provides for the possibility of reconnecting with the wellbeing that is surely there. That requires becoming consciously aware of all that is locked within. When you are aware of this you can help yourself and others who are open to a journey of self discovery, one etched upon your physical bodies like a map to your emotional past. If you do not believe this will help, or are beyond caring, then it is of little value. Regardless, there always comes a time when we are done. Each exit is personal and each person makes a choice. There is no right or wrong in our choices, at some point we all surrender to going. And, as I have said, few are consciously aware that they are the ones in the driving seat. For my great aunt, I knew before xmas the time we had with her here was running out; she’d had a fall and it had thwarted her trademark independent style. While I jokingly cajoled her in her greetings card that I fully expected her to still be up and running by the time I eventually made it back to the UK for a visit, I knew there was little hope of that. Her time here was done and while I honour that, I will of course miss her. That is the long and short of it, it’s about how those of us left behind cope with that absence. From a pragmatic viewpoint, the more someone is in our day to day lives, the bigger the adjustment. But more than anything, it’s an emotional adjustment. From my standpoint, knowing no one is ever truly gone, and their positive attention and love is fixed upon us for the rest of our days, it’s still simply not the same as having them here in physical form. Even if the person had a significantly bad impact on our lives, people report their passing is neither as satisfying nor liberating as they had hoped. It’s a personal emotional journey of forgiveness. Eventually the “it’s not fair” feeling has to be released, or it will eat you up; literally. That is the irony for me, so few would disagree with the ups and downs of the grief cycle, yet see themselves as otherwise unattached or unaffected by their emotions from a physical standpoint. “Life does go on” was the thought that entered my head today as I drove past a street sign bathed in sunlight. The sun comes up, one day at a time, into a world in which your loved one (or otherwise) no longer exists. Whatever that person was to you, good or bad, needs honoured so that you are not enslaved to the memory of the emotions. You are still here, you are still breathing as the sun rises and sets, and so you still have choices about your life and the way you want to lead it. There is no hurry, saying goodbye is a process, a letting go that can be worse one day and better the next, before being horrible the day after. Denial is futile. Eventually – if you let it - pain fades, it comes to a quiet centre of stillness. Beyond that, more happy memories dominate. They give resonance to the hope of today, which is always that today will be a better day, a good day. You are here to have a good time, but it’s all relative, good can never feel so good when you have never known bad. Saying goodbye to someone means saying goodbye to a version of you that can no longer exist in the world, it creates space and allows for a different version to emerge. It’s your choice who that is, and you will only live your best life through a process of saying yes to more good times. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.
2 Comments
 My friend’s daughter recently graduated with a Masters degree, as I looked at the striking photo I felt goosebumps. Someone had captured her looking back over her shoulder, from which hung the most stunning (and befitting) graduation cape I’ve ever seen.
The cape, I’m guessing, was made exclusively with the feathers of native New Zealand birds; splendid white ones at the shoulders, with iridescent blue and green feathers cascading down her back. Immediately the Māori word mana sprang to mind. Mana is not something easily explained, but it can be felt. It is about an honour carried within ones soul. Despite her young age, and in the face of more than her fair share of challenges, she has begun to unpack who she is and there is a very wise and mature soul emerging. There have been times she wondered whether she could do it, I know, whether what she was doing was any good, but she has held firm in her desire to do this for herself; and more than succeeded. It’s such a beautiful thing to see. We each harbor within us gifts, talents, strengths and desires that the world needs. I’m not talking about grandiose gestures, though some will no doubt be here to make those, I’m talking about everyday ways of being in the world that demonstrate qualities of love, kindness, passion and upliftment to ourselves and those around us. Life here in the modern age can be hectic, chaotic and frenetic. In a world of ever increasing technological connectedness there is a yearning for deeper connection, a greater sense of self. As we move through early life we inevitably lose sight of the person within as children are generally made to conform to one extent or another to the expectations around them. But here you are now as an adult, now able to make your own choices. There is no longer any need for you to hold onto anything self-limiting you have come to believe about yourself or the world; truly. No exceptions. Are there people around you who are not honouring you in some way? That is a surefire sign that you are not honouring those things in yourself. When you look to the outside world to honour who you are, you are giving away both your power and honour. It starts within, you have to value and trust the dreams that you have, the gifts, talents and traits that remain largely hidden. Often we are far more encouraging of towards other people than to ourselves, but it’s time to be your own cheerleader. Trust that the world needs what you truly desire, it’s no accident that you are who you are. When you believe in yourself others believe in you too. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  “Resenting one or both of your parents for suffering (caused) is a completely normal and human reaction.” As I read these powerful words written by Lise Bourbeau, written in the context of repressed suffering that eats way like a cancer, literally manifesting decades later as a cancer, I wondered two things:
The first was why the role emotions play in our wellbeing is still so widely looked upon as psychobabble. The realization that our emotions don’t just sometimes play a role in our physical state, but rather our physical state is always a result of our emotional state was – for me – both obvious and potent as I recounted in What is Your Body Telling You. The second thing I wondered is why there is such a stigma attached to this issue of resenting our parents in adulthood. In society we accept it as normal in teenagers, but if this resentment is such a normal and human reaction, yet it causes such unseen damage in later life, why is it not accepted as a rite of passage that people accept and openly talk about? Looking at it from a child’s point of view, whether your parents are absent or present in your life, either way there is a high likelihood you will resent some aspect of that. If they are absent, particularly if they died, you may feel guilt for your pain and resentment. If they were very much alive and present in your life, there is also a very good chance that you will resent some aspect of who they were to you. Parents are – in effect – the gateway to a somewhat more limited form of existence than these young ones want to lead. Learning to live in a human body requires focus, and that requires making their world small enough at each stage to gain confidence and simultaneously making it large enough to allow them to fully express who they are in that moment. That is a tricky task for anyone to facilitate. Often we are driven in our own parenting by the things we resented (and the things we admired) about the way we were brought up, in an attempt to avoid having our children resent us. We want to be loved unconditionally yet often hold back our love in disapproval of our children's reactions at some point or another, if not as part of an adopted regime of discipline. Seeing resentment as the thanks you get for all your hard years of parenting isn’t attractive, but if instead we were to accept it as a natural and inevitable part of our child’s development into adulthood, helping them figure out who they are and what they do and don’t want in life, it would be more palatable. Then, who you are (in terms of the sum of your experiences and the resentments, ideas and beliefs you hold) can cause countless arguments between those co-parenting. And with your children’s unique blend of who they are, and an ever evolving social context, you are bound to trip up somewhere. Great teachers are emerging, like Mary Willow, but an average parent may only be vaguely aware (if at all) of the various stages of development their child is going through in the years up to young adulthood, never mind have a good grasp of their role each step of the way. As adults we either continue to carry our resentment around consciously, still berating our parent/s for who they are/what they did, or we just accept it as part of who we and they are and, every now and again, those emotions surface triggered by patterns playing out in our adult lives. The reason Lise Bourbeau’s words were so powerful, was the dawning of a realization of the damage it causes to stuff these emotions down. I remembered the story I recounted in an article last year, about forgiveness. The story was of a teacher who got her students to bring in potatoes. The task was to etch on each the name of the person or people who had wronged them and the hurt it had caused. Each student was then asked to put all their potatoes in a sack and carry it around for a week, it could sit beside them when they were eating or sleeping, but they had to carry it everywhere it went. This was simply an exercise in demonstrating the sheer burden of carrying all those negative emotions. The act of forgiveness does not mean you condone what took place; it is an act of kindness towards yourself, an act of self love. Certainly most people have emotional baggage of some sort about their upbringing. The reality is that our ‘sack’ is already pretty heavy by the time we are 8, and yet it’s a period in our life where we have the least amount of conscious memories. None the less, you will have an idea of the emotions in there as they will have attracted many many more examples to reinforce them throughout your life, accompanied by self-limiting thoughts that become beliefs. It seems that it would be useful to consider that is normal and healthy to face resentment from your children at some point. And, conversely, somewhere in your own emotional baggage are some things you might want to really look at rather than just carrying them around. So what do you resent your parents for? Once you bring things out into the light of the present day, the process of forgiveness can begin, your load will lighten and you will be free to live a life of wellbeing. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You.  I saw a short play this week, well, more of a narrated puppet show. It was a story of sacrifice, as the birds of New Zealand were asked who among them wanted to come to the forest floor to stop all the insects from destroying the trees. Of all the birds, our famous kiwi was the one who offered and so has (as this legend would have it), from that day, been a nocturnal forest dweller that no longer flies.
As I reflected on the story, a kindergarten play, I saw the analogy with our soul’s journey into this life. By soul I am meaning that part of you that drives you, it’s not a part of your physical being you can point to, more the source of the feelings and energy that flow through you. It is more than just the sum of your experiences in this life, it existed before you were born and it will exist after you die. When that energy isn’t giving its attention to the world it experiences through our physical body, it’s multidimensional and omnipresent, and it knows only instant gratification. It soars among all the energy that is, reveling in the joy and growth created from the expansion caused in the new desires born from the likes of you and I. We are the kiwi, we each gave up our wings to come to the forest floor. We exchanged our awareness of the bigger picture, for a view from our limited experiences here on earth. In doing so we created a point of focus that creates eternal expansion. Without the distraction of the wider horizon, we participate in world of focused contrast that gives rise to new desires each and every moment in time. These desires start as the desire to walk as others do, to talk as others do, to have the autonomy that others have. The desire to be, have and do more is what drives us. As we progress, we start to search for the meaning in all of it, and we start to climb the mountain, shedding some of the more limited notions we had from down there on the forest floor and progressively seeing more and more of the vista. Many camp out along the way, unable to shed the self limiting thoughts they have come to believe about themselves. Many are driven from a point of fear, false limitations, a sense of being unworthy. But for those who become more and more aware of their unhelpful self talk that no longer serves them (the limitations of a narrow focus) the load becomes lighter, the journey easier. There is irony in this sacrifice; it is both a learning and an unlearning in order to soar. To arrive knowing all this, then to focus into our bodies and forget in order to fully function and be here, then, only after the mastery of that, begins the undoing of limitation. Believing in oneself – the true self, the soul that wants to soar – is a right of passage. But energy is moving faster, there are more of us here. This creates more contrast, and – with that – more desire for a better way. Despair is your soul knocking, it cannot agree with the limitation you are feeling. It is soaring, seeing the bigger picture and it wants you to climb the mountain so you can see the solution your despair has given rise to. Despite the forgetting, the narrow focus in the beginnings of your life, your soul never forgets what it feels like to soar. It will drive you higher always, and the more you resist that feeling, the worse you feel. The more you embrace it, the more you will remember and the more you will let in of your best life. Knowing I’ve helped in some way through my writing means a lot - I’d love for you to like, comment on, or share these thoughts with others, or contact me directly at shona@shonakeachie.com, I’m always happy to help if I can. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and, as a special thank you, you will receive the link to my video 3 Steps to Becoming You. |
This is a two-step sign-up process, you will have to verify your subscription by clicking the link in the email you should receive after clicking this 'Subscribe' button. If you do not receive the email please check your Junk mail.
By signing up you will only receive emails from shonakeachie.com related to Shona's Blog and you can unsubscribe at any time, thank you. Please note if you are using the Google Chrome browser and want to subscribe to the RSS Feed you will first need to get an RSS plugin from the Chrome Store.
|
RSS Feed
Site powered by Weebly. Managed by iPage