The Heart Medicine was Always There!

At forty-four, Ifinally understood what my abandonment was trying to teach me.

For years, I carried it like a wound – my father and mother splitting when I was nine months old, the fights, the distance, my father moving to another country.

I wore their separation like a story of lack, of not enough, of being left behind.

And like all unhealed stories, I kept recreating it, abandoning others before they could abandon me.

But grace

has a way of revealing medicine in our deepest wounds.

Sitting in silence,

I realized something that broke me open: those endless nights of missing my father, those tears in the back of the classroom, those long-distance calls and carefully written letters –

they weren't just pain.

They were my first lessons in keeping my heart open.

Every moment of longing for him created a current of love so strong it carved rivers in my heart.

The very absence I cursed was actually training my heart to stay open, teaching me the muscle memory of love.

This is why,

perhaps,

after countless ceremonies with heart medicine, after hundreds of journeys into the depths,

after all the seeking and searching, I'm finally seeing the truth: my heart knows how to stay open because it had to learn so early.

The very thing I thought broke me

was actually building me.

Those childhood years of missing him,

of swimming in the deep waters of longing,

weren't a tragedy – they were preparation for carrying divine love.

And now, I can finally say:

Thank you, dad.

Thank you, mom.

Thank you for this initiation I didn't understand until…

Your separation wasn't my abandonment – it was my awakening to the love I've always been.

Every opening and closing,

every presence and absence,

every moment of missing and longing – it was all just practice for remembering what I truly am:

love itself,

learning to recognize its own face in the mirror of separation.

Love, Oriya