Holding Your Own Hand<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen my husband
Stephen died, I was living in a remote place with no people around so I had tlearn to hold my own hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0– – – Ondrea Levine<\/p>\n
Loss shows up in an abundance of\u00a0different ways. A partner walks out on you. A close friend betrays your trust.\u00a0You get fired from your job. Your favorite white blouse goes missing. Your\u00a0partner cheats on you. Your dog breathes his last breath. A loved one becomes\u00a0ill and dies. Whatever the loss, it hurts, and when you find yourself alone
with your pain, you have to figure out how to hold your own hand as you walk\u00a0the rocky path of healing your heart.<\/p>\n
I was five when my great Aunt Ruth\u00a0passed away. I loved her so much, I believed that the two large moles, one on\u00a0her forehead, one on the right side of her chin, were beauty marks. To me, she\u00a0was that beautiful and I looked at my face in the mirror each morning, hoping\u00a0that a mole would show up on my forehead.<\/p>\n
Aunt Ruth lived with us and every\u00a0day, she and I took a walk to the neighborhood market where she bought me a\u00a0piece of chocolate and we put a dime in the slot of a cardboard square for \u201cThe\u00a0March of Dimes.\u201d She went to the hospital from time to time but I had no\u00a0 idea why because no one told me she had cancer. I was seven when she passed away and I was filled with sorrow and emptiness. After my mother told me that my beloved aunt was gone, she went to her bedroom and closed the door. I don’t remember what my father did, but neither of my parents asked me how I felt. On the day of the funeral, I told them I wanted to go but they said I was too young. I watched them walk out of the house dressed in black and they left me behind with a depth of sorrow I didn’t understand. I had to find a way to cope so I hid my aunt\u2019s red suitcase in my closet, I rubbed her Jergen\u2019s Lotion on my hands and I climbed into her bed so I could inhale her smell. That was my childhood version of holding my own hand.<\/p>\n
While the above is a powerful\u00a0example of the need for self-soothing, the little things also show up as wounds\u00a0that need healing. However small, they deserve our loving kindness. Here\u2019s an\u00a0example of something that sounds so insignificant, it almost embarrasses me to
write it, but at the time it mattered in my heart and mind, and it needed my\u00a0attention.<\/p>\n
I was twenty and I\u2019d been married\u00a0for several years to the wrong person but that\u2019s a different story. We were\u00a0living in England at the time, managing a denim store in Brighton. I was young\u00a0and insecure, I had judgments about my body and I remember rummaging through
the latest arrivals of jeans when I found a pair of bell bottoms that fit me\u00a0perfectly. I thought they made me look slim and I took them home and put them\u00a0in my dresser. The next morning when I got up, I opened the drawer where I had\u00a0tucked the jeans away and they were gone. I called the shop where the \u201cwrong\u00a0person\u201d was serving customers. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did you do with my jeans?\u201d I\u00a0asked him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were out of stock and someone\u00a0wanted them,\u201d he said. \u201cI sold them. You have plenty of jeans.\u201d<\/p>\n
As petty and unimportant as this\u00a0sounds, I felt anger, I felt betrayed, and then I began to feel loss. My\u00a0husband didn’t understand how important those jeans were to my self-esteem and\u00a0if I tried to explain, I knew he would make fun of me. I felt betrayed andI had to find a way to\u00a0soothe myself. We lived in an apartment in a crescent at the end of a long\u00a0street and I climbed a huge elm tree, sat on a thick branch and cried for a\u00a0while. I watched people walking underneath me, they never looked up and saw me,\u00a0and the safety of the tree and the scent of the leaves soothed me. \u00a0acknowledging my emotions and allowing them to be real. I was holding my own\u00a0hand.<\/p>\n
There are as many ways to calm\u00a0ourselves and heal our pain as there are creative paths. \u00a0Listening to music, deep breathing,
painting, dancing and writing soothe us, anything that forces us to dig deep\u00a0into the center of our spirits to have compassion for ourselves and heal our\u00a0hearts. In his poem, \u201cServant to Servants,\u201d Robert Frost wrote: \u201cThe only way out\u00a0is always through.\u201d That\u2019s how we get to the other side. No matter how chaotic\u00a0and dramatic the situation, if you stay with your feelings and not abandon\u00a0yourself, you\u2019ll be able to heal your wound.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve found that the most important\u00a0way to hold my own hand is to leave myself alone and feel my feelings, whatever\u00a0they are. However insignificant they seem. It\u2019s important to not attach shame
to an already painful situation. Listen to yourself, even if you don’t like what\u00a0you\u2019re hearing. Look at yourself, even if you don’t like what you\u2019re seeing. Feel\u00a0the pain, even when you want to run away. Stop judging yourself for judging\u00a0yourself. When a betrayal or a tragedy happens, people gather round for a while\u00a0but the time comes when they go back to their homes and to their lives. When no\u00a0one is there for you, just grab your hand, hold onto it, and take the ride. When
you\u2019re at the helm of your feelings, if you can gentle yourself along and treat\u00a0yourself with kindness, you\u2019ll feel seen, heard, soothed and perfectly safe. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Holding Your Own Hand \u201cWhen my husbandStephen died, I was living in a remote place with no people around so I had tlearn to hold my own hand.\u201d \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2398,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2396"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2399,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2396\/revisions\/2399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}