No Christmas party with the half-mile of luminaria and the carols around the piano. And no Best of book. This is living time, not documenting time. If I am going to move forward in a truly authentic way, I need to find refuge in myself. And those alone Christmas moments are a good place to cut my teeth. My gut says, Become your own family. Light the expensive candle and feel grateful for the way it focuses your gaze, fills the room with the scent of amber.
I trust my gut. I have to find the light in my own eyes, alone. I have to believe, once and for all, that I am okay , alone. It all begins there. And perhaps ends there too. So tonight, alone, in a cashmere robe, candle lit, I created a Best of book of these post-divorce years. And something magical and Christmas-kissed happened.
I looked for sacred. But only if there was light in those eyes I love so much. Including my own. Maybe the definition of family is really a radical acceptance of self. And once we accept that, both my mind and my gut tell me, we will find our family community thriving, even if it looks entirely different than we ever thought it would. Marina Illich , Ph. With a doctorate in Buddhist Studies, she spent five years in Asia studying Tibetan Buddhist practices for developing self-awareness, focus and resilience.
Jerry Brown. Marina can be contacted at: marina. She lives in Montana with her family of three and one! The entry point was a marital crisis, but the book and the essay were not really about marriage.
They were about focusing on what you can control and letting go of the rest. And they were about powerfully choosing to not play emotional victim to the things that others say and do to you. Today, five years later, the essay is having a resurgence all over the internet and in The Week magazine where thousands of people have made comments, and over , people have shared it. That number is increasing by thousands every hour. It has been the top read article for days on The Week , sparking blog posts and ribald conversation on social media platforms from Facebook to Twitter and beyond.
People are used to playing emotional victim, and society re-enforces that. I wrote that essay and that book to help myself process a difficult time in my life, and I wrote it to help others do the same. My message never has been about staying in a relationship.
Moment by moment. Thought by thought. Breath by breath. I own what there is to own, set boundaries for myself, and mind my own business. And that usually begins with getting in touch with our own self-talk. I have moved on from that time in my life, and while the end of the essay and the book leave my marriage in a place of healing, that marriage needed to end, and it did. Again, it was never about staying together.
It was about taking care of yourself in a time when society says that you should suffer greatly, fight, splay yourself supplicant. I refused to do that. I felt that it was his crisis, and my job was to focus on what I could control and let go of the rest, which included the outcome of my marriage.
I gave myself a stopping point. And eventually we stopped. And now we are divorced. We are on to new chapters. All the players are thriving. They still apply and they are still lifelines. And I can say that I know, without a doubt, that happiness is within. But in the light of this break-neck resurgence of that small essay I wrote what seems a lifetime ago, I am moved to respond to a few things that might help you wherever you are in your lives—in a crisis, post-crisis, free zone.
With the recent inundation of intimate, bleeding emails these last few days, for the most part about a painful marriage…thanking me for my essay on The Week , which indeed provided relief for people, and perhaps a new way of looking at life…I am moved to investigate this phenomena of the collective We. We are in pain. We are looking for hope. We are looking for empowering messages. We are looking for these things from every-day people. We want to know that We are not alone.
We want to re-invent our relationship with pain. We want to know that to fight is not always the best way to win. We want to know that the only real winning is in our ability to step outside of suffering and into emotional freedom. We want to know that we can powerfully choose our emotions. We want to know that no one can really make us mad or sad or feel guilty.
Or even happy. Even at our kitchen sink. We want to feel connected to our loved ones, but sometimes the best way to connect is by stepping out of their way. We have forgotten the power of deep breathing. A long walk. A hot bath. A singular flower in a vase on our nightstand. We have forgotten that pain can be a terrific guide when we breathe into the groundlessness of it. We have forgotten that life is about endless possibility. And endless Yes. Writing helps. I have used my writing to process this beautiful and heartbreaking thing called life since I was a child.
I did it in my published memoir and essay so many people have read, are re-reading, or reading for the first time and sharing with their loved ones. Now I help others dig deeper into their creative self-expression on the page.
I invite you to write your way through the difficult times in your life. You never know what might happen…. One hour later. We are 5, hungry for these messages and counting…. For more information email: Laura lauramunsonauthor. September September October October Retreat in Big Sky Beauty!
Haven Writing Retreats :. And believe. And feel tucked into community between my loving mother and father, to harmonize on good old fashioned hymns, and to take the Holy Eucharist and really believe I was having a feast with my other loving parent: The Big Guy. Who somehow could make himself small too, wafer and wine-sized that fit into the cup of my soft little girl fingers. I was always so thankful for that. It was the thing that stood out for me Sunday after Sunday: God could be bigger than the night sky, and small enough to rest on my tongue and be swallowed down with sweet communion wine.
I learned to be grateful because of the Holy Eucharist. Somewhere along the line, I started expecting things to happen.
And I lost much of my gratitude. I guess they call that entitlement. I started to get easily angered when the smallest hardships would happen. Not the big things— those I took in slowly; piece meal. I had faith that the Big Guy would handle that stuff. That was what my sister, mother, and grandmothers told me, and I listened. People simply needed to use writing the way I had all my life.
I knew how to do it for myself. I could teach others, whether or not they considered themselves writers of any kind, to find their way to the essence of what they had to say, through the brilliant and transformative practice that is writing! So I kept writing. What can I create that would help people find their voice, using what I know and who I am? What would that look like? An hour later, I had a plan. I would lead writing retreats. I would teach people that they had a unique voice, and that they are in fact creative beyond their wildest imaginings.
Whether they were a best-selling author, or just starting. Whether they had that book idea burning inside them or that one personal essay or poem, or message, or needed to find the permission to honor their original thoughts in the first place. They would learn to delight in it! They would learn what writing meant to them, in process and project, based on exactly who they were, what their responsibilities were, what their habits were and their dreams and their stuck places.
I had these exact skills in spades! I would create a program that would meet them where they needed to be met. And I would teach them to hunger for their writing and to use it to help them move forward in their lives, book or no book. I had done it alone. I would create community and support and a program which would hold their heart and not let it go. Hey—anybody want to come on a writing retreat with me in Montana?
Mind you, at that time in my life, I had a lot of trusting fans who had written me to say that they felt like I was writing my book directly to them.
That I felt like an old friend. I suspect that it was for this very reason that within two hours, twenty-four people signed up for a retreat which had no place, price-point, design, reputation, cred. Yet I had almost booked three retreats! That was five years ago. Haven Writing Retreat is now ranked in the top writing retreats in the country. I have grown a flourishing online community by writing daily inspiration on our private Haven page.
I have created advanced programs that when combined with my primary program, many have told me, are consistent with a MFA program. I do one-day private Haven Workshops in the homes of alums for their friends and communities across the country.
I offer Writer-in-Residencies in Montana, and do consulting, editing, coaching, for Haven alums only. And I see alums stay together, have reunions, and come back for more.
The only currency that matters at Haven is your ability to take this stand for yourself when no one else asked you to, to go outside your comfort zone, to put your heart in your hand and be kind and supportive and honest in a small group in the woods of Montana. To take a free fall into a free zone and trust that I will hold the net and never drop it. Outside of my motherhood, Haven Writing Retreats and Workshops, and now the Haven Foundation, feel like the miracle of my life.
What question do you have burning inside you that could make all the difference in your life if you lived into it boldly? I wonder: Is there heart language in such a trajectory? I was in London when this all started. It was the night before I was going on the most-watched talk show in the United Kingdom.
I was going on to talk about emotional freedom. When you get home, I will be living elsewhere. I finally know what love feels like. Our marriage is a sham. I went out into the rainy streets of London and stood in the cold, breathing deeply.
I had been practicing maitri on rejection—rejection from the publishing world, primarily, but also from family and friends and the general ways of the world. Now I had a chance to practice it on betrayal. The meditation works like this: First we send loving-kindness to someone we love dearly, someone who is easy to love. Next we send loving-kindness to someone we are fond of, followed by someone who is neutral in our lives.
Finally—and this is the clincher—we send loving-kindness to ourselves. Because most of us treat our worst enemies much better than we do ourselves. So whether it ultimately was to change the world, or to change my relationship with myself, or to attempt the high calling of Being Love, I stood in those rainy London streets that night and I practiced maitri.
I sent out loving-kindness to my children.
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