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.
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