You Cannot Be Abandoned

"I felt an inner devastation that caused so much emotional distress I could no longer hide it or hide from it through my work. I did not feel like doing anything except cry and share my suffering with anyone willing to listen. After Karla left me for the third time, I went to a meditation retreat in Estes Park, Colorado, led by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who founded mindfulness and was nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr., for the Nobel Peace Prize."

"During the first few days of the retreat, the severe disappointment I felt with my life permeated every moment of my daily meditations. I had thought that Karla was stable, more so than any woman I'd ever known. Yet she had left me three times-not exactly the dictionary definition of stable. Each time, I judged her as unstable, unworthy of marrying because I couldn't count on her not to leave me after having children."

"Eating lunch silently with hundreds of other meditators, I could not stop thinking about the engagement ring I had made for her from a diamond handed down from my grandmother, who passed away when I was a few years old. I could not remove the image of the ring, and the love inside me it represented, from my mind. At that lunch, I broke down into tears."

The narrator experienced inner devastation and overwhelming emotional distress that work could no longer conceal. After Karla left for the third time, the narrator attended a meditation retreat in Estes Park, Colorado, led by Thich Nhat Hanh. Early meditations were dominated by severe disappointment and persistent judgment of Karla as unstable because she had left three times. Fear of repeating childhood abandonment prevented trust in marriage and parenting. While eating lunch in silence, the narrator became consumed by the image of an engagement ring made from a grandmother's diamond and erupted into uncontrollable grief when comforted by fellow meditators.

Read at Psychology Today