Dear Peace:

I just completed 2 hours of re-reading our past communication, including Tee’s (under a bit different screen name) valuable communication with you over the years.

You wrote today: “Now that I am here from last 1.5 months and want to stay here till December and I have met my siblings, I am feeling very heavy inside. I regret thinking so negatively about them — believing they only cared about money and not about me. I don’t know how much they care, but the idea that they were only interested in money kept torturing me, and now I feel full of regret for having those thoughts…

“I realize how much pain and hardship they are living with. Now I feel my assumptions were wrong. I shouldn’t have thought like that. I feel extremely heavy inside, as if I became the worst version of myself. I feel like I disappointed myself, because that wasn’t who I am in my heart. I don’t know how I became so harsh. They did come to me for help, but I refused to support them financially because I thought they were using me like an ATM. Now the guilt is eating me.”-

The first time you talked about Guilt may have been Feb 2018 (under a different account, screen name: Princess123): “I am guilty because I know (boyfriend at the time) is very sensitive.. I just think how he is doing.. if he is hurting from this break up? I don’t want to hurt anyone”. 

On May 6, 2020, in this account, you titled your first thread: “Guilty or not?” (the very first word in this account was “Guilty”).

You wrote in your first post as “Peace”:

“He (boyfriend at the time) made me feel so guilty I just wanted to cry at that moment.. I felt I’m the cruel person on this earth for doing this to him.. Now, I m just stressing out… Sometimes I just want to break up but then, the guilt start killing me..”

Fast forward five years, five months and 25 days (fast forward a marriage and a child), back to India, the place where you were born, where you grew up- and here’s the Guilt, back big time, eating you (“Now the guilt is eating me.”)

(I just read your most recent post, asking me to take my time).

Well, I am quite tired, peace, so, I’ll get straight to the point:

You are a good person, you care about doing the right thing by people. You are conscientious. You care about people: your family members and non-family. You care about me taking my time.

* You are not a bad person for having any of the thoughts that go through your mind, nor for the feelings that come and go.

There is a saying: “Hurt people hurt people” (I think I got the wording right, not sure).

Your mother, your sisters, cousins.. hurt themselves, proceeded to either neglect you or hurt you with critical comments and judgments.

They were so hurt/ neglected themselves.. they proceeded to neglect or hurt you.

And in al that going-on, all that massive neglect and abuse that you suffered growing up and onward, how could you have possibly turn out to be a perfect specimen of some kind, an unaffected human (thinking and feeling perfect thoughts and perfect feelings, not to mention choosing perfect action all the time). It’s impossible!

First, you are not responsible for the conditions you were born into, the prejudices, the poverty, the neglect and abuse that people suffered before you were even born.

Whatever you chose wrong in your past: forgive yourself, let go of regret and hold yourself accountable only for today, only for what you say and do today (not for yesterday).

This is what I do.

I suffered from more guilt than I can express in words. Much of it was for things and people I was born into (a baby is not responsible.. right, Peace?)

The fact that your sisters, or a few of them suffer, does not mean that they did not cause you unnecessary suffering, or that they will not do so in the future. Like I said: hurt people hurt people (until they hold themselves accountable each and every day).

I am sorry to read about your sister with the severely autistic child who is unsupported and mistreated by her husband, or your sister who wants to get pregnant but can’t, or the other abroad.

But remember, you are not responsible for their misfortunes or for their choices.

Be there for them, listen to them (if you can), be present for them. Don’t try to fix their problems, just be there for them, listening, empathetic. That’s all that you can do.. and it can make a positive difference, however small.

The Serenity Prayer says: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference”.

I hope this helps.. a bit?

🤍🌿 Anita

Dear James:

Thank you for your comment. You are welcome to join any conversation that I’m having.

You submitted the above six minutes after I submitted my new post to Peter, so I am guessing you didn’t read it. I think that it is really happening, me dropping Anita as a separate wave, one separated from the ocean (the Source, the Presence), and seeing others as separate waves as well. I think it’s happening.

“BE the LOVE. MUCH LOVE, Best Regards”-

Much love and best regards back to you 🙂

Anita

Hi Nichole 🙂

I just read a bit about Florida’s cold fronts, they follow the rainy season (May to October), begins in late October or early November, and continuing through winter, each typically lasting a few days, after which temperatures rebound to more typical Florida warmth.

Yes, it’s not good for any social animal, including humans, to be isolated. We are like a song says, “People who Need People”.

Interacting with people right here, in the forums, is part of it, as long as the interaction is sincere and quite spontaneous, like right here, as I type.. this is part of my social life.

If you’re living in or near Orlando, the weather forecast is clear skies and warming trend into the weekend, reaching highs in the upper 70s by Sunday 🙂

Anita

Dear Peter:

Thank you for your thoughtful, kind and patient response. I will process and reply tomorrow.

For now, I just read this (elsewhere) and it resonates:

“Non-dual teachers say the separate self is like a wave forgetting it’s part of the ocean.”

Back to you Fri morning.

🌊 Anita

How are you, Tom???

How are you, Mollie?

Dear Peter:

* I am adding this comment 2 hours and 20 minutes into typing this post, right before submitting it, to let you know that it felt like having a back and forth conversation with you, almost as if we were sitting here together, this early Thursday morning. I wrote whatever came to mind (no editing), just like we were talking in real-life. It was dark out when I started, totally light now. I wish you could read this message in a similar spirit, relaxed, conversational.. So here it goes:

“When we rest in what is already whole, compassion arises as a natural fragrance, not as a commandment.”- you write so beautifully. I can almost smell a pleasant fragrance rising from a blank canvas.

“The sacred does not demand perfection. It waits in the stillness beneath all striving. It is the silence behind the sound, the breath between the breaths,”- again, beautiful.

“the presence that was never absent.”- it’s not a presence that protects people from cruelty, disasters and such, or a presence that lets itself be known in countless personal, national and global disasters.

I remember walking at night, looking up to the sky and praying to the stars: “Help me. PLEASE help me!”-

Nothing.

The stars/ the presence.. if it was present, it didn’t mind staying silent night after night, year after year.

Now, if you counter this, Peter, with.. it being my Ego praying to the stars, and transcending the ego (as a child) would have led me to “rest in what is already whole” night after night.. Well, would you suggest this to me, retroactively, imagining me praying to the stars?

I am trying to understand the “presence”: is it indifferent to human suffering? (I am asking the same question people ask in regard to God)

“We do not reach the source by chasing the changing. We return by softening. By listening. By remembering… We are that”- We are Presence/ Source/ Canvas, aka God?

“Dear Anita,”- I think that this is the 2nd time you addressed me with a “Dear”. The first was 2 days ago, and I just noticed today. This is the softening you are talking about (“We return by softening”), is it? If so, I am touched.. moved by your softening.

“I sense a quiet hesitation. Not a rejection of the embrace, but a trembling at what it might ask of you. Maybe not because it demands anything, but because it invites a soft undoing, a loosening of the self you’ve so carefully tended, shaped, and protected.”-

A loosening of the self created by circumstances and other people in my early life, during those Formative Years, the years when the self/ ego is formed in physical ways (brain/body).

Where was the source, the presence, the embrace when I- and others- needed it so desperately? It was there sometimes, here and there. Often it wasn’t there.. so, not a dependable presence.

What I point toward is… something more ancient and intimate, a remembering. Not of a moment in time, but of essence of the canvas that holds creation yet remains untouched by its unfolding.”-

Oh, here it is, “untouched” by human pain and struggle, including that of babies who didn’t yet choose anything. Untouched, indifferent.

An Embrace by an Untouched.. is it possible?

“So perhaps the invitation isn’t to let go of the self, but to rest in the space where the self is quietly held. Not erased. Not corrected. Simply met. And in that meeting, something tender unfolds.. not as a task, but as a return. A return not to what was, but to what always is. The breath turns. The veil thins. And in the stillness between, we are home..”-

I feel like I am home this morning as I’m sitting by the computer, now hours of talking with you right here, in this post. I quote your words (that’s you saying something to me) and then I respond (that’s me saying something to you).. then you say and I say.. we’re talking. Connecting (that’s my experience here), and I like it.

“You are not outside the embrace, Anita… Your are, we are that.”- It’s the Connecting itself, not the topic discussed, that is the Embrace I am experiencing right now.

And I’ve known you- in context of the forums for so long: my first post on tiny buddha was sometime in May 2015, yours.. on May 27 the year after, 2016. Interestingly (to me), you posted 4 times on Oct 30, 2016, exactly 9 years ago. In the 1st of the four (thread: “Do you believe in God?”, you wrote:

“I think that when religion views God as an alien being that exists out there as a watcher and judge, they have missed the target.. Others also mistake the organization and religious teaching as being God. They mistake the map for the territory…

“The problem with being so angry at a God you don’t experience as existing is that you’re shaking your fist at empty air.

“Believe me I relate to your experience. There is a part of me that so badly wanted to belong to the community I was raised in. but unable to experience this God they claimed was so loving, just and worthy of praise. All I felt and saw was injustice and pain all of which left me feeling I must have failed and didn’t belong.

“Yet no matter how hard I tried I have never been able to deny G_d’s existence and like you in a way that had me shaking my fist.

“One day I got tired of shaking my fist and fighting this something that I apparently didn’t believe in. If I was shaking my fist, I was shaking it at something, so I set out to work out what this something was. I began a long journey of separating my experience of G_d from my experience of family, community, church, religion

“I began to look past the words, allowing the words to be transparent to transcendence and when I did began to feel that there was a something that ‘binds us all’. A definition of religion is that which binds us, not the rules not the words but something greater than the sum of all parts, that transcends the rules and words that can only point.

“We tend to use the word God when we talk about this experience but the word God is not God.”-

The word God is Source, Presence, Canvas, Embrace..?

So, you too noticed (of course) the “injustice and pain” in our world, and you too were angry at the not “so loving, just and worthy of praise” God.

But.. wait.. The Source, Presence, etc., is not so loving, or just.. is it? I mean, it’s the same painful and unjust world. Isn’t the proof in the pudding..?

✨ 🌟 ⭐ 💫 Anita