Eleventh.Experience.Elevation.

Seemed the best day to start my First blog . I don’t even know what blog means…. But I personally think journal is a more elegant word, I suppose journaling has a personal feel to the word, perhaps that is why this blog word came about. Blogging is to mean words shared to help heal each other. It’s what I am going to go with as it’s meaning. So many have asked me to start a blog for a long time now… some have asked me to write a book…..To share my experience of this world, some say that my words touch them in a way that helps the experiencing of their worlds by bringing connectedness of the whole, that we all share, just in different ways. I claim to know….NOTHING, and I am certainly no expert, but I do have a pretty good handle on my own experience in my 39 years of life…

11 years ago, right this moment, I was signing paperwork authorizing brain surgery after brain surgery. My world was just at the beginning of what became my experience of what it means to lose everything I held so dear. My TRUTH for the term ” your world has just been turned upside down.” Was coming into light.

As the rug was slowly being pulled out from underneath me, my 5 year old son and our families, my husband Matthew, was fighting for his life in an ICU bed….while laying in a coma. The number 11 has had good and bad significance to me even as a child. I was born on the 11th. My first basketball jersey was 11, as I got older the number 11 seemed to be showing itself to me in ways I prefer not to go into now… But here it is again…. 11th year without him, it seems to be holding true that the number 11 is showing itself again tonight and my feeling of loss is deep, cutting and painful.

When we lose a person we love, we lose a piece of ourselves. That remains true and will for the rest of our lives. Whether that is a loss from death, or divorce, separation, estrangement…. loss is loss. But if we allow it to consume us, if we allow it to cause our hearts to shut the door on feeling deeply again, we lose ourselves …completely. There is no time limit on loss… Time just doesn’t exist when a soul leaves us to move on to their afterlife, leaving us here on Earth to experience life without them…. The ones who leave before us, well, their work is done here and it becomes powerfully evident that our work has just begun.

I let my loss consume me. It ate me alive for years, 10 to be exact. Not many know this, because it was a quiet consumption, one I kept to myself, hidden from the world. My Buddhist Practice has beenn a big help along the way AND….Thankfully I had a child to raise, to keep it together for, otherwise I can only guess what my fate would have been. I am blessed that my child in a sense has also raised me as I have him. He is my life, my world. He shines bright, making me laugh and bringing to my life comedy relief when all I want to do is cry. There are so many things he gets from me….. But there isn’t one single day that has gone by that he is doesn’t RADIATE Matthew. Matt lives thru our son…. And that right there had been enough LOVE that keeps me going, keeps me on track and keeps me from falling completely apart.

This past year, I have let completely GO of so many things, people, self doubt, self preservation, ego, judgements, societal bullshit. I entered a space in time where it became ok to completely dissolve into whatever I felt or didn’t feel…. I allowed myself to say good bye to a couple of big losses and what came from it was even more self love, love in general for the human sprint and soul. My love of GOD is so strong that most of my fears and anxieties have dissipated. I finally fully let Matthew go, I did this out of love for him and for myself in equal parts. He is no longer bound to me in the Earthly sense that I held him for so long. He soars higher and freer than ever, which in the same aspect so have I. We all deserve to be FREE…. Free from the suffering we create for ouselves.

Loss. Letting GO…. Is as essential to our learning, our growing, as all the bright sunshiny days. As tough as it is, if we allow for grieving, allow ourselves to FEEL, to LOVE, to EXPERIENCE life even in our darkest hours…… Our hearts open. We open to all the possibilities that make life beautiful. No matter how deep your heart breaks….no matter the loss…..It’s crucial to let the light IN……Only always. It’s what grows our soul.

God Bless,

xo-T