A 56 years old male had come to me a couple of weeks ago. A tall man with a long beard, a heavy body and a big face. Really intimidating at a first visit.
He told me that he was not able to sleep well at night, and would get intense dreams disturbing him. He was feeling agitated most of the day, and could not concentrate at all at his work.
Sometimes he would feel a kind of heaviness on his chest, and also had episodes of feeling short of his breaths.
I was listening to his complaints patiently and was interested to know more. I empathized with his feelings and said that I could understand his discomfort and pain.
Suddenly he started crying profusely. A big-sized man was crying like a child in front of me. The emotional pain was truly unbearable; that was very clear to me.
Tears were running down his cheeks, he was sobbing uncontrollably, and then in a need to feel more comfort he then hugged his wife who was sitting besides him. Still he could not stop his crying or may be he was feeling better while crying, and so he just let tears flow.
As he got a little comfortable with his self, I asked,
“What’s going on… would you like to share it with me?”
He took a few deep breaths, removed his spectacles, cleared his tears, a deep breath again, and started sharing with me his inner self.
His father had died three months ago at the age of 80. It was a peaceful departure and wasn’t a much suffering before dying.
The man managed with all the necessary rituals and fulfilled a few obligations. But then for last one month, he started feeling a strange emptiness in his life. He described himself as an active, socially fully-engaged, and a community leader.
He told me a little about how he could manage the most difficult situations of his life up to that point. Being the eldest among his siblings, he had been handling all major responsibilities of their lives, and had made his father almost retired for last 10 to 15 years.
Losing his father and then living without him was seeming the most difficult challenged he could ever had in his life! And he said that he won’t be able to face it.
The difficulty rose to the level that he even started thinking about ending his life and leave the world, so that he could meet his father; he believed.
His dreams were also filled with the content of his father’s memories and some vague scenes which included himself and his father.
Narrating a few incidences of his life, lovingly cherished with his father, he again had a bout of weeping, heavy breathing and tears running down his cheeks once again. There was nothing but his father who had filled his awareness in last one month.
A child in him was so deeply in love with his father that all learned behaviors and tactics of daily lives which he had mastered in his lifetime were not helping him getting back to normalcy.
It was only when he let himself cry, without any control, that the acceptance of ‘what it is’ gently rose up.
I am touched and moved by the relationships and bonds we create with one another in our lifetime, and how deeply they stay and impact us.
Worldly affairs cannot heal, they just cover up what’s beneath.
Let’s be conscious in nurturing these bonds and remain open for natural healing process to do its own job. Rituals may not help if you are not connected with the purpose and meanings behind them.
To your resourceful life,
Sudeep Shroff 🙂
Nurturing relationships, consciously!