Making Amends

Watching Twelve Years a Slave and writing my last post have really caused me to think about how I live my life, and how I might be able to live it better in regards to others.  So over the last week or so, I've been reviewing the past few years of my life and taking stock of how I could have acted differently, better, more appropriately, more compassionately, and who I might have harmed in some way along the way because my actions, or inaction, didn't really serve my highest good.

I have to say that I was fairly pleased with what I found, although I did find a couple of instances where I hadn't done my best, and in fact, may have caused harm, or at least discomfort to someone. Nothing that I discovered was anything really awful, but, still, I knew, in considering the situations (and one in particular) that I wanted to be accountable and take responsibility.  I decided to make amends. 

Making amends (compensation for a loss or injury) is a big part of the recovery process in all of the 12 step programs.  Step 8 requires the person working the steps to make a list of all persons she/he harmed and to become willing to make amends to them all.  Step 9 requires that direct amends be made to each person wherever possible, except when doing so would injure them or others. In other words, it's not acceptable to tell a third party to offer the apology to the injured party for someone else.  The person working the steps has to make the amends personally, directly.  They're not easy steps to take, because in doing so, the person making amends has to allow himself/herself to be vulnerable, and has no control over how his/her actions will be received.

During my trip to Alaska in 2012, I met a lot of truly good people. One was a woman who had a profound effect on me (and whose identity I will keep private just to protect her privacy), and who I had promised to keep in touch with after I said my goodbyes and continued on my journey.

For whatever reason, I never did.  At first I was just too caught up in the excitement of being on the road, exploring new places and being on my own in such a novel way.  Later, when I'd think about calling, it always seemed to be the wrong time: I was too tired, it was during her work day, etc. There was always some reason (excuse!).  And then, as more time went by, as the trip ended and I was back at home, I felt guilty and embarrassed that I'd waited so long, and that made it even harder to pick up the phone.

But I never forgot her, and certainly couldn't forget that I hadn't kept in touch.  Her name would come to mind at the strangest times, and I'd find myself wondering what she was doing, how she was doing, and, yes, probably most often, wondering what she was thinking about me! (I imagined they weren't very good thoughts if she was thinking about me at all.)

So last week I decided to right the wrong, and I sent her an email apologizing for not keeping in touch, asking her to let me know how she was doing and what she was up to, and even acknowledging that I'd understand if she didn't want to connect with me after all this time. I actually had a hard knot in my stomach when I hit the send button. But at least I did it.

Several days went by without a reply, and the self-talk in my head wasn't positive at all.  I was convinced that she wasn't going to respond, and I didn't feel good about it.  On Friday, as I was driving to Atlanta to do a healing circle, I heard that little voice in my head that I've come to recognize oh so well, say, "Really, after all this time, do you think a little email was enough?  You need to make a direct effort. You need to call."

It was one thing to send an email. A phone call was a completely different ballgame, and I could feel the unease in my gut just from thinking about it.  But I also knew it was the right thing to do.  So a short time later I stopped for lunch, and before I got out of the car, I made the call.  I got voice mail and my ego went to work!  "She doesn't want to talk to you. She's got caller ID. She knows who's calling and she's not going to answer."  Maybe not, I thought, but I could at least try, so when her greeting ended, I left a message with a very heartfelt and sincere apology. I really was sorry, and I did want to renew our connection.  I was sorry I had lost it to begin with.

I was busy over the weekend, but I was also very aware that she didn't return my call.  I knew when I sent the email that I didn't have any control over whether or not she responded, and I knew that was true of the voice mail message as well.  I had done what I could do to make amends.  It was time to let it go.

Making amends isn't easy, even when it's something as simple as just apologizing for not having followed through with my promise to stay connected.  My ego was hard at work with negative self-talk and my emotions were quick to respond to the words it was speaking.  And when the offense is something even more weighted, it goes without saying that the task of being accountable, of taking responsibility and making things right, is equally weighted in difficulty. I know because I've been there.

And having been there, I can honestly say that the weight and cost of carrying around that unfinished business is far greater than the temporary discomfort of making amends. The difficulty is, we don't realize that's the case until after we have the courage to own up. Until we do, that old stuff just sits in our guts, and in the buried recesses of our hearts and minds, festering, poking its way into our conscious awareness whenever it has the opportunity to do so.

It takes a lot of effort to keep it buried, a lot of energy to keep pushing it away, to keep reburying it each time it resurfaces.  That's energy we could be using for other things, things that could help us move forward. (Not to mention the good it could be doing for the injured person when we own our screw-up!) That old stuff, that old unfinished business, is just helping us to stay stuck.  And if we don't own up, there's no way that old stuff will heal. When we take responsibility for our actions and do our best to make things right, there's always the possibility we'll be forgiven, which makes room for even better things to come.  And even if we aren't forgiven, even if the other person doesn't respond at all, taking responsibility, holding ourselves accountable, lightens the load that we carry in immeasurable and unimaginable ways, and it frees our energy to take us higher, further, and to allow us to do more good in other ways.

It's been four days since I placed that call, and I knew I'd be okay even if I didn't hear back.  I can already feel a lightness in my gut and in my heart simply from having taken action.  And that negative self-talk is gone. The results are well worth the discomfort I felt when I sent the email and made the call.

Figuring it was all behind me, I decided to check my email one last time before I started this post, just to make sure there were no last minute responses for tomorrow night's workshop.  When I opened my inbox, there it was: her response!  She thanked me for the voice mail, especially because she hadn't noticed my email, and assured me she wasn't angry, never had been.  She wrote that she was delighted to hear from me, and had so much to share with me! She was overloaded with work but was on vacation next week and hoped to get in touch then when she had more time, so we could catch up. 

For eighteen months I've been carrying this around with me, spending my energy worrying, hearing all that negative self-talk.  I wish I'd had the courage to send that email and make that call sooner.  It sure would have saved me a lot of unnecessary grief, and would have given me the extra benefit of having this like-minded soul as a friend and resource as I moved to Nashville and started this next part of my journey.

Isn't it interesting how much energy we spend resisting what we know we need to do to make things right, and how much power we lose, simply because we're afraid to take responsibility, to be accountable, to make amends?

I'm going to keep a closer eye on myself from now on, and when I make a mess of things (and I will, I'm human), I'm going to make every effort humanly possible to make amends sooner rather than later.  I just don't want to waste energy anymore, mine or the other person's, when I have the power, and the responsibility, to fix them.

A Heavy Heart

I have this heaviness in my heart tonight.  I think the last time I felt like this was when I had to transfer my mother from her apartment in the assisted living facility where she had been living, to the Alzheimer's unit because she needed more care and assistance than they could provide where she had been living.  

It wasn't the transfer so much that caused the heaviness, as it was my mother's response to the transfer.  She stood in the hallway of the Alzheimer's unit, supported by her walker, and as they moved her furniture into her new room, she screamed at me, her face contorted into an agonized caricature of the mother I knew, tears pouring down her face, "What right do you have to do this to me?  Who said you could make this decision without my permission? You're a horrible daughter and I hate you."

I knew my mother didn't really mean what she said; that her words and emotions were a result of her mental confusion and cognitive impairment.  But it was a difficult experience nonetheless, for so many reasons and on so many levels.  I rarely think of it anymore, but when I do, it's never without that heaviness in my heart.

So what happened today that left me feeling so much like I felt that night?  Believe it or not, I went to the movies.  I saw Twelve Years a Slave and when I left the theater, I was so overwhelmed by my feelings, I had difficulty speaking.  It was quite a while before normal conversation wasn't an effort.

I knew the movie wouldn't be an easy one to watch, but I wasn't prepared for the depth of my response. In fact, it's because this feeling in my chest is still so strong, so palpable, so present, that I decided I had to write about it.  

If you haven't seen the movie, it's based on a true story about a black man, a free man, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery ( I believe it was 1841.), and remained a slave for twelve years, before he was freed and was able to return to his family.

All I could think about as I watched the movie (and sometimes I had to cover my eyes, because I just couldn't watch), was how could one human being do that to another?  And although slavery doesn't exist in this country anymore, atrocities just as terrible as what were enacted on that screen, take place every day somewhere on this planet.

I don't know why it took that movie to make me think about that, or why, now, that movie touched me at such a deep level of raw emotion.  I've certainly seen similar depictions of inhumane treatment before, and been affected by what I saw, but I've never been this affected.

Maybe it's because I'm so much more aware now of how connected we each are to one another, and how each action that we take against or for another, impacts not only that one person, but all of us on some level, known or not.  What I'm feeling tonight is making me reconsider my own way of being in the world, and whether or not I'm truly doing my best when it comes to my own interactions with others.

I can't personally stop the wars, or end hunger, or provide every person who needs a place to sleep a warm bed, but I can be more accountable, more responsible, for my own actions.  I can make a bigger effort to come from a place of love, a place of caring, a place of recognizing the importance and value of every human being that crosses my path and do my best to treat each of them the way that I would like to be treated, with dignity and respect.   

That doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme of things, does it?  But if we all did that, just that, every one of us, every day?  Wow!  Just imagine what a different place this world would be! 

  

Divine Synchronicities

A couple of weeks ago, actually, it was Saturday, January 4, the morning of my first float session, I went to a women's meeting at the church.  This is a monthly meeting on the first Saturday, and they usually do some kind of activity, or have a guest speaker.  I'd gone to my first one in December, and had decided that I would attend a couple of more and see if they had value for me. 

When I got the email reminder for the meeting, the notice said we would be making vision boards, and my first reaction was, 'okay, that clinches it, I'm not going.'  (If you're not familiar with vision boards, they became wildly popular following the movie, The Secret.  In the movie we were encouraged to cut out pictures of the things we wanted to have in our lives and paste them on a board of some kind, and then as we focused our intentions on that board, the Universe would bring those things to us.)  I'm not big on cutting and pasting, and I think part of me just didn't want anyone else to see/know what was going on in my mind at that point. 

But two days before the meeting, during my spiritual practice, I not only heard the message, "You need to go for the connections." but I also heard I was to offer to lead the heart chakra exercise I've been using in my own groups to help all of us attending the
women's group to have a deeper experience as we worked on our vision boards.  

"Really, God?" I thought.  "Are you kidding?  I'm new to these meetings, a stranger to most of these women, and you think they're going to let me to do this?"  God's response was: "No harm in offering!"

So I emailed the group leader but got no response. Hah!  They're not interested, I thought.  And to God, I said, "See, I told you so!"  I'm sure She was smiling down on me, smugly, of course, knowing I didn't have the whole picture.

I did what I was told to do, and went to the meeting. As soon as the group leader saw me, she rushed over.  "Did you get my email?" she asked.  "No, I didn't." I responded, with a sinking feeling in my stomach.  "I'd love for you to do the chakra exercise. It fits perfectly in the schedule." she said.

Okay, so much for my 'I told you so' to God!  So I did my part and lead the exercise (It brought some people to tears.), and then we started in on our vision boards.  I picked a table where no one else was sitting and began leafing through the magazines on the table, cutting out words and images that called to me.  Two others joined me, and as we chatted, I continue to do what I was supposed to do.  I admit, I really didn't put a whole lot of energy into it. 

All that sorting through and cutting out took a lot of time, and since we only had two hours for the whole meeting, most of us didn't complete our boards.  Mine was really only a pile of pages that I'd torn out of the magazines and placed in a pile on top of my piece of poster board, intending later to cut out the specific images and words that I wanted to use.  When it came time to leave, I was tempted to just heave the whole pile into the trash, but afraid that someone would see me, I decided I'd take it home with me and trash it there.  I was pretty sure I wasn't going to do
anything else with it once I left.

When I got home, I put the pile on my dining room table, made myself some lunch, and took care of some chores, all the time with my eye on the clock, anticipating my float session. 

I did the float session, had the first class with Rev. Denise, and found myself in the abyss that opened as a result.  That pile of stuff sat on my dining room table for several days at least.  A couple of times I moved it to the top of the cupboard because I needed the space on the table, but I never threw it out.  I never gave it much thought, either.

And then one night, around 11 PM, as I was rinsing out my teacup and getting ready for bed, my eyes drifted to that pile of stuff.  Normally, there's no way in the world I would have even thought of starting to mess with that stuff that late in the evening.  But something drew me to it, and I found a glue stick and a pair of scissors and began to work.  "I'll only spend a few minutes," I thought.  "Just get it started, and then I'll go to bed."  Next thing I knew, the board was done.

As I looked at it, the first thing I did was berate myself for doing it all wrong!  This was supposed to be a vision of the things I wanted in my life, whatever they might be.  But as I perused my board, there really weren't any things pictured: no new car, no vacations, no new clothes, no images of a woman with a smaller butt and leaner thighs! Nothing.  Just words, ideas, concepts.  What was I thinking?

But then I heard that God voice in my head:  "Look at it.  Really look at it.  What did you ask for?  What do you need right now?  What did you tell Rev. Denise you had lost?"  

As I listened to the words and stepped back from the table, what I saw on the board were words and images to inspire me!  I had asked Rev. Denise how I could get my inspiration back, and God had already been hard at work giving me exactly what I needed, even before I voiced the question, because these were words and images I had chosen before I even took that first class, before I ever asked the question, before I had even thought the question!  Sitting in front of me was a tool I could use to help me get my inspiration back. But until I refocused, until I looked at that board from a different perspective, I hadn't seen it.

I asked.  God provided.

I've got my inspiration board taped to the wall inside my walk-in closet, where I can see it every morning when I get dressed, and every evening when I undress, and whenever else I go in there to change shoes, or get the laundry out of the hamper.  At least once a day I intentionally stand there and read each of those statements as I send Reiki to all aspects of those images and concepts.  It only takes a few minutes of my time, but I can feel the energy surging through me and around me each time I do it.  And the feeling lingers long after I've moved out of the closet.

My inspiration board isn't the only tool I've been using to get me out of the abyss, but I do think it's one of the more powerful, just because I can see it and use it every day.  And the effects are obvious:  I'm more energized and focused; I'm more excited about my work than I've been since I moved to Nashville; I got some great Guidance about some new events to offer and scheduled them; I've gotten the paperwork to register my business in Tennessee, and I'm committed to completing the teleclass with Rev. Denise.  As that old refrain goes, 'I'm movin' on up!' and it feels great!