“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” – Dr Seuss
This morning, as I woke to a chilly morning, I had a hankering for daffodils. It happens every year when the weather turns cooler. But rather than think of these golden globes with fondness, I felt melancholy, a deepening pit of sadness, ironic given that they are such a bright and cheery flower. I thought the sadness was due to the fact that I nurture a secret dream of moving to the country, a place with winters cold enough to grow daffodils. Sadly, it’s too warm where I live for these bursts of sunshine to grow. Perhaps my melancholy was just an unfulfilled dream that left me feeling blue, instead of sunny yellow.
Born a forensic psychologist, I wanted to uncover the thoughts behind these feelings. Why would thinking of such a pretty, happy flower make me sad? As I probed my feelings, I realised that daffodils remind me of a very happy time in my childhood when we would spend school holidays at a family friend’s farm. It was a time when I got to see more of my father, and the pressures and worries of city living were magically erased as we drove past the farm gate. I loved the draughty old farm house, the open fire that smoked like crazy and left us smelling like burnt sausages, the crispy frost that snapped blades of grass in two as we raced to the top of the hill, collapsing on the grass, simultaneous gasping for air and laughing…and then there were the daffodils. I’d begin my daily vigil beside the little mounds, as the hidden miracles pushed and shoved at the earth, striving to burst their sunny disposition from the dark and slowly warming earth. Watching their challenging attempts at emerging from the dark and morphing into a new creation was to become more than just a childhood memory. It became my life’s metaphor when I faced my own challenges and was called to emerge from dark times, changed, from whatever life experiences I was dealt at the time.
My sentimental feelings weren’t just about childhood memories. There was a deeper sadness beneath it. For 10 years I’ve struggled through a range of ongoing and undiagnosed health issues. More days than I care to remember have been spent in bed, or trapped inside my own home. It’s been as though my own metaphoric daffodils have been continually moving through the dark earth, with unrelenting regularity, struggling to find a way to push out of the dark and into the light, until now.
Through journaling and with the energetic help of a lunar eclipse, I’ve come to understand the sadness. For years I’ve been fixated on physical healing and addressing my anxiety and fear based thoughts, and while I understand where my fears come from and have begun to address these, I’d missed something really important. Underneath it all, lay a deep wound that needed healing. Yes, it’s that onion layering thing, and just like the skins of a daffodil bulb, I was removing the outer skins to reach a core wound.
Painful emotions are messengers alerting us to disharmony between our heart and mind. For me, the sadness aroused by the daffodils came from the sadness I felt for my younger self, the little girl I once was, and how her life had turned out. Don’t get me wrong, I have so many things to be grateful for, truly I do, but I also feel a sense of loss at the many hours, days, weeks spent in bed or at home, too unwell to join the other mothers at school morning teas, or to travel, to do more than the bare minimum with my children, being unable to extend my circle of friends as I often had to decline invitations to social events, eventually those invites stop coming, and to the woman who I thought I would become and who would change the world. A thought leader, shaker, mover, change maker. I was going to fully embody my Aquarian characteristics, the humanitarian, the disruptor. None of this came to pass. All that happened was that I disrupted my own world and with great ferocity.
And so I was stuck, feeling sadness, regret and unsure how to deal with it. I know that in all painful situations, there is often a nugget of wisdom hidden within the pain. What could I glean from this painful memory? And so I began to journal.
What I found was that I wanted was to contact and warn my 10 year old self and say, “When you meet the guy with the weird moustache, steer clear. See that fancy looking job? Don’t take it. Your boss will suck you dry and slam dunk your self esteem. Every time your mother yells at you for making a mistake, it’s not your mistake that’s got her riled up, it’s her own life and frustrations bubbling up to the surface. You just got in the way of some emotionally toxic spray that was unleashed, and sadly, some of it will land on you.”
Then I realised I that all my rumination, worries, sadness wouldn’t change a thing.
Instead I stumbled upon a healing formula for my wound.
- The past is done! Part of the pain was from frustration at not being able to change the past. Realising that what’s done is done allows some closure.
- I did the best with what I had. Remembering this fact is vital to healing past wounds. We create pain when looking back from the rich tapestry of knowledge and experience we’ve gained and trying to see a past situation from our current wiser self. If we’d known then what we know now, we’d make different choices, but the fact remains that we didn’t know and it’s why we did what we did, with what we had at our disposal at the time.
- Healing balm mantra – Apply Daily: “I did what I did with what I knew then. I did the best I could. I send my old self love and know I did the best I could.”
- Forgiveness. Sigh! Forgiveness is the key to healing so many wounds, yet I find it the toughest of processes to work with. I was blaming my current adult self for stuffing up the potential life of my younger self. That’s crazy I hear you say. How could you have known what was coming? Exactly. This is faulty thinking at its best, then add to it my own peculiar ability to blame myself for everything that goes wrong (see item 2 – doing the best with what you’ve got) and you’ve got little room for forgiveness. In this case, fault finding comes from that sticky toxic spray I mentioned earlier. The one that made me think I was to blame for everything that went wrong. Those toxic remarks from care givers can be tough to dislodge and this is where self love and forgiveness helps. As psychologist Rick Hanson says, …”the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones.” So, it’s time to develop a Teflon brain for negative experiences and velcro for the good ones.
So with this special lunar eclipse entering our skies and consciousness, I’m going to lay to rest into the dark earth, the old ways of seeing my childhood, mistakes of adulthood and slough off some of that toxic spray. With the new moon, I call in new skin to heal my wound and layer it with love and forgiveness and from this rich soil, new daffodils of wisdom can grow and shine their sunny faces towards mine.
What old pain can you heal and return to the earth, and what new nugget of wisdom will you add to your blooming flowers of knowledge and insight?
