The Day My Buddha Burned - part ten

In retrospect

Without the inherent belief that my father was the be all and end all of my life, without the crashing of this pattern, without the void that was left in its place, there was no space for more. The cup must be partly empty to pour more into it. I needed to believe and to suffer the breaking of my illusion and to recover and discover what was really there, before the belief.

Conscious and unconscious awakening… the difference

Lovingly embracing consciousness (like a child)

The Day My Buddha Burned - part nine

With Every Loss There is a Gain

These Losses were giant foundation stones deeply embedded in the building of me. Their excavation left me capable of seeing clearer than I had before. And yet, at the same time, there were little subtle and invasive beliefs that surfaced through the years under different experiences. Some of them were quite painful to let go of, and some of them could be released by purely being aware of their existence.

One of the hardest sensations I had to let go of was the subtle feeling that my value of truth, holding truth as a beacon of light and assuming it was the highest goal of all, was only that- a value. That blindly holding onto Truth as the sword of light was not necessarily kind, considerate or of value to others. It was not a golden rule set in stone written down by God. It was indeed, after careful searching, only a value. A value that I didn’t even know I possessed until I suddenly saw the effects my insensitive insistence of truth was having around me.

I remember lying on the green banks of lake Mjosa and facing my truth and my path and realizing one had to go. I could not continue to live honestly if I held so tightly onto truth. And I allowed the value to drop from my body, and I cried again. I had thought it was me. I felt a part of my personality, what I had identified as myself, fall away into the earth. It was a death, again. A deep loss. And a great space. And freedom in that death.

It’s not what you look like…. Levels of awareness .. the need to express physically what you know in your mind…

The Day My Buddha Burned - part eight

The Loss of ‘The One’

Ever since I was a little girl, I, along with countless others, was trained to believe that there would be a ‘one’.  If you asked me straight to my face, I would have to say no, it’s not sane, I don’t believe that, and yet, in actual fact, when the situation arose, I have to say, I finally thought ‘ahh, now, here is the end of my search.’

Please remember at this point in time, that I am someone who at a relatively young age lost what she thought was her belief system, only to find that there were still beliefs to be lost. The angst of knowing better and yet being pulled along by a force so much stronger than I could bear mingled with every stage of grief.

It was love at first sight. I have never experienced it before and have never experienced it again. A certain knowing that he was ‘the one’. A figure so unlike what I might be attracted to, and yet a face known and recorded deep in my mind from a time past that I have no recollection of it. Yes, it felt like destiny.

After countless misunderstandings and a myriad of disappointments, I let him go to a barrage of tears and sudden aging.  Lines appeared where there had been none before. Skin sagged and for the first time in my life, I looked my age. But I prayed. I trusted the will of the Universe. I waited.

A year passed until I heard from him again. And this time, I felt the strong urge in my body that said we were destined to be together and at the same moment, it didn’t command me. I was not swayed by it. I was patient, watchful, and part of me was healthily indifferent. Non attached. It felt different than ever before. I was not a victim to the overpowering flow of feeling. I experienced it, but I was not it. It was a significant moment that I remember clearly. Being rooted in the observer.

And even after the words ‘I think I have misjudged you’ I did not flutter in hope. I saw clearly into the fear and confusion in his own mind and I knew that it was not to be. He called later with suspicion and his own delusion fully intact and I let my ‘the one’ go. I shed no tears. And indeed, it was a relief. It was another illusion that I had passed through, and this time I was getting the hang of it, understanding the feel of emotion in the body and its influence on the mind. I’d had time to absorb it all and learn from it, and to repeat the experience from a different foundation. 

The Day My Buddha Burned - part seven

Integration

It seems that I didn’t truly die. The old ideas, the old me slowly came back and reformed about the body I was in. I became a ‘me’ again. I  never truly believed the stories, as I did before this grand awakening experience, but I have been blinded at times by the power of my patterns.

After the first initial break I started the long slow work of digging up the foundation stones of what I believed I was. I worked arduously, vigilantly and with continual dedication. I faced loss after loss. I held moments of clarity so bright it felt as though there was no going back, and then  finding myself suddenly  tripping on another layer of stone work a little deeper than the one before. Very well then. The sun does not rise all at once. It takes it’s time.

(And even this, ‘it takes time’ is a belief that needs careful scrutiny and is addressed accordingly in Myss’s Defy Gravity.)

I was 14 when I was left with my grandparents. I saw children as a burden. I saw them as annoying, cloying creatures that ate into your ‘real’ time. I certainly was not bought up to think of myself as a mother and I was not a female who was interested in children in any way shape or form.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was pregnant! At 28 I looked at the plastic stick with the blue markings and straight into the eyes of Responsibility and said I do. From that moment forward, I found myself wrapped in duty towards my unborn child, regardless of what those responsibilities meant to myself. I turned to my partner of three years and committed myself to a ‘family’ with all that it meant to me.

You know what is coming. The loss of my ideals. The second great crash of my belief system, after the loss of my father, was the loss of the ‘ideal family’.  I promised myself that no child of mine would grow up like I did. There wouldn’t be lies, secrets, strange rules, drugs, instability or confusion. There would be love, support, two stable parents, honesty, hugs and more ‘I love you’s’ than a child could count.

Before my son’s second birthday I was a single working mother in a foreign country. My son was handed between the kindergarten, a baby sitter and the Japanese family I lived beside. I came home one day to my son speaking Japanese better than I could and calling the woman of the house grandmother and I realized, perhaps erroneously, that I needed to get the hell out of there. I didn’t know the smallest thing about my son. I was too busy feeling depressed, alone, victimised and confused. I was suffering the death blow to my family values. The ideal family was pure fiction inside of my head. What I had was exactly what I didn’t want. And I was still alive and thriving and in retrospect, better off than I had been before. I had support, money and care for my child. But I couldn’t see it at all. I was only feeling the death toll of another belief system.

The father did not exist.

The family did not exist. 

And I was soon to find out, ‘the one’ did not exist.

The Day My Buddha Burned - part six

This is part of a novella. You can go straight to the beginning here, or go back to the previous post here. 

Loss of the belief that there was no God

Journey of the Magi ts eliot

One of the first thoughts that entered my head was but, how am I going to tell my mother?

We were brought up atheists. My family laughed at God and made bad Jesus jokes. People who ‘believed’, people who went to Church, people who changed their behaviour to comply with religious beliefs were all subject to ridicule for their blatant stupidity.

And here I was, suddenly, with no rational means to explain what had happened to me, what I felt and saw, what shifted inside of me, and what it meant to my life. I lost all connection to people around me who thought in the old way. I lost connection to the old ideas I had. There was no way to follow back along the tracks when the storm had utterly destroyed them in its wake.

I lost interest in the things I used to be interested in. I didn’t care for the music I used to like. I stopped what little interest in fashion I had. I cared nothing for my hair or face. I was only interested in discovering a way to fit back into society with the experience that I had had.  I lost contact points with everyone around me. I was anchor-less and felt I had no guidance. I was not mature or knowledgeable or confident enough dwell with all that I had. My mind had already taken over and I was reborn.

I was 21, my life wiped away in a flash, and I had no purpose whatsoever.  But there was God and the existence of the All in all things and that was that. And for a very short time, that was enough.