Leonard Cohen, Suzanne
Today I vowed to encounter a feeling that I seem to dread experiencing.
I’d never named it. I didn’t know what in the past it was connected to. I noticed I had the thought that I’d rather die than fully experience it. Linda Dillon calls this a “core issue.” I call it a “root vasana.”
I didn’t attach to that thought and it disappeared.
But, almost immediately after, I was hit with a tsunami of energy. I heard: “Your Mother is dead. She died in a housefire.” And a wall of sorrow swept over me. I dissolved in grief.
The pang of loneliness I felt then, the feeling of being abandoned and alone in the world burned right into me.
And this is that same loneliness.
I open to the full experience of it. I allow myself to be a river of tears.
She offered such a noble example to those who had eyes to see. Always tolerant, always hospitable, always generous.
And to come to such an end.
I later talked to her through a medium and she told me she left well before the flames. She did not suffer.
She’s now a weaver of consciousness, Michael tells me – a re-weaver of the tears in the various grids of human consciousness. She picks up after us – on the umpteenth dimension.
I’ve never felt grief such as I did at that moment, standing there with Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne album cover in my hands – the one with the woman in chains amid flames (above).
The loss of that connection came just when it could have proven so beneficial for the both of us. We were a team.
After years of drug dependence, she was on the mend. She had a new boyfriend, whom I greatly respected. I was at an educational/career choicepoint. We had plans to travel together.
I’m experiencing that grief as I write and I’m aware that nothing in my life before or since approached the jolt of electricity that ran through me then. Thank you for allowing me to fully express it.
Now the insights are going off like roman candles: that’s why I prefer to work with women. (1) That’s why the domestic violence she suffered had me choose gender-based refugee law.
A connection similar to that which I had with my Mum is exactly what I seek from a woman, repeatedly – comfort, affirmation, humor, love. I just lie about it to myself.
I still feel the electricity racing through my body. She and I were like positive and negative poles of a magnet; we had a natural attraction to each other.
All those dreams for the future went up in smoke that day.
Oh my Gawd. I’ve been refusing to fully re-experience the grief I felt back then.
Well, let me now re-experience it, until it’s ready to depart.
Two hours later
I still feel twitches but not the river of electricity I felt earlier. I’ve re-experienced every aspect of the unexperienced grief that wanted to be experienced. I’m available to anything else that surfaces.
If nothing else does, then I can say, this definitely feels better. I can breathe easier. I have more room.
Like so many feelings I’ve described lately, I didn’t even know I had this one lurking in the background. I feel a great release in tension generally from raising this one to awareness.
The more I can process my vasanas before one of the big events occurs, the better it’ll be for me. It’s Job One right now.
Footnotes
(1) We all work for a woman – the Divine Mother. Get over it.