I was out of pocket last week because I was with my dad. He turned 94 two weeks ago and last week he went into hospice care at home. Being with him at this stage feels a lot like being with my grandchildren – keeping him safe, being patient when he’s defiant, listening when he’s talking even when it doesn’t quite make sense. Respecting that he can’t always articulate what he needs or wants or feels, but honoring that he absolutely needs and wants and feels every bit of it.
Watching him move in and out of himself, conscious and lucid one minute, angry and bitter the next, disoriented and confused the next, it really hit me that who we ARE never changes.
We move in and out of different aspects of ourselves depending on what we’re experiencing, but our TRUE Self is there when we get here and it’s there when we leave, regardless of what happens in between. Not the trauma. Not the relationships. Not the years of believing things about ourselves that were never true. None of it touches the real thing – but sometimes it does get buried.
They say the end of life is a reconciliation, a making peace with the parts of ourselves and our lives that were left unsettled, or parts we’ve carried shame about. I believe I’ve been witnessing him doing that. It made me sad to think of what he must have carried for so many years, and I wondered what his life and his relationships would have been like had he known how to forgive himself. If he’d known there was never anything to forgive to begin with.
Can you imagine what your life would be like if you knew that? (maybe that’s why they call it Heaven?)
Why do we wait until we’re at the end or until it hurts so much, to come back to ourselves?
A new client was referred to me the other day and she said, “I’ve stepped to the well three times in my life and I’ve always turned away because I don’t want to open up those wounds again.” She’s made a good life for herself, but those wounds were already open and always right beneath the surface. She even called it Whack-a-Mole! (one of my favorite terms 😎) She’s starting her Return to Self™ this week. Eeeeep!
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be at the end of my life wrestling with any of the bs I could have let go already. I don’t want to carry it even one day longer than I have to, so if it pops its head up, I don’t bop it back down. I love on it. I let it show me what it needs. I do what I have to do to heal it, and that’s what I help you do, too.
This work is never about retraumatizing or reliving pain. It’s about releasing it, and you can’t do that without allowing it to be seen. That’s what I help you do, so you don’t have to keep coping and staying one step ahead of it. You already know it’s there. What would it feel like if it wasn’t?
That’s the whole of this work. Not fixing you. Not rebuilding you. Just helping you find your way back to what was always true, what has always been there, what nothing in this life could actually take away.
