You practice the skills, and you take your chances. It's still true that, in the middle of the night or any time during the day that there's a reminder, or any time at all, randomly, you can be thrown back into what feels like the exact same mire you were in months previously. Or an even worse storm of pain.
whatever. It's not going to happen on your time. And the feeling of being wronged and being caught in the pain of that experience might get worse before it gets better, no matter what you do. This is just the way it works.
It's maddening to have the expectation that progress toward liberation from the feeling of having been victimized will be in a tidy straight line from imprisoned to free.
The only thing we can do sometimes is keep showing up. In fact, passages occur where all of the skills and insight seem utterly ineffectual and as if it is all just a distraction to keep us occupied while time passes and we forget.
They also heal who only stand and wait.
ReplyDeleteWait
Galway Kinnell, 1927 - 2014
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.