Phoenix Process

It's been a rollercoaster of a week. Down, up, down, up, mostly down but not in a lying-down-in-a-depressed-funk kinda way. More like a carry-the-angry-dark-cloud-around-with-you-while-you-do-your-stuff kind of funk. But I'm OK now, for the moment.

In the time I've been back, Mum has had the operation on her back to stabilise her spine and she is now 4 days out of hospital. The excruciating pain she was in was due to her vertebrae pressing down on the nerves. Not nice, not at all. But she is out now and slowly recovering. She is getting down now - depression is often due to repressed anger and I know she is angry, very angry. Angry that this has happened to her, angry at the doctors for not being able to fix it right away and she was put through a lot of pain "all for nothing", angry that this is stopping her from leading the life she wants to, however temporary that may be. She is holding tight onto that anger, not letting it go and suffering because of it. I know what happens to you when you hold onto anger. It sits inside and festers and boils and makes you miserable. And the people you love and care about the most bear the brunt of it. And I'm sure it's slowing her recovery because it keeps you in that dark place. This is not her fault, not by any stretch of anyone's imagination, but that doesn't change that it has happened and that we need to deal with it in the best way possible.

I hope she knows that she is not alone, for although we can't imagine the pain she went through, we want to help her in all our individual ways. I will call her and support my father in whatever way I can, my brother will cook for them (he's staying there because of his own dramas), my sister will help with housework, cooking and a thousand other things we'll never know about, my Dad will do doctor's appointments, shopping, cleaning and medicine and her friends will be there to take away the loneliness of long days spent slowly recovering.

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As to my own situation, well, you know it's easy to spout words but not always easy to follow through, so I've been re-reading a book called Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lesser. The author is a spiritual teacher and teaches that difficult circumstances and events pave the way for growth (that's putting it simply) - there is truth in the saying that 'what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger'. She describes the process as the Phoenix Process, after the mythical bird that dies in a burst of flames and then builds itself up again from the ashes. She says the only way to get through the hard stuff in life is to fully relinquish the resistance that we naturally have towards such events and experience them for exactly what they are. Once you've done that, only then are you able to pick yourself up again and rebuild yourself and your life - in essence you are a different person for having gone through what you have. It made sense, to me anyway, in the same way A New Earth did. The more we hate and fight our circumstances or the things that happen to us, the worse we make it for ourselves. Acceptance and non-resistance is the way to freedom from the anguish and suffering we create for ourselves.

The thing about the Phoenix Process is that it happens again and again, allowing us to learn more and more, about ourselves mostly and how we are with the world. I've seen ex, from a distance, go through his own 'stuff' - going out, drinking til he's passed out, trying new things, people and activities (to put it mildly). And now I think he's on the way up - but he has a long way to go. He's changed in many ways, he is not grateful for what he went through and he still doesn't take any responsibility for what happened between us.

For myself, I think the process of going down happened over a rather long time and I finally hit bottom just before I left in 07. Having finally accepted that my marriage had to end, I was able to make the decision to leave and then begin the very long business of salvage and repair. Though I'm much better now, I recognise that I still have a long way to go before I will feel completely at ease with myself and I know along the way, there'll be times when things will get tough. At those times I will resist and hate and desperately cling to what little control I have... and then it will get too much and I will let go. I will wallow for a while and feel and cry and get angry, but then it will pass. And thank the universe that it does.

We never like change. We all think that life should be easy and run smoothly. But it's just not like that - not at all. And I know you know that.

Cheers.