On Saturday night, the last night together at the annual Breitenbush retreat, we dance.
People have been deeply examining their thinking since Wednesday….
….walking through the memories, experiences, or relationships with others they’ve found hopeless, depressing, frightening or sad.
It’s courageous work.
I’m sometimes amazed, literally astonished, that people show up to investigate something painful they’d rather not look at. The death of a husband, the heroin addiction of a son, a painful divorce, needing to lay off people at the company, having insomnia for years, a mother’s death very early in life.
All these situations came to these woods at Breitenbush.
And The Work, the Four Questions plus Turnarounds, was all that was needed to open people to other alternatives and possibilities, to feeling love and self-compassion.
Not just love for the self, but love and acceptance for others. Even the ones who hurt us.
What many beliefs boil down to, suggests Byron Katie in Loving What is, is the deep conviction that I shouldn’t have had to experience something, and it shouldn’t have happened.
“I want an alternative life, where I don’t have to experience THAT (insert rough experience)”.
You might think….
….BUT….
….I really DO think my life would be better, and I’d be a better person, if I didn’t have to go through “x”. That experience made things worse than they could have been. It was a waste of time!
I’d be further along by now, if it hadn’t have happened. More confident. More of service. Calmer.
I wouldn’t have had to spend all those years in therapy. I could have just lived a more “normal” life. I might have a better condition NOW, if I hadn’t experienced that other thing THEN.
I want a do-over!!
(Remember yelling this when you were a kid playing a card game, or trying to shoot baskets, or trying to hit the bullseye, or making a batch of cookies and forgetting the baking soda?)
But can you absolutely know this is true, you want a do-over of some part of your life?
For me, I’ve thought often that much of my life from age 18 through 30 I could do without.
Visions come to mind of dropping out of college because I was too sick with addiction, bulimia, borderline anorexia, compulsive over-exercising, too anxiety-riddled, smoking cigarettes, occasionally over-drinking, isolated, and disassociated. Mind full of violent thoughts like “you’re such an idiot” or “what a fool you are” or “there’s something wrong with you” that covered up the ability to look more closely at my beliefs about what I feared. I lost my dad in that time period, too.
Is it true I want a do-over of that decade beginning with going to college?
Whew. It sure does seem like it would be better if I hadn’t dropped out of an awesome school, returned home to my parents, spent thousands of their dollars on therapy, struggled becoming a grown up, or lived with a tortured mind.
Can I absolutely know it’s true though?
No.
As one woman at the Breitenbush retreat discovered, unexpectedly, about her difficult past with her father….
….without her experience with her dad, she might still be living in the suburbs where she grew up, living an uncreative, boring, unimaginative, dissatisfying life. Instead, she moved across the entire country, married someone with opposite traits to dad, and raised two amazing kids.
I felt the same for my experience, and I felt the urge once again, to give a little bow to reality.
Without those ten years in my life that shaped my future in a completely different way than planned….
….I wouldn’t be at this retreat at Breitenbush, facilitating.
It was like my life, back then, showed the need to push the PAUSE button on my future direction.
More like CONTROL-ALT-DELETE, come to think of it.
That other imaginary version of the story, the one where I graduate from college with certainty and drive, and honors of course….and leave for Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar following in my dad’s footsteps…..plus write a screen play and land a leading role on stage somewhere….and invent something high-tech on the side that accidentally makes millions of dollars….
….THAT version of the story is, well, heh heh, fictional.
But that version would never have offered a collapse of the Know-It-All mind, that led to a sense of destruction, that led to a sense of devastation, that led to a sense of rebirth, that led to a sense of infinity and detachment, that led to a sense of peace beyond all stories and outcomes and plans and successes in this world, that led to a sense of unconditional love.
Nice.
Nevermind about the Do-Over.
Much love,
Grace