Recently I saw a woman, whom I’ll call Alison, who admitted to me that she wasn’t very “free.” She had chronic fibromyalgia, which meant she was in constant pain on the right side of her body, and this affected her ability to work. She worked as a dog-walker for an agency, and they called her at all kinds of odd hours.
When she walked the dogs, she was usually experiencing pain from the fibromyalgia, and while she loved the dogs themselves, because she loved all animals, she mostly obsessed about the pain she felt. Then she was always thinking about the one-person show she had developed, and had performed a number of times (she was an actress). The show was really her life story, and it was in an ongoing state of development. It was her ultimate goal to be performing her show full-time. She wanted to make a professional living from it.
When she saw me the grief in her eyes, her look, was obvious. She told me the story behind it. Her mother had died over two years ago and she missed her terribly, having frequent sobbing fits. I asked her about the thought, the story she told herself when she had these bouts of intense grief. She told me it was always some version of, “I miss you, Mom…”
Then I asked about her cat, Petals, with whom she had been very close for many years, before she died last year. She said it was the same thing. Like her mother, Petals had been a true and constant companion in her life, and now both were gone. As she relayed this story to me, and the emotional memories they evoked, she started sobbing again. She said, through her tears, “I just miss Petals so much…”
I invited her to breathe deeply, slowly, and consciously into her emotional pain, and as she did this, she gradually became more relaxed and present, the weeping stopped, and after awhile, she smiled.
“What’s happening now?” I asked.
“I just feel more present, more here,” Alison said. “The smile was because of a memory, the way Petals always looked at me first, whenever I fed her… It was as if she was asking my permission, like ‘Is it okay for me to eat now?’”
“Tell me a similarly happy memory of your Mom,” I encouraged her.
She thought for a moment, and then smiled again. “Whenever I would worry about something, Mom would always stroke my hair in a particular way, and reassure me… And it always worked. I’d feel reassured, comforted…”
“Good,” I said, and then I invited her to just relax into silence, to experience her true nature as love, peace, and the harmonious flow of being.
After awhile, she smiled again, a smile of contentment. We just enjoyed each other’s presence.
“So, next time the grief comes up” I said, “just be in the pure experience of it, without any story, without telling yourself ‘I miss Mom so much,’ or ‘I miss Petals so much…’
Just allow yourself to surrender to, to honor, the pure feeling of the grief and I promise you, the grief will gradually leave you, and then you’ll have only the warm, feel-good memories of your Mom and Petals.”
I added: “Because we are not our stories, our memories about our departed loved ones… We have stories and memories about everything, of course, but freedom or self-realization is discovering we are not our thoughts and stories, but rather we are always this… This clear, luminous presence that is right here, right now…”
She smiled again as she heard my words. The presence between us was palpable, an exquisite sense of an alive, vibrating current.
“And guess what?”
“What?” she said, leaning toward me.
“As you stop living in the past and become more established in your true nature—in other words, in present-time awareness—the fibromyalgia pain will diminish, if not clear up all together. Either way, it will be manageable, tolerable. Everything becomes tolerable when you live in freedom.”
