Nov 1: When you spend all your time crying in meditation

As you know, I’m in my 300hr at the moment and as part of it we did a virtual meditation retreat. I know. I literally would have bawked at this 2 months ago. But now that I’m basically a citizen of Zoom-land it didn’t seem that outrageous.

Anyhoo, I heard the outline and though “Fuck yeah. I’m going to blast so far off into the universe with my zenness I’ll come back to earth and think I’ve landed in Nirvana itself.

Welp. It didn’t quite happen that way.

I cried my eyes out for most of it. Old wounds ripped open with the bandaid I’d carefully stuck on, blown to smithereens. As I sat there with bulbous tears rolling down my face in a metta meditation wanting my heart to stop seeping all of the anxiety of my past self in the fear that some pour soul on the other end of the screen would catch it like an infection, I had a moment of realization.

The work doesn’t stop.

You may address a piece of yourself, acknowledge it and maybe even hug it with the strength of a mother bear but if you don’t continue to practice the self care, the self inquiry, the restoration and acceptance of the past self, how can your present self be happy. Not even happy, but content?

To get to where I’m going with this point… in the backarseways that I do, I’d like to remind you to be kind to yourself. In the US, it’s election season and God save us with the stress of it. Back home in Ireland (and my friends in the UK) who are in/ going into their second wave of lockdown, keep the chin up. In all of this external fire, remember that there is you. In all of your uniqueness.

Find time to write a love letter to yourself. Find time to turn off all of the devices and just think, or not think at all. Set some strong boundaries. Take a moment to come back to your own true home. Find time to continue or maybe just start the process of continuing your own work.