Warning: Spiritual big concept stuff in this blog.  If you aren’t into that and you just want to see pretty pictures of China or hear funny tales of adventure, tune in later this week.

Yep, my sketchy flight from Phuket to Bangkok ended up being legit.  Go Thailand!  I got into my hotel in Bangkok and was hungry and sore so I headed out for dinner and a massage even though I needed to be going to bed to get up early for my flight to China.  There was a food market nearby.  I didn’t see anything I wanted so I had coconut ice cream for dinner.  After massage I had a crepe with mystery green goo (pandan?), sprinkles and jelly balls.  This did not make for a healthy dinner, but it was quite delicious.

During massage the word “forgive” kept coming to me.  Ok, got it, forgiveness.  I tried to figure out who or what I need to forgive.  During massage, it felt like the list is so long that it is comical.  It doesn’t feel like any big injustices, just a lifetime of tiny judgements and petty gripes.  This isn’t a 12 step process and I don’t think listing them all out makes sense or is useful.  The big one, the original one is the one that all the others are actually built on.  For any person or event that I haven’t forgiven, it’s not actually about that person or event, it’s still the original.  Years ago I discovered that I had a belief that life itself is unsafe and that I was angry with life/myself/god/the greater power/the universe or whatever you want to believe is the greater power or knowledge out there.  I was angry, scared and mistrusting.  As I’ve worked on this over the years, my allergies have been disappearing, my non working thyroid started working again as well many other healthy changes in my body.  As much as I have worked and as much as I have let go, I think there’s more.  I don’t think forgive at this level I’m working on is “I forgive you for being mean” or  “I understand you didn’t know better, so it’s ok”.  There’s ego in that.  There’s a sense of blaming “you were wrong” and a sense of ego “I am the bigger person and I forgive you”.   The forgive that is coming up is not that.  It doesn’t have to do with a person, a situation or an event.  It is a letting go and surrender, again not of a situation or event.  It is to let go of everything – every event, good or bad, every person, every interaction, every judgement, every belief, the world as I know it, everything I think I am, everything I ever wanted to be.  I have been working on this little bit by little bit for years.  Investigate this feeling, that belief, this relationship, looking into every nook and crany of my brain.  I have changed and made it quite far in this process.  But, it’s still me, my idealized self image, a series of thoughts in the brain that is making all this “progress”.  In an earlier post I talked about how I wanted to live abroad not to find myself, but to lose myself.  The forgive that is coming up is to let go to the point that I lose myself.

When I speak of myself, I don’t mean I won’t remember who my friends and family are or that I will simply cease to exist, or I’ll become a monk and sit on a mountain top meditating for the rest of my life.  I’m referring to the self image, who I think I am which is just a series of synapses in the brain routed and created from my experiences and interpretations of those experiences.  I am not the synapses and memories in my brain.  I am something else completely (so are you).

I got to the airport in the morning for my flight to China.  I found most everyone to be annoying.  I found myself to be very judgmental about the way one person acted or another was dressed.  People were in my personal space.  The airplane music threatened to send me in a downward spiral.  Why is airplane music so bad?  Why do we have to have music on the airplane anyway?  Is it really soothing anyone that is scared?  It’s just there to piss me off.  What’s wrong with no music?  Although most of the day went smoothly, I found everything to be either stressful or annoying.  Apparently, I was not letting go and forgiving yesterday.

Today was the first day of my China tour and it was wonderful.  I’ll cover the details of that in another blog.  But as I sit here tonight trying to put “forgive” into words that will make sense, I can feel it happening.  I feel a lightness in my body kind of like being light headed, but over the whole body.  It feels like the cells on the outside of my body are slowly breaking apart and floating away.  They are shiny and glass like, but have no weight.  It feels like disintegration.  So, now I’m heading off to sleep or disintegrate or both.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore