On meeting tough moments...

Deep waters, break downs & breakthroughs.

Now and then, the deeper layers of life leap forward in what often feels like a confronting, overwhelming and all consuming way.

A fight with a friend. An unexpected career change. A person departing before I ever imagined they might. A ‘bad’ trip. A break up. A complete shift in circumstance.

When I muster the courage to truly look, a situation of such can often show me many things about myself that aren’t so savoury.

Great unravellings often leave me thinking little of who I thought I was.

Almost always I find myself feeling exposed, raw and inadequate.

As I meet more of these moments, I have come to see that the standard response and tendencies I have acquired from society are two fold;

Strive to forget what has been revealed and get back into the daily doings of life.

Or, fixate, dig into, therapise and identify with the event that unearthed the blind spot(s) and circle upon the situation until it becomes boring and again I forget.

For me, both of these responses diffuse the momentum of the deeper wave of awareness.

They are ways to contain the intense feelings that naturally come with a tsunami of change by focussing on the comfort of life’s familiar ripples.

And yet with the ongoing benefit of hindsight, I can’t say strongly enough that these moments of reckoning are fast becoming completely cherished moments of my growth.

Not the actual incident itself, often that just sucks (and continues too).

But the learning that this space, the one where life engulfs me, is safe.

It is inherently safe. It is special. And it seems almost essential for my inner world and the evolution I desire most.

These breakdowns are really breakthroughs.

Breakthroughs into the heart of what it means to be human. To greet emotions I have previously run from with the terror that they’ll break me.

And they do, they break the walls I create within me. They dismantle the defence I have towards all others. They destroy the unexamined stories that stop me from feeling.

Feeling the depth of life, both the eternal equanimity that terrifies my finite self, and the vast scope of appropriate emotions that bring colour to my day.

And when I allow these waves to land and I find myself feeling utterly defenceless, I am left with but one option… to turn towards, to greet and to meet the things I’ve feared most.

And in the meeting of my separated selves, the pieces of me I’ve judged as unworthy of love and pushed to the hidden corners of within, I receive, in my bones, what it means to love what is.

I receive what it means to feel a core suffering of humanity as I know that this burden of building walls and fearing feelings is shared by all who walk this world.

I receive the gift of compassion birthed from a lived understanding and a heart that can extend the loving embrace of relatability to those in need.

These waves drown me to the depths where deep breaths truly exist and the shared spark lives eternally in the collective human heart.

So yeah, the massive moments are hard, and yet somehow they seem essential.

The breaking is the building, to fall back together again.

With love,

Ryan