What Happens After Everything Changes?

Somewhere Between the Old Life and the New

The river laughed incessantly as I swayed in my hammock, angry and confused, staring up into the palm thatch. All around, the birds laughed too; they croaked and sang; baseball-sized cicadas droned in the trees; crickets chirped; unseen creatures slinked through the underbrush. On my desk, a single candle flame flickered; ants marched and scrambled around it, carrying off dead moths lost to the waxmelt. The silver smoke of wood powder and insecticide rose up into the damp night air, the sky full of stars and rain.

I laid there in the dark, stewing in a question I could not answer, a pattern I could not see.

What does it mean to be a victim of one’s own life?

I’ve returned home from my journey. Now I sit in the integration period, a quiet phase in which new programs seem to be anchoring in my system, while the old ones still swirl without roots, with little to grab hold of. I am meant to sit and surrender in this phase, allow it to be what it will. I imagine this is how the butterfly feels in that waiting period after emerging from the chrysalis, when her wings are still wet and she clings to the old broken shell, looking at the sky, the sun, the glade. Days I wake up and the old longings stick to me like a sheen of sweat. They carve rivers through my being. I let them flow. No point in damming them. They are meant to move through me. And I have learned a great deal about sitting in discomfort. I have learned to sit up straight and breathe deep into my heart. I have learned to trust in the slow wisdom of my body and its elegant rhythms. I have learned to trust the soft self-assured voice inside me. That voice tells me now to relax. Do not act. Not from this place. Let your wings dry and the time will come. The present situation may be uncomfortable, but not so much that you can’t handle it, when you have endured far more chaos and terror in your life. Remember the bathroom. How could I forget the bathroom, the red light on the tiled shower rim, the bats squeaking in the thatch overhead, the chemical scent of mosquito repellent burning by the door, the awful nausea roiling through me, the flashes of light, the strange blue eyes staring all about me like surgeons at the operating table, the voice, soft and still, telling me to sit up, don’t fold forward onto my knees, do not withdraw from this, do not fold. Do not fold into passivity and victimhood; that’s the old way of doing things. Fold and let the terror have its turn. Or sit up straight and breathe into the center of your being such that all parts of you receive the message, which is this: I AM IN CHARGE OF MY OWN LIFE. I AM NOT AT THE WHIM OF OLD STORIES AND WOUNDS. I AM NOT A PATTERN. I AM A FREE CREATURE.

As I continue deeper into the integration process, I find myself utterly stripped of my previous manner of orientation. But the old patterns persist. It’s hard to explain. I’ll start in my body. There is a heaviness inside me, but a lightness too. How can it be? This sense of being unmoored now from my previous life. And it does feel like a previous life. So there is grief, but excitement too, anticipation. In this liminal space, I have to rely on my practices: writing, meditation, music.

I don’t know where I’d be without my devotional practices, and thankfully I don’t have to know. But still, I’m finding that I have to navigate everything—my relationships, my work life, family—from completely new ground. Like I’m starting over. As I reenter the world, life feels new. Sometimes it’s a wonderful, spacious feeling of freedom and rebirth; other times, it’s strange, dim, full of questions without answers. Fear comes up. Sadness. Longing for the things that used to comfort me, which no longer do. What if people don’t know how to relate to me anymore? But really, the question is, what if I don’t know how to relate to people anymore? Of course, it’s not that deep. I’m still human in a human world. But I’m operating from a completely different register than I was even a month ago. And even trying to talk about it here feels wrong in a way—like I shouldn’t share any of it. What I’ve gone through is, after all, a deeply personal process, and to most people a rather alien one. So I’m grasping for words without being too specific. Which I realize leaves my readers feeling as confused and unmoored as I am.

Because, how do I communicate who I am now?

I suppose I can say this: I see clearly now what I am and what I am not. What I am is pure witness consciousness, empty, silent, still, loving, without a singular point of orientation. What I am not is all my old, wounded parts stuck in the dream of separation, armed with their holding patterns of self-protection, and self-centered control. Those parts still linger in me, but they no longer have the same hold. I no longer identify with them and their stories. Instead I see and feel their stories and their patterned ways of operating and all I can do is hold space for them to rise and fall, pass through me like smoke through a fishing net.

At its core, it’s just mindfulness in action. I’m not some new and alien being speaking a different language. But I’m no longer the person caught in old relational dynamics. I’m no longer the people-pleaser, the over-giver, the self-abandoning, attention-starved child scanning for danger and disconnection, ignoring herself, her body, her desires. That child still lives in me, changing, dissolving, slowly relinquishing her old ways, learning to walk once more upon the earth, learning to trust me, and the Universe, and this new way of moving through life. Sometimes I feel how uncertain she is. I feel her questions. I wish I could answer them. But all I can say is, trust me, come back to me, to this stillness; let it be the place you find comfort, where once you sought it in others. Those days are behind me. And I am grateful for that.

I am stepping into a new life but that new life is still forming, still taking shape, and the child wants to know what it’s going to look like. She wants certainty in the face of mystery, the known in the face of the unknown. And all I can do is say, I hear you; it’s okay to be afraid, but I’m here. You can trust me, you can unclench your jaw and soften your shoulders and stop scanning.

To her I want to say this: I am sorry for all those years of trying to silence you, to soothe you through external means. I’m sorry for getting lost in your stories, your contortions and grasping and shouting. I’m sorry for getting lost in your little dream of forgetting. I am sorry for not remembering. But I remember now. And all I can say is, it’s going to be okay; it is okay. Things are shifting positively even if you can’t see it. Things are taking shape beyond the cocoon and soon we’ll fly off, wings dried, into the world, made new, whole, present.

Soon we’ll fly off into the sunlight. But for now, patience is the name of the game. It is, after, all a virtue. If I am going to orient myself around anything, let it be patience—the surrender to the slow unfoldment of life. Is that not the point after all? To be so present that I no longer miss anything?

I remember when I was little, I used to complain to my dad that I couldn’t get out of my head. For so long, all I wanted was to escape my body, escape life. I’ve realized that desire was coming from a fundamental resistance to life. I believed I was separate, so I resisted being in my body; I resisted my calling; I resisted love. I thought for a long time that love was all I wanted. But all that time, without realizing it, I had a wall around my heart—I feared love, because I thought love meant self-abandonment. I thought love meant forgoing my needs for the sake of others. So I learned to ignore my body, my desires, my dreams. I learned to separate myself farther and farther from the world, from others. An entire personality formed around the wound of separation. And so, for years, I cried about how life was passing me by, about how utterly incapable I was of being still and present. Time passed, but I remained a child, stuck in my old ways, reliving the same patterns over and over again, unable to break free.

Until now. Now I have seen through my resistance. I have seen where it comes from, and that, by sitting still with it, I learn to operate differently—I learn to break the patterns by choosing differently, by choosing stillness, by anchoring myself in the practices that foster that stillness. So whenever my parts rise up with their stories, their fears, their ways of control, their self-pity and victimhood and false sense of superiority, I simply return to my practices; I ground myself. I sit still and upright. I breathe deeply into my body, into that place I once sought to escape. And there I find what I’ve been searching for all along: I find myself, my peace, my intuition, my deep bodily knowing that was buried beneath layers and layers of conditioning, trauma, suffering.

And while the process of healing is ongoing, I have reached a new register of being—one in which I am free to follow my dreams and desires, to abide in them, abide in stillness and the slow pace of life as it unfolds naturally, a river flowing on. I am free to let the current carry me. Of course, the work does not stop. Each moment offers new lessons, opportunities to grow, to come back again and again to this newfound awareness.

So as I navigate this liminal space, as my wings dry, at least I can take solace in what I’ve learned, and continue to learn. I can relax into this integration, allow this new energy to root deeper inside me and infuse itself into my life. My parts may be full of grief and confusion, but I am full of strength, calm, clarity.

I have only to keep returning to it.

I have only to remain here, now, in this place of remembrance.