Grief in a pink cardigan

I awoke crying this morning and I was at the tail end of a dream.  I know it involves working to lay my grief to rest over Mum and her death and everything about the wounded feminine in our family, its just over a week until the first anniversary of Mum’s death and it was today my grandniece had her seizures last year which sparked all the underground trauma awakening

In the dream I was at a place with a person (a woman from the crematorium I think)  and we had one of my Mum’s favourite pink cardigans in a box tied up with a bow and I was begin asked to acknowledge the letting go.  I was coiling and uncoiling as I do when I wake up many days now trying to focus on my breath. My body feels like its a pool I could drown in, if I don’t work to build the life raft to float with gentle exercise and stretches to pump my lymphatic system and work with my heart energy. 

I live in constant fear of my breast cancer returning as I cannot seem to stop eating ice  cream and strawberries and cream at night.  Judith Orloff says in her book on empaths that often we reach for food when we are overwhelmed or need to process emotions  She recommends placing a meditation cushion in front of the fridge and meditating or connecting inwardly each time we feel the desire to eat for emotional reasons.  I may be worrying needlessly as other wise my diet is excellent, I don’t eat junk and my only other ‘vice’ is a weak cup of coffee everyday.

Anyway today I have found myself feeling the grief and crying deeply several times : driving to walk Jasper at our favourite spot as he looked up with his luminous puppy eyes, seeing so deeply into my aching soul and expressing concern. And then under the green trees at the swings on the way back from the oval we walk to as I considered the power of the dream image and contemplated all the complex entangled ins and outs of my relationship with my Mum and family and our complex inheritance.  

Today in bed I hugged myself and just cried and knew  I HAD DONE THE RIGHT THING coming back to Australia in 2001 even though it meant putting therapy on hold and my psychological astrology course too and ended up finishing my marriage.  I had the final years with my sister and Mum before they died and although another part of me is angry I didn’t get to individuate or disentangle from the psychic enmeshment sooner, I also know it was as it was meant to be AND I HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG in staying close and giving love even if at times it was not returned or I could not receive it due to psychological defences I did not even realise I was carrying.   I see WE ALL DO OUR BEST and it is only that approach that can ever give me peace in my life.

Scott has been in regular contact and giving me love all the time.  I still have my doubts as to if he is real or someone preying on a vulnerable soul.   I would rather help him to get free and if he doesn’t come home after the last lot of help that will be the end.  I may end up moving north to be closer to my older sister’s family who are the only ones who reach out to me. 

Sadly my niece did not want to get together after the party.  I invited her over and she said she would call back but did not.  But I also accept that too.  She finds the emotional side difficult too.  I know her astrology and so I see clearly how much she carries of the ancestral patterns and fights against.  She gets upset with her Dad because she can be like him at times and hates to see it.  She doesn’t really see deeper into his wound but then sometimes she sees it all with an alarming accuracy, gosh life is complex

In the end I believe life is really a journey of self discovery.  We can connect with others for a time but we can only ever be fully and deeply known by ourselves and even then we probably have all kinds of blind spots.  That said there are one or two rare souls who see and know us.  And nothing of this archetypal human experience is really all that strange once we come to know ourselves. 

Accepting that I am fundamentally alone somehow and also profoundly interconnected is part of the mysterious duality of the incarnate human experience.   At times I feel the most shattering aloneness, at others profound feelings of connection.  Life is dual, it really is, I see that more and more these days.  There are polarities in everything and as soon as we are born we partake of division from the soul to some degree and maybe for some of us the major quest is to find our way back. 

I was also thinking today how right it was I looked for the missing spirit in our family in alcohol which was a kind of spirit that luminated things while eventually clouding my relationships to myself and to others.  Sobriety has been a journey of trying to integrate things and understand how my own personal life and journey is both a continuation of a collective one as well as a journey to create my own destiny and path within it.   I lack adequate words at times, and I know dreams and the psyche can be so very powerful.  Many times I have found myself waking from dreams about either my mother or father crying to the depths of my soul.  When I first got sober in December 1993 Dad’s spirit flew into my dream and pierced my heart and I awoke crying.  My healing had begun and I was launching on a most profound ancestral healing journey.  It is far from over.  I am and always will be a soul in progress.