Sympathy, Acceptance, Mediation, The Ugly Cry and Oprah

I had a good cry this morning.

Damn you, Oprah!  It's all your fault.

I got into the office this morning to prepare for my friend Tory who's coming to write with my today.  I arrived before nine, there was only one other car in the lot.  I unlocked our gate.  And I did my ritual: water for the tea kettle, washed my mug and sat down to look at my meditation for the day.

I am doing Oprah and Deepak's 21 Day Meditation Challenge that's all about finding joy.  Yes, I am a Super Souler.  I watch Super Soul Sunday reruns.  I'm an OWN viewer.  I am Eric and I'm an Oprahholic.  It's true.

So today's meditation is Day 18: Radiating Compassion.  I like compassion.  I feel compassionate.  I hope I radiate.  I read the email they sent and read the centering thought, which I will use as my mantra in today's meditation:

I radiate sympathy and acceptance.

I look at the mug I brought in from my mom's house over the weekend.  My tarot reading said that I need to bring items from home into my personal space.  My most personal space is my office.  Dad had this mug that someone gave him when I was a little kid and I've always loved it.  I would always drink out of it when I could, even when he was alive.  It's a short little white mug, nothing oversized, with his name on it: Danny (in Old English letters).  Then two red dice.  And the words Las Vegas (also in Old English red letters).  

I turn on my timer and I close my eyes.  I repeat the phrase over and over and over again.  I can hear the water boiling in my hot water kettle.  This usually gets me through the first part of my meditation.  I love hearing that sound of the water getting hot.  At some point during my meditation, I really fixate on those words: I radiate sympathy and acceptance.  I decide to think about those words, what they mean to me, and how they show up in my life.  For some reason, I get the voice of Iyanla Vanzant in my head.  She says, "Let's think about that."  Okay.  I don't know what Iyanla's doing my my head right now during my meditation.  I thought I only had room for Oprah and Deepak.  Get your own meditation challenge, Iyanla!  

But I did take a moment to pause and think about that.  Then I thought again about the word: Compassion.  What does that mean to me?  When I talk about my Dad now, the big thing I mention is that the healing that happened when I was sick was because I offered compassion to someone who I never felt had it for me.  Now in my meditation, that hit deep.  I thought about sympathy.  That wasn't there for me either.  Then I thought about acceptance.  I never felt acceptance from him.  But I did offer him compassion and wasn't that a good thing for me to do.

Then something else creeped up.  I have been doing a lot of work on my self lately in the area of accepting my self as I am.  I have been working on getting whole.  I give gratitude every day and especially every time I write a blog post.  I end my posts with statements of what I am grateful for.  Once I accepted my father, had sympathy for him, and offered compassion to him, I finally had acceptance, sympathy and compassion for myself.  

Once I offered compassion to someone who didn't have it for me, I was finally able to have compassion for myself.

Oh God.  I started to tear up.  I went back to Iyanla's voice: "Let's think about that."  My throat got tight.  The tears started to roll down my cheeks.  My face was contorting into the ugly cry.  I think this is what is referred to as having an "a-ha moment."  I just let the tears come.  I let the realization hit me.  I had never really had compassion for myself until after my Dad died.  And it wasn't because he died. But it is because I finally offered him compassion.  He was hard on me, so I was hard on myself.  Nothing was never good enough for him, so nothing was ever good enough for me.  And this simple thing of doing the opposite worked.  It was a two way street.  If he could give me negative messages, they could affect me negatively.  But if I had something positive, it could trickle up.  And it did.  And he finally had compassion before he died.  And sympathy.  And understanding.  And acceptance.  And peace.  I had done that.  But just as importantly, because I had done that for him, I had done it for myself.  I don't live under a dark cloud of self loathing any more.  Yes, I have my days where I am ridiculously hard on myself.  But the love, the compassion, the sympathy and the acceptance comes through first.  My drive is based in that now and not based on knocking myself down in order to pick myself up.

The feeling passed through me.  My breathing got more steady.  My a-ha moment was pretty disruptive, but felt wonderful when it passed through.  That was something I had known for a long time, but it hadn't coalesced until now.  

Then I thought about how that is tied to today.  To what I'm doing today.  

I am writing a screenplay.  The first screenplay I have written since graduate school, which is a while.  I had an idea for this play about my life growing up and my obsession with Woody Allen.  And I got the opportunity to write it as a screenplay in order to apply for a spot in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab.  It's really about the transformative power of art.  It's about how I became the person I am.  It's my origin story, in a way.  It's also about how I met my best friend Alanna, who I've been friends for since we were wee little kids.  That all sounds wonderful, right?  The story of how I came to be this wonderful person I am today: creative, smart, curious, artistic.  All of that sounds so lovely.  But the story of how I became who I am is the story of a fearful, tough, mean, abusive guy.  My father.  He was hard on me and said pretty rough things to me because, in his mind, he was making me tough to handle the world.  He was tearing me down to be built back up.  That's the origin of what came before all of the compassion.  I am writing this story honestly.  Not everything that happens in the screenplay happened to me.  But the emotional truth is there.  I don't think I was prepared to write about my parents fighting or getting hit with a belt or the pain of being eleven and disappointing the only person you want to please.  I don't wrap everything up neatly, either.  I don't have the perfect relationship with my Dad at the end of the screenplay.  I had to find something that worked for me.  I had to find what made me feel better and that's where my best friend's family came into my life.  It's a love letter really to all four of the parents in my life, mine and Alanna's.  And it makes me emotional.

So as I get ready to start my rewrite this morning, the Universe (and Oprah and Deepak) gave me a gift.  To focus on that compassion.  Because while I have to tell the truth of what happened and who my Dad was to me, I also know why now.  I am able to have sympathy for him without rewriting history.  This is what I have been working on personally and now I get to put it into my work.  That's a gift.

I am grateful for a good cry.

I am grateful to be in a state of mind where I am open.

I am grateful for the lessons of my childhood.

I am grateful for my struggles.

I am grateful for my pain.

I am grateful for the ability to write about it.

I am grateful for the access I have to my personal truth.

I am grateful for my sense of humor about it all.

I am grateful for the survival quality of that humor.

I am grateful to be able to laugh about it and have sympathy and compassion about it now.