yoga with mommy

Good Morning Relatives

How are you today    Ive been thinking about kindness  at first I thought it was compassion i was thinking about  but I don't think it is    there is something that sets a person apart when compassion is the action  perhaps it is solicitude?  or maybe what is known as fellow feeling  

being able to perceive and register the emotions of another without taking them on  sharing them (as in shouldering their load)  perceiving the suffering that that person is feeling the impact on their psyche their life because of events, turns of events, or disillusionment

disillusionment is not a bad thing   it is simply the crash and burn of ones expectations and fantasies when we meet life as it is rather than as we imagined hoped or planned on it being

so wham  when that happens  a person may be crestfallen  disappointed  devastated or actually relieved encouraged and or simply glad that that which is false is no longer plaguing their mind

it all depends on the fantasy and the reality and how they come together and what the heart and mind of the reoriented person was set on before things changed

so what happens when we witness someone come face to face with their circumstance and realize that their hearts their imaginings their what they thought they were getting into are not at all what they ended up in ?

this all came about because I had a dream about my parents   on occasion they show up with something they either want me to witness or something they are still intent on teaching me    in this dream part of what I witnessed was my mother as a young woman alone coming face to face with the reality that she was not Cinderella, and her marriage to the prince was not going to go like she thought

I am not sure (not being my mother) what she wanted exactly  or what she saw that was so different  but what I am sure of was that I was watching her come apart   melt as surely as the wicked witch of the west did when Dorothy's innocence threw water on her because she was just trying to help put her fire out

I watched my mother as a young woman melt and crush inside

I could feel her pain not like it was mine but I could feel that she felt it  it was coursing through her and in that moment she was in agony

in that moment in the dream I realized that my mother was at one time a young woman who had to endure the experience of realization that so many of us have also gone through  somehow after years of being exposed to my mother something inside of me decided she wasn't human and thus that had for who knows how long made it ok for me to not care about her and to have the opinion that she had no life no existence beyond my opinion of her    

that is not only wrong  relatives it is amazingly horrible to recognize that was what I thought about her without knowing it consciously    obviously it was a defensive and very practical position for me to hold given that my mother made it very clear the last time we spoke that she would kill me if she could and had planned to do so on more than one occasion   anyhow this blog is not about that past  but about me ending up standing unconsciously in such a blatant generality of non existence towards this human being    

so it was a surprise to see her in my dream  as a young woman who I could tell was not forged into the horror I knew when she was fifty years or more beyond that day in my dream  she was not yet what she became   it was kind of a wake up call to me to think to recognize that at one time she was young and coming face to face with her own choices and circumstance

she was definitely in pain   and in that moment I felt kindness? compassion? empathy for her?  something

and that morning I woke up with the question of what does it mean to feel these types of feelings for a person who as it turned out  as she made her way through the forest and over the hill of life to be
a person who chose not to be kind herself     it was as if she that day long ago when she was a person whose reality was adjusted whose fantasies were crushed she planted the seed of bitterness and revenge

so what was it like for me (someone who lived with this bitter, narcissistic, vengeful person as a child growing up myself and later as a child that she tried to murder because I was resistant to her  and her ways ) what was it like for me to feel a non negative feeling towards her?  maybe not even a negative feeling but any feeling at all?  what was it like  it was odd  it was weird.  it was a new idea

it made me question the application of kindness and compassion  it made me question whether or not I was conditional  and because being conditional in my mind is not right it made me question me which in turn made me want to learn a deeper more valuable skill    something that takes into consideration the past humanness the past negativity and the present choice of no connection   how do I think of or consider this person in her complexity?

it was a good question

right away I want to say that it is not my job, my wish or my anything what so ever to change her or to be connected to her.  what I saw in all of this was a clearer picture of me  and so I got to take a look at me with the idea of using that dream and the experience of experiencing witnessing her in her moment ( a moment) of pain and having feelings about it   sort of a retro ah-ha moment.  no need to rethink me and her, no need to criticize the solid decisions I have made about the facts of my life,  but an opportunity to give myself a better future because of an encounter with her past  

that's kind of cool

so for me it comes down to learning to be at ease with life's flexibility with the stages we all go through with the freedom we have to be one person one minute and another the next   I am not dependent on my mother being one way or another,   negative or positive according to how she affects me  i.e. my perception of her   to herself she may be always positive  

and I may in an overall general sense wish her well but that doesn't mean I want to rely on her or experience her in my personal time and space continuum   I'd rather not
however it was good to be reminded that she is a human being  and for that human being who lost her dreams on the face of reality I can feel  something
for the person who took that experience and made herself into something that is bitter and destructive not so much

why does this matter?  because we are not all lump sum   we are not generalized beings   I would rather be a being that can feel  even if I cannot identify those feelings and even if those feelings do not change my activities  I can feel them   and just that change in me  that nuance of positivity  I do know will is some form of love that the person that she was  at that time and space where she stood where all of us have stood at one time or another, and in that time and space having that love extended to her even minutely  even from now back to then and when  even in that small way  that change in me  that openness to her  will make a difference    it felt like a gift to her   unconditional love from me to her    spontaneous   no strings  no future fantasies  nothing but that instant of love released from me extended to her  

who would have thought I had it in me ?

and perhaps that person that she is then obviously somewhere still going through that pain maybe she will in the time and space that the dream was connected to  maybe she will shift even a little  not towards hate and bitterness and revenge  but towards care

who knows

what I do know is that inside of me I was glad to find that I cared  that I was capable of opening myself up to a deeper perhaps more skilled response   I think that is important  I think it is worthwhile   I don't want to be dependent or rigid or emotionless  and I don't want to crash or hang out over some edge of fantasy or despair or disillusionment or separation    that means that I have got to have better skills

the other thing that this little exercise has given me is joy in me  joy in seeing who I choose to be  and whether it changes something somewhere or nothing  what I know is that because I felt it, delved into it, sussed out a skill from it and now will practice until competent  I like me more today   I also like the world a little more because I feel I can move about in it with more confidence

so good luck there star troopers  going where no human has gone before  or so it feels on a daily basis

best mb