“We must continue to open in the face of tremendous opposition.
No one is encouraging us to open and still we must
peel away the layers of the heart.”
Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

And so I pick up the thread from yesterday’s post and begin here. No one is encouraging us to open and still we must peel away the layers of the heart. In the next 365 days I am going to do just that, each and every day, in whatever form that takes.

As I begin I am feeling everything — afraid, unsure, determined, so full I don’t know where to begin and so empty I don’t feel like I have anything to say. I will start here…

This morning I woke up about 5 a.m. and I was uneasy. Uneasy and then anxious, anxious and then afraid, and it grew and grew. After 9 months on no medication for the most part except a very occasional Xanax, and having gone back on antidepressant and anxiety medication for 10 days and then off again a little over a month ago, I have been able to maintain pretty well with no medication. This is good. Long term use of Xanax — and I was on daily and usually multiple doses of Xanax for 20 or so years, they are finding can lead to dementia, Alzheimers, and more. I have very good reasons for having gone off this medication and I don’t want to be on it. A very occasional instance, like the night my pug Tanner died in April, is one thing, but then 3 weeks ago the hurricane hit and my whole world was turned upside down. I was advised to take Xanax as needed even if that was daily and it mostly was but I have cut back toward weaning myself away from it except on the occasional as needed basis. I have never abused medication and I won’t now so I am trying not to take it. But I have mornings like this one where I become so filled with terror I am almost coming out of my skin. Finally, a little after 6:30, I took the Xanax and was finally able to go back to sleep. I slept until 9:30 when the phone woke me up.

I have been filled with remorse for having taken it but at 6:30 this morning I was in such a state I needed help. In that moment I experienced a kind of acceptance and opening of my heart as if I was embracing my frightened self and, with tears running down my cheeks, I took the medication. It will be alright, I told myself. You will get past this.

Every day is a struggle for me. There are good days, beautiful times, so many things I am grateful for, but at the bottom of it all is a woman for whom suffering and struggling has been the familiar state, something always to be faced and dealt with, and yet in the middle of it all I do carry on. I have spent so many years feeling so badly about myself it is time that the tides turn. I am embracing myself, I am cradling the hurt frightened woman in my arms, I am loving her, I am showing her the kind compassion she never got as a child, sexually and emotionally abused for many years, fragile as an adult woman, suffering from serious clinical depression, anxiety, PTSD, and Bipolar disorder, more in therapy than out, on a lot of medication for a long time, alone and frightened after the end of a 31 year marriage, making mistakes as the Bipolar disorder flared, living through a devastating fire, losing all financial security, not knowing how I would survive, and facing every single day so afraid I wasn’t sure how I could go on. And then one terrible, terrifying night the Mobile Crisis Unit had to be called.

It was a critical point and fortunately I turned a corner. New doctors, new medication, a diet that so changed my life I was able to go off medication but still needing constant vigilance, and now facing aging and an uncertain future I have become afraid again, but I have made a choice. I cannot allow my sense of urgency about doing what I need to do to survive financially to push me into doing things that will put me over the edge emotionally. I have to slow down, so slow that I can see the smallest things that it is easy to rush past, and I must accept myself where I am with kind compassion, while gently, ever so gently, encouraging myself to see what might be possible, peeling back one layer at a time, as I am ready, to see what is there. I have been afraid to look. There has been so much there that was dark and scary. I have only begun to appreciate, in these last months, that there is much there that is beautiful too, that I do have much to offer, and to that end, in these next 365 days, I will uncover that which might be possible in my life.

Just after the hurricane hit, exactly 3 weeks ago, I was given a tremendous gift. I was given a course that I badly wanted to take but it was expensive and I didn’t have the money. I knew this course could benefit me in my own life personally, and also with my work, with my teaching and writing, but there was no way I could afford it, and then just days after the hurricane, sitting in a dark house with no power, afraid, and shaky, having only my phone with limited battery to communicate with the outside world, the word came, I had been given the course. It is Pema Chödrön’s “This Sacred Journey,” an interactive online retreat on “Living Purposefully and Dying Fearlessly.” It is a powerful course that acknowledges that in facing the knowledge that we will one day die we live more fully in the present moment. It is very deep material. And there are all manner of little births and deaths in our lives, and the only way to live fully is to face them all. There will be two live meetings with Pema herself, a community, and practice material. In this year of living with infinite compassion toward myself, and others, and all of life, I will be training for the future and the work that will come. The recent hurricane was filled with deaths of many types, and out of the ashes of these deaths, large and small, a new life is emerging. I will be exploring all of this over the next 365 days.

So this is how I am beginning, with the knowledge of my own fragility, with the knowledge that I will one day die, and with the determination to live as fully and with as much compassion and loving-kindness as I can for all of the days of the life that I do have. “Infinite Compassion” is the way of the Bodhisattva, a path I have followed for decades. I am in my deepest heart a teacher. I long to be of service in the world, but it must begin with me. In the next year I will daily work toward healing my broken heart, and in so doing it is my wish, through my writings here, to reach out to others with love and compassion. We are not alone. Come here, talk to me, comment on my posts, ask me questions, I will answer you, I will do my best.

And if you have joined me with your own 365 day journey when you leave a comment after my posts you can leave a link to your own blog journey, and along the way you can share with us how the act of showing up for your own life each and every day is helping you to heal, to move forward, to find new ways into your own journey of compassion and kindness for yourself and the world around you. This is important work and I am honored to have you as companions on the journey. It is finally time. We begin now. May you be blessed each and every day, may you know love in your heart for yourself and others, may you find peace and rest in this moment. Our journey has begun…