I'm having a moment here. I went on a "walk and talk" with Coach Leigh here at Miraval, the one who gave the Reflect and Transcend lecture, and she pointed something out to me. It's kind of like one of those "duh" moments. I started out telling her how the visualization exercise made me feel, what it made me realize about my life and then I said I have all this stuff to process still - my childhood, breast cancer, and all that comes with it. I have to process it. Process. Process. Process. She asked me what that even means. What does processing look like and what does it look like when the processing is done? Well hell - I don't know. I never thought about what the end point would be - I just knew I hadn't arrived because I had not yet achieved what felt like "resolution" of my too many to count issues.
So we walked around the desert and talked. She asked questions, I answered them. She had an observation - she said you are obviously incredibly intelligent, you know exactly what happened to you, you understand your behaviors, you get why you are the way you are and why you do what you do, you even want to change those things, you are incredibly self-aware - you have processed and analyzed the shit out of yourself. There is nothing left to "process." I've never thought of it this way. That there could be an "end point" without a resolution, or without a great epiphany or an amazing transformation of personality. She said it doesn't work that way - that there is no real end point, there is no real resolution, though there may be a feeling sometimes of the ability to move beyond something. You don't truly and fully move beyond it - you are who you are because of your experiences. You cannot change what happened to you. Dr. Frank, the exorcism man, said something very important to me the other day when I first showed up at his door. He said - you realize that you are not meant to spend the second half of your life undoing what was done to you in the first half, right? Let's just say, I have been working on the undoing for about 14 years already and I feel as fucked up as I ever have.
So Coach Leigh said this is it - you are done. This is the "end point" you have been waiting for. Wow, how incredibly anti-climactic. Shit, now what? I guess that this is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. Now you keep living. Hasn't that always been the question anyway really? How do I live in the aftermath of what I have suffered, which after my many many years of and varying attempts at "processing," I have deemed to be a multitude of traumas. How do you live with what you have lost? Or perhaps without what you never got in the first place but should have? How do you live with what is left in the wake of what you have suffered? If there isn't closure, if there isn't an ending, if there is no so-called resolution, then what the fuck am I doing?
She said that life is a moment to moment to moment attempt. It is a momentary attempt at doing better, living better, living differently, choosing differently, taking chances, letting go. And there are momentary successes and momentary failures. Life is happening in those moments and I hate to refer to the journey and the destination because we all hate that saying even though we know it's true, but I've been missing the point. I have always struggled with this - missing the moment. Present moment time. That's another post.
So how do you move on then? How do you change? How do you choose differently, live differently? She said it the other day during her lecture. You must approach situations and live life with what she calls blind optimism, or what someone else might call faith.
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