I just got in from the gong bath / meditation. I hadn’t been in 2 months, a record for me I think. I missed them. I will miss them so much when I move. Linda my friend/gong player said I’ll find them there. I don’t know, it’s not that easy. While I know of 3 groups here that have them, I know friends all over the country in highly populated areas that can’t find them. I told Linda if I can’t, maybe I’ll have to start them.

I guess it’s just more of the stuff here I love that I will be leaving. But I’ll figure it out, I always do.

The gongs tonight sent me so deep. I thought I would just continue with healing, the letting go of all of the trauma and sadness and ugliness of the last year. I began the meditation with the Ho’oponopono (I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you). I began a gratitude list, thankful for all the incredible blessings I have had bestowed on me. So many more right now, with finding my house in Florida, and my sis and her hubby doing so much of the leg work for me. Just so blessed.

But I knew I have stuff yet to let go of.

I think the connections I have to people, especially some people, are like the roots of a plant. They are wrapped around each other and everything inside of me. My heart, my lungs, my liver, my kidneys, my ovaries….everything. I cannot possibly remove them all, and let go of everything. Those connections are now part of who I am. I came to the conclusion out there in the ethers, that I only have to accept that those connections are part of me. They are at times uncomfortable, at times comforting, but whatever they are at the moment, doesn’t matter, because they have become part of who I am. I cannot look back at my life and ignore parts of it, or say parts of it didn’t matter. It all mattered, it all taught me, and now I have to accept that all of those experiences are part of what makes me a unique person. Acceptance. Just, let it be.

Suddenly I got the Cheryl Strayed quotation that I posted the other day in a much more profound way. What if I wanted all of that? What if the same thing that broke me so hard, also made me beautiful? What if I ignored all the warning signs, and chose to feel the pain instead? Because…the cause of the pain, the intense pain, was also at times a thing that caused me intense joy. What if my soul needed that experience? The ying and the yang. The light and the dark. One cannot exist without the other. I needed to know this, to feel this, in a way that made it part of me.

My God, our lives, in all their painful misery and excruciating joy, are so sacred.

I don’t think that I’m going to try any longer to let it go. It hasn’t been working anyway. And why should it? How can I let go of who I am, who all those experiences helped to create. I like myself well enough, and if I rid myself of all those connections, if I pull them out by the roots….I’ll damage a lot of other things, trying to get rid of things that are completely entwined in my being now.

I’m going to accept them all. I’m going to just let it be. If I miss someone, then I’ll miss them. Wish them love and light, and say the Ho’oponopono for them a few times, and sit with the sadness until it’s gone.

When it was over, when the gongs and the crystal bowls, and the drums were silent, I was a million miles away. I heard, finally, someone talking and I opened my eyes. Everyone was sitting up, discussing their experience. Later, Linda told me she had called my name, but she didn’t think I’d heard her. I hadn’t.

I stayed and visited with she and Peter, her husband. He is mentoring a men’s weekend put on by The Mankind Project, which he’s been involved in for a dozen years. It’s such a worthwhile project. He is such a cool guy. We often all talk about our hippie days, and music and drugs, but now….he holds gong baths and sweat lodges and teaches men how to reconnect with themselves.

I will surely miss those two. But they have promised to come see me in Florida.

I’m reposting the Cheryl Strayed quote, because it was so instrumental in my meditation tonight, and I think I really got somewhere, I think I really helped my healing in a big way. Time will tell, but instead of letting it all go, I am going to try embracing what’s left. And embracing myself while I do it.

Love and Light, all….