Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk

Phew.

This weekend was rough for me.  Really rough.

I had about a 24 hour melt-down.  

It was ugly, it was vicious, and it was so excruciating to go through, and even more excruciating to witness, I imagine.

I am both proud and ashamed of my various behaviors during that time period.  

Some things I would give myself a solid C (maybe even a few B-‘s, too) on.  On other things I failed; spectacularly.  I am struggling today (and yesterday evening) with how to not hate myself for my behavior, and how to completely forgive others for their behavior.

Obviously, I have been doing this long enough to know that I’m not really trying to forgive the behavior of others, because the behavior of others isn’t where the work is done.  I know this.  I know all the work is internal.  It’s perspective shifting.  The work is finding love, not losing anger.  I know this.  But today, the best I can do is reach for forgiveness, because the love feels too far out of reach.  For myself, for others whose actions I allowed to crush my fledgling confidence, but mostly for myself.

I said some things to my husband I shouldn’t have, because I couldn’t untangle the ball of pain I had inside from the day before.  A husband that I adore very deeply… and I can’t stop beating myself up for it.  I was acting like a wounded animal, snarling, feral, biting at anyone who came near, even if they were only trying to help me.  Yet he never backed up.  He never fled.  He never turned away from me, or the seething mass of pain and fury I had become.  And that is why I am broken inside today.

Yesterday, I saw unconditional love, and it was not within me, it was for me, and it broke me.

So far, what I have learned from this experience is:

1) Unless you live under a rock, life keeps happening to you, whether you’re ready or not.

2) The hardest person to love after they speak angry/hurt/frustrated/irritated words is yourself.

3) I have better control of my words & actions when I am experiencing emotional imbalance in public than in private. 

4)  I need to come up with a plan for the next time I begin to lose touch with myself.

5) Rigid control of my words & actions in public does not translate to ‘being in control of myself’, it only transforms into disastrous break-downs later.  All the shit I push down does come back up, and if I don’t come up with a system, I will struggle more than necessary for balance every single time.

6) I have the most amazing husband in the world (I already knew this one, but he keeps proving it over and over, so it’s worth repeating).

I know this isn’t my usual ‘voice’ here.  I try to share positive, uplifting, helpful, thoughtful, interesting, attempting to be funny (or at least entertaining) blog posts, and this one is a little flat and somewhat low-spirited, or so it seems to me, but more than anything, I want to be honest, authentic, raw… and that this post has in spades.

The work ebbs and flows.  You learn intellectually, then you learn through experience.  The experiences teach us where we still need to dig deeper, where the love we allow ourselves to feel for others (and ourselves) is still reliant upon the external conditions of that person, not the internal condition of ourselves.  If our connection with that part of us that is unconditional, and loves unconditionally, is weak or unstable, so will our love be.  So will we be.

The work is never done.  There will always be someone or something or some condition that we can love more fully, more openly, more unconditionally.  

And on that note, I’m off to meditate.