For the past year and a half,
I've been getting a talk and meditation around a word.
This has happened at a little local sangha in Santa Barbara.
Bringing this to all of you live.
And the word that I chose for this week is the word endings.
Endings I've been going through,
As we all have,
Lots of endings.
We keep on ending and beginning things.
It's a cycle.
So ending isn't sort of like the end of a thread or the end of a line.
There's beginnings and then there's middles and there's endings and we keep on going around and around and around that cycle of continuation.
And if you think about an ending for yourself that you are going through right now,
Maybe You're in the process of ending something or beginning something or something has come to an end.
What I've discovered for myself in my own process of ending,
But also in working with many,
Many clients is that we're not very good at it.
We're not very good at it.
We tend to get psychologically inflexible.
At the end of things,
And that psychological inflexibility shows up in our attention.
We replay over and over again the past,
And what if we had done this differently or that differently?
Would it have ended differently?
We get caught up in our feelings that,
Like,
I can't do it.
This is too painful.
I just want to rush through it.
Right.
Or I want to skip over it or I want to ignore it.
We get caught up in our thoughts.
We add so much story to the ending of things.
So much story.
And we get caught up in our sense of self.
We get we're identified with something and over identified with that thing and can't see ourselves as fluid and changing over time.
Self is context.
And then we also lose track of our motivation.
So one of the things that.
I ended was this in-person sangha.
And what you,
If you were watching me through this process,
You would have seen me in all these things,
Right,
Of the difficulty to let go.
And the ways in which I was staying on too long,
You know,
Like,
You know,
In your body,
Like this is this is this is coming to an end,
But you.
You keep on going.
And the way in which your motivation gets co-opted.
In which you are no longer pursuing your values or pursuing something else,
Which may be a motivation just to keep it,
The chase,
The attachment.
And then it shows up in our behavior,
In flexibility of behavior.
So we'll talk about,
Before we do our meditation,
How to end things.
How to end things.
And in my own process of ending and beginning anew,
I started to look into some of the psychological research on ending,
And in particular,
This construct from psychology which is called the action crisis.
There's a term for this.
And the action crisis is when we're persisting towards something.
And it's clear that we need to start to disengage.
So this could be even persisting at a relationship that's not working for you in the way that it's not working for you or a job or a health behavior,
You know,
And you know that you need to like end it or shift it in some way.
And it has these four qualities to it,
Which have to do with this sort of back and forth of doubt.
It's called the decisional conflict.
So you notice yourself over time is going back and forth,
Back and forth.
You're ready to end.
Then you keep on picking it up and then you're ready to end and then you keep on picking it up.
And then there's implemental disorientation,
Which is you get kind of confused and you feel like,
I don't even know how to do this.
Even though you've ended a ton of things and you've begun a ton of things in your life,
You get this sense of like,
I don't know how to implement it.
It's confusion in your mind.
And that's part of the action crisis.
And then you also have this rumination.
The intrusive thoughts,
You keep on going back over and over again.
And the disengagement impulses,
Which is the impulse to just drop it all,
Run away,
Hide.
In my case,
Go to Costa Rica.
So what do we do with this action crisis?
One is just to acknowledge that endings do not happen like a break.
Internal conflict.
And it's okay for that to be happening.
It's actually normal.
It's so normal that psychologists have created a construct to describe what is happening.
But what do we do?
How do we get from this place of like the churning and the ugh?
Struggle with the end.
To something that's different,
To a true transformation,
To beginning anew,
And to seeing that.
Endings are part of the cycle of the beginning,
The middle,
The end,
The beginning again.
So the first thing is to stop the reasoning.
I called Trudy Goodman,
Who's my mentor.
She's a meditation teacher,
Founder of Inside LA.
And I was like so distraught by the ending of the sangha.
And,
You know,
Trudy's 81 now.
And she takes my calls from this like wise mentor role and she listens to me and she listens to me.
And then she said,
She said at the end of the call,
She was like,
Well,
Diana.
You know,
It sounds like you've spent a year and a half.
A year and a half of your life building something really beautiful and now it's coming to an end.
So be it.
And so it is.
Maybe it's a life that's coming to an end.
You have an aging parent.
Maybe there's a physical ability for you that's changing and shifting because you have a health issue.
Condition.
Maybe it's a kid going off to college.
And your whole life is shifting around that.
So be it.
And so it is.
Get out of the reasoning.
Because what you will do is you will just generate all sorts of reasoning and story and then you'll talk about it to everybody over here and then talk about it and you do this.
What my friend Meg calls mental masturbation.
You're just in your head like.
.
.
And not helpful.
So can you land in?
The wise words of Trudy Goodman.
So be it.
And so it is.
So,
So be it,
And so it is.
And that,
In psychology,
Is what we call goal disengagement,
That actually the relief comes from the disenchantment,
From no longer pursuing,
Trying to make it something that you can't make it anymore.
The next slide.
The piece around ending is this recognition,
This is a line that's on the stairs,
It's written on the stairs of my son's middle school.
As you walk up the stairs,
It says,
Because of us.
Because of them,
Us.
Because of us,
Them.
And this is a teaching about nothing is really ending.
Everything is continuing.
And to honor,
Because of this,
Whatever is coming to an end for you has changed you in some form or another.
And then because of this,
And that change will continue on.
So if you have something that's ending,
Which all of us do,
And you think about what's shifting or changing in your life.
You carry on.
You know,
Just as the sunflower carries on all the energy of the seeds into the bloom.
And then the bloom turns back into a seed.
That is happening for you in whatever shift or change you're going through.
Because of them,
Us,
And because of us,
Them.
So can you honor,
Go with gratitude for what has changed and shifted from this experience?
And then how are you going to offer?
Has come to an end in a different form.
This fourth step.
Is comes from my childhood.
So I grew up And I was thinking about this and going through something.
I grew up with a lot of animals in our house.
Dogs and cats and guinea pigs and rabbits and hamsters.
And then at any point in time,
We were taking care of someone else's snake.
And so there were a lot of endings.
Snakes that get lost,
Hamsters that died because the cat jumped on the couch next to the hamster and gave it a heart attack.
So lots and lots and lots.
And my mom had this habit of whenever we would have an animal die.
We'd be like going to put the cat down on the way home.
We'd stop at the Humane Society and pick up a new one,
Right?
So this is the light of,
It's okay to get the kitten.
You know,
When we have an ending,
We often want to start the new beginning.
Um,
I remember this when I,
When I lost a baby,
All I wanted in the world was to get pregnant.
It's like,
All I could do is just fixate on the pregnancy.
Right.
And.
And it's okay.
It's okay to get pregnant again.
It's okay to go into another relationship.
It's okay to pursue,
You know,
Your kid goes off to school and to pursue social groups to fill some of your time.
But the most important thing to know in that Is it the kitten that you get?
Does not replace the cat that you lost.
It's going to be different.
And to be honest,
This little meditation group that you're all sitting in with me now,
We will meditate in four minutes.
I'll be on time.
This little meditation group.
Is the kitten for me.
I had so much loss around ending this film.
The Sangha.
And then my husband,
Craig,
He's just such a rock for me in so many ways.
And he was like,
You know,
The Sangha continues and so what are the creative ways in which you want to teach,
You want to give,
You want to be in connection with people,
You want to meditate as a group?
And so he's like,
Why don't you send it out to everyone on your list?
Have everyone come.
And here we are like this,
You know,
48 people in here together and we just sent this out this week.
So you're all the kitten,
But you don't replace the cat.
But maybe this little kitten will grow into something,
Right?
It's going to be something different and beautiful in its own form.
So it's okay to get the kitten.
And then these last two steps before we meditate together is honor with a ritual.
Um,
Honor with a ritual,
And there's rituals for beginnings and endings.
Every meditation will start with a bow.
Every meditation will end with some bows.
And you can also do bigger rituals to honor a ceremony of closure.
This past week,
I went down to the beach with a group of friends,
And we carried a bunch of logs,
Carried a bunch of logs,
And we decorated the logs.
We built a big forest.
Pit and we put in the pit.
The things that were coming to a close and we burnt them.
And we buried it all up,
And then we decorated it with flowers.
And then we said,
This is coming to an end.
And we honor it.
And that type of physicalizing of a ritual has been.
Part of our religious and spiritual traditions forever.
And guess what?
You get to create your own.
You can co-create rituals.
You can make them yours.
You don't have to follow a specific tradition.
And then it's also to remember some of these traditions that maybe have been passed on to you,
That maybe your parents or your family or your lineage has showed you a little bit about how to end things.
And then finally,
Continuation.
So number six is the re-engagement with something new,
Or what we call in our house,
The second pancake.
Whenever the first pancake comes out,
It's always like a,
You know,
It's like.
It is what it is.
It's the first pancake and it has a little bit of loss to it.
But there's a second pancake and there's another pancake.
And that part of re-engagement in psychology is a really important part of hope and regeneration and growth.
And to remember that you can always make another pancake.
It's not the same as the first,
But it's a continuation of you.
We are constantly moving through beginnings and middles and endings and beginning anew.
Francis Weller,
Who writes about In the Absence of the Ordinary.
About endings in relationship to grief and loss and he says,
And yet it is here in the flux of loss and sorrow.
That soul is deepened.
Here in the Valley of Grief.
Is where the character.
Of the soul.
Is shaped.
Thank you for joining me.
We'll be back again next week.
This will be recorded every week.
Endings is your word of the week.
So what that means is I want you to think about this week endings,
How you are psychologically flexible or inflexible in them.
And maybe some of these practices.
Allow for the action crisis.
Stop the reasoning,
So be it so it is.
Remember that because of them,
Us.
Because of our STEM.
It's okay to get the kitten.
Honor with a ritual.
Like this one.
And go ahead and make another pancake.
It's just a pancake.
All right,
Love to you all.
Thank you for joining and hopefully we'll see you soon.
Many blessings.
