This post is just about how I feel when it all grows huge and surrounds me. I will follow it with how we can live with and respond kindly to such things (click here), but for now please excuse so many words just about me……
There is a new born gloom that, without me having noticed where it started or how it grew, blankets me. One day last week it was here like a restrictive cave. I had to sit hunched over to fit in it, my head bowed to my feet; neither able, nor wishing, to look out into the world. Yesterday it felt like there were grey boulders dividing up my heart. It was as if loneliness was lounging weightily in my chest trying to push out through the rib cage. And when it couldn’t manage that it crashed down to the belly like it had been too heavy for its shelf. Recently the gloom appeared as though a black stone was filling the body, sucking in bones and ligaments and muscles until all of me felts as dense as the rock itself. I become a separated mass; orbited by and orbiting no one. I both curse and indulge my loneliness. I so want to weep prodigiously but cannot find the tears.
This depth and heaviness of feeling is new to me. I am a novice within the overwhelming nature of it all. However, I know well the thought trains that inevitably follow. They are close travel companions. I set out wearily yet willingly with them on our habitual paths. I am well acquainted with where this road is headed and the destinations are familiar locations. Yet still, without hesitation or pause for breath, I buy the ticket. I’d rather hang out with the protective and self-harming storyline than spend even one more moment with the physical sensation of it all. After all, those tales are what enable me to think I am the centre and very heart of all I name as my world. I make a free choice, albeit an habitual one, to create more suffering in the moment, because I crave a solidity of me that can be found only in the made up stories I repeatedly tell myself.
“Watch yourself as you cling to feeling sorry for yourself or you cling to the awful state of your life. That’s your drama. The truth is we like our dramas very much.” Charlotte Beck ‘Everyday Zen’
I have sat with my storylines from the first day I meditated. I have sat with them everyday since and I will no doubt sit with them later today. They travel in one of two directions. I can bed in with the feelings of isolation and social failure and indulge myself in the pain and hurt of it all, wallowing in the dark physical feelings and weaving them in with self negating mental activity. My mind turns over tones and vibrations of being unwanted, unlovable, excluded, isolated and of failing at life’s basics. In that way creates my joint physical and mental identity is created for me.
Whole meditation sits can pass in this way. Chunks of the day too.
“When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive.” Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoché
For so long, probably decades, I have rushed to cover that vulnerable tenderness in my body from being poked and enflamed that I look back now and can see I have thrown a thick cloak over all of me. It functions well when I don’t have the resources to do cope with what is in front of me in a particular moment. Shutting out, running away or refusing to accept what is occurring can be a necessary technique for all of us – especially in times of trauma. But when I meet present reality time and time again with one of these two storylines of repetitive deliberate denial or its opposite of fully gorging on it have brought me to a life and heart devoid of colour, greyed out of emotions and distant from all the people around me.
Even when not assailed by overwhelming negativity I had brought myself to a place absent of joy and where the word love was used as a rote declaration if it was used at all (but wondrously the exception to this use of the ‘L’ word has always been with my children). I had created a world for myself dulled of the excitement of life.
Right now I am caught between boredom with the escapist thought spirals which have been with me for so long. There is nothing new to them, there are no alarms and no surprises with what arises. It all feels a little self indulgent and lazy. But with the upsurge of overpowering bodily emotion I am lost. It feels impossible to meditate and at times even to breathe. All there is, is to wait. Agency is removed. I find myself sometimes slumping to the floor against a wall or in the corner of a room. Or shaking without intending to. I scratch and cut my skin in an effort to bring the sensations to one place and maybe to a crescendo and a conclusion. Creating pain in this way also returns control to me rather than just receiving this flood of ache; waiting for it all to fade and flow through seems so passive. And there is the knowledge that something as yet unmet will in the next instant propel the another polluted wave of self-criticism, harm and disgust.
Within that irresistible and pervasive state I feel powerless. Sitting here now and not amongst all of it I know that is not so, but that is how in those moments that it appears. All I know and trust is not worth stretching out for. All those who love and care for me are not worth reaching out to and hugging tightly. I can think of one clear and irrevocable step to take and I do toy with the idea, even though I know I would never cross that threshold.
What Pema Chodron says is of course true and to the very point of it all. There is more about that in part 2 –click here if you wish to read that as well.
“So whether it’s anger or craving or fear or jealousy – whatever it might be – the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you’ve experienced it fully, to let go.” Pema Chodron ‘The Wisdom of no Escape’ chapter 4.
.
trustingmind 
Leave a comment