What’s Yours is Yours, What’s Mine is Mine

I’ve been thinking about how memory lives in my body. The connection between my bouts of anxiety or torpor and my past, or why I have a deep-seated fear that I will become sick one day with something dreadful. 

Intellectually, I have an inkling. I grew up with a great deal of fear. My father’s angry outbursts left us all angry and on edge. And his heart disease was profound and devastating—five heart attacks, triple bypass surgery and an early heart transplant, with its anti-rejection drugs which transformed this 6’1” slim man into a 5’6” Humpty Dumpty. He died at 56, so ill it was a blessing, but too young for me to meet whom he might have become. 

My father could be glorious—charming and charismatic. But he was also a narcissist who wielded his authority over his children in sometimes cruel ways. I have examined my relationship with him for decades, and yet anxiety and the fear of illness live on in me.

From the time I was young, I put as much distance between me and him as possible. From shutting him out to moving across the globe to exit his orbit. All these decades later I understand that cutting the chords to painful relationships, while necessary, does not always mean full resolution. I want that—my goal in this lifetime is freedom. Not to do an end run around memory but to move through it and let go of what was.

As I get older, I have realized I want to do this in a way that love remains. So it seemed somewhat providential that a wise friend recently shared this practice with me. By golly, it helped.

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Sit comfortably and imagine the person for whom the ties that bind you together are troubling. Any person in your life, dead or alive, with whom you have had a troubled, unresolved relationship. Then say these words out loud: 

I cut the chord that binds us in all but love

All that is yours, is yours

All that is mine, is mine

We are separate consciousnesses and I am grateful for the separation

Blessed be

If you like, you can make cutting motion with your hand when you say line one. You can push your hand away from your heart in line two. You can bring you hand to your heart in line three.

Practice this anytime, anywhere, as often as you need.

This is not a magic formula where suddenly all is resolved (though miracles can happen). At its most basic, this practice reminds us it is possible to let go of someone who has caused us pain while keeping a connection of love (I’m alsonot saying this goal is right for everyone). The repetition of this practice is a reminder that boundaries matter and we are not who other people say we are or think we are. When you release something, you will find yourself taking a big breath, almost a sigh. For me, it’s the lines: What’s yours is yours, what’s mine is mine. I am grateful for this separation.

I am. And maybe one day, only love will remain.

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In Blackwater Woods (Excerpt)  By Mary Oliver

To live in this world 

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.