Don’t run from your weakness

Don’t run from your weakness, you will only give it strength.

This quote touched my heart deeply when I read it in my daily meditation book on the subject Patience With Myself, this morning. It seems that like many people I can be loving and kind to others, but not always as loving and kind with myself, and at the moment, heading towards what I experience as a difficult time of year it is so important that I go gently with myself.

I’ve noticed that I’ve been feeling particularly sensitive and raw over the past few weeks. It has been a painful few years, I lost my sister around Easter, it was not only a sad loss but a blessed liberation for her soul, on one level. Her life was very challenging and difficult, confined as she was by the repercussions of a painful family history and a major trauma of her early thirties that lead through stroke, coma, partial paralysis, psychosis, separation and numerous challenges.

The aftermath of my sister’s breakdown in the early 1980’s as Pluto was passing through Scorpio, splintered and fragmented my extended family and in the aftermath of four painful years of tragic events, I lost my father over the Christmas period in 1984. He was diagnosed with cancer in November and dead by January 8.

It was in the early hours of Christmas morning that he was taken back to hospital following surgery to remove his stomach that went wrong, within just over two weeks he was gone, taken suddenly from us, no time to say a proper goodbye. His heart gave way during a procedure to perform a tracheoctomy, the process of inserting a tube in his throat to enable him to breathe following even further complications.

These painful events are now, of course, well in the past, but there are echoes over Christmas which often highlights the different aspects of our interconnections with those we have loved and lost.

It was four years ago that my last relationship broke up, following a separation over Christmas that evoked too much pain for my partner and brought to light old ghosts of Christmas past. Imprints of old leavings and experiences which replayed and over which we were both powerless due to the full weight of the historic past, were influencing our actions and reactions in ways, which were not obvious then, only became obvious in the light of hindsight and through the pain of processing the aftermath.

I am conscious, over this last week that there is a heavy weight of sadness around, a deep underground spring of watery feeling which threatens to rise up and flood the banks. Last night I received a call from my mother : she wanted me to go to a dinner with her and my brother and sister. It will be the only opportunity we have to gather together before Christmas. I didn’t want to go, I think that is the truth. I had to admit this truth to my mother who was, understandably disappointed. The sadness in her voice made me feel so sad. I told her how sorry I was for disappointing her.

Maybe it’s a sign of growth that I can allow her to have this disappointment and act anyway to take care of myself and do what I feel I need to do for myself. As I reflect on it, others have disappointed me this year too, I had to bear the pain of it and acknowledge it as a necessary part of my healing.

The flood of feeling I feel at Christmas and at most other times, does not meet with recognition in my family. So many times I have acted against my deepest instincts and been driven by the longing to have it affirmed launching myself into yet another painful encounter that leaves me crying in the bathroom alone.   It may not even be that way, but I know there is this pattern, when we get together, I will be the one carrying and expressing all of the feeling, it is just what happens. It’s a dynamic I am powerless over.

I feel deeply connected to my mother’s sadness and longing for us all to be together at a time of year that is so deeply painful for her, associated as it is with the loss of my father. I broke down in tears myself, as our conversation was ending.

To be honest I really struggled when I got off the phone.  I could then get very hard on myself and tell myself what I should be doing. But the truth is, that part of me wants the comfort of space and distance from the pain of it, so that I can be with the pain of it in a way that is ultimately more healing for me, this will bring me happiness, rather than more pain.

Maybe I am putting up defences. Maybe this time, with the changes we have all gone through during the year there will be a softening and a sharing of feeling. Maybe by saying “No” and not going, not participating I am putting a block on something. These are the kind of revolving thoughts I endure as I wrestle with the issue.

My inner voice today bid me reach out to someone to share the feelings, someone safe who would just listen and with whom I was free to express myself fully. I then opened my daily reader and read the reading that I opened with at the outset of this blog.

Today I am conscious that I need to be with the inner child in me who at times gets overwhelmed. I need to take her by the hand and give her support and let her know it is okay to feel sad, to have lots of unfulfilled longings, to center within and listen deeply to those, showing her the way to go. I need her to know that whatever happens I will not abandon her.

Tian Dayton’s reading helped me, today to understand this. She wrote

Today I will give myself the same kind of comfort I would extend to a hurt child, knowing the comfort will help me have the strength to forgive and move on. I will hold the child within me and give her love and encouragement. The simple act of holding, of letting the child within me lean into me, sob, hurts, adore and need without shutting it down will be enough.

It is not even that I feel the need to indulge deep feelings of pain but moreso that I need to acknowledge they exist. At the moment I feel fragile and tender. There is a sense of something new, vulnerable and small that is trying to emerge and birth its power.

I was conscious this morning as thundery showers encircled my home that Uranus is stationing to move forward soon. At 12 degrees of Aries in my eight house there is banking up of energy for forward movement and growth that is rumbling around. I feel it echoing deep within my body, along the energetic channels hitting my natal Neptune at 13 Scorpio in the third, sextiling all my Aquarian planets in the seventh house and trining my North Node and Leo ascendant upon which Jupiter is stationing too.

It is an energy that is calling me towards authenticity. It is an energy that is not easy to express in words, but at its heart I feel it whispering to me of the longing I have to be conscious, honest and free. To live as I am, as the child within me intended me to be.

Christ once said, it is through the child that we find our way to the kingdom of heaven. To me that kingdom represents authentic honest self hood that recognises its interconnection at a very deep level with every living thing. This morning I felt that interconnection as the thunder around me echoed deeply the thundering rumble of energy moving within me.

To live in this moment for me I guess means acknowledging what it is, even with all of its pain and difficulty, finding deep within that the answers for that moment which show me in the next instant the way to move forward.  There is no formula just the unfolding of consciousness and expression in this moment that contains within it all that is necessary and essential to our growth.  In feeling and being with my pain and weakness I find the way to move forward with the strength and courage I earned through being vulnerable.

Vulnerability, once accepted gives me permission to be human, to struggle, to be weak and scared at times.  It gives me the ability to acknowledge what is rather than deny it or remain locked in a painful struggle.  Acceptance then allows a release of energy that was previously buried and trapped.

As it struggles to emerge into the light, the new shoot is tender and weak.  It will take time to strengthen and it is okay just for this time to surround it with protection and care from the wild winds that blow.  Like that tender shoot I am a soul in process, struggling to emerge, to be free, of that weight of the past, of pain that traps me when it remains unexpressed, unacknowledged, unreleased.  Healing asks of me this liberation, this release.