LABOUR

I have been attempting to figure out what is going on with me so that I can fix it. I know that it has something to do with believing in duality. This morning, I took one look at my loyal Sadie and realized that I owe it to her to stick around, so I took my warfarin. I am fickle, but I am also loyal to those that are loyal and I know that Sadie might adjust to a new home, but I made a committment to her when I adopted her and she has earned my devotion by her own example of devotion and I just plain love her. What a wonderful girl. And I just had an email from a friend announcing that one of her dogs had died yesterday, Sunday. Sadie will be nine in July and I hope I have many more years with her; she was already four when she came to live with me.

I have huge abandonment issues which I have not yet been able to resolve, but that doesn't mean that I owe another being the same treatment that I have had in my life. I admit that when I graduated from high school, I abandoned my parents and sister to go to college, and never really returned home, and this is as it probably should be. I sometimes think that extended families, if individual family members get along well together, should live together if they want to. Well, anybody should live with anybody if they want to. But the point is that I don't think it is odd for several generations to live in the same home or on the same property. In fact, given the right company of respectful people who accept one as one is, I think it would be fun. Other than leaving home to get on with my life, it has been me who has been abandoned over and over again by people I love. I also think that it is healthy for people and loved ones to come and go as life dictates and I make it a point to say nothing to departing people that will cause them guilty or divided feelings.

Being abandoned happened mostly when I was very young as I had a bicuspid aorta valve which apparently required monitoring and resulted in several extended stays in several hospitals. Particularly hard was the stay in St. Joseph's, a Catholic run hospital in Victoria, with Catholic values and Catholic sisters, and had the atmosphere of an institution. There I was on one occasion, a two-year-old vegetarian, being screamed at by a terrifying nurse because I wouldn't eat my beef. I had no concept of what it was, tried to chew it, and when it came time to swallow it, thought I might choke and repeatedly spat it out. Oh, that sister was livid and the threats and insults that she fired at me didn't help as they caused me to feel more frightened and homesick than I was already feeling and this in turn constricted my throat even more, making it virtually impossible to swallow that tought bit of stew.

Apart from many stays in hospitals, my parents also abandoned me with English grandparents (I was born in Canada), and of course each of my children eventually left which is what one's children should do, and then my husband of thirty-odd years left. So one would think that I am well practiced at dealing with abandonment. So it could be that I am feeling the grief at the thought of my young visitors leaving in a few weeks to go to Chetwynd to make a life for themselves. I am happy for them and listen to their plans, and am very glad that I don't have to move. Maybe it is because it has been a long winter and even though I have faithfully used the S.A.D. light and taken 2000 iu of Vitamin D daily, I am beginning to need some sunshine.

Today, I listened to Adyashanti and a portion of the Mount Madonna Retreat 2009 audio while I made pet food -- this takes about an hour -- and a caramel pecan pie. It helped that I had selected a portion of the audio, more by accident than by design, that dealt with some aspects of how I have been feeling of late. At one point, Adyashanti tells us to own where we are: "I am where I am; I feel what I feel; whatever state I am in emotionally, psychologically, I am in this state and it has nothing to do with the people around me, life around me. I notice that I drag this state around with me everywhere I go. Any situation I am in, it may be good for a while, but I'll eventually drag this right in with me. It is really important to really see clearly that it's not out there. It seems to be out there. The kids seem to be the cause of my blowing my top now and then and my wife doesn't act the way I would like her to act and she doesn't do what I would like her to do and that seems to be the cause ... When you really start to own it, you start to see that's not really true. I am actually doing every bit of it to my Self. Nobody's doing a damn thing to me. Nobody is. Nobody has the power to make you happy or sad."

I know all this in theory, appreciate Eleanor Roosevelt's quote about "nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission," but it is so hard for me to make it real, or rather, prevent myself from feeling abandoned -- or whatever it is that I think somebody is doing to me. I also spent the better part of yesterday feeling extraordinarily lonely and realizing that that too was because I had allowed my Self to believe in separation from Source.

As mentioned in a previous post, tasking for my Self, meaning not performing a task for somebody else, and doing a task for the benefit of loved ones, my cats and dog in this case, really helps malais. I don't know what it is about work that is so therapeutic. I can see that if one had to perform the same task all day and every day, one would become tired of it. Or should I say that the likelihood of becoming weary of doing the same thing over and over ad infinitum is high. But tackling a task, although tedious and mindless, seems to improve my outlook on life. Why? I have no answer except that the work sometimes "sucks me in" and might distract me enough to give me a "time out" from the unsettling negative energy that is bothering me so much.

Namaste