Level Up

 

I was traveling this week, which while I love to travel, I was traveling alone and navigating my general anxiety around air travel and driving long car rides alone. It's been tricky, trying to fall back in love with car trips while having, at times, crippling anxiety around driving in general. I've come a long way with managing the anxiety while driving; however, it's still managing around the feeling of anxiety. The anxiety doesn't go away, it's just sort of there and I'm managing it like a rowdy toddler who won't stop screaming and you've managed to turn down the noise just a bit with some ear buds here and there. 

So, on the drive back (2 hours), I decided to leverage some of the visualization techniques I've been trying lately to work through the anxiety and intrusive thoughts. I asked myself what peace would feel like in my body. What would it feel like if I just let the anxiety go? Would it feel like relief? Would it feel like a loosening of the pressure I often feel in my chest lately. What would it feel like if I just didn't feel anxious? And while I can't say the anxiety went away completely, or didn't at least crop up during times I was driving over bridges or past semis that weren't staying in their lanes; overall, I felt good. And even when I got on the plane, I just didn't feel scared. I felt at peace and just happy to be where I was at.

Now granted, I also still utilized grounding, deep breathing, and even some prayer on my part. But overall, I was really pleased with this new way of approaching my anxiety. Not fighting against it, but letting myself feel it and then letting it go - or perhaps transmuting it into peace. 

I'm still working on allowing myself to ponder what certain emotions feel like in my body. I've been so disconnected to my body for so long because I was in chronic pain for so long I had to disassociate from my body in order to survive it. But now that I've identified the majority of my food triggers and my physical symptoms are generally manageable, I still tend to fall into that habit of being disconnected. so that's definitely a work in progress. 

What really started all of this was when I was meditating midday and asking myself what hope felt like in my body. Just a simple thing, or seemingly simple thing, recommended by a dear friend in one of my online communities. But it's changed everything. 

It feels like a leve up. Like this has become a huge shift. My goal right now is to stick with that feeling and continue to explore it.

The Price We Pay

I read somewhere and I often think that a common sentiment about grief is that "grief is the price we pay for love." And I used to believe that whole-heartedly... maybe up until just a few moments ago. But as I was meditating just now on what I need to let go of this month (mostly my need to control everything), I started thinking about my brother again. And it came to me that grief isn't the price we pay for love - grief IS love. 

Grief is the feeling in our body when we lose someone we love - yes - but it's also the way our love can transform when we feel that we have lost something we have loved. But the thing is, we never really lose that love, that love simply transforms. 

I have often over the last few years felt like I should be letting go of my grief over my brother; as if there was some magical moment in which I would no longer feel this intense loss. Moreover, I have felt an internal refusal to let go of that grief. A sense that if I let go of that grief that I am, in essence, letting go of my brother. That I am giving up, giving into that he died and that is the end of his story. But that isn't the end. He will always live on through my memories of him. He will always live on through the brotherly love he showed me. He will always live on because there is a part of me that believes his spirit is with me in some form (because it is).

And so what I've just realized is that my grief for him isn't want I need to let go of at all. What I need to let go of is the need to control how that grief is transforming - my love will never fade, and in a sense, neither will my grief. But that grief is transmuting into something else; a new form of love. That grief, over time, is slowly transforming into remembrance, into fondness, into the kind of love that endures through holding dearly everything my brother gave me to me throughout my life - put simply, love. The love of a brother, the love of an attempted mentor, a father figure (in some ways). The love of a deeply bonded sibling who got to know me over and over as I grew from a child, to a teenager, and into an adult.

I think for so long I've been so afraid to accept his passing because I was afraid that in that acceptance I would lose something. I hadn't identified what that something was. But I can't operate from a place of fear any longer - it's hurting me physically and mentally to keep doing this to myself. And my brother wouldn't have wanted that. And while I can't say I'm quite to that "acceptance" phase of grief yet, I can say that I slowly seeing in real time where that grief is transforming into something so beautiful - into the spirit of love and remembrance. Into the spirit of gratitude. Into the spirit of the collective.

So today, I am not letting go of my brother or the grief from his death. I am letting go of my need to control or hold on to the cycle of keeping my grief in the same place. The cycle of keeping myself in the same place. I am not letting my brother go, I am letting go of the fear and control that I have been clutching so tightly... because not only does it no longer serve me, but because I no longer need it. Only the the love remains, and that is more powerful than anything I could have ever imagined.