Deserving Joy (Blog 5)

I just finished my daily meditation--a 5 minute Post-Ride Peloton Meditation with my Boo Cody Rigsby.* Truthfully, I picked this meditation because I did not feel like meditating, but I am really determined to stick to my 2021 goals,  and Cody always makes me laugh. So I thought this meditation might be easy breezy. 

Okay, so it was totally not easy. 

I know it was just 5 minutes--but in 5 minutes my brain can go to a trillion different places.** I can think faster than I can type and talk (and I type and talk fast). Cody had us repeat a mantra:

I am strong. 

I am resilient. 

I deserve joy. 

The first go around, I was thinking whether I wanted to have the juice I picked up today at Wild & Co or a cup of tea when I was finally released from meditation. Then the second round, I breezed over strong and stopped on resilient. 

In flash, I was transported to those hard places--the places of discord in relationships and preeclampsia and my premature daughters and my daughter's brain tumor diagnosis, nearly 14 years ago. I went to the other dark place--the one where my brother lay dying in coma and I sat at his bedside, frantically asking question after question after question trying to logic and science my way out of being a mourning, broken sister.

But, most of you know how that ended. 

I am still here, though. I am resilient. But, when I recount those hard places that tested and strengthened my resilience--it is tough to get to the next step. 

Deserving joy. 

When there is sorrow and heartbreak in my own life or on the news or in the lives of my loved ones or in my social media feeds, it is really easy to confuse empathy with owning sorrow. Even when the sorrow is based in my own first-hand experience, I often falsely believe that sorrow belongs to me. I feel guilty over laughing or guilty over having a ridiculous nonsensical problem or like a total jerk for celebrating when someone else is grieving. 

But I don't own sorrow. I don't deserve that. I had the sorrow--and yes, I'll visit the sorrow, over and over again. I might even borrow it. But I never need to own it, because I deserve joy. I just have to remind myself once in a while. 

*I will probably talk about Cody almost as much as I talk about my children. 

**There has to be some sort of data on this somewhere in a neurology journal. 

Writer's Note: This blog is unedited, unproofed and depending on the day, unfiltered. Grammar police--you can get your fix elsewhere. I am just practicing my craft and crafts are always messy. 

Comments