Moving on Mindfully, with Dora

Check out this clip from Headspace Studios' podcast series Dear Headspace. Are you ready, Dora? I am. My name is Cole and I'm 20 years old. Six months ago, I got out of a relationship with an older man who was in the closet and had a little girl. It's been very hard for me to move on. I really miss him and his little girl, but he was not good for me and did not treat me well, to say the least. How can meditation and mindfulness help me move on? Thank you. Ugh, this is such a hard question because, you know, when you love a person, you want to be with that person. But often when a person is in the closet, there can be a real self-loathing that comes along with it and there can be a real ... There's no pride in the relationship. Then there's all of the hidden aspects of: you can't be in public, you can't show affection. That can really take a toll on a relationship. So I just hear where you're coming from, that's hard. Yeah. My very first relationship, I was both these people in this relationship. So like initially I was really, I had a whole almost one-year relationship and lied to all of my friends. Wow. I mean, I made up a name for her. Wow. Because my friends had met her and knew she was gay, so I gave her some other name. I hid her. It was just an absolute hot mess. Yeah. I mean, and to the point that my friends were saying to me things like, "You know, Robin, Janice is gay and we're really good friends." And I'd be like, "Good for Janice" because I was not at a place. Yeah. Like, I had such internalized homophobia that I was not at a place where I was comfortable even as my friends were basically begging me to tell them. Yeah. Like, I just couldn't get there. Yeah. My whole point of going into, like, the awful 20s of Robin is to say that there's so many feelings and there's so much stuff that's happening when you aren't living authentically as who you are. I mean, you're hypervigilant. You're living in a state of fight-or-flight, right? Yeah. Which means that you feel unsafe and therefore your perception on life is so skewed. Yeah. Everything is out of whack, out of balance, which again, it's so harmful. Yeah. But if you live in that way for so long, it just becomes your second nature. Well, and there's another component to our caller's question. Yeah. There's a child involved. Yeah. And I mean, sometimes mindfulness and meditation just won't be able to help you with what it is that you're experiencing in the moment. Like, therapy is also an alternative as well. Having someone that you can trust in, a mental health professional to help you reconcile with that, because this is grieving. There's a...