I think I have mentioned before that ever since we returned from our cruise in July, I have had wanderlust. I have tried to fulfill that yearning for travel by reading Travel Biographies and watching movies where the characters travel to other countries. Reading "Man Seeks God;" Watching "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "Eat, Pray, Love." I have read or heard somewhere that imagining living a certain experience is almost as or maybe more fulfilling than actually living the experience. I agree with that. Sitting still and imagining it allows you to really hear, see, smell, and taste all of the things that you might miss while being concerned with your bad hair day, the blisters on your feet, or your increasingly burning skin from the brightness of the sun. Maybe this is what meditation is all about. Experiencing without experiencing so that you may experience more fully.
Speaking of meditation and "Eat, Pray, Love." This morning during my weekly, Sunday morning movie time with Bella and coffee, we watched that movie. I know that in the movie and book and real life ... Liz Gilbert was going through a divorce and made the decision to do so herself. Some may say that she didn't deserve to be miserable or to be able to leave her life and explore the world the way she did. Some may call her selfish. Who says it is selfish to acknowledge some of the most difficult, unpleasant things about yourself and take the time to reconcile those things. To better them. Now don't start thinking, "Oh Ashley's gone off the deep end! She wants to leave her life and run away." No. Actually, while watching Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert, find herself, I started thinking about how much I have to be grateful for. Of course, I've always known this, but sometimes things just become very clear in your mind and you are able to just sit quietly and really feel the gratitude and happiness at what you are blessed with in your life. I started thinking ...."I have Love. I have Casey. It almost hurts too much to think about what having Casey in my life means."
My sister recently posed the question to me, "Ash, sometimes do you feel like you're afraid to be too happy? Like you're afraid you don't deserve it, so when you start to feel it, you do something to mess it up? You start a fight or think about something that makes you unhappy so that you don't have to actually open up and feel that happy?" Wow. It is true. Lately, if I allow myself, I have these moments of brief clariy during which I feel overcome through my whole body with peace and contentedness. Immediately, though, my mind .... my mind ... diverts itself to thinking about the baby situation, and I surprise myself by almost feeling relieved at the small presence of discontent that brings me back down to reality. And then follows disappointment at the fleeting nature of happiness.
Recently, I have read so many things that I am not sure where I read this but somewhere I read or heard that for things to come to you, you must be receptive. During those fleeting moments of clarity and contentedness, I feel receptive. My body relaxes, and I feel myself open up. I felt this way during the 2 hours it took me to watch Eat Pray Love this morning. Perhaps because at that moment I was not living Ashley's life. I was living Liz Gilbert's, and I felt permission from myself to be receptive for her sake. Are we taught this? That to think about ourselves and to be receptive to what we really want is selfish, so we learn to block those things. We are miserable because we cannot have what we want, but we feel that we are good people because we are sacrificing our own happiness for others.
Maybe this is the problem. Maybe I am so afraid to have children because I am afraid of the amount of Love I will feel. A friend recently said to me, "From the outside your life looks perfect." That statement made me uneasy because when she said it, my immediate feeling was defensiveness and I wanted to say, "It is." But then I thought, "Wait! You can't say that because you are the one who thinks it isn't!" Talk about feeling confused. Not to mention that I would never say to someone, "My life is perfect" because I have been taught to believe that sounds haughty and self-centered. But really, what is wrong with saying, "My life is good. There are things I have and things I don't have. But it is perfect in it's imperfection." There is always someone who is in a less perfect situation, so doesn't it make us a little ungrateful to dwell in what we feel is missing from our lives while others suffer greater deficiencies and still find it in themselves to feel happy?
If all I am missing in my life is children ... and even that is only missing at this moment. Up until about 3 years ago, I never felt like children were missing. I only started feeling like they were missing when people started asking me when we'd have babies. So then we started trying. Then I lost the first one ... this is where the real feeling of something missing began. Ever since then, I have been unable to focus on anything except what I feel is missing. In Eat Pray Love, Ketut, a medicine man from Bali, scolds Liz for breaking things off with a wonderful Brazilian man she meets while in Bali. She explains that she did it because while in Love she can't maintain her balance. I think I can relate to that. Feeling too much Love and Gratitude makes me feel unbalanced or afraid. Ketut says to her, "Sometimes losing balance in Love is part of living a balanced Life." Maybe being receptive is just a state of feeling unbalanced for a time so that the real balance can make it's way into your life.
In Life, I see everything as a sign. If you can't tell by reading this blog, I see something in everything. I can analyze a piece of lettuce as holding the meaning to life if you give me the time to think and write about it. (Probably I need to find some balance in that aspect of my life. I have a feeling Ketut would laugh and say, Ashley, part of living a balanced life is just shutting up and eating your food.) Anyway, after sitting quietly through the credits of Eat Pray Love, I turn the DVD off only to see the image of Joel Osteen preaching his Sunday morning Sermon on television. I won't lie. I'm a fan of Mr. Osteen. I believe he believes. I believe he cares about people and sees himself as a human being that may be able to help others. As I turned the DVD off still a little lost in thought about what I had gathered from the movie, specifically, I need to be receptive... I hear Mr. Osteen's voice telling me to, "trust in God as Mary trusted in Him when he told her she would have a child without knowing a man." I immediately stopped in my tracks and sat down on the edge of the coffee table about 1 foot from the television screen to hear what Joel had to say.
He went on to say that we shouldn't look at our situation as something we have to control and analyze. We should simply do as Mary did, and say, "I don't see any way this is possible any more, but I'm gonna trust You." I liked this. He didn't tell me, "Don't lose Hope. Have Faith." He acknowledged that sometimes your situation is just greater than all that. That Hope and Faith are sometimes even too far out of reach. To be receptive at that point, you have to just be honest with yourself and with God and say, "I don't see any way this is possible anymore in this physical world, so all I have left is You." This, after hearing the Hindi belief that "God exists in You as You." So when you tell God that all you have left is Him and he is You, then you are only left to trust your "self" to do what it already knows how to do. This is so empowering. Whew. Now I must go find my balance. Grocery shopping and house cleaning it is.
Seylah!
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