Triggers!!!!
What do we do when the pain gets so bad and all we want to do is hide? Hide under the duvet, watch TV, play with technology, with friends and family, work, eat, drink alcohol, think - ruminate, procastinate and then there is always beating ourselves up.
For me there will always be triggers to my loss. Yep always, but I have noticed that they get less in strength! It tells me that I am not quite over not being a mother. It tells me that, my wanting to be a mother was so very important to me. It tells me to stop and breath - to listen - to take sersiously what I have to feel.
Compassion is the most important aspect to 'grieving with gusto' for me! I forget sometimes that I am a feeling and loving human being.
Yesterday I took my beautiful, fully blooded, almost 4 and 7 year old cousins out for the day with my partner. Everything was planned and organised extremely well. It was so much fun feeding the ducks, watching my partner carry their scooters as they ran around and then as we all played footie together. But there were moments that I looked at my partner and I felt the sadness and it broke my heart to realise again that I will never have my own children.
I used to hide from these moments, but I've learnt how to embrace them now. They are moments that I am grateful for - but they hurt inside my heart, my stomach and my shoulders clench, still with old habits of fighting the pain. Today I allow time for myself. As I sit and go through my plans for this weekend I remember to breath and open to the feelings. I remind myself there is nothing to hide from, this is normal and not to be feared. I have practised welcoming these feelings when they come. I breath and say - this is already here, let me feel it. I go inside the pain and open to it again and again, there is healing in there. Allowing the tears to fall or the sadness to take over has taught me that this is the healing from my feelings.
Art helps this:
Choosing the colour that I'm drawn too and allowing the emotion to come through the colour and the marks. I never know what is going to come up, but it feels so good to allow the red to move onto the paper and the blue to form and fall through the red. I allow and trust and let it come out from my body and onto the paper.
Today another image came, one of healing and growth. I would be lying if I said that the pain has all gone today, I don't false it to come all at once, trusting the process allows me not to pressure myself and keeps this process safe for me. It feels good to know that this place is here at all times, it feels good to have the image contain the pain.