Acceptance: ALL of The Moments Past Led To Now

We truly are the totality of all of our experience.  Even those things we don’t quite remember continue to be part of ourselves.  Even those parts that we might want to forget hang around until we open to their gifts.  Until we learn to love them.  None of it goes anywhere.  Each moment becomes a building block to make the YOU, you have become.

When I was quite small I had on-going pain in one of my knees which was followed by several years of treatment and surgeries.  Eventually I went on with my life.

I have had a good life.  In fact, I have had a really great life.  There were the growing up years.  Then the adventurous years.  Followed by the settling down years.  Having fabulous kids; living on the top of a small mountain; creating a career that helped to support my family as well as feeding my heart and soul.  I felt strong, proud of my relationship with power and with spirit, and confident that whatever came my way, I would in time learn to roll with it.

I took risks.  I leapt off of metaphorical cliffs.  I learned that I was resilient.  And that I could, indeed fly.  Even if the flying was sometimes preceded by significant period of crawling through muck.

So the other day when I learned that the knee that I thought was a long lost relic of my childhood had at last given out one might wonder, why I was shocked.

Now I find myself sitting in the unknown.  Again. After the dust settles from the adventures and hard work, the hard work remains.  Over the next couple of days I began to recover from the impact of reality and took stock of my life.  I discovered a few of things.

First, I had taken this past month of February to use my daily meditation practice to offer Metta, loving kindness. During my daily sit, I send Metta, prayers, in the form of benevolent statements to myself, to loved ones and friends both far and near, to those in need of support, to the challenging people in one’s life and eventually to all beings. 

Practicing Metta gave me something to fall back on: a sense of self-caring and self love that, I hope will carry me during this next trying time.

The other aspect of taking stock has been to acknowledge the wealth of personal work I have taken on over the years.  Dredging into the murky past to pick through and examine my old out-worn belief structures has offered an opportunity to care for and hold experiences that had previously caused pain.  Now my adult self has gathered the skills, perseverance and resilience to comfort and care for my scared young child as I negotiate today’s medical realities.

That, and the Breath.  A former student and now friend sent an encouraging reminder.  “Breathe in courage for the journey is hard.  Breathe out compassion because you (I) are doing the hard work of traveling this road."
Another former student, now friend, taught me an Aruvedic/accupressure massage that gives instant, if temporary, pain relief.

No, we do not leave our past behind us.  Each moment is very much a part of our present held in trust by the path we each of us has created for ourselves.  Perhaps we can see our past as a gift that the many moments of our lifetime offers to Now.