I found the following meditations very helpful and enlightening when I read them a few years ago. When we are recovering on an emotional level it is likely that we will experience many ups and downs. I know I have less of the abyss like days than I had two years ago. When I have one of these days lately I do feel scared that I am regressing. I have heard it said that recovery is often three steps forward and two steps back, if we are doing work to process past experiences the feelings we can feel can be scary and intense. In the long run we need to accept them, so we can feel them understand them and let them pass through without keeping them lodged deep inside. We abort this healing process when our inner critic judges us when we have them or tells us we should not have them or they should not be happening to us. We need to let them move through us so we can move to a better place but this process takes a while and uses a lot of our emotional energy.
I hope the following mediations help some readers.
Accepting Mood Swings
Today I will not be down on myself if I seem to swing in my moods through my recovery process. Mood swings have been scary to me, so I use them as a way to judge (or misjudge) my health. I force myself to be in a stable good mood and then I feel I`m okay. As I re-experience old, repressed feelings, it is possible that I will feel deeply disoriented, angry, rageful or depressed and then two hours later almost high. This is not just because I can’t control my moods – I am opening myself to all that is going on with me. – I am not longer denying parts of myself so that I will fit into a designated constellation of roles. I am allowing what happening with me to happen to me.
I understand that my moods may swing in this life changing process.
Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.
Goethe
Natural Growth
Today I recognise that my bursts of growth are accompanied by backslides and I accept that as a natural learning pattern. When children have a learning explosion into talking, walking or whatever, they experience a minor regression. When I have a learning or growth explosion, I may experience a regression afterward. New behaviour and awareness stabilise with practice Today I will not take the regression to mean that growth was not genuine. I will understand that accompanying a large step forward is a small step backward. I will allow this to take place, trusting that my experience of growth will integrate naturally if I allow it to.
Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.
Ella Fitzgerald
Taken from : Meditations for Forgiving and Moving On, by Tian Dayton
Emerging From The Dark Night 