Stillness Speaks...

My first impulse to dealing with this gaping hole left after our breakup was to just jump in and start meeting new people. After all that is what I had always done in life. My life had been one string of relationships after another. Really since the time I was seventeen, I had continuously been in a relationship with a man.

So I did what I always had done, I went out on a date with a psychologist that had kept asking me out over the last few months who I had met during one of the mini breakups with Ken that lasted a couple of days. He had emailed me every month to just check in and to see if I was single and over the relationship. Finally I answered him and said his persistence had paid off ...it was over.

He lived in a suburb of LA and I had decided to visit a girlfriend for the day in Orange County and we made plans to meet. It was uneventful on my end, we went out to dinner, walked in a park, sat on a park bench as he attempted to teach me Spanish in between kissing me. I felt numb and realized I was not at all ready for this. I had him walk me back to my hotel and we said goodnight. When he called the next morning for breakfast, I didn't return his call.

On the drive home, I was contemplating my sorrow and crying to the Universe for my soulmate. Did he really exist? Was he out there? Could someone really complete and understand me on a deep level? I was rattling off a stream of qualities that were important as hot tears were running down my cheeks. Below that sadness I began to get a glimmer of another truth...

And then I glanced over at the radio that I had turned down through my pleading episode with life. It is a digital one that displays the name of the song and artist that is playing.

Displayed were the words Love You.

At first I smiled at the message and said "Find me, wherever you are...I love you too."  I kept on driving, lost in my thoughts of a dream relationship admiring the beauty of the mountain range I was winding through.  Then I glanced over again.  Love You was still displayed and it had been probably twenty minutes since I first noticed it.  It was locked on that message for some reason.  As I drove further, I kept glancing down at the radio again and again.

Love you.

Love you.

Love. You.

Then I got it!  Love YOU.  A knowing washed over me... I needed to love ME. 

Somehow I knew that was the key.  That was what I had never done in my entire life. Never before had I taken the time to really develop a relationship with who I really was deep down below the labels and my mind identity.  I have heard people say this before, and I thought that I had been doing it through my life as I have walked a spiritual path.  But when I really got clear and asked myself honestly the question "Do I love ME?"  I burst out crying again and realized I did not know how....

I sometimes just crack up at life and how connected everything really is.  When I returned home, I got on to the internet and checked my facebook feed and there was a link from Ken.  It was a short video of Eckhart Tolle talking about the power of now, he was hurting too and was trying to find his footing. 

I had read his Eckhart Tolle's books The Power of Now, A New Earth and Stillness Speaks just before Ken and I had started dating and I loved them...and just as I had started I had let the practice fall to the wayside as our romance heated up and I got lost once again in a relationship.  I was captivated again and for the rest of the day watched video after video of his talks on Youtube.  I then went and checked out his website http://www.eckharttolletv.com/ and looked through his site.  I found a down-loadable nine hour series from a retreat he had done called "Journey Into Yourself".  What could be more perfect?  And that Ken had unknowingly provided the pointers.....

I have just spent the weekend retreating from the world and the constant chatter of my mind.  Eckhart says deep sorrowful episodes have a profound possibility of cracking you open so you can reach in and discover that presence that is you.  It is about not running from the pain of the void that a death leaves in you.  It entails allowing it to be and creating some space within for an alert, still, loving intelligence to reveal itself.  Accepting what is in this moment.  Getting quiet and feeling the life that fills the body always.  Becoming aware of the presence that is still, peaceful and yet fierce in its ability to cut through the density of our mind and emotional bodies.  Our deepest self is only accessed when we are in the moment and not in our thoughts. I have had a profound breakthrough. 

I am now embarking on a new relationship.... with ME.

Intuitive Knowing...

Another benefit to modern technological life is that things seem to really be speeding up and there is so much information coming at everyone from all sorts of directions.  After the first couple of days of attention, I was off everyone's radar and was able to have that breathing room I coveted.  I knew intuitively that ending this relationship was going to be painful and was why I had delayed doing it for so long.  We all want to avoid pain...

We had originally met online and realized quickly we had a lot in common environmentally and politically.  We began dating and soon we were quickly entwined on a professional level too. He had stepped in as legal counsel for a sustainability organization that I was on the board of that was in need of legal direction in organizing.  A creative idea for a revolutionary project came to me soon after and he helped to conceptualize it further and became a co-founder.  The same organization we both devoted time to loved the idea and offered to incubate the project and help with its development and introduction into the community.

It all happened so fast.  And as with any new relationship we were intoxicated by the feelings of "being in love".  High on the hope that we had finally found that one person to fill up the emptiness and hole we all feel deep inside of us.  My intuition had been telling me almost from the beginning, in spite of having genuine feelings of love and attraction for him that this was not the right relationship for me.  There were flashes of knowing, times when he lied or his actions didn't match his words. There was a nagging sense of distrust for him even with his professions of love and devotion.  Without getting into details, for the sake of his privacy, I will just say... our intuition is always correct.

And this week I saw this, I had KNOWN it but, but, but....

"No matter how seductive a person, place or opportunity seems - do not move forward unless your intuition says "yes". We wonder sometimes why things don't work out, yet if we look back on situations that ended badly we see that we knew better from the first moment we started down ...this path. No matter how beautiful a person is. No matter how much money may be offered to you. No matter what, if you do not listen to you intuition and choose to follow a path of external power your life will not manifest to it's highest potential. Before you make a decision about dating someone, moving forward with a business deal or making any changes in your life get still and ask your intuition if it feels right. If the answer is yes your whole body will light up and you will feel the "yes" inside you. If the answer is "no" you will feel disempowered with the thought of making the decision. Get quiet and listen and life will eventually begin to flow." ~Mastin Kipp, Founder of Daily Love

I guess I didn't want to believe it.  I had fallen in love...but that is not saying a lot, I can and DO find a way to love everybody I meet.  Loving isn't the hard part, letting go is. To top it all off, our whole organization was benefiting from our relationship, what would happen to this project that was potentially going to be a model for community based cap and trade system in California and the rest of the country, if I couldn't put my big girl pants on and make the relationship work??

So for seventeen months I endured inner conflict, laughter, struggle, wonderful lovemaking, endless compromising, stuffing feelings, addictive longings and yet deep profound inner suffering. And on the night before we were to sign a lease on a house together... I found I just could not go through with it.  

I could not take one more step down this path.  The inner pain had become more unbearable than the grief I knew I would have to go through in ending it all and dealing with the consequences.

Death of a Relationship...

We all face death in one form or another many times throughout our life.  I happen to be facing a death of a love relationship right now...

It has been a week and I have been grieving.  I consciously chose to go through this process because I initiated the breakup. It doesn't make it easier or less painful to let go of someone you love.  I was hoping for a little breathing room before answering questions from friends and family but thanks to the recent addition to modern life...social networking, I had a message at 7:00am from my mother the day after it happened.

"Ken just changed his facebook status to single, was does that mean?"

It is bad enough that your mother now can follow every move you make on Facebook.  But now all of my friends and family could see this bold statement posted on their Home page without the context from me.  It would only be a matter of time before the messages and calls started coming in seeking answers. So much for some breathing room...

I took a deep breath, logged in and went to see his profile.  Sure enough there it was..."Single" and Facebook is so cute it even adds a little heart after it.  He had also changed his "Interested In" and "Looking For" to Women, Dating and a Relationship.  Wow that was fast! 

The cards had been dealt, I made the next move.  I changed my status from "In a relationship" to "Single" and then I unfriended him.

Now I just had to sit back and deal with the responses.  On one hand having your life so public and transparent to your friends and family with social networking sites can be a challenge.  On the other, despite needing some time to process and grieve my new reality on my own, there was something quite magical and empowering that happened.  Friends took time out of their busy day to write me loving notes of support, some even linked to songs that were just perfect, several called me to say I did the right thing and that they were there, my sister came over during her lunch hour and all and all I did not feel as vulnerable as I thought I would.

I felt loved and a strange, alert energy pulsing deep within me...