13 - Initiation, Part 6: Learning that I can "do my emotions"

I'm quite enjoying the process of writing this blog. I wasn't sure I would like it. Since I've been out of school, I've never written anything other than copious journals, which are fascinating to go back and read years later, but which entail an entirely different process from writing this blog.

I finally feel like a "real" writer, because I'm not just rambling in an unedited stream of consciousness. I start out with a general idea of which story I want to tell, or what idea I want to communicate in each post, and start writing... and then go back and re-read each sentence and paragraph, to see how things flow, and change things, and take a break to let it all settle, and write some more, and revise some more, and sometimes completely change the focus, or erase whole sections I've written...It's cool to watch my mind, as it's noticing where I want to clarify, or add an important detail, or take something out, to make the story flow and somehow connect to the other stories I've told already. And it's interesting to recognize that each day or week or year of my life contains so many details that have played a part in who I am now, that it's challenging to figure out what to include and what to leave out.

And I can feel that there could be a trap in writing about my life. Like, once I get this written, then that means that is who I AM. And then I might not feel or remember all the rest of the things that I didn't write about, or all the meanings that are still waiting to be discovered, because I have captured myself already in this one narrative. I don't ever want this to be a cage that I can stay in to feel safe. I want it to be a porous container that can constantly let new things in to expand my awareness of who I am.

     --------------------

I'm ready to get back to the very long story that I'm calling my initiation. I left off at the chapter of that story that I call "The Tree and I." That event was more or less the end of what I think of as my enlightenment period. The divine dimensions had thoroughly seeded themselves in my awareness, with the three parting-of-the-veils glimpses of the More of reality: the Face in the Sky, the glimpses of the other side when my mother died, and the grand finale of The Tree, showing me the divine dimensions of this world where we find ourselves right now. Honestly, I look back at that period with envy and awe. I'd love to get another intense glimpse of those dimensions, but so far, they have been elusive for the past 15 years.

What followed has been my "embodiment" period. I described this as learning to let the Love virus infect more and more of me. This is a metaphor, of course, and what this actually entailed was learning to have an entirely different relationship with my emotions than I had previously known was possible.

These new understandings sprouted, not surprisingly, as the result of the human relationships I found myself in. So in order to piece together where these understandings came from, I need to tell the stories of my relationships. And though they sprouted from my unique individual relationships, I began to find echoes and resonances of these same understandings in things I was reading from all over the world, and in conversations with certain people, and these stories from others had a way of making sense of and validating what I was feeling myself. Without these other stories resonating with my own, it would have been a lot harder to trust my own intuition about where I was heading, because my heading was so radically different from what my society had conditioned me to believe was "the way things are."

        ------------------------

The event with the Tree and I, that showed me the dimension of myself that is shining indestructible Love, had blasted into my life in late fall of 2007. Nick and I had been together since March of that year, and that relationship had taken off just as I had realized that I could let go of Ed BECAUSE I loved him. In other words, I had had no break at all between one intense relationship and the next.

Nick and I were in love, but I was beginning to recognize an essential difference between us. He was focused primarily on our relationship, and wanted his life to revolve around the love we felt for each other, and how we could make a life together. I had started out being of the same mindset and having the same enthusiasm for our togetherness. But as I got farther along in discovering more of my newfound "spiritual" self, and especially after having the experience with the Tree of Light, I felt like my journey into discovering more of who I was and what to do with that new understanding was taking more of my attention than a relationship with another person.

And I also was aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, ever since letting go of Ed, that loving someone meant that I wanted them to be exactly who they are, and that that meant that I didn't want them in a cage of a relationship with me, and I didn't want someone else putting ME in a cage. This was a vague and subtle feeling that I mostly wasn't consciously aware of, but that was going to come into greater focus as time went on.

I felt like I was a newly sprouting seed, and didn't really know what sort of being I was growing into. I was going through the motions of making plans with Nick for building a cordwood house on the land owned by our friends, and of being a permaculture designer at my job, but I felt the sand of my worldview shifting beneath my feet in ways that I couldn't predict the outcome of.

In August of 2008, I was given a chance to take an extended break from work and focus even more on my internal journey. This came along because, unbeknownst to me, my 84-year-old dad, who had been living alone since my mom died in 2004, had been getting progressively sicker over the course of that summer, and in early August, one of his neighbors called to tell me that he was in rough shape and I should come see him. So I made the 4-hour drive to visit him the next Saturday, and sure enough, he really was in rough shape.

He had been losing weight because of constant diarrhea, and now weighed only 95 pounds, instead of his normal 135. He looked like a prisoner in Auschwitz. He also had a nasty cough. The whole picture was quite alarming.

It was obvious that someone needed to stay and take care of him. The echoes of guilt and regret from spending very little time with my mom as she got sick and died, were potent forces pushing me to decide that that someone needed to be me. I told my work that I wouldn't be back on Monday, and wasn't sure when I would be. I spent the next three months nursing my dad back to health, staying with him at his house.

This was a time-consuming job, but I also had lots more time to myself than I normally had. His house was on the North Shore of Lake Superior, the same place that I had spent summers as a child. (The cabin that we had been driving to when I got the childhood glimpse of being Love had been turned into a house and become my parents' full time residence in the mid-1980's, about the time I was graduating from college.)

The Lake and the little pebble beach at the base of the cliffs below the house had been my favorite place in the world growing up, and now that I had time to spend here again, it was a source of immense comfort and calm. Nick would come on weekends, and sometimes Justin would spend a week with me at a time, but the presence of the Lake, and not having a job to think about, at the same time as having a very important and immediate purpose, allowed more relief from daily stress than I could ever remember feeling as an adult.

I could feel myself slowly unwinding, and as the calm grew and made space in my internal landscape, I could feel emotions rumbling beneath the surface that I had been suppressing for years, from when I had been married to Ed.

In previous posts, I have described the general milieu of conflict that Ed and I had been steeped in for the entirety of our marriage, but I haven't described in detail how those conflicts felt inside of me. The general resonance that was floating back up into my awareness, now that I was staying with my dad, was an amalgamation of the feelings of being emotionally abused, that had felt like a constant cloud over my head when I was with Ed, from having my actions and decisions criticized, my ideas dismissed and belittled, and my motivations mis-characterized negatively in some way. Nearly every discussion that Ed and I had while we were together had felt like an endless and futile attempt on my part to defend myself against what I felt were unfair criticisms.

My normal way of interacting with the feelings of powerlessness and of being unseen and dismissed, had always been to try to try to make them go away by getting Ed to actually see who I was, or when that didn't work, to re-suppress them and avoid them and pretend they weren't affecting me. I was surprised, now, to find that re-suppressing them, or avoiding them in some way, didn't feel like what I wanted to do.. I wasn't sure what I WAS supposed to do with them, but my intuition was telling me that at least I should allow them to come into my awareness and sit there.

As I had begun to notice this phenomenon of wanting to allow the "negative" emotions to actually surface, I started reading "A New Earth," by Eckhart Tolle. What particularly intrigued me was the chapter where he talked about the "pain body," or those things that we carry around with us from the past, that haven't been resolved, and that show up in our lives as conflict in present relationships. This was a whole new way of thinking about my emotions, and it intrigued me as a paradigm, but I didn't really know what to do about it in myself.

At this same time, I also found out that a friend had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had met this woman, Amy Sabrina, that spring, and had immediately felt drawn by her aliveness and her openness to talking about her inner landscape, and her grounded and sincere listening. I sensed that she and I were on a similar path but that she was a step or two ahead of me. I knew I wanted her in my life, and we had struck up a friendship.

Amy's email about her cancer diagnosis was fascinating to me, because she described how she didn't want to engage with her cancer in the normal way our society, including the medical establishment, does, which is to view cancer as an enemy to be fought and vanquished. She declined all of the interventions her oncologist recommended, which included having both breasts removed, and getting chemo and radiation. She wanted to approach her cancer with curiosity and listen for what it was trying to teach her. I found this inspiring, and I wanted to know more about how she was relating to this dreaded condition.

When I went to visit her later that fall, I probed her about her approach, which felt loving and fearless. I asked her, "Is it important that you stay out of fear?" Her answer threw me for a loop. She said, "no, I do my emotions." She had, indeed, felt a lot of fear initially.  And she could sense the fear in her oncologist, that was driving him to suggest all the drastic interventions that he thought she should submit herself to. She knew she didn't want to live her life based on that energy. So instead of letting that fear drive her decisions about how to treat the cancer, she had allowed the energy of fear to run through her body, and then when it had played itself out, she felt more clear, and could make better decisions about how to proceed.

Well. This concept, of "doing my emotions," was a completely different way of relating to emotions than I had encountered before. But I immediately recognized that it was what I had been needing to hear, to resolve my mysterious urges to let the negative emotions from my marriage hang out instead of re-suppressing them. I'd never felt like having those emotions was a good thing, because when they were strong, they made me feel miserable and like I needed to change something in my environment, which had always just led to frustration. This was the first time I'd heard of allowing the energy to just play out in my body, instead of either suppressing it, or trying to change what I felt was the source of them outside myself.

"I do my emotions." What a game changer of an idea. I can still remember where I was standing in Amy's kitchen when I heard those words from her.

        ------------------

I still didn't know how to actually do this new thing, but a new paradigm was starting to form in my mind, about what I was feeling in my body, and what to do about it. This new paradigm was also helping to make sense of what I felt going on in Nick. I had been acutely aware that the way he'd been sad because he thought I was attracted to George at the Wild Food Summit the previous summer, and how that feeling that he had, had been unrelated to the reality of what was going on in me. And I could feel the old emotions surfacing in myself from my marriage.

It hadn't quite dawned on me yet, that the way Nick was feeling in relation to me was a mirror image of the way I had been feeling with Ed. However, I definitely was getting the idea that the old "baggage" doesn't just go away when we ignore it and try to "move on" from it.

This new paradigm was getting clarified for me partly because it was very different from the way Nick was understanding things in the present. Even before I moved in with my dad that summer, I had been feeling jealousy re-surfacing about Ed's friendships and relationships with beautiful women who were much younger than I was. And I had gotten agitated about some disagreements with Ed over how to best be parents to Justin. I had tried talking to Nick about these things, just to get them off my chest and let him in on my inner landscape, but he didn't want me to have any feelings in relation to Ed at all. In his mind, I should just be happy about our relationship in the present and leave the past behind.

This notion didn't leave any space for me to have my bodily experience, and I didn't have the right words to explain to Nick why I couldn't do what he wanted me to do. And though Nick explained that this way of approaching my feelings would be better for me, and that he was suggesting, or more like requesting, that I do this because he cared about me, I could sense quite clearly that his suggestion was, in fact, coming from a place of fear in himself. Just beneath the surface, obvious to me, but apparently hidden from his own conscious mind, was a fear of abandonment, and if any of my attention was put towards my relationship with Ed, this was felt, somewhere in his subconscious, as a terrifying threat to his attachment to me.

This difference in perspective between Nick and I was about to get another huge clarification, later that fall, when I was introduced to the writing and speaking of Martin Prechtel. I've mentioned Martin Prechtel several times already in these posts. Martin has been the single most influential person in helping to contextualize my dissatisfaction with my society, and give me a different way of understanding human history and relationships, and our relationship with the universe. I live in constant gratitude for the gift of Martin's paradigm in my life.

Martin's entry into my life will be the focus of my next post. Or at least I think that's what the next post will be about...but I've been known to be wrong about how this story wants to proceed out of my brain.

In any case, it's intermission time again.