moving blues

so its almost here. well, its still some time away - april 1st. but with my week in ko samui in between for me it feels just five days away. 

these last weeks have been filled with a lot of fear and suddenly i am having a hard time letting this apartment go and embracing change. just a month ago i was desperate to get out sure that all the negative experiences i was having here were pushing me to leave. i was filled with fear then too.  i am still scared that i made a choice about the new apartment based on fear. we keep running into big and small snags as we try to imagine how to make this new place our home.

this morning i felt i needed to meditate and welcome the fears. since i also have wrenched my back badly last week and one of the biggest fears today is that this injury will really hamper me in the week of training in koh samui. i decided to focus on this fear first. we train five intense hours a day there and arriving in good health feels like a must for a fifty-plus body like mine.

i began with that and just followed where it took me. i found myself amplifying that fear and feeling that i would return with a even worse back to the move. then as i thought of the move the fears about the new home came up and these led me deeper into my core fears and insecurities of being homeless and penniless. but as i just let them all well up and overwhelm, rode with the constricting chest and the  nausea that arose, slowly something shifted. i started feeling the hopeless loss of leaving this gorgeous home. 

this apartment is rented, but everyone who comes in here tells me that it feels like home. i really love this apartment. it was the first one we saw when we came to singapore and i loved it from the moment i walked in. it felt then like a safe spot in this new and strange land. our house agent of course insisted on us seeing more apartments but my mind  constantly returned to this one and we were lucky enough to get it. moving into it was smooth and joyful.

as i think back over the five years i feel how this apartment has been the healing container for us and how much all three of us have grown here. living here by ourselves completely cut off from family and the other deep support systems we have in bombay we were left to deal with everything that came up between us just by ourselves. having no others to diffuse any of the tensions - initially between my spouse and me and later with our daughter - we often found that during a conflict our feeling and angers intensified and grew larger and larger forcing us to face them completely or run away from them and from each other. but the house provided a space that held us and helped us face ourselves and love ourselves and each other even more. we healed from many deep wounds from the past. we healed from destructive patterns.

healing is not the sweet easy experience we want always. whether it is healing through physical injury or through emotional heartbreak there is a period of great pain, of great fear, of facing losses, of feeling fragmented, of feeling alone and abandoned, of feeling we will never be whole again. and we really don't know if we ever will be whole. in the midst of healing there is no vision of the other side and all there is often, is bleak darkness. sometimes there is faith in the great benevolent unknown but sometimes  there is only murky terror.

there were many days like that here too. but we did find our way to the other side and this apartment now has the most beautiful memories for us. here we made our own rules and found our own ways of living different from those we grew up in. the place allowed us all to transform in different ways.

moving into the new home is filled with problems and each time we solve one another emerges. so i often wonder why am i letting this home go? its given us love and new life.

but as i grieve the loss of this home i can finally release the light and love of it to the new family that will move in and wish that they too will enjoy its beautiful healing energy. i can leave feeling glad that as a tenant i left this space richer than when i came in. the agent always tells us how well we take care of this place and that makes us smile with pride. but its not just the visible we have  cared for, we have added our positive vibrations into the very walls of this apartment. let it now work its magic on another.

it is time to move on and face whatever the new space brings. 

as i have these thoughts i also hope that when i leave this country i leave something positive behind in this not so strange city state that has given me so much. and ultimately when i leave this earth i hope i can go feeling that i gave the earth as much as i received from it.