The Art of Feeling Goodbye
It occurred today that I keep leaving places, people, and things because some part of me is trying to figure out how to get goodbye right. I think part of me is afraid of how goodbye makes me feel, and since the feelings we are afraid of are the feelings that keep coming back, goodbye keeps coming back.
Goodbye is not a feeling.
Really? Are you sure?
What is it about goodbye I have not fully experienced? What is it that needs to be felt? I think my whole life is built on the shaky foundation of a not-well-executed goodbye. A goodbye is something that happened to me.
When I sit with the fact that I’m leaving California and headed for what I’m not exactly sure and that in a couple of weeks I’ll be more than a 3,000 mile drive away from my daughter, I get caught up in the spin of my head and forget to breathe. I go into dorsal state, collapse. I become a possum so out of its comfort zone it “plays” dead. Any food in my digestive track is not getting digested. My eyesight is narrowed; the small muscles around my eyes are tight. The neighbor’s barking dog makes me more anxious. My jeans feel tight. So many things feel wrong. Where do I go when I’m not fully embodied? Do I switch off? I don’t think I go on vacation because I never bring back memories.
When I sit down and focus on breathing all the way down into my feet, my heart and thinking slow down. I sit with the feeling of goodbye and get curious. My head wants to jump in and create stories, but the stories aren’t helpful. They are stories of “This is too much and This is too sad and I can’t handle this,” so I tell my head thank you but I’m going to pay attention to my body for a while. My body feels tingly. My face feels full of tears. My body feels like a balloon that could be ten times its size, maybe a hundred, if I relaxed enough for the spaciousness to happen. I relax. My sense of boundaries get so big I lose the sense of being a body. Maybe this is the part my brain is so afraid of—it’s afraid that I won’t be seen in the goodbye, that I will disappear.
I can feel part of myself panicking—as if what I am saying goodbye to is also me saying goodbye to myself. Like the thing that is leaving is taking me with it. I breathe into my feet again. I am here, I tell myself. The thing is leaving, but I am still here.
This feels important. I can experience leaving without losing myself.
There is nothing too big to lose if I stay embodied.
This being in my body while dissolving feels really good.
It feels like great sex.
I can say goodbye when I know I am not losing myself. And I can’t lose anything if I’m one with it. I can’t lose my daughter if I’m so big and she is so big we swim in the same energy field.
I can’t lose my mother if the bubble of consciousness that held us stretches infinitely because of the infinite nature of consciousness. Maybe this is the lesson I needed to learn—that I can handle the grief that comes with goodbye, that letting it run through me won’t destroy me and that on the other side is a feeling of connection.
There can be pleasure in goodbye because the deep ache and sense of loss means You are important to me. It means I was brave enough to open to connection, to I need you, to I love you.
Goodbye.
(Hi!)
After I wrote this, Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao and I had a discussion about adopted people and goodbyes. Joyce taught me about the concept of good byes. I had never really heard the word good in goodbye. I love the emphasis on good and how it reframes the whole event for me.
You can watch our talk here: https://youtu.be/q5of55yTYOU?si=IGNScKhhE4tgi-EU
