Dot Six
In 2013, everything seemed to fall apart. I had been off work since 2010 and used savings, retirement, and credit cards to pay my and my mom’s expenses. I had never had a problem finding work; but, after my mother’s passing in 2012, I could not get back into the job market to save my life. I started work/trade at a yoga studio for classes. After only a month or so, I was fired!! Can you imagine? I couldn’t even keep a free job!!
The next day, I broke my foot. Now I had no money, no job. I was immobile. No swimming, running, bicycling, yoga, showering, walking without crutches, or sleeping comfortably. Every month I would return to the doctor who would tell me that the bone was not healing. I was in a boot for seven months! I wanted to kill myself. While I was going through it, all I felt was struggle, pain, and horribleness.
Looking back, I realize that I moved to another level. My journal entries are critical because I wouldn’t remember the details today if I had not documented every emotion, thought, activity, and insight and every angry, hopeless, fear-filled, enlightened, relieved, and joyful moment.
Reading A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield lets me know that I am not the only one to experience a succession of difficulties, mistakes, fear, painful patterns, and dissolution that comes from not having the life I desire, expect, and feel that I should have because of my ego-centered reasons: I earned it, I’m a good person, I’ve done the right things, other people live well and prosper, etc.
As part of my spiritual practice, I used to recite a Tibetan prayer in A Path With Heart:
Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may be truly fulfilled.
After awhile, I disposed of that prayer. I had had enough difficulties and sufferings. Time to move past that. I couldn’t even remember where I found that prayer until I started re-reading A Path With Heart. It must be time for me to become reacquainted with it.
Sometimes, going through life’s challenges, we are growing exponentially and can’t see it. Looking back, the growth that I experienced during 2013 and 2014 would not have been possible without the seeds that were planted between 1994 and 1998. Those were the years that I got off of my first treadmill and resumed an inner focus that began when I was 19. The next 15 years were my experiential, living-life years. That period made me find my dormant seeds and start watering them.
