I'm not sure who all needs to hear this, but there is nothing you have done that you can't come back from. In Nicherin Buddhism, there is this belief that karma is like a body of water that you can keep filling up with good deeds and actions, no matter what already exists within it. The more you fill it with the good or the bad, that is what it becomes - that is who you become. Cheryl Strayed said of a difficult time in her life, "What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here?" She, of course, was speaking from a place of redemption at that time. She'd gotten the message that she could begin again, and she did. You can, too. I did. That's not to say it will be easy or that it won't be messy. It doesn't mean people won't still be hurt or that it won't take a while to build trust. It doesn't mean you won't still suffer. But what changes, is that you accept all of that. You accept the things you can't control and try to find peace with them. You focus on being good to the people who are still in your life. You realize what you have and who you have, instead of dwelling on what and who is missing. You learn to be with those feelings of discomfort and pain. You stop running and learn to sit. Suffering is not the worst thing, it's the things we are capable of doing to resist it, to numb it or get through it as fast as we can - those things are what bring the most pain and anguish. It's the drinking, the drugs, the promiscuity, the overeating and the spending - it's all the excess we can get, just so that we don't have to feel what it is we are meant to feel. If someone lies to you, it's natural to feel angry about that. It's what you do with that anger, how you process it and how much you feed it that makes the difference. If someone you love dies, you feel sad. Sometimes, so unbelievably sad. You cry, you grieve, you mourn, you may feel as if part of you has died too - but you didn't die, so you live. You live with it, you don't get through it. You may never get over it. But you get stronger, and as Ram Dass said, who you think you are dies. You are no longer this person who hasn't experienced this tragedy or this loss. You're someone new, someone stronger and more experienced. There are opportunities here. Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened." What that means to me is that when we are busy being in love, we don't want to make time for sadness, just as when we are busy being sad, we don't know that we can also experience feelings of happiness - maybe we don't think we are allowed, or that it is okay.
In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron wrote, "Things falling apart is kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen; room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy."
Life is full of feelings. It's filled with ups and downs, wins and losses, love and loss. This is what it means to be a human. You will make mistakes and the people you love will too. Have compassion, be patient, and feel. There's good you can still do. I've always loved this saying and will leave you with it, "It will all be okay in the end, and if it's not okay, it's not the end." Thank you for reading. Don't give up.
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