Letting in the messy truth.

My 12 year old’s face is changing. When I get a chance to stare at him (today it was at his piano lesson), my heart feels like it’s breaking. All at once he seems to be the man he is becoming and the boy he is leaving behind. Parenting is an invitation to constantly let go, to open to such a deep groove of vulnerability you think you might not survive. Of course, we are always being invited to feel into this rawness. Life is brutally beautiful, tempting us to break open our own hearts to touch the staggering sensation of being alive in mortal bodies.

What do we do with this heartbreak? How do we manage our overwhelming emotions when we get close to feelings like grief, terror, loneliness or shame? How do we invite these unwanted guests to find a seat in our being for as long as they need to be there? I’m still figuring it out. I breathe. I allow the emotions into the body. I cry and feel and allow the raw sensation of the feeling to be without giving it a story in the mind. I give myself permission to let in the messy truth of me. My deepest fears, my unprocessed rage, my grief, my pain.

I can see how uninviting this might sound. To sit in silence with no distractions to hold our most undesired feelings at bay. But man it feels good when you do. The reward for this willingness is to know yourself more completely, to love yourself more fully, to trust yourself more deeply. And you discover that nothing you experience is living in isolation from it’s opposite. To be human is to remember the truth of this paradox again and again. To free ourselves to simply be here in our wholeness…living, loving, creating, growing, becoming.