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By Singhashri Gazmuri

Here’s a truth. If you think you’ve got it wrong, you’re right. You’ve got it wrong. You’ve got it absolutely wrong. I learned this hard truth at age 16 when the relief of death finally came for my mother – and for me. We weren’t particularly close, in fact we fought endlessly. She never understood my rage and I never understood her ambivalence. But she loved me anyways and I loved her too, because she was my mother. Turns out she was terribly depressed. When she finally realized what was happening it was too late. By the time she started taking the Prozac, the cancer was already working its insidious way through the tissue in her breasts. Five years of illness followed by the overwhelming relief when she finally died was a shock.

I spent years feeling guilty for that. Nothing stays as it is. Not even for an instant. Take nature for example: Does anything remain static? Even for the duration of time that you can remain focused on it? Take the body, just now, as you’re reading this – is there any sensation that isn’t changing, even subtly? How do we know we are embodied? We know through the senses. Does anything we experience through the senses stay the same? If there is something that seems not to be changing how long can that last? Eventually you’ll have to move, to eat or sleep or go to the loo, then what happens to those sensations that seemed so solid? Where is there anything that doesn’t change? Is there a moment in time when the light remains just as it is?

If we think there is anything that can stay just as it is, without ever changing, or even without changing for a little while, then we’ve got it wrong. And this is the problem. There is nothing wrong with things changing. That is just the way they are. In fact, life would not be life without movement, dynamism and flow. All living things come into being, grow and develop. But eventually, for everything that ever existed, or will exist in the future, they decline, depreciate and die. This is simply the way things are.

Our problem is not that things change, or even that we change, or that other people change. Our problem is that we operate from an underlying assumption that they don’t, shouldn’t or won’t. We can’t get our heads around the truth of the matter. And so we act like it’s not happening. We act like things are going to stay as they are. And then when they don’t, we get upset, depressed, anxious, fearful.

I spent five years in that dark place. I couldn’t believe the most important person in my life, the one who was supposed to be there forever, even when I didn’t want her to be, could just disappear. Could simply be here one day and gone the rest. I was attached – and rightly so. The greatest attachment of my life up to that point was to my mother. And when she was taken away from me, I suffered greatly. I felt the pain of that separation. And deep down inside of me I knew that all attachment would end in that same pain.

And so I ran. I didn’t want to feel that pain. I didn’t want to know how it really was. I did everything I could to escape it. I was depressed, angry, full of resentment and ultimately self-hatred. If the only person who had ever loved me unconditionally couldn’t even stick around, who else would? And why should they?

Look at everything around you, in you, outside of you. How is it now? And now? After five years of running I finally had had enough. I couldn’t go on like this if I hoped to have any kind of a normal life. I couldn’t go on, hating myself, and everyone around me. I had to learn how to be with my pain. How to meet it and listen to it and give it the space it was begging for. So I began to practice mindfulness. And when I finally started to do that, I realized that there was nothing ultimately wrong with the pain. In fact, there was something finally satisfying about being able to simply be with it that was much less painful than trying to fight it off.

All the energy I had wasted running away from it and keeping it at bay began to get freed up. And slowly I began to learn how to turn that energy back towards myself in the form of acceptance and finally, self-love. I’m fifteen years into that journey now, and everyday I surprise myself with the possibility of opening to myself even more fully. Opening to life, other people and whatever is happening now to greater and greater depths. What a gift.

If you are living with something uncomfortable, or suffering from physical or mental pain please see if Breathworks’ courses or books may be of help to you.