My Meditation Path: Old Connections Light up New Pathways

May 29, 2025

Something unexpected has come up this past week reader, the universe has sent me another new (old) idea and feeling to process with my newly found tools of meditation and spiritual awareness. Within the past year or so I poked my head up on social media among family and old friends and started making random posts occasionally, mostly about my daughter's plays or concerts or little quirky funny (non-personal) things that happen in my life that I think someone I know might get a kick out of. One of those people I'm friends with happens to be an old boyfriend from my early 20's, who was actually not a narcissist and who was loving and fun and who I loved very much. We lived together for 2 years while I was in college upstate. I was really ready to marry him and have his babies after graduation, and he really wanted to travel the country and see what was left of the Grateful Dead in exotic locales and try new IPA's. We had to break up, and I was truly heartbroken. I didn't date anyone else seriously for 8 years, until I met my eventual husband and I believe I covered that in another post.

Quite without any prompting from me, this man who I remembered as such a bright light from my past started making very nice and funny comments on my posts, and I started answering his little comments. I don't want to make any more of this than it was, reader, we are talking about 2 gen-Xers exchanging 12-word quips back and forth on Facebook. But it has been continuing for a little while now, and while I don't know if I can call the comments flirtatious because honestly that part of my brain has been completely burned away and is gone, they are definitely nostalgic. This man doesn't remember me poorly. I must have been at least kind to him. That knowledge fills me with a peace that I needed reader, especially after all the years of being told what a horrible and difficult partner I was by my ex-husband.

Beads

I left my husband 5 years ago, and when I heard my psychologist say to me for the first time about being in a relationship "you don't have to" I can't tell you the wave of relief that washed over me. I still feel that way reader. This man is one of the very few in that time who has even caused me to think about such a thing at this vulnerable moment in my life, possibly because there is still a lot of love there for me. This feels both beautiful and scary. I heard a therapist on a podcast I watch recently say "People say they need time after a breakup, it's not true! Do you get better at basketball by reading books about basketball or laying around thinking about basketball? No! You need to get out and practice with someone!" And I had never thought of it like that. Maybe there is some truth to that way of thinking. But I know I still need to heal. I also know that this man is still fit, and I have put on 100 pounds since I last saw him, when I used to be cute as a bug's ear, and I doubt he would be attracted to the increased me very much. For some reason although the pictures of the new me are right there on Facebook to be seen, I still feel quite sure he hasn't looked back at them. The only thing I know in his favor of being able to get beyond such a thing is that he is a deep person, and he might have the desire someday to do the kind of spiritual work I am doing.

Of course I have been meditating on this reader, and asking for clarity. I have learned that once you have a strong bond with someone you forever have a connection that either of you can sort of light up by thinking of the other. You may have experienced this before, like when you say to yourself "Hey remember Chuck from high school. I wonder how the heck he's doing." And then out of the blue you get a call from your old friend Chuck, or you run into him or somehow that person you just were thinking about shows up in your life in some way. I felt like my connection with this special person was lighting up like crazy with memories and good feelings. In meditation I asked what I needed to know that I didn't already know.

Meditating outdoors

The answer that I got (after the stillness) was a vision, not words, and I understood it instantly. I was walking in the dark, wearing some kind of hooded monk's robe and carrying a candle, my only source of light. Suddenly this person was walking sort of behind and beside me, dressed alike and carrying his candle. I was leading the way, I was strong. But then, for some reason I blew out my own light. Suddenly he was gone, and I was alone in the dark with no source of light at all. I knew in a flash that this vision summed up my every relationship. As soon as I was partnered with someone, I gave myself up completely and everything became about them. I lost myself in them, I gave up my own light to follow theirs, but that's not healthy and it's not what I was meant to do. I was taught how to love this way by my mother, who adopted my father's political views, converted to Catholicism for him, trusted his opinion about any kind of tricky decisions, and deferred to him when it came to difficult situations. He was her support. He was also her substructure, and when he died and his light went out in this world, she was blind for a while. She was living with no light to see by, and all she did was sit in the dark and cry for about a year and a half. It took a new boyfriend to really get some light back into her life again, but she has grown a lot I believe over these 6 years, and I hope she can keep her own light going no matter what happens with this guy. And the kind of partner I would eventually want in my life if I ever do want another one wouldn't want to journey through life beside me if they had to light the way all by themselves, then I would just be baggage. And I know at this point in my life I am not willing to follow blindly behind another man through life again.

But more importantly, my light (and everyone's really) is too strong, too beautiful to let go out in the world. Right now, I need to learn how to tend my light, to feed it and make it strong. To learn how to shelter it from any storm and to make it as bright as possible, because my light is finally starting to shine out onto my loved ones now. My 82-year-old mother, she needs a lot of light, and now I am giving her as much as I have. My daughter, she was raised in an abusive environment for 13 years when we lived with her father and now, she's graduating and going off to college to be away from me for the first time. As difficult as she can be at times, she deserves my light to grow and feel good about herself deep down where it matters, now I'm giving her all I can. My son is autistic and keeps to himself a lot, but when he has something to say or something to share, I'm right there and I spend time drawing him out of himself and filling him with light, I visualize pumping him full of love to make him strong. My sister, my nieces, my brother-in-law, my best friend is the closest person in the world to me, and she is a very bright light in this world, I could go on and on. My light makes it so much more comfortable inside this body, and it helps my relationships too because I can get out of the way now.

Pond

That's not to say I'm not still struggling. I still wake up in sadness or anxiety every morning since I've opened up the hatch where I had all my feelings stuffed down inside and let them out. I still work every day to release them, some days more successfully than others. In this morning's meditation for example I brought up a very hard feeling that was wound up tighter than a nut. I couldn't identify it. But I figured that it felt like a nut, so I would crack it open like a walnut in my heart and just thinking that 3 emotions came pouring out of it very powerfully: anxiety, sadness, and fear in the form of a huge black dog. It was almost overwhelming, and I had to remind myself that I was a soul with an efficient system built in to handle these exact disturbances. I stepped back from the entangled trio of feelings and gave it the space and honor it deserved in my heart as an experience in this life, really three experiences that somehow had been bound together inside me. It hurt, a lot, for a few minutes. I just kept relaxing, and stepping away in my heart from it, leaning back from it so I could observe it rather than be inside it. And then suddenly, I realized it was gone. Reader, the relief is still washing over me as I write this. That was probably the biggest emotional baggage I have encountered and let go of so far.

I find more often when I'm meditating now that I will find myself just deep in thought instead of in the seat of my soul, my thoughts aren't random and chaotic, they're ordered and logical because I have managed to slow down the drunken monkey on roller skates that is my mind and he is sitting somewhat reluctantly, but regardless I don't want thoughts in there I just want awareness. I'm greedy and I just want revelations, every one of which I am so grateful for. I want to move along on this path. I want to be truly happy. I want to help others move along on their paths once I have knowledge to share. But whatever happens, deep down I know that I have to be patient and accept knowledge as I am blessed to receive it from the universe, to tend my light, burning as strong as it can, and not ever let anything blow it out as long as I have life left in me.