This blog discusses the process of how meditation helped me understand when I had let go of a desired outcome within a conflict. I found it genuinely fascinating and helpful in my healing process.
Healing takes time.
Healing takes time.
Healing takes time.
Can you relate to wanting things you feel are important to go the way you feel they should go? This is a story worth sharing that involves me being stuck in overwhelm, anger, and sadness over a family of origin relationship in which I was a care provider. I was in conflict with this important relationship due to the choices the person was making. I wanted a particular outcome that I felt was in the best interest of everyone. My mentor saw my predicament and gave me this beautiful meditation to help me sort through my challenges and attachments. After all, I had worked hard over the years to help this person I so deeply loved and I thought I knew what was best.
This meditation involves the placement of attention on the breath and the images of water and waterfall. You call to mind a conflict or challenge and imagine your breath carries it from a place within you to your hands while you are sitting next to the upper bank of a river. You allow the object to be dropped into the river. “LET GO!” As you focus on breath, you visualize the current taking your obstacle down the stream and over the edge of the waterfall paying attention to the weight, shape, and size of the obstacle. You also pay attention to where you feel this release in your body. Stay curious!
Multiple times a week, I practiced this meditation and had the same response. The shape of the object was big, the weight was heavy making a big splash when I imagined dropping it in the river.
I was still attached to the outcome that I hoped for and this weighed heavily on me. This lingered for months.
Magically, one day in the middle of this meditation, after many experiences with the same feeling/observation...something shifted. I went to drop this same issue in the water and a different shape, size, and weight emerged. I could not have written the object that emerged more beautifully. It was in fact the complete opposite of heavy and big while making no splash at all when I dropped it in the water. The object was in the shape of a paper ship. I watched it float so quietly down the stream. My body immediately felt lighter and I remember laughing.
My mentor explained that I now was at peace with the situation and was letting go of desired outcome. He even said, “healed.” OOOOOH, how I loved that insight and direction.
Meditation takes us into our “knowing” where all answers await. While there are many different types of meditation, I use the Viniyoga system of placing meditation at the end of my practice after working with breath-centric postures and pranayama to bring my system into balance first. I find that if I skip this process, I have a much harder time paying attention as my system is still out of balance.
I will end with this saying by my teacher, Gary Kraftsow who says, “With correct understanding, things become lighter not heavier.”
And so, the paper ship goes merrily, merrily down the stream.