Back in June, I was scheduled to go to my first Goenka silent meditation retreat. It was a few years in the making after R first suggested it. Finally, I made the commitment to wake up early to sign up online. I suspected that the demand would be high after the pandemic put a pause on in-person retreats. But the morning I woke up, I laid in bed and decided to ignore my intuition. I signed up half an hour after enrollment opened. Of course, I got waitlisted. I was very disappointed in myself but wasn’t surprised. A few weeks before the retreat, I was notified that I was confirmed to attend. A rush of relief and gratitude flooded me. I felt like there had been divine intervention and I was given a second chance. I wasn’t going to miss it for anything!
I looked forward to the retreat believing it would transform my life. That’s a tall order for one single event but I was motivated. Whatever I learned at the retreat, I was resolved to apply the skills and knowledge. I believed I would learn to not just hear my intuition but to act on it. I believed that I would learn to fortify my sense of self, so that I could never waver from a decision, that I would become a fighter first for myself and then for others. I don’t know why I had all these preconceptions and expectations, except that these were aspects of myself that I had long wanted to improve upon. I spoke excitedly with my friends my plans to attend the retreat and what I hoped to gain from it.
A week before the meditation retreat, I got the fateful text from my brother, K. My mother had fallen and was in the emergency room.
Ever since then, life has been upended and regressed. I’ve returned to my priorities and values of the past. My priority has reverted back to my responsibilities of a daughter and a sister and my home is now split three ways, between my sister’s house, my apartment in Oakland, and my mother’s house. Each home has a different wardrobe for a different persona. It’s been a refresh on my personal appearance and image which is a needed change after what I’ve gone through in the last year.
It’s a return to yesteryear because in order to start afresh, I had to clean out the old. I had to clean up my old relationship dynamics and establish new healthier ones with siblings and with my mother. I have to say goodbye to my former self and commit to the current one that I would listen more and apply more wisdom to my decisions. I’ve been literally and figuratively cleaning out the closets, dark corners, and all other areas that have been neglected and forgotten.
This year is a pause in my life to really clean out the old, and plan for the new to arrive.
My new year’s resolutions to cultivate deeper and more loving relationships with my siblings especially the ones with whom I was estranged with started with the family meeting in January and then accelerated after my mom’s fall. I wasn’t prepared nor had any desire to be the group leader but I’ve been told that given my temperament of patience and diplomacy, my siblings look towards me for direction, for peacemaking, for planning, for organization. Besides, if I didn’t take the role, nothing would get done and I couldn’t live with the consequences. I’m not sure how well I’m handling everything but I’m doing my best.
I was seeking 10 days of inner work at a peaceful, quiet, and tranquil nature setting in the mountains of San Bernardino. Where I found myself instead was in the middle of a messy, chaotic, tornado of my family in a house that may or may not be inhabited by ghosts. Is this the message from my guides that I need more incentive to get going with my life plans? That if I don’t help set my family up for success with my mom and a more cooperative dynamic that I will be stuck here doing it on my own? Whose responsibility is it to take care of mom? Not just me. It’s all of us. It’s my brother’s and my responsibility to take care of the house but our mom is the mother of nine children. I have 1/9th share of the responsibility and I’m the sixth in line to boot! I can’t ask anyone to do anything other to look deeply at their relationship with our mother, see what and if it could be changed. Ideally, everyone takes turns spending a few days with her. Spending time with her can be the torture they’re avoiding or a lesson in patience, loving compassion, and forgiveness. Forgiveness starts with ourselves first before we can start healing our relationships to others. We can’t change our mother but we can learn to change our response to her.
It’s up to each of us to decide what our experience will be.