On Trust and Abandonment
Today I was planning on doing some energy work in the near future, so as I was sitting at my mundane job waiting for the phones to ring I decided I’d “check in” to the ethers and see what I needed to see beforehand. A little light meditation at work never hurt anyone, right? lol
What I found was surprising… Be forewarned, this will likely be another long read, like most of my musings, and possibly a bit graphic in places. Anyway, I checked in to the work I’m planning on doing, found my starting place for that task, then opened up to anything that might come through… things I might need to know in the moment. It occurred to me that I don’t do this near often enough – I get used to the barriers I put up and forget to be ‘open’ sometimes. It feels like coming home though, letting myself be open to other worlds… I could go on about that for a while, but I’ll try to stay on task here…. 😊
And as I was ‘wandering’, I became aware of a pain in my left shoulder, calling for my attention. I’ve had this pain this time since Midsummer or thereabouts, sometimes a tingling moving along my shoulder bone, sometimes a pain that echoes up through my neck, sometimes feeling like my whole left side is frozen and I can’t breathe. Sometimes it’s not pain, but pressure in my shoulders, numbness in both hands, a slight twinge if I don’t sit right. If I ignore it long enough, I notice I’m grinding my teeth, and there’s pressure on the nerves, and eventually migraines. Sometimes it goes away and I forget it’s there, then it pops up at the most inopportune time. Physically I'm positive it's pressure on the nerve in the neck, an echo of my lower back troubles. It has felt all this time that there's more to it though...
I’ve worked on it energy wise a few times over the last few months, never actually sitting with it but being aware while I’m driving, or getting ready to sleep – and it felt maybe like an attachment. Maybe I picked something up in my travels, here and/or other planes, maybe I inadvertently picked it up from someone else, or maybe someone left it there… It has to be foreign, right? I would call it to attention, take hold of what I could, and remove it. Send the energy off to be cleansed, burned, buried, whatever I was feeling at the moment… and the pain would go away. For a short time anyway, then pop back up when I wasn’t paying attention.
In a mindfulness practice, being present in the moment means being aware of your Self and the things around you at all times – knowing what you’re thinking, observing the things that are going on around you, acting instead of reacting, going with the flow so to speak. The main thing to remember in a mindfulness practice is that we are not always going to be in that flow, and to just bring yourself back when you notice that you’re off track. Right?! So I have to say, I have not been very mindful lately and I don’t know what I was thinking when this pain and fuzziness would pop up in my shoulder. I could however hazard a guess that at those times I was feeling “less than”.
So I was sitting there today, connected and listening, and my shoulder called for attention so I really looked this time. (You may want to skip this part – it wasn’t pretty.) The thing I saw was long, slimy, pulsing, black … almost looked like a slug but with tendrils. It curved all along the left side of my body, just on the inside curve of my ribs, tendrils curved around the ribs, the spine, down and around the organs, and I could feel it breathing.
(Okay, you can come back now 😊 ) My first thought of course was “attachment” – no wonder I never got rid of all of it with it intertwined like that! That’s sometimes what we learn in spiritual communities right – these things are not “us” but something to be wary of, get rid of immediately, someone or something is in my space… Is this always true though? I could feel the knee jerk reaction of revulsion – of needing an exorcism or some such immediately, but the thought/feeling stayed on the fringes of my awareness. Since it wasn't an overwhelming urge, what else is going on?
So what is this then? It didn’t ‘feel’ like an attachment – it didn’t seem to be foreign, and I wasn’t seeking to be rid of it. Was this mine then? So I asked it’s name. A barely whispered word floated across the back of my mind – rejection. And that did it, I was fully engaged, at work or not. It’s a fear of rejection, that’s the picture that came to mind. So while I’m listening in and observing it’s structure, I’m looking up on my phone lol – what is the correspondence between fear and the left side of the body? What can I learn in the mundane along with what I’m hearing in the ethers that will help me understand what I need to process … especially since it’s been so long since it started. (Time and space don’t truly exist outside of the human construct lol, but it does feel like a long time…)
The suggested search on the phone was “Fear of rejection vs fear of abandonment”, and that fully caught my attention. Is that what this creature of my own creation is hiding? About this time, the slug thing was clearly uncomfortable, looking for places to hide, but it no longer had anywhere to go, now that I could see it fully.
If you’re still with me, I’m almost to the point 😊 Thank you so much for hanging in there with me.
Abandonment. Such a strong word, that for me carries loss, pain, grief, fear, guilt, so many things tied up in just a few syllables. Where does it stem from? I remembered a reading I got one time at a fair, we were talking about my parents and the reader said “You have to forgive them for dying”. I cried then, for quite a while, but she was so very kind in the delivery that I didn’t feel the guilt I normally would have let through. I am very nearly in tears now, because it seems maybe I didn’t fully process those feelings then. It would be so easy to allow myself to be the victim in those situations – they left me. The anniversary of my mom’s passing was last week, 37 years ago… and even though Dad lived considerably longer it was still too early in my thinking. And I could take that personally – they left me and my family. Dad used to say, there are only two things certain in life, change and death. Everything that lives dies, and there is nothing we can do about that. So should I take it personally?
Which brought me to thoughts of my youngest daughter. She had only lived for a few weeks, hadn’t even gotten to where she could lift her head for long periods of time, and she was gone. Is that really abandonment though? These deaths were not the doing of those people, it is simply the natural order of things. They did not “choose” to leave. Maybe it was I who abandoned them. Maybe in telling my mom that I preferred to live with my dad, maybe in not showing up for my dad as much as he wanted, maybe not protecting my daughter as was my duty and privilege.. maybe all of that was me abandoning them… which brings in the guilt. Was it truly me abandoning them though, if I was doing the best I could with what I had at the time? I don’t know for sure…
And that leads to the years I checked out, when I wasn’t there for my family, and even though I didn’t consciously choose it it was still a choice – I hid from the world and in so doing abandoned them. The one regret that I will carry until the end of time is not spending more time engaged in their lives, and I truly hope that one day I can earn their forgiveness.
Which leads to the point of my story. These things are a part of life, as are the comings and goings of friends and family members over the years, not always with a good ending… None of those people, living or dead, who have left my life could be considered as “abandoning” me, if they were doing what they needed to do at that time. Abandonment is my perception of that, and underneath it all, I believe I abandoned myself.
I remembered the me from my teens and twenties who was loud and stood her ground, and I wonder where she went. I remembered the me from my late twenties and early thirties, who hid from the world. I thought of the late thirties and early forties, the me who is trying to do the best she can but keeps tripping herself up. And I wonder when was it I truly abandoned myself. I’ve written so many times about something I learned about me while processing and figuring myself out, and sometimes I wonder where those versions of me went too.
Is this a thing that happened all at once and I didn’t pay attention? Was it something that happened over years and I didn’t notice? Or didn’t want to notice? Don’t get me wrong, there are days when I know “I’m the shit” as they said way back in the 1900s LOL and I still can’t pass up the opportunity to admire myself in a reflective surface. And there are other days when I miss myself fiercely. And today I accidentally found me… buried in a slug along my left side, desperately trying to stay connected while simultaneously hiding from the fear of abandoning myself, causing myself pain when I get too far in my feels. There truly isn’t anyone to blame in this instance but me, right?!
The moral of the story – we give grace, understanding, and compassion to those around us when things don’t always go their way. We hold space when other people need room to learn and grow. We may walk away because we can no longer be a part of their fight, but wish them well (hopefully) as we part. We don’t always remember to be this same person with our Selves though. When things happen, and we break off that part of ourselves or hide it, we are abandoning that piece of who we are. It causes me pain, my perception of abandonment, so I’m going to tuck it away in the dark – and then that dark grows into a slug that truly causes me pain until I acknowledge it. And in the meantime affects much more of my life than I’m aware of at this time, I’m sure.
Inside the slug, I can feel it - a glimmer, a shiny spot, a part of a small child waiting to be remembered, pieces that want to be seen and recognized. It may be a bit of a journey, but I'm ready to unravel those tendrils and unveil these parts that I hid away. I was surprised to find them in that way, but so very grateful I did.
And for tonight, I wish my Self, and all of you, grace, compassion and understanding… strength and love … and above all, faith and trust in your Self. Trust doesn’t leave room for abandonment – it gives us the ability to keep going, to truly know ourselves, to know that you’ve got your back. 😊 My hope is that we all remember that these things are always available to us, and holding that space for your Self echoes out into everyone around as well. Maybe a part of the Golden Rule should be to “treat ourselves as we would like to be treated” and then “treat others as we would like to be treated”. Good night, my friends, may your dreams be peaceful. <3
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