Walking on the beach yesterday — a beach that is officially closed except for exercise — I started to let in the fact that our summer is essentially cancelled. Each event was cancelled one at a time and there was a feeling of loss, or sometimes relief. But now there is the empty beach and the empty summer stretched out in front of me for miles. My mind went to all kinds of conclusions. First, that I should not feel sad because I have so much to be grateful for, second that we could stay a shorter time here and then go home and third that I was just feeling blah and would get over it.
I came back home and listened to a Tara Brach podcast I have been following Called Sheltering in Love. She has been a teacher of the practice of RAIN meditation, a profound process of Recognizing a feeling, Allowing it, Intimately feeling it in the body, and then Nurturing it. As I fought my feelings that arose when I felt the loss of our summer I had hoped for, we usually resist our feelings. We do this by minimizing them to try and make them small or exaggerating them so they feel too big to handle or by trying to fix them. So naming them and allowing them is so different. And then giving them space in our bodies and our own comfort — it is revolutionary.
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