Dark Night of the Soul
It has been just a little over two years since my last post
to this blog. This has been a
difficult time for me, a time of wanting to get free of my marriage and yet so
not wanting it to end. A
book by Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the
Soul, helped me by naming what I was experiencing in the grip of these
conflicting impulses. “Sometimes a dark night begins to brew when you are
caught between incompatible wishes,” Moore writes. “At one level you want
change, but at another it’s the last thing in the world you want.”
Moore encouraged me to accept that what I needed to do was
sit with this dilemma until my internal conflict resolved itself and allowed me
to move on. This sitting with the
feelings that arise and accepting “what is,” is, of course, what Buddhist
practice and yoga practice are all about.
So, I have been practicing intensely but not feeling much like writing
about it.
For the past year, I have been living on my own. I still see my husband nearly every
day, however, when I go back to the house to get our dog Suzie for a
walk. Also in the past year, our
older daughter had a baby girl, another bond of love between him and me. We talk about our family, see the
occasional movie or concert together and help each other out with practical
things. The absence of rancor and
continuing friendship are good things.
Yet, there has been a stuck quality to this arrangement, much like the
stuckness in my interior state.
The past winter, in particular, was a dark period of
grieving and ruminating over the 44 years of our marriage. I have been painfully aware of the many
aspects of our life together I want to cling to, for example, our house and the
things we did well together as a couple, like making a home for our daughters
and managing our joint finances.
Also, I now realize, I have been clinging to the pain caused by the fact
that I wasn’t able to get from him the attention and affection I longed for. I have experienced remorse over some
very unskillful ways I responded to this pain, in particular my withdrawal into
an extended period of workaholism (the deeper shadow side of “Shoulder-pad
Bettye”). Yet I have held on
to the unrequited longing and the unhappiness associated with it.
In the past few months, however, my hold on these emotions started
to loosen a bit. I have been working
with Pema Chodron’s teaching on the Bodhisattva path, with her emphasis on
letting go. I have worked on
developing other areas of my life more fully. Most important, I have decided to
move to New York to live closer to our daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter and this
impending change has opened up my sense of what the future might bring. Slowly, slowly, I am beginning to experience less internal resistance to how this part of my life is unfolding. Here’s what Thomas Moore has to say: