inner peace

how are you holding? it has been a little while since my last note to you. i needed a bit of recovery time after the way i poured myself in the confrontation of my paternal wound. almost as if my heart needed some solitude to accept and stretch into the new space created from that cleansing. that is what writing has always been for me, a cleansing experience.

i like the feeling of coming clean especially with things that can be too tender to talk about. i used to be ashamed of my pain. i thought it made me weak or damaged somehow. i no longer feel that way. all that i am, all that i have suffered in my life is what makes me who i am. the inner peace that arrives after coming clean is what inspires me to continue to be vulnerable.

i am held and strengthened with every layer that i shed. i find that i am arriving more fully into my life experiences, all the while comforted by the (light)ness of inner peace... in exchange for trusting the universe by letting go.

much of what weighs us down is our shame. and some of what shame is, from my understanding, is feeling as if we are responsible for some of the things that happened to us at the hands of others. i know this is true for me.

i have learned from years of therapy that this is a child's response to a traumatic childhood — a way to find some sense of control in the chaos of a dysfunctional home. this response becomes hard-wired into the adult child and transforms into a default way of responding. default to me means there was no pause to choose a different course. would you remain in "default" if you knew you could choose differently?

what would it mean if you could untangle that ball of shame and leave it? and if you can’t leave it completely yet, what if you only kept what you felt was “yours?” — until the day comes when you are ready to part with that weight, too.

our pain, our shame, can appear as comfort. and sometimes we hang on to it because we do not know what it will be like on the other side.

we know what it’s like to live with pain, we don’t yet know the experience of being free of the pain. we get lost in the with-out. trust enough to know the other side, the peace that arrives after the processing, and the questioning, is a type of liberation i wish for you.

one of my favorite quotes of all time comes from a book called what happy people know -- “life is love: bittersweet, vulnerable, ever-changing, imperfect---and eternally worthy of unbounded appreciation.”

this time of chaos, of uncertainty, of illness and death, of the unearthing of the ugliness of humanity, is fertile ground for an inner journey.

your pleas to the universe do not go unheard. you can trust that.


big love,

Max and Nya.