I know I’ve written about this before, but March is my least favorite month. I’m very prone to the March blues. That’s a story I’ve been telling myself for a long, long time. This year has been no exception. It hasn’t been fun.
Knowing what I do about magick and the Law of Attraction, it seems obvious that telling the tale of how this time of year sucks only ensures that it comes true. Yet sometimes these old patterns are so deeply rooted that it feels like you can never dig them up.
Doing some inner work and journaling around it led me back to March of 1985. I was 15 years old, and my favorite grandparent (and the last one I had who was still living), my Mom’s mother, went into the hospital to have surgery on her hip. It was elective surgery. She’d already had the other hip replaced several years earlier, and this surgery promised to help her get around more easily.
Grammy was only 67 years old. There was a medical error that happened, related to a separate condition, and she never came home. She died in the hospital – and with the medical phobia that I had at that time, I never got to see her again.
The day she died so unexpectedly was March 15th, the infamous Ides of March.
No wonder March became such a time of sorrow, loss, and hopelessness for me.
There are other reasons that I struggle at this time of year, too, and I know I’m not alone. But it strikes me that carrying this major loss with me for so many years affects my experience of early Spring to this day.
I’m currently reading a fascinating book called Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Dr. Joe Dispenza. It’s about the brain science behind how we get into these old patterns, stuck in our stories about the way things are.
(A side note: if you haven’t yet tuned into how recent scientific research is validating ancient spiritual wisdom, this book is a great place to start.)
Anyway, the idea is that we have an emotional experience, but then we make it part of our story. Eventually, by repeatedly practicing those emotions, they become part of our personality. It feels like we’re stuck with them, permanently.
But we are the ones who created these patterns, and because we are able to be the observer, to be self-aware, we can also change them. We do so through practices like meditation, using our powers of creativity, and weaning ourselves from our dependence on addictive emotions. If you’ve ever made a big change in your life, one that involved re-creating yourself and your approach to the world, you probably have an inkling what I mean.
I’ve made these big changes in other areas of my life, such as self-love and creativity. But we’re all human, and even when we’re living a conscious life, we’ll be continually refining and learning.
My current work is to heal my relationship with Spring. I’m beginning with a lot of nurturing self-care, and with a practice of forgiveness. I’m letting myself off the hook, and making some new choices.
What changes are you making in your experience? How can you begin to unpack an old pattern that’s holding you back? Can you forgive yourself for circling back around to this story yet again? Are you ready to move forward in new ways?
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