Sixteen years ago, I was the poster girl for the panic-stricken 50-year-old control freak who had lost control.
My husband of 17 years had just left me and our family. He exited in a blaze of blame — screaming his list of grievances for an hour after I collapsed to the tile floor of the kitchen.
That was my hard stop: the cold, white tile floor. My salvation: the soothing words of poet and spiritual teacher Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening, a volume of daily meditations that became my map to self-awareness and my guide to my own slow, painful and complicated awakening.
“Pain is often a sign that something needs to change,” Nepo writes. “We may need to withstand great pain, great heartache, great disappointment and loss in order to unfold into the rest of our lives.”
The more tightly wound you are, the more this unfolding process hurts.
I couldn’t eat, and I couldn’t sleep, and I got scary skinny. I lost 20 pounds in a month, and that was just the wreckage people could see. Inside, I was the embodiment of one of Nepo’s truths: “What is not ex-pressed is de-pressed.”
I had worked so hard trying to “fix” things I could not control — a pattern developed after my father died of a heart attack when I was 9 — I had de-pressed my own emotional needs. I pushed them down so far, most people didn’t notice. My best friends understood: My husband might have swung the hammer, but I built that glass tower of illusion all by myself.
Author Nepo gets it, too. He’s a self-described people pleaser who survived a critical and dominating mother, the breakup of his first marriage and then excruciating physical pain while recovering from a rare lymphoma. His body literally could not tolerate all the pain it was holding, and in the act of feeling and healing, he wrote:
“Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.”
Similar to the format of author Melody Beattie’s daybook, The Language of Letting Go, Nepo wrote 365 essays, lessons to awaken us to “having the life you want by being present to the life you have.”
Beattie’s work also is a lifesaver for boundary-challenged codependents like me and Mark Nepo. I got my first copy of The Language of Letting Go from my college roommate Jo Beth, who had just gone through a divorce herself. I flipped it open and saw a line I would repeat to myself: “This moment, we are right where we need to be, right where we are meant to be.” And then another passage I needed: “We need only allow ourselves to feel vulnerable enough to feel hurt, when that’s appropriate, and take responsibility for our feelings, behaviors and what we need to do to take care of ourselves. We don’t have to analyze or justify our feelings. We need to feel them and try not to let them control our behavior.”