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Things Work Out

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Whatever you have going on in your life right now, if you are suffering or feeling heartbroken, I send you love.

My own experiences have taught me so much that my heart bursts open with compassion at the thought of your pain.

I attempted suicide and took an overdose in my twenties, early in my thirties found myself completely disorientated upon the discovery of unfaithfulness and the break up of the family to which I had given my all for more than ten years. In my forties, relationship heartbreak, and even very recently, in the last few days, an event that some might describe as traumatising.

I understand what it’s like to feel depressed, broken and lost, suicidal. At least, I understand my version of them…

Yet I have a deeper sense of love and peace than I’ve ever felt. A lightness and flow in life that, when I remember, (which is certainly not all the time!) reminds me of the three words in this picture, sent to me by a very dear friend a few years ago.

That doesn’t mean I don’t get upset, angry, or feel emotional pain. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel fear, occasionally a sense of apprehension, or even momentary bat-shit scared, even traumatised.

What it means is that I’m no longer attempting to avoid these experiences, at least not to the extent I may have done in my twenties.

You’ve probably seen it written a thousand times, it is our resisting the flow of life that prolongs our suffering. It looks to me that my attempts to avoid ‘bad’ experiences has me avoid ‘good’ ones too. We can’t numb ourself to fear and sadness without numbing ourselves to all life has to offer, including love and happiness.

What I see, time and time again, in myself and in many others, is an incredible resilience. However broken our dreams, however broken we feel, we have an incredible capacity to carry on and recover.

Surely recovering is the most badass thing that humans do!

Not much looks real to me nowadays, I’m increasingly seeing the made-up nature of everything in life. But this one thing, our resilience, looks very real to me, certainly more real than any suffering I have experienced, since, for the most part, I am still here and my suffering is not.

In the absence of our resistance to experiences, our innate ability to recover does it’s thing, whatever that is, and we get through, things work out, and very often we grow in ways we may not have without these experiences.

During a particularly tough time last year I was fortunate to have friends who were simply with me, loving me, without trying to change my experience, knowing that within me was the capacity to recover, naturally.

‘I know’ they told me, as I shared my pain.

And I could sense they did know, that they knew something I was simply not seeing at the time - things would change, how I felt would change, how I was seeing life would change, and there really was nothing I needed to do for that to happen.

Recovery was inevitable.

And one day I woke up and simply noticed, ‘Aha yes, I do feel different.’ I can’t tell you what I did because whatever it was, things changed, I recovered. Despite whatever I did.

Life itself seemed to take care of the ‘how.’

If we’re suffering all we need know is that however we feel and however things look right now, that can and invariably will change. How that change might look and feel, I can’t tell you, I just know it will.

Actually, we don’t even need to know this. It just happens.

Reflecting on the impermanence of absolutely everything, seeing the transient nature of even the most painful of questions such as ‘How on earth am I ever going to get through this?’ - all I know is that we can. Peace and love seems to be relentless in finding a way to come back through us even after the most harrowing and painful experiences.

And of course, such is our experience of life that when we are in the mire of it all, this can look like absolute bullshit. I get it.

So, whatever is going on in your life right now, particularly if it sucks, it’s painful, you wish with all your might it were different, I know. I know.

I love you. ❤️

(And irrespective of whether you believe it, things will work out.)
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