The Beginning of Winter

Greetings from me!

Hello!

How is everyone doing?

How are you welcoming the arrival of winter?
As the year 2018 gradually draws to a close,
there may be times when you feel unresolved problems and challenges, in your heart or in your actual life, closing in on you.
Even if that is so, why not pause for a moment and deliberately place yourself in an environment where you can take good care of yourself?

A quiet café, simply walking in the park, listening to your favorite music in your room,
making soup—anything is fine.

By creating for yourself an environment where you can settle your breathing a little,
the events and emotions taking place are no longer at the center; instead, your breath goes on, steady and unceasing,
and your confidence returns, as the owner of this perfect body and as a living being.

By doing this, I think that where you are, in truth,
is not a place of desperation, and you, as a precious being walking a great journey,
will simply come alive again.

The Gift of Not Knowing

I do not know what I should do.
I do not know whether I should get divorced.
I do not know whether I should continue this job.

Today, about this "I do not know" that always comes up in sessions,
let me share something that suddenly occurred to me while walking my dog the other day.

If I were to make a list of what I do not know right now, I could write down several things immediately.
When we cannot decide something or move forward because there is something we do not know,
it feels like a kind of confinement, and it is uncomfortable, so we try somehow to figure it out
and come up with an answer—a human instinct, or perhaps a habit we are born with.

But the other day, as I was walking slowly through the park,
I suddenly began to reflect and remembered something from long ago.

When my two children were still small, I lived together with my mother and my sister.
I was the only one earning a living.
Things were hard financially, and I felt that going on like this, working to support two adults and two children,
would be very difficult to keep up, but
at the same time, because I am a parent, because we are family—
I found reasons like these and did what I could.

I became exhausted in body and mind, and many people advised me, for the sake of my children's future,
to have my mother and my sister become independent
and to live apart from them.

The counselor I trusted, whom I was seeing at the time, also
told me that without becoming independent soon, it would have a bad influence on my children,
and recommended that we live apart.
This was the person I trusted most back then,
so I was also convinced that what this counselor said was the most correct.

Yet my honest feeling at the time was, "I do not know what I should do."
While I hesitated, the burden seemed to keep growing,
and it is true that I felt a lot of anxiety, as if my time with my young children was being wasted more and more.

But now, decades later, I remembered myself back then so vividly,
and suddenly realized the gift given to me by that state of being unable to move forward because "I do not know."

During that time when I thought I could not move on because I did not know,
my mother and my sister were able to prepare to live on their own.
These were things that, had I forced myself to ignore my feelings and cut them off back then,
could never have happened: a process of moving forward as people while feeling the support that lies at the root of a family;
time for my children to prepare their hearts and find the courage to part;
and above all, a free path for me to forgive myself and create my own life.

If I had ignored the feeling of still not knowing what to do,
and done as others told me, I would have lost something important for good—
now, decades later, I have been made to realize this.

After we separated, my mother and my sister both blamed me for how terrible a thing I was doing,
but even so, we each lived our own lives, helping one another where we could,
and now each of us is living in our own place.
My mother has since passed away, but my children, too, see her not as someone who at some point was forced out of their daily lives, but
as their own "grandmother, a woman," and seem to still have their own connection with her.

Including the fact that not everything can be told in a pretty light,
that we are each able to choose to live as ourselves on our own paths
is, I feel, because back then something stopped me in the form of "I do not know,"
let what was needed happen, and allowed us to experience it.

In this way, because it feels uncomfortable, we usually think we must do something about it—
yet this state of "I do not know" may actually be giving us, as people with very delicate and rich sensitivity,
time to prepare so that we can move on to whatever happens next.

So rather than despairing over the very fact of not knowing what to do,
or losing confidence because of it, we might see it as time for us to become able to engage with whatever is happening now,
time given to us by Divinity, and accept it as much as we can and try savoring that time.

Enjoy!

B

The photo is of a food court in Los Angeles that I visited recently.
In the photo I am tasting the carrot juice my daughter ordered,
but actually, it is the moment I was happily waiting for the heaping plate of fried chicken I ordered to finish frying.

(2018/11/26)