Natalie,

I’m sorry for your difficulties, and can understand why your tender light is flickering, fading. Sometimes when we are surrounded by stressful situations, vibrant emotions, and puzzles, our bodies become exhausted, and everything becomes even more difficult. So, not only do the moments we experience the difficulty drain us, but so do their echoes. Don’t despair, dear sister, there is always a path to joy. A few things came to heart as I read your words.

Consider that reading mindful words and spending time praying is a great start, but perhaps not as effective as other methods of growing a stronger light inside you. When we experience pressure from our situation, reading and praying can add more layers, more mental chatter. Instead, we can let all the chatter settle, the echoes settle. Most forms of self nurturing can help with this (such as taking a bath with candles and salts, walking alone in nature, listening to soft music), but the best I’ve found is loving kindness meditation. Buddha taught that metta practice (loving kindness) helps the mind become concentrated, peaceful. Said differently, metta meditation fuels our light very directly. This allows the shadows around us to dissipate, become less confusing, confounding. From that space, its easier to come up with a solution to our difficulties, because we have the inner strength to take it in and choose a response. When our light dims, we feel like a victim, bounced around by the situations around us. As we regrow our light, it has a way of cutting through the chaos directly, and our view becomes simple, resolved, smooth. Consider searching YouTube for “Sharon Salzburg guided metta meditation” if interested. Even a few times meditating in this way will surely bring a lot of relief, rekindle much light inside your chest.

When I sit with metta for you and your husband, for instance, it seems to me like he has some difficulty with his emotions, and you take them in, internalize them. That’s unnecessary! Imagine for a moment that you’re at the zoo, looking in the monkey cage. You see them screaming at each other, throwing poo, jumping up and down. Inside ourselves, detached from the monkey games, we see them without disturbance. Monkeys being monkeys. On their side, perhaps there is anger, but on our side, peaceful observance. Your husband is perhaps the same. He gets emotions, and starts ranting them out like a fool. Instead of sitting on a meditation cushion and abiding his emotions peacefully, he chooses a path of expressing and blaming and paranoia and so forth. Knocking down a bathroom door because he thinks a man is in there? How much pain must be inside him to fear such a thing? If it weren’t so tragic, so painful, it would almost seem like a slapstick comedy. For you though, he’s just being a monkey, has some “figuring out” to do.

As you two work through communication and trust through therapy, consider in the interim to view his outbursting like a loud stereo. You walk in the room, and here it is, pounding drums and screaming guitars. Competing with the sound, such as yelling back or shouting to stop just leaves you hoarse, scratchy, dim… and often they’ll just turn up the stereo to overwhelm our voice. Instead, the sounds can pass right by you, in one ear and out the other. The sounds are not yours, nothing you need to do with them, his. My teacher said to me (when I was with a woman that would rev up emotional whirlwinds almost daily) “have you ever just sat and not engaged the whirlwind? How long could it last if you just watched and breathed? If you calmly took her hand?”

All that being said, there is no need for your life to be an endurance trial. Consider that perhaps somewhere inside perhaps you think you deserve such a thing, such a man. You don’t, of course. As you self nurture, rekindle your light, perhaps you’ll find its just not worth it. Why try to dance with a porcupine? That’s between you and your heart, of course, but just remember that you are the guardian and shepherd of your tender light, and there is no greater treasure. Not a marriage, not a career, not a house competes with the magic and beauty of a heartsong flowing with joy and light.

With warmth,
Matt

Natalie and Francesca,

I cannot even imagine what you ladies must be going through – I read your posts and my heart sank. I dont have enough live experience yet to give you some words of advice (but Matt’s post is beautiful!) but I only wanted to send you warmth, peace and kindness your way. I hope you always know that you are NEVER deserving of this behaviour from anyone. I hope counselling helps the both of you (with your partners and individually) but please dont put yourself second – take care of yourself because you are unique and we need you in this world. You need you, let yourself heal, breath and learn to feel peace and love again.

Warmest hugs to both of you
Lily.