I find it nearly impossible to stop my mind from slipping into nostalgia and remembrance. I’ve spent a lot of time seeing it as my mind's greatest weakness, but I’ve slowly come to see it as a beauty, and its acceptance, a strength!
Nostalgia, the particles of what’s left in our hearts and minds of what was. The honouring of what was here, and is now, gone.
All grief is a profound honour or honouring. Sometimes the memory’s attached to certain places and people are so heavy for me. It feels like someone is sitting on my chest. Like all forms of pain and discomfort, we tend not to want to feel the suck. Get on with it, right? Don’t think about it and certainly don’t feel it.
But is it discomfort or the depth of our own love that we really don’t want to feel? What if I just allow it to be here and feel it? What’s the worst that could happen?
What if I suggested that acceptance of your condition would make you a better partner, a better parent, a better human and ultimately a much better athlete?
Why do we engage in sport?
Why look for a partner? Why have children? Why do we engage in anything for that matter? Why even live?
Is it not love? Is love of some sort not behind everything every single thing you ever do?
Even that nervous system of yours that tries to regulate your reactions to this world is doing it out of instinctive, protective love.
So here’s the point, when we decide we don’t want to feel something in a memory, we stuff it down and risk becoming a blocked drain.
We all have experiences and memories that are traumatic. To me, trauma is just a word for an experience that I didn’t have the ram to process.
But I’ll share some personal experiences with you. If something keeps coming up and bringing painful memories with it, stay with the pain, stay with the discomfort, allow it, forget facing it, just feel it. Yea, I know you hate that nagging doubt or fearful memory that you don’t want a repeat of, but all of that is born out of love.
The protection that is there now, is there because you need protection!You keep informing that nervous system that it’s not ok to feel discomfort, fear or trepidation and so on. So we cut it off and, at the very same time, we are cutting off our own love.
So, of course, the protection doubles down and you become more and more doubtful and fearful.
We become trapped in pain because we resist it!
Try and see the truth here, everything inside you and outside you owes its existence to you. Yes, that’s how much power we really have.
Where do you think you can go to escape these feelings? These memories? These thoughts?
If I tell you not to think of a red rose, what is the first thing that comes into your head?It’s not about getting rid of a memory, it’s about releasing the charge, that’s why it keeps coming at you. So yea, I sit with the nostalgia and heaviness and allow it to teach me what I need to understand.
Otherwise I’m trapped in it. It’s safe to remember to remember as long as I stay with the feeling, not the story. The self-help books, or even the words I write, are mere pointers.
There are no answers out there, you can trust me on this. You have to find it out for yourself. This is our individual, unique responsibility.
While ever I believe it is outside myself, I will engage in a fruitless search for answers out there. There is nothing wrong with workshops, self-help books or even therapy, but at some point it either moves inside or it doesn’t work.
You can end up knowing a whole lot without understanding very much.
You have to take your experience and say yes to it, all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly. We are all conduits to experience. This is my own learning on this Earth.
Trying to hold it back is merely holding yourself back from the quality and love of your own life.
Letting go and allowing it all is the only reason you can read these words and I can write them. There’s no real difference between the two.
If the words resonate, that’s you, not me. Nothing exists independently of you.
It’s all you!
It really is all your love, and yes, even when you think it isn’t.
Gilesy