Teremia,
I'm not sure about all this wall and door talk- or what its supposed to stand for..... but last year was rather traumatic for me. Bad thing after bad thing happened and it was very depressing. Before I'd have a chance to recover from the last thing, something new and traumatic would happen.
In the midst of all this storm, we caught a feral kitten and brought him home to live with us.
I, and the rest of my family focused on this new baby like there was nothing else in the world as important. We still got hit with _bad_thing_ after _bad_thing_ , but it didn't seem as important when we were focusing on that kitty.
:D
I learned NOT to add up all the bad things in my head, because it kind of fed itself. Counting up all the bad things was like hugging the memory of the trauma to myself and increased it's importance. Even now, I won't list out all the things that happened that year. Nobody died, even though it was awfully close on my son's appendicitis. One by one I had to let go of the specific emotions associated with the events. For instance in the case of my son's appendix, I had tremendous personal guilt over rejecting a CAT scan during our first ER visit. I thought the doctor was just wanting to do unnecessary tests, since I was sure my kid just had a case of the stomach flu. It was my fault that he went for 4 days with a burst appendix before we went back to the ER.
My son forgave me before even going into surgery. Forgiving myself was infinitely harder. Months afterwards, when I'd think back on that decision, my guts would clench up at the memory and my face would literally turn red. It was bad. The memory just wasn't fading like it should. Finally I started including self-forgiveness in a type of meditation I was doing. I'd think back about the incident, and FEEL that guilt and fear and other messy emotions again and literally think "I forgive you. You did what you did and it's over. You know better now. Let it go....." And I'd visualize putting those emotions into a pretty bubble and blowing it away, watching it float off into the distance.
The next time I was meditating I'd do the same thing, first probing the memory and seeing if it still bothered me. It did. So, I'd FEEL those emotions again, think about it again, and let them blow away. Each time, the intensity of the feelings was smaller. Finally its got to the point where I can now think about that incident without discomfort. I did what I did because of who I was then. I'm slightly different now. Older, maybe wiser. More careful of my kids' health, perhaps. Lesson learned, no need to beat myself up over it anymore.
You can't suppress such things and hope they go away, you have to feel them enough that you can learn from the experience. Hopefully you will come out of it wiser, even if you cannot see it at the time. Deliberately re-invoking the feelings while thinking about nothing else at all while meditating hastened the process, I think, without bottling anything up inside which I might otherwise have done and hurt my psyche (is that the right word?? ).
I did this for whatever damaging emotion I felt with each _bad_thing_ that year. Some were easier than others. Guilt over the appendicitis decision was the worst. Through it all, we all focused a lot of love over our little kitty, who is now the best cat I've ever had.
Tom Bombadil, the most important thing that happened in 2004!
:):)
edit: CRAP! Those pics are WAY too big. I thought photobucket shrank them automatically! I'll fix them, but it'll take a little while. SORRY!.
edit 2: fixed, I think.