Gratitude - Infertility Insight

Dear Buffy, I hope this letter finds you happy.  Your work remains active in me daily – it’s in my cells now.  It has transformed my life, so please accept these words as an expression of my gratitude. Your 10 week infertility workshop started me on a journey that has blessed me with liberation from a long dark night of the soul—I could say a lifelong night of the soul.  I came into that workshop bereft of hope, filled with suffering, and no light in sight.  I left with tools that blossomed over these couple of years into a deep practice in the art of living.  Living richly in the face of continued great loss.  The debilitating anxiety, fear, anger, and disappointment that characterized how I internally met life have metamorphosed into mostly fleeting moments that come and go as I watch, often with a healthy dose of compassion in that gaze.  Unheard of prior to mindfulness practice being my daily bread!  Their hold on my mind has decreased to the point that I marvel at how I made it through all the years of living in such suffering.  What a gift it was to walk into your workshop and be generously given the tools to begin my journey back to myself!  I’d been searching for so very long for healing, trying many things, but had never seen clearly enough to realize that the practice of presence was absolutely foundational to any healing for me. Ever since the workshop, I’ve meditated an hour a day with few exceptions.  It was hard to do, a daily commitment, and remains thus.  But the benefits!  It’s like all that work sets me up to bring mindfulness into the whole day, moment by moment.  Oh, my mind goes flying all over the place, but now I catch it again and again and again, throughout the day, reground, show up again; and in doing so, I stop terrorizing myself with my thoughts.  More and more over time, I catch myself before my body has gripped in fear, regret, or dark anticipation.  Or if I’m too late, I can now give myself some kindness, breathing myself back off the ledge.  “Yes. This, too. This, too.”  Remember teaching that?  What a help it’s been.  Of course, I haven’t been magically relieved of all my Stuff, I fall about constantly, but I’m finally there to pick myself up.  And with ever-diminishing Germanocatholic self-berating!  Indeed, compassion for myself continues to take root.  And that is miraculous. Life has become richer and much more interesting.  My marriage has grown.  All of my relationships have deepened.  I have been reunited in a heartfelt way with my family, and the tenor of my friendships is fuller, sweeter.  I don’t dread myself and my lacks very much anymore, and can share this newfound peace with those I love. In order to show up, I have had to fundamentally change the pace of my life.  Slow way, way down.  Hurry is tantamount to anxiety for me.  My adrenals took a big toll from my prior mode of existence, such that overwhelm sits very close to the surface.  Since adolescence,  I’ve experienced the symptoms of PTSD, but now instead of being frustrated about that and simply pushing on through to my detriment, I  practice accepting what it is, and letting it guide how I structure my days.  This has required a quiet kind of life without much socializing or go-getting.  It’s quite hard on one level, as I long have wanted to expand and deepen my work, spend more time with my friends, visit my family more often, make and maintain a great big luscious vegetable garden, etc.  But learning to honor my energy limitations, and give gratitude for what I  can do, for the abundance I do have, has been one of the most powerful teachings of my life.  My days are now filled with countless moments of internal “thank yous.”  For example, when, for the 57th day in a row my husband administers another injection of progesterone into my bruised and painful butt cheek, instead of the previous frustration and shame that I am in the position of having to do this at all, I feel,  “Thank you that I am lucky enough to even be able to use ART.  Thank you that at 45 I get to get pregnant with my sister’s help, with my husband’s financial sacrifice, with science’s advances.”  How different the world looks from this shift in perspective! Love, K