Continuing the story of Lydia and Me
Last year I was given a great gift.
It was wrapped up in special packaging: a teaching and meditation morning at a Buddhist centre.
The teaching carried in it a message that helped me to put to rest something that I’d been struggling with for decades.
I’d thought, for a long time, that I would never be able to put right mistakes that I’d made in the past because they were too big; too major. I thought that I’d fallen and failed early on in my life and all my efforts to rebuild had failed too. Despite doing my best to push through on positives for a long time, it had never been enough.
Then, suddenly, there it was, in the teaching that morning. It was possible for me to put the past behind me and be happy in the present. All I had to do was develop a calm and peaceful mind.
That teaching gave me hope, when I needed hope, and I’ve been building on it ever since.
That doesn’t mean that I am suddenly happy and joyful all the time. You don’t go through a lifetime of struggling with complex mental health and emotional difficulties without that struggle alone taking its toll. But I now allow myself to feel lighter, have stopped berating myself, stopped feeling responsible for everything that goes ‘wrong’ or has gone ‘wrong’ in the past.
For a long time, friends have told me that I deserved to be happy, but there was something so badly hurt, and at such a deep level, that it’s taken a long, long time for that place of hurt to be finally exposed to a point of healing, and for that healing to start taking place.
Tonight is a meeting of the Buddhist group that I go to, which is an outreach from the Centre that I went to last year[i].
I’ve already had a good day today, and I have that to look forward to this evening.
Some gifts just keep on giving.
[i] Madhyamaka Centre, Pocklington, UK
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