Perhaps something that you made yourself, a letter or picture that symbolizes where you hope to move towards?

During this time of reconciliation work you mentioned I am reminded of the symbolism behind the Christmas tree.

The evergreen representing the promise that life continues even during the cold long nights of winter when all might seem lost. Winter a time to move inward, reflect, sleep, reconcile and restore our energies that, when the time is right, leads to spring.

We decorate the promises of the tree with lights and ornaments many of which represents those that have past and our fondest memories, some bitter sweet yet more meaningful because of it. The ornaments shining and reflecting in light revealing new perspectives.

Underneath the branches of the promise of the evergreen renewal and reflecting memories of hope we place our gifts. Gifts wrapped in paper so that we might wonder what possibility lies within. Perhaps the ritual reminding us that there are hidden gifts, new possibilities, a new birth… that are still to be discovered within ourselves and those we love.

Enjoy your Christmas and being together with those you care about in embracing all the imperfections of the season. That would be a great gift for anyone.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Peter.

It just occurred to me that my problem may be that I don’t understand the concept of “letting it go”. LOL

If you figure it out and could bottle it you would be a rich man.

What does Letting go mean and what would it look like. I ask myself those question daily.
Would it be forgetting? Sometimes I wish it was and that I’d wake up one day and magically be a different me which is really a wish to be someone other then me.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps in that moment between sleep and waking as consciousness of the sense of ‘I’ returns and we dress our ‘selves’ in our personas, expectations, fears, dreams… that I might just let go of the past and dress differently… but I don’t. Or if I do it’s in small ways.

How do I let go of the past? You don’t its past, you can’t undo it, you can’t step in the same river twice, there is nothing to hold onto.

What are your holding on to? Memory. Recalling a memory of the past is always the present

How do I let go of memory? Many people try to forget… drinking, drugs, sex….. but that method is not recommend.

How to come to terms with memory? Acceptance.

Each experience, those you might label as being bad or good has brought you to this point in space and time. You survived you are here. You are not living in denial, you made mistakes, you also had successes. Others have influenced you and you have influenced others some in ways you judge in positive ways some in negative. Good and bad both have pushed you into becoming.

Perhaps you begin to see that you are more than the sum of the memories you have of your experience and how you label them, just as others are more. Perhaps acceptance and letting go is being open to learning so that as you learn better you do better. What more can we ask of anyone? Of ourselves? Perhaps that is how we love ourselves and loving ourselves others. Maybe that is a place to start (and end)

Ravens sit on Odin’s/SELF shoulders. One is called ‘Thought’ the other is called ‘Memory’
Ravens are tricksters and co-creators of the world. We create our world though or thoughts and our Memories. Words and Memories Tricksters.

The universe/god/nature/life/SELF… demands growth and the Trickster plays the role of shaking things up, things are not as they seem, illusions, the mother bird that pushes chicks out of the nest.

Consciousness is limited in what it sees. To function the ‘I’ discards millions of bits of information every second to focus on just a few. Yet we assume that our memory of an experience is exactly as it was, even the why of others peoples intentions, and then use those memories to create the stories we live.

Accepting that we cannot know all the facts about why and how what happened a window opens to forgive ourselves when we got it wrong.

Perhaps forgiveness is letting go? Not a forgetting but a honest yes to what happened and how our experiences have influenced us, moving forward, learning better so we might do better and then the grace to allow others the same.

Recommend the book ‘When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships” by David Richo

My real deal right now is that whenever I try to do so, there is like a voice in my head saying “it’s all useless: you will die one day”. Sometimes, it strikes me while I do everyday things and totally stops me in my will.

I very much relate, you are not alone.

My experience has been that the car/self goes were the eyes go. If you’re driving on ice and start to lose control of the car and can’t take your eyes off the tree on the side of the road that you fear you’re going to hit. You are going to hit it. Professional drivers know that to avoid the crash they must look ahead to where they want to go, the body reactions, if they trust/let it, will do the rest.

My strategy has been to notice as soon as possible when I’m looking at such questions as “it’s all useless”, acknowledge it without labeling, and then look instead at where I want to go. It’s a practice and I’m not always successful however those moments don’t last as long

Have you read the book The Fault in Our Stars by John Green or seen the movie
When it comes to exploring thoughts on existential angst that you are experiencing it does a pretty good job.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Peter.

I very much recommend the following book.
Art of Forgiving: When You Need to Forgive and Don’t Know How by Lewis B. Smedes

A problem you face is that you can only imagine what you think the impact your ex_husband actions are having on him. Right now you’re telling yourself the story that his actions have had no consequences however that is not something you cannot know as consequences tend to show up unexpected ways.

We can become the stories we tell so be careful not to fall into a story of bitterness. The car goes where the eyes go so a when you notice yourself thinking about what your ex may or may not be experiencing, acknowledge it and set your gaze onto where you want to go.
It is a practice so no labeling self judgments.

If your ex’s does not deal with his karma/filters he will inevitable repeat the same experiences over and over again perhaps believing that a new relationship will fix things without him have to make any meaningful changes.

It is true that some people are blessed/cursed with no thought for self-reflection which may be the path your ex is on but I suspect is not the path that you are on. Self realization is a difficult process. I believe that consciousness is a result of a confrontation with the problem of opposites, our expectations of what should be good, what should be bad, what is fair…

In a way you are in this moment experience the tensions between fairness and injustice perhaps asking yourself the question (if unconsciously) what is relationship what does love have to do with it, what is love, what is my relationship to relationship and to love… all which can lead you to greater self-understanding and individuation. If your ex does not experience this tension he is unlikely to grow and that you might say might be labeled as a negative consequence if you believe growth is important. (Karma/life demands growth)

With regards to karma and being reborn because of our intentional bad actions
Labels like bad and good in Buddhism tend to disappear so I’m pretty sure karma is not about our concept of punishment or justice.
As for believing in reincarnation… I have no clue… however I do know that each breath we take is a death and rebirth, life living off of life, each moment a birth, death and resurrection two which we get to respond to with a yes or no. Yes to life as it is, or no. My own experience is that saying no only ends in more suffering. (the trick is saying yes to live as it is while still engaging in life and living your truths as you know them to be in the moment – not easy)

Your experience happened, it hurts, let it hurt, but also let it connect you to your authentic self.
I am sorry to say that in my experience time does not heal, forgiveness does not forget, forgiveness leans to say yes to the experience, to life, and then just maybe if you work at it to your authentic self to which your ex was a door to pass through

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Peter.

Worry can be addictive and though you might hate it your mind and body may have learned to crave it and craving it create it.
Worry can be the fear of not having control where we never have control. Life lives off life, birth and death are a part of life. To fear death, to fear this cycle, is to fear life and so to many people stop living.

Never lose the opportunity to worry about something now about what might happen in the future… If it never happens well at least we didn’t waist the opportunity to worry about…

Sounds silly right but that is what most of us do. We imaging a future of fear and loss and worry about it today.

The wisdom traditions tell us that the solution is to learn to live in the present. To appreciate the time you have with a loved one in the moment and avoid muddying the moment with fear of the future. This is easier said than done as by now you may have created a dependency on worry.

I think the first step is to acknowledge the addiction to worry and that the worry stories you tell yourself are ones that you wrote. Avoid making judgments of good or bad, right or wrong on that acknowledgment as that just feeds the worry. It just is. You worry about things that have not happened.

Worry and fear serve a purpose. These emotions are intended to get our attention. However once the issue at hand has your attention fear and worry are no longer helpful. Instead say thank you to fear and worry for pointing out the concern, you see the problem, and are doing x, y and z to address it… and in those situations where you have no influence over the concern work on acceptance.

Instead of remaining fixated on the fear of losing my grandmother I’m going to appreciate the preset movement that I have with my grandmother. I am only emotionally week because I tell myself I am emotionally week, I om working on telling myself a better story.

.
Give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as the wisdom traditions suggest,
This world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
Amen.

5 SIGNS YOU’RE ON THE HERO’S JOURNEY. http://www.rebellesociety.com/2013/08/15/5-signs-youre-on-the-heros-journey-2/

“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.” ~ Joseph Campbell

You won’t feel ready for it when it comes. No one does.

Castor doesn’t train heroes anymore. No, your call will come when you are folding the laundry, punching the time clock, sitting at your desk with stacks of paper in neat and organized piles. One day, when you are writing checks, the wind will blow through you, and you will wonder where that chill came from as you notice your windows are so safely shut, and the room is a comfortable seventy-five degrees. This is your warning.

For those among us who are prone to leaping off bridges just to feel the thrill of falling, your call may not feel like a call at all.

You might meet a tall dark stranger who extends to you a harmless invitation and find yourself suddenly hurdling through space- gleefully- while cosmic dragons hurl fire that whizzes past your ear, singeing your hair and giant spiders weave nets all around. Be careful out there.

Your call to adventure may come as a shriek in the stillness of the night while you lie awake ruminating about the rising waters, the secrets you keep, the way your lover turns away from you after sex. Or it might come as haunting and melodious pipe music you can only almost hear, being played by a nymph in the wild places of your dreamscape.

Your call might be a regal horn blown by the breath of a great angel through a million tree branches scraping against your window. Finally, if you’re truly destined for greatness, your call may not arrive until the skies catch fire, and set ablaze all the small comforts you’ve so meticulously collected, turning the house you were raised in to ash.

No matter how your call comes, it is the trumpet of your destiny. You will say that you have more important things to do: you are raising children, punching the clock, planning a vacation to escape from an oppressive life.

You will protest to the messenger. You will say he has confused you with someone else, that you’ve not a heroic bone in your whole body, that your Honda, your atrium, your sensible beige walls are who you really are- what you see is what you get- and you simply cannot accept his invitation right now. You’re too young. You’re too old. You’re not financially ready. You’re not emotionally ready. You’re blind. You’re deaf.

“But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found…. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” ~Joseph Campbell

It’s already too late. When you are called, no refusal, no denial, no sputtering rejection can stop it from beginning, so don’t go back to sleep.

1. The calling itself is your qualification.

“The real work of our lives is to become aware. And awakened. To answer the call.” ~Oprah Winfrey

You don’t feel qualified? Good. Neither does anyone else. In the ass-backward and meaningless world created by our collective insanity, you must qualify. You must qualify to be permitted to work, to be housed, to have status as a human being. If you are bat-shit crazy and poor, you are diagnosed with a thought-crime from the big book of The Healthy State’s Conformity Manual (fake book title- you know the one).

If you’re crazy- and you find a way to monetize it- you’re eccentric and brilliant, a sharp and creative mind (relative to the growth and return on your bank account, that is).

How strange, to give so much power away in a world that measures the value of a human life with numbers in a vast virtual databank. What is your life worth? Do the numbers add up?

Are you qualified to receive the right to live with dignity and purpose? Do you qualify for healthcare? A safe home in which to raise your child? Food? This is a system that we collectively- and literally- just made up. It is insane. It is meaningless. Only our agreement allows it to exist at all.

Underneath all your concessions, your hold-outs, your hold-ins, your thrashing, your frozenness lies something original, unique and profoundly real, truly alive, bursting with creative ecstasy.

If you have done everything right-or even if you haven’t — and you don’t know why it feels hollow, how you’ve become so tame, so stiff and gray and boring, like the color has been squeezed out of you, then your call has come right on time. Pick up. The phone. Fate knows you’re home. Don’t make her blow a tornado through your living room to get your attention.

2. Your life begins taking on magical or supernatural qualities.

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell others.” ~ Mary Oliver

Once you have been called it is not so far-fetched that you would begin to experience unusual phenomena. After all, you do not yet know what you are called to- what you will become could not be explained to you because it is not in your frame of reference.

Can you imagine a color that does not exist?

Even as you take your very first step, you are blind. It seems unfair to be asked to walk a path that you cannot see, but in exchange for your lack of sight, you shall be awarded vision. You will see with the eyes in your hands as you feel your way forward. You will peer into worlds that lay upon the dust under your physical feet; you will see the greater focus of existence and you will learn to let go your attachment to appearances.

With any luck at all, it will start small: a glimmer out of the corner of your eye, a strange encounter with an old woman who says the oddest thing you’d ever heard, the sense that you are not alone in an empty room. You will wish to brush these off as tricks of your clever mind, but failure to heed the secret knowledge of your gut will only result in more powerful demonstrations designed to dash the illusions under which you live to pieces.

If you think the chill rolling down your spine in the silence is eerie, just dare to ignore it.

If you insist on physical demonstration it will come, but great risks you take with this demand, whose form you cannot control. Do you really think you are ready to kneel before an apparition as solid in your perception as your own flesh? Do you really believe that you could withstand the light of your own being without being shattered to your humanity? Would you become a prophet or an empty shell housed in the nearest nuthouse?

You cannot answer these questions. You are too fragmented as yet to know what you are. We all are. If you do not think you are shattered, then you do not yet know even the most basic thing about your human condition. When finally you see yourself break, which may not become evident to you without great loss, only then have you begun to see what has happened to you in your sleep. This is the first hint to the true purpose of your journey.

3. You begin to lose your grip.

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present.” ~ Anais Nin

So tightly clenched have been your fists around what is left of your old life- of the pre-called self- that your fingertips have turned white, the joints in your knuckles ache, the ragged edges of your nails draw blood in half-moon shapes from the meaty bases of your palms.

Your old reality is now called into question. What was solid and true begins to warp and fade. The bedrock on which you built yourself is turning to dust beneath your feet, the walls on which you have hung photos of your dearest memories turn to ash before your eyes.

At every threshold you lose something: your shoe, your watch, your favorite negligée. Yesterday you needed these things; today the Universe teaches you that you don’t. You’re in a perpetual state of grief and wonder. In every mirror you will see yet another of your many faces. The days of being two-faced have ended as you discover, slowly, that you are everything that has ever been.

What a great and terrible responsibility that falls upon the awakening human. Ever more weary as you tread, you cannot return for you have lost your way in the vastness of yourself now.

Time, you find, moves in every direction. The alarm clock still rings, you still drink coffee, your body still sits in traffic, but your spirit is stretched across eternity. Everything looks the same, and yet, not at all.

Your skin becomes increasingly uncomfortable as you try to contain all that you are. You find you cannot stuff anymore in, and so now you must begin to sort through the storage of your eternal self and cast out what no longer seems valuable, what no longer seems true, what no longer seems real.

You no longer look with your eyes, but with your inner sight. You see all the world, all its devious systems, the way it lulls, the way it oppresses, the way it is designed against all truth. You have fallen for so many deceits. You can no longer trust anything you once knew. You begin to realize that this quest will claim your life, and one blink later…

4. The Abyss has taken hold.

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” ~Joseph Campbell

Lost and empty, there is no longer a road, only darkness all around. It breathes, it hisses and all lights go out. You no longer exist, and yet you are in pain. All but catatonic, you lie there in your sweat, your tears, in the blood spilling from your broken and hopeless heart.

You believe in nothing, in no one. You are sure your end is upon you; you wish for it to come swiftly and terribly. You can do nothing but wait for your heart to stop beating, and out of this long dark night, a distant, golden glimmer, and harp music calls you through the boundaries of worlds.

Finally, you’ve broken. Finally, all your defenses have been defeated. Finally, you have no choice but to see that all you have clung to is meaningless, that it could not save you. Finally, you have surrendered to the void.

“When there’s no sign of hope in the desert, so much hope still lives inside despair. Heart, don’t kill that hope…” ~ Rumi

You die.

You dream.

So many sights from a life now over: streamers and cupcakes, past due notices and pink slips, campfires and moonlight. Here, in the nothing you face your fears, no longer formless they rise as phantoms in the dark.

War weary, fightless, you watch them hang you and light you on fire, drag you through the dust by a rope around your neck on horseback, throw you from bridges, chop your head off on dusty cobblestone streets. You hear yourself screaming, through the long hallways of time. You hear yourself wailing from a cavern on the ocean floor. Your spirit has carried this pain since the first time you took form. You are sharing the womb with thousands of selves, frozen in the traumas of ages in human time.

You begin to realize what you have done. You begin to realize that your cleverness is not so clever after all. You start to see that your mis-creations never die, not even when you do. You see that you have forgotten, but your creations never did; they cannot. They are bound to you and you are bound by the laws you made for them.
You are ready now, to accept your undoing. You are ready to become a stem cell again. Formless. Helpless. You might become anything: a liver, a heart, a uterine lining. A star, a queen, a priestess. You’ve lost your will. You await instruction from the vast dark womb of the Mother.

5. You are ready to accept your transformation.

“The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can’t reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven… in the ponds broken off from the sky. . .” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The cacophony of all worlds falls silent as you cross the bridge, the only direction you can now go. Behind you there is no life. It’s funny how you glide now, swimming through the etheric soup, no longer hindered by your clumsy body, loaded down with heavy, dented armor, or bags of worthless trinkets from a world that no longer exists for you.

It is dark in the womb, but it is peaceful. You have made it to the temple. You lost everything along the way, even your identity, which no longer hinges on what you do for money, what you do for specific individuals, what kind of car you drive.

You are utterly empty and without will, you have come to realize that you cannot know what to be next and have finally let yourself go into the arms of the Great Mother, whose embrace is a soft golden cocoon where your emaciated self can finish safely disintegrating.

The caterpillar cannot imagine what it is to be a butterfly. The sperm cannot imagine what it is to be a human. And ever so slowly, you are being rebuilt. You are being made new.

You are going to be birthed one day, into a world you cannot yet fathom, into a life you did not know was possible. Where you have come from will seem like a dream, and your slate will be wiped clean by the hand of She who created you.

Though the home you now live in seems to get increasingly cramped and tight as you grow, you also have been given new ears and eyes, new limbs, a fresh and open heart, innocence. You can sense the excitement as you float, you can feel that a new dawn is now close.

You can hear their voices now, the voices of those who you are coming to save, to heal, to love into newness. You can hear them speak of you as the royalty whose arrival they eagerly await.

It takes some effort- the labor- it is uncomfortable and your new muscles, new lungs, new eyes work hard to adjust you as you squeeze through the same bridge you crossed as a tiny speck of pure potential all those long months ago, so you can emerge atoned, and blazing with soul.

“Everything changes when you start to emit your own frequency rather than absorbing the frequencies around you, when you start imprinting your intent on the universe rather than receiving an imprint from existence.” ~ Barbara Marciniak

You are no longer a slave, but a true and compassionate servant. You have no needs, only desires that burst into being by the power of the divine will you now are.

Your body, your brain, your singing heart exist only to embody God, as you, in a world that once seemed so scary, so dark, so dangerous. The dark armies are now like ant colonies.

They climb over your your big toe on their way to feed on the crumbs left behind by picnicking families, but they cannot see you, let alone harm you. Now, the dark cities where you were chased by monsters are the playground of creativity, mercy, joy, peace and happiness. Miracles are ordinary occurrences, and you give them away freely to everyone you meet. Your breath raises crystal cities, and your heart beat is the rhythm of the music that holds the universe together.
You are home again.

Then, the phone rings.

Pick it up.

I struggle to feel its truth.
Clinging on to a relationship that I know is not what I want and not good for me because I’m so afraid of being alone and am unsure if there is anyone better out there..

I firmly believe that we create what we fear. On the upside that also implies that we can create what we hope for, it’s just more difficult as it is the nature of fear to grab our attention, (And so intention), and once fear has our attention, it takes skill to look past it.

As long as you hold onto your fear of being alone and worry that something better “may or may not be out there” your relationships will always be at risk. Authenticity/nature/self/god demands that you to become and so you will find yourself recreating and reliving scenarios where you will be faced with this fear over and over again until you overcome it.