Hello!
I’m (30m) going on a date tomorrow, which I am excited about, but also very anxious about. I’ve had a horrible pattern of failed relationships for various reasons. Some ended ugly, some ended civil, some ended and we still get together as friends. Still, my heart feels congested and bruised after so many heartbreaks. I feel broken and poisoned and ruined.
I don’t consider myself a witch, and I don’t usually think of myself as especially spiritual, but yesterday I felt especially nervous about a future relationship. Am I ready? Will I hurt them? Will they hurt me? Will I pass up the opportunity to find love with the kindest, softest, cutest, happiest person I’ve met? I thought about how I felt after the 20 years of me falling for people, and all that I’ve been through.
My friend who is a witch gave me some sage a while ago, so I decided to light the sage and walk in a circle in my apartment. I was improvising, but thought maybe I could do SOMETHING. ANYTHING.
I said the name of all of my exes out loud, with long pauses in between for me to reflect on the relationship, how I felt in the beginning, the middle, and the end of each one. Some I felt warmth remembering how kind they were to me. Some I felt gratitude to what they taught me. Some I cried because of the guilt of how I left them. Some I cried because of the memory of how they left me. The ones who were especially impactful I gave a full 10 minutes of silence and reflection. I said all the names of my partners going back to the initial most innocent “relationship” I had in 4th grade. I felt some relief, and felt better about my date as I was going into it without as much of the baggage that held me down before.
What are your thoughts? I really don’t know what I’m doing but I know I want to stop feeling the guilt and sadness of the people I loved. I am so lucky to have loved so many people, but also feel like I need to let go.
I’m Vajrayana, but have fond memories of the subreddit: such spiritual focus in living, such I value…
I’d say that it’s somewhat relentlessness of practice ( not identical to “consistency”, as erratic still produces results, just not as much as consistent, but it is keeping picking-up the practice again that counts most, in the long-term, if you see … the long-term average has to be positive, see? : )
that matters most…
So, make some practice for yourself, whether daily or weekly, not longer than 1/2-moon intervals is best, moon-ly is 2nd-best, & make it consistent that you breathe-out the damage, the harm ( see Taisha Abelar’s “Sweeping Breath” practice for a more-advanced version of this ), & you breathe-in pure clean sunshine, or LivingSpirit, or whatever it is you find makes your Soul whole, see?
One has to let-go, in order to fill-up with new meanings, right? ( that old Zen story about some Westerner going to the Zen-master, to ask lots of questions, the Zen-master poured tea for the guy, & just kept pouring, with the cup overflowing, & finally the guest burst-out “it’s full! it can’t hold any more!” … to which the Zen-master replied “as your mind is: you have to empty it out, to pour new stuff in”, or something like that )
Another thing which helps me is that now, finally, I’m understanding that one has to differentiate between the-personality/the-person on the 1 hand, vs the Continuum/Soul on the other hand, & one can have unconditional-love for the Continuum/Soul, which did induce lessons/realizations, without being entangled-up with the personality/person, just letting them go, & opposing them, if required ( all the evil-pushers in our world, e.g. )
Here’s another item, which took me decades to learn: ritual is required for unconscious mind to work-through its meaning.
A true master-of-inner-yoga doesn’t bother with ritual, it’s completely unnecessary.
However, someone whose mind is mostly-unconscious ( because life hasn’t yet grinded them through 0.6 or more of a century of “education” … I think 2-Saturn-orbits really is the basic-threshold for maturity, now … ), then ritual can be a means for getting one’s unconscious-mind to be engaging that kind of function, see?
So, e.g. “baptism” is just a ritual that is enacting a symbol-representation of what Souls do, when they immerse themselves in OceanOfAllPhenomena/Universes…
Souls do it, climbing “down Jacob’s Ladder”, until they experience their fundamental Soul-ignorance, then when they get fed-up with that condition’s result, they begin climbing “up Jacob’s Ladder”, until they “return home”, to their Origin, see?
The Christian “Prodigal Son” parable is also about Souls, just centering on an individual one, which climbs down “Jacob’s Ladder” & then later, when it turns from “the kingdom without” to “the kingdom within”, climbing up it, into inner-realization…
it’s all just symbol-representations, metaphors, & once the key is understood, you find that many of them are actually just different cultural-appearances on top of the same root-meaning…
Find the root-meaning you need your unconscious-mind doing, & make a ritual for getting it to engage that meaning, is the point of this bit…
You may find the books of Gottman, on relationships, to be useful in improving your life-process’s quality … you may find the 5 culture-levels identified in “Tribal Leadership”, by researchers Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright to get your life up a notch in both spirit & quality, & you may find the book “Immunity to Change”, on our unconscious-mind’s fighting-off of growing-up, a dysfunction-protection mechanism, & how to convince it to allow the growing-up to happen … by researchers Kegan & Lahey to give your life leverage…
Each of these I’d require all high-school students to at-least encounter, so as to give their lives better leverage for their own, autonomous, evolution, you know?
I wish you well, & hope that whatever leverage you need, you find…
maybe this is sufficient: LivingSpirit is ALWAYS offering healing-blessings, to ALL lives, see?
The problem isn’t that LivingSpirit “isn’t offering”, rather the problem is that we’re blocked-up, we default to locking/blocking our own hearts, & we then can’t find healing, when it’s being offered to us, endlessly, Universally, all the time…
So, all we really ought do, is simply stop blocking, get honest, & openly accept LivingSpirit’s continuously-offered healing, see?
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