Somewhere over the rainbow
I don't have time to write well or to say things in the best way. And, if you don't know me, I don't think you'll get a thing out of reading this. I've mostly written for myself so I can follow my process later.
I feel quite odd tonight. I don't know what to make of the last few days! A good part of me though is not attempting to make anything of it, but rather just appreciating what is happening, and doing what feels right (which, much of the time, is just standing and appreciating a field with trees or something of that sort). Something other than the usual aspect of mind that tells me "everything is going to go wrong if you aren't on top of everything all the time" is present.
I've procrastinated taking care of my business for a full week longer than I usually do. I still don't understand what that's about, exactly, except from this perspective it isn't really a problem. Perhaps I’m trying to create something as a catalyst. Maybe my organism knows when and how and why to do things and I don’t need to worry about that so much. What is meant to happen will happen. Either I lose clients or I don't. Really, what's the worst that can happen? Either way, it’s just life.
Even losing my business: if that's what *wants* to happen, well then, let it happen. Maybe I've been sabotaging it. If I need to let this fall apart and then fix it (or accept that it's fallen apart and do something else) then that's just what I need to learn. At the moment I’m just not too worried about it. I don’t know if words convey at all the state of mind I’ve been in. I don’t feel as identified by or as trapped by my business or by other things in my life, right now, as I usually do. So it’s like, either I do or I don’t, and rather than coming from a have to, when I choose to work on my business, it’s more like, okay, now is the right time for it. I choose to. No matter what I do, opportunities and obstacles will come.
Last night, when I finally decided it was time to deal with my business, I just sat with it for what felt like hours in this state of utter stuckness and where do I go with this? A voice of clarity -- not the usual voice that would be speaking -- said, "Dude, even the spreadsheet you created to be helpful is a mess. You need to organize! Just organize and that will help so much!" So, I decided to start organizing. It felt like all this was going to take forever. And then, last night, when I was going to spend some time continuing to get up to date with my business, an unexpected voice told me, "What you really *need* to do to take care of the business is not all that much. Just organize the files that have already been done and get started on the ones that haven't. Simple." And I figured that, when I needed to get back to take care of the business, my body would tell me rather than my mind; in the same way that, coming back from Easter, I found myself automatically transitioning into pre-travel activities like cleaning and locking the chicken coop before my mind was aware that I had begun preparing. When something is important, it tends to just happen (of course, some degree of organizing doesn't hurt!) It wasn't procrastinating so much as, "There are things going on inside of you that require attention right now; when it's time to shift out and into a different mode of being, that shift will happen, don't worry." And that’s where intentions can be really helpful -- because the sorts of things that I’ve truly intended are the ones that will just start happening when the time is right, and I don’t need to think about it!
There have been a lot of insights over the last week or two. Some just really simple: if I want my life to change, there are such simple things I need to do. I don’t need to mystify it or make it into a big thing. Just: write my memoir, spend time in nature, get in touch with my body. Take care of my body. If I do that, something is telling me right now, so much will fall in place for me. That, and organize! I don’t know where a lot of this insight comes from lately; it just appears and I know it’s more than just a thought but something I can really trust, that feels true.
I've spent so much time just admiring the beauty of nature and feeling like the entire world is timeless and open to me. I've spent a lot of time just being and letting whatever sort of crazy process -- as much as it feels like it's a forever process -- I'm going through unfold. Trusting it, not trusting it... ultimately, I’ve read a lot of stuff about experiences like this: spiritual emergency, kundalini/spiritual awakening, etc. and so much of what I’m going through is really not unique. Others go through it, too, and ultimately, as crazy and chaotic as it can often seem, and as chaotic as it can be for *years*, the consensus is that it *can* be trusted, that something very beneficial and healing is actually going on even though it often feels like I’m just stuck in the same stuff forever!
I’ve been in a place of not knowing anything at all about who I am or anything really and it’s scary. It’s really horrifying at times to not know what anything is -- things that were dear to you, you can’t say that anything is quite what you once thought it was. As I read, the book suggests that very few regret the process in the end, though it may take years to unfold. My kundalini awakening started in 2004. I wonder if it’s really starting to unfold now in a big way. Maybe it’s time to seek out and network with people who are familiar with spiritual emergency. Seek out conferences, healers, people who get this stuff, you know?
A number of things stand out for me as I read this book. It is suggested that falling in love for the first time, especially as a teenager, at a fragile time in development, or losing that first love, is a common cause of kundalini awakening. That's me; what more can I say? I also read that such experiences tend to happen most intensely around Easter. It was precisely that time of year. Something about the mythic story of Jesus and death and resurrection seems to bring out all these energies in people. Well! Maybe that’s especially true for someone who branded Jesus Christ Superstar on her soul as a teenager! Then, the book talked about Jung's Red Book as an excellent account and guide through such experiences -- it was just last week that I found myself in a bookstore, unexpectedly enchanted by the words of the Red Book. Of course when Jung himself is involved in one way or another, synchronicity is bound to happen. All I can say is, I feel somewhat validated that my experiences are not really all that uncommon; that they’re a natural healing mechanism; that, though people in my life might not get it, that doesn’t mean I’m alone. This is one aspect of my loneliness, I think I hear a voice speaking. Go to a conference, meet people doing Kundalini / spiritual emergency stuff. One thing that I really need is to stop feeling so alone and so weird and if I can meet others who have gone through similar things, that can help.
And now, as I’m researching Kundalini conferences, a woman who is a friend of a woman I met in Michigan comes up. Dorothy Walters, a friend of Patricia Lay Dorsay. It reminds me that there are people in the world with such wisdom and caring. I’ve been thinking about Michigan a lot lately. For example, many moments of my life lately remind me of little magical moments I experienced there.
I wrote, "I don't trust that this chaos of insight and paradox which results in the end as emptiness or ego loss CAN integrate. Adyashanti says that people don't trust their natural selves, their non-manipulated selves. And yes, one of my fear is of doing something crazy and not being able to trust myself." I have such a hard time explaining to friends what I'm going through. Often it feels like I'm going crazy. I don't trust myself to act in ways I want to be acting, etc. I'm afraid of getting so disconnected from the ego self that people won't recognize me; that I will be dysfunctional in the world; that I will unintentionally cross some boundary. People are likely to respond, "Well, if you don't trust yourself, how can I trust you?" And that's the thing: I need them to, and I can't quite explain to them how this works. The process is to be trusted, one way or another: that I know for certain. A deeper part of me trusts it even when the ego reels against it. There's the ego-mind-me that does all this manipulation to keep everything 'safe'. Feeling like you don't know who's acting, like you're not in control of yourself, that you might do something that absolutely horrifies your ego self -- these are apparently such common aspects of spiritual emergency. And this rightly scares a lot of people. Not in control? People are scared of anything unbounded. People are scared when someone says, for example, that the same potentials of Hitler are also present in me. We are simply expressing a universal truth that we’ve become aware of in ourselves, and actually, though it’s uncomfortable, people who are able to admit it are probably actually safer than those who keep such truths locked away in some closet.
I can’t say what this process will do. I have no idea. That comes out of humility and knowing how powerful this process is. None of us knows what the process of our lives will do; how we will be changed tomorrow or next year. None of us knows whether a few years down the road we’ll find ourselves locked up in a psych ward and acting in ways altogether unfamiliar to us. We just don’t know these things, though we can think we know. This is the awareness that becomes acutely clear to me in spiritual emergency. It’s not just theory anymore. In the end, admitting that “I’m” not always in control -- and that I don’t even quite know who this me is that’s supposed to be in control is -- may be a higher level of awareness, and ultimately safer, than someone who thinks that they’re totally in control and know exactly where things are going and they have the best intentions. That’s how I was before I messed up my relationship with Crystal: my ego thought that it knew what it was doing, that it had good intentions, that it wouldn’t let anything get out of hand, but my ego which kept saying it was trustworthy found a way to keep deceiving itself! It was my love for her that shocked me into realizing what I was doing, and now, I feel in a sense absolutely incapable of the same kind of emotional abuse because I have awareness of what I was actually doing and how far from loving it was. I love. I know that. Because I love so much, I’m afraid of not being in control, of hurting people.
So how do you explain the sometimes messy dis-identification with ego, the sense that the you that you've always known yourself to be is not in control of this entity you've always known to be "yourself," in a way that doesn't frighten others? Whenever I've tried to explain, it leads to mistrust, and I want to say -- don't you understand? This is the same dilemma we *all* deal with -- can we trust ourselves? Who is it that we're trusting? -- if any of us looked a bit more clearly, we'd discover the shocking fact that there are parts of us, besides the parts that we typically identify with, that sometimes have plans for us that are very different from what we would consciously intend. It's not that I'm any less trustworthy or more likely to do erratic things than anyone else, perhaps; it's that I'm more aware of this potential. And even this beyond-ego-beingness part of me would not do anything it knows to be ultimately unloving. There is the level of ego that wants to control everything; and there is the level beyond that where sometimes the ego’s control is thwarted and who knows what will happen? This is the part that frightens me. There is an even deeper knowing, an understanding that this process is to be trusted, whatever it is, and that yes, I will mess up in life, and all of that, but it’s all actually okay and as it should be. That’s the part that it seems people don’t get when I try to explain this to them. People are horrified that there is a part of them that might simply fuck up, or do something that would terrorize their ego; and yet, I’m simply aware that this is what life is. I know this process is to be trusted because ultimately it comes out of love.
I wrote: “So much repressed stuff is being released and not wanting to be repressed anymore that I’m afraid it’s coming out in odd ways. The sudden desire to, for no reason, send Denae a marriage request on Facebook is just one benign example. I don’t know why I did it -- in some ways, I was trying to recreate something, I’m sure -- a sense of being loved, maybe. I remember that sense I had, a very subtle sense, when I was with Crystal, that it isn’t me doing these actions. Feeling stuck in a role, one that had all the inertia to play out inside of me, and I stood there, horrified that I kept falling into the same traps. Some of them were social scripts, like how a man was supposed to be towards a woman. That I had to save face, could never be wrong. These roles were in control, as much as the part I considered the “real me” wanted to change that. Even then, even before Kundalini, some of this stuff was happening, but I had no language for it.”
And then, I had these insights into the part of me that I don’t trust, the part of me I think is going to sabotage my life, and I recorded my thoughts -- or its thoughts. Here’s a rough transcription of what came out:
***
So I’ve been thinking to myself, oh man, it’s really deep -- just going through my process and saying, OK, I connected to the process in myself that wants to destroy everything in my life. There are a lot of competing forces that I wanted to have dialogues with because they’re not working together very well. So I decided to connect to the part of myself that wants to destroy and sabotage my life -- it tells me it’s the same part of me that enjoys being a trickster, glamourbombing, throwing things out of sorts just for the sheer pleasure of it. It delights in the unusual and unexpected but it’s also the part of me that will create pain and suffering to get me to see -- it’s telling me it has a message for me. As long as I’m not willing to accept the part of me that is willing to destroy everything -- I guess that’s Kali energy -- it’s the same part of me that had dreams when I was younger about smashing down malls with baseball bats. It’s the same wanting to break free I’ve always had. And then these school dreams that keep coming up... this part of me that wants to sabotage my life is a part that wants to break free from constraints, to be consequence free, to let go of the pressure, and just be free.
But that doesn’t mean I have to break everything. Ultimately, this part says, it doesn’t matter if you break anything or not. As I write this, a part of me really wants to smash in the window of my car. That would certainly be unexpected and a stepping out of ordinary boundaries. Am I going to do that? No. On the one hand, what amazing power it would be to fuck up something in my life like that, so easily. Creating pain. I don’t know why I want or need that, but this part of me is saying, you need pain in your life to grow! It says: it doesn’t ultimately matter to me if you break a window or screw up a relationship or don’t check your business emial for a week. I mean, yeah, I want you to do something scary and dangerous with your life. Breaking a car window is certainly a metaphor of that! I want you to go out there and take risks and say fuck you to the naysayers. That’s what I want! I want you to just be in yourself, be who you are. Be who you fucking are and don’t give that up. Just be that! It seems like the way there for you is breaking things, getting in trouble with the law -- it’s all about breaking things, never a wanting to hurt another human being. It says to me, that’s not beneficial. It wants to screw things up in my life but it doesn’t want to hurt others -- it might disappoint others, yes, but it would never intentionally hurt them. It wants to destroy things and structures and create pain for me in a beautiful way. It’s not trying to kill me. It’s trying to get me in touch with what really matters and what really wants. It’s trying to connect me with what really matters: to destroy my relationship with that school I found myself in in the dream, to just walk out, burn my bridges, and live my own life! And to get there, maybe it’s just part of my makeup -- I need to be a rebel. I need to transcend boundaries.
It’s also really turned on by all of this stuff. The dreams of smashing things in the mall were actually really erotic. And now it’s like, what is left but to break my whole fucking life?! I made a list of things I need: one other thing I need is, to go through a really powerful experience, maybe a metaphorical experience, an ordeal, I suppose. And I’m going to seek all sorts of ways to create that rite of passage for myself -- ways that may sound kind of silly, like intentionally destroying my car window. Re-enacting past trauma in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. And now I need a ritual, an ordeal, a rite of passage, in order to satisfy this part of myself -- it doesn’t really care whether I really destroy my life so as to shock myself into making changes, or if I go through some sort of ritual which I can then integrate into my life. I’ll get to the same place in the end. And it’s what BDSM is, too -- feeling all this stuff in a highly charged metaphorical way, and integrating it.
Create or destroy something with a really big, magical, powerful ritual process. One of intentional destruction and letting go. Ritual pain, perhaps. Symbolically going through this process will have the same effect on the trauma as actually playing it out.
***
There is trauma in my back, mid to upper spine, and when I shake it out, this feeling of terror comes over me. If I want to feel this primal terror all I need to do is wiggle my spine back and forth and I’ll get there pretty quickly. How odd. I first noticed it when I was rolling around during the shamanic process at the retreat with Jon and LJ. I went into this terribly vulnerable rebirthing experience which was probably prematurely interrupted. This is a key to releasing it, if I want to. Keep shaking it out. I get numb when I shake, too, so the numbness is connected to it. It feels connected to why I feel myself in a double bind, unable to make decisions about anything, feeling so stuck, the dream of being stuck in school, etc. If I can pay attention to this, and start to work it out, who knews where it will take me...
Last night, I smoked about the last of the marijuana that I had, and I stood there in a position that released some of the trauma in my spine. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, for a half a second, I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was falling down. I stumbled from here to there, trying to get myself not to fall -- being terrified of falling, of losing control, of possibly hitting the ground and making a loud noise, waking everyone up, etc. So here was the battle, between the part of me I have no control over, and the ego trying desperately not to fall and lose control. And it was like, I just fell, and I lost the battle. It’s like the part of me that I dialogued with above orchestrated this fall as one way to experience myself as not in control and to surrender to that experience. All of a sudden, I was on the floor, and I had to accept that. I had fallen. In an instant, I DID lose control of my body and my actions -- I fell down -- and there I was, lying on the ground, having gone through the experience, and feeling somehow okay about it. I surrendered something. Somehow this fall had shaken something loose in me. It was terrifying, blacking out and then being in a place of just trying to stay up and realizing I had no choice but to fall. There is so much metaphor in that! I’m reminded of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: his discovery that so many of our accidents are coordinated by our psyches. Well, this fall feels that way. It was, as in the dialogue I had with the destructive part of me, a way for me to grow and let go of old forms.
I got myself to lie in bed. Then, I had this blissful experience, that wasn’t just fleeting, but a sense that I don’t know who I am at all, and it’s okay, and it doesn’t matter. I just couldn’t connect to the part of me that thought it knew who it was, it all felt illusory.
And it was like, ah, at last, I’d gotten there, to the other side! The other side of what, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I was on the other side of something. On the other side of all my resistance, maybe? I had spent so much time terrified of losing control and then I find myself right in the middle of a situation where I do fall and it turns out okay. Was this the other side of my kundalini crisis where things would unfold more easily from this point? It felt like the energy had shifted to the left side of my body. I kept getting these symbolic messages that something had shifted and in some sense things were going to be different now. What am I on the other side of? And the sense of the energy moving through me suddenly changed. It was this warm, electrical erotic energy that started flowing through me, not connected to anything in particular, but just an energy moving through me. I feel it right now, this warm erotic cleansing energy, a lot more than the tension and blockage that I had experienced before.
And today, too, I kept feeling this erotic energy flowing in the world and interacting with life and the ego normally in control just wasn’t really there. I kept seeing these images, these scenes, in nature, and it would fleetingly occur to me: “Now this reminds me of being in Michigan,” or “Now this reminds me of a moment I had with Crystal,” or “Now this reminds me of Anna,” or “Now I feel like I’m right back in Ireland.” It was as though everything was reminding me of all sorts of times in my life, and I was just noticing this. I didn’t feel traumatized by it, I was just noticing how my experience of this moment took on so many different forms. And yet, I was also present in the moment, to the scene that was happening. And then, I started thinking about this sense of being on the other side again. What am I on the other side of? About a minute later, it made sense, there was a big rainbow, I could see from one side to the other.
Somewhere over the rainbow? Of course, this was my next rainbow, and it made perfect sense that this would be the time that it would emerge. I was SO connected with all of my past at once as all these ways of seeing scenes emerged for me. And it’s somehow out of that, that rainbows decide to take shape. I drove to the park and found myself standing pretty much at the middle of the rainbow. I walked towards some water, stood near some robins... I bowed in the midst of the rainbow, but it didn’t feel any more or less amazing than anything else in life. It just was.
And right now I don’t know what any of this means except -- something *has* changed. I feel more integrated, somehow. I am experiencing something really big, something too big for most people to understand, and that can be lonely. I don’t know where I’m going. But at the moment...
I feel quite odd tonight. I don't know what to make of the last few days! A good part of me though is not attempting to make anything of it, but rather just appreciating what is happening, and doing what feels right (which, much of the time, is just standing and appreciating a field with trees or something of that sort). Something other than the usual aspect of mind that tells me "everything is going to go wrong if you aren't on top of everything all the time" is present.
I've procrastinated taking care of my business for a full week longer than I usually do. I still don't understand what that's about, exactly, except from this perspective it isn't really a problem. Perhaps I’m trying to create something as a catalyst. Maybe my organism knows when and how and why to do things and I don’t need to worry about that so much. What is meant to happen will happen. Either I lose clients or I don't. Really, what's the worst that can happen? Either way, it’s just life.
Even losing my business: if that's what *wants* to happen, well then, let it happen. Maybe I've been sabotaging it. If I need to let this fall apart and then fix it (or accept that it's fallen apart and do something else) then that's just what I need to learn. At the moment I’m just not too worried about it. I don’t know if words convey at all the state of mind I’ve been in. I don’t feel as identified by or as trapped by my business or by other things in my life, right now, as I usually do. So it’s like, either I do or I don’t, and rather than coming from a have to, when I choose to work on my business, it’s more like, okay, now is the right time for it. I choose to. No matter what I do, opportunities and obstacles will come.
Last night, when I finally decided it was time to deal with my business, I just sat with it for what felt like hours in this state of utter stuckness and where do I go with this? A voice of clarity -- not the usual voice that would be speaking -- said, "Dude, even the spreadsheet you created to be helpful is a mess. You need to organize! Just organize and that will help so much!" So, I decided to start organizing. It felt like all this was going to take forever. And then, last night, when I was going to spend some time continuing to get up to date with my business, an unexpected voice told me, "What you really *need* to do to take care of the business is not all that much. Just organize the files that have already been done and get started on the ones that haven't. Simple." And I figured that, when I needed to get back to take care of the business, my body would tell me rather than my mind; in the same way that, coming back from Easter, I found myself automatically transitioning into pre-travel activities like cleaning and locking the chicken coop before my mind was aware that I had begun preparing. When something is important, it tends to just happen (of course, some degree of organizing doesn't hurt!) It wasn't procrastinating so much as, "There are things going on inside of you that require attention right now; when it's time to shift out and into a different mode of being, that shift will happen, don't worry." And that’s where intentions can be really helpful -- because the sorts of things that I’ve truly intended are the ones that will just start happening when the time is right, and I don’t need to think about it!
There have been a lot of insights over the last week or two. Some just really simple: if I want my life to change, there are such simple things I need to do. I don’t need to mystify it or make it into a big thing. Just: write my memoir, spend time in nature, get in touch with my body. Take care of my body. If I do that, something is telling me right now, so much will fall in place for me. That, and organize! I don’t know where a lot of this insight comes from lately; it just appears and I know it’s more than just a thought but something I can really trust, that feels true.
I've spent so much time just admiring the beauty of nature and feeling like the entire world is timeless and open to me. I've spent a lot of time just being and letting whatever sort of crazy process -- as much as it feels like it's a forever process -- I'm going through unfold. Trusting it, not trusting it... ultimately, I’ve read a lot of stuff about experiences like this: spiritual emergency, kundalini/spiritual awakening, etc. and so much of what I’m going through is really not unique. Others go through it, too, and ultimately, as crazy and chaotic as it can often seem, and as chaotic as it can be for *years*, the consensus is that it *can* be trusted, that something very beneficial and healing is actually going on even though it often feels like I’m just stuck in the same stuff forever!
I’ve been in a place of not knowing anything at all about who I am or anything really and it’s scary. It’s really horrifying at times to not know what anything is -- things that were dear to you, you can’t say that anything is quite what you once thought it was. As I read, the book suggests that very few regret the process in the end, though it may take years to unfold. My kundalini awakening started in 2004. I wonder if it’s really starting to unfold now in a big way. Maybe it’s time to seek out and network with people who are familiar with spiritual emergency. Seek out conferences, healers, people who get this stuff, you know?
A number of things stand out for me as I read this book. It is suggested that falling in love for the first time, especially as a teenager, at a fragile time in development, or losing that first love, is a common cause of kundalini awakening. That's me; what more can I say? I also read that such experiences tend to happen most intensely around Easter. It was precisely that time of year. Something about the mythic story of Jesus and death and resurrection seems to bring out all these energies in people. Well! Maybe that’s especially true for someone who branded Jesus Christ Superstar on her soul as a teenager! Then, the book talked about Jung's Red Book as an excellent account and guide through such experiences -- it was just last week that I found myself in a bookstore, unexpectedly enchanted by the words of the Red Book. Of course when Jung himself is involved in one way or another, synchronicity is bound to happen. All I can say is, I feel somewhat validated that my experiences are not really all that uncommon; that they’re a natural healing mechanism; that, though people in my life might not get it, that doesn’t mean I’m alone. This is one aspect of my loneliness, I think I hear a voice speaking. Go to a conference, meet people doing Kundalini / spiritual emergency stuff. One thing that I really need is to stop feeling so alone and so weird and if I can meet others who have gone through similar things, that can help.
And now, as I’m researching Kundalini conferences, a woman who is a friend of a woman I met in Michigan comes up. Dorothy Walters, a friend of Patricia Lay Dorsay. It reminds me that there are people in the world with such wisdom and caring. I’ve been thinking about Michigan a lot lately. For example, many moments of my life lately remind me of little magical moments I experienced there.
I wrote, "I don't trust that this chaos of insight and paradox which results in the end as emptiness or ego loss CAN integrate. Adyashanti says that people don't trust their natural selves, their non-manipulated selves. And yes, one of my fear is of doing something crazy and not being able to trust myself." I have such a hard time explaining to friends what I'm going through. Often it feels like I'm going crazy. I don't trust myself to act in ways I want to be acting, etc. I'm afraid of getting so disconnected from the ego self that people won't recognize me; that I will be dysfunctional in the world; that I will unintentionally cross some boundary. People are likely to respond, "Well, if you don't trust yourself, how can I trust you?" And that's the thing: I need them to, and I can't quite explain to them how this works. The process is to be trusted, one way or another: that I know for certain. A deeper part of me trusts it even when the ego reels against it. There's the ego-mind-me that does all this manipulation to keep everything 'safe'. Feeling like you don't know who's acting, like you're not in control of yourself, that you might do something that absolutely horrifies your ego self -- these are apparently such common aspects of spiritual emergency. And this rightly scares a lot of people. Not in control? People are scared of anything unbounded. People are scared when someone says, for example, that the same potentials of Hitler are also present in me. We are simply expressing a universal truth that we’ve become aware of in ourselves, and actually, though it’s uncomfortable, people who are able to admit it are probably actually safer than those who keep such truths locked away in some closet.
I can’t say what this process will do. I have no idea. That comes out of humility and knowing how powerful this process is. None of us knows what the process of our lives will do; how we will be changed tomorrow or next year. None of us knows whether a few years down the road we’ll find ourselves locked up in a psych ward and acting in ways altogether unfamiliar to us. We just don’t know these things, though we can think we know. This is the awareness that becomes acutely clear to me in spiritual emergency. It’s not just theory anymore. In the end, admitting that “I’m” not always in control -- and that I don’t even quite know who this me is that’s supposed to be in control is -- may be a higher level of awareness, and ultimately safer, than someone who thinks that they’re totally in control and know exactly where things are going and they have the best intentions. That’s how I was before I messed up my relationship with Crystal: my ego thought that it knew what it was doing, that it had good intentions, that it wouldn’t let anything get out of hand, but my ego which kept saying it was trustworthy found a way to keep deceiving itself! It was my love for her that shocked me into realizing what I was doing, and now, I feel in a sense absolutely incapable of the same kind of emotional abuse because I have awareness of what I was actually doing and how far from loving it was. I love. I know that. Because I love so much, I’m afraid of not being in control, of hurting people.
So how do you explain the sometimes messy dis-identification with ego, the sense that the you that you've always known yourself to be is not in control of this entity you've always known to be "yourself," in a way that doesn't frighten others? Whenever I've tried to explain, it leads to mistrust, and I want to say -- don't you understand? This is the same dilemma we *all* deal with -- can we trust ourselves? Who is it that we're trusting? -- if any of us looked a bit more clearly, we'd discover the shocking fact that there are parts of us, besides the parts that we typically identify with, that sometimes have plans for us that are very different from what we would consciously intend. It's not that I'm any less trustworthy or more likely to do erratic things than anyone else, perhaps; it's that I'm more aware of this potential. And even this beyond-ego-beingness part of me would not do anything it knows to be ultimately unloving. There is the level of ego that wants to control everything; and there is the level beyond that where sometimes the ego’s control is thwarted and who knows what will happen? This is the part that frightens me. There is an even deeper knowing, an understanding that this process is to be trusted, whatever it is, and that yes, I will mess up in life, and all of that, but it’s all actually okay and as it should be. That’s the part that it seems people don’t get when I try to explain this to them. People are horrified that there is a part of them that might simply fuck up, or do something that would terrorize their ego; and yet, I’m simply aware that this is what life is. I know this process is to be trusted because ultimately it comes out of love.
I wrote: “So much repressed stuff is being released and not wanting to be repressed anymore that I’m afraid it’s coming out in odd ways. The sudden desire to, for no reason, send Denae a marriage request on Facebook is just one benign example. I don’t know why I did it -- in some ways, I was trying to recreate something, I’m sure -- a sense of being loved, maybe. I remember that sense I had, a very subtle sense, when I was with Crystal, that it isn’t me doing these actions. Feeling stuck in a role, one that had all the inertia to play out inside of me, and I stood there, horrified that I kept falling into the same traps. Some of them were social scripts, like how a man was supposed to be towards a woman. That I had to save face, could never be wrong. These roles were in control, as much as the part I considered the “real me” wanted to change that. Even then, even before Kundalini, some of this stuff was happening, but I had no language for it.”
And then, I had these insights into the part of me that I don’t trust, the part of me I think is going to sabotage my life, and I recorded my thoughts -- or its thoughts. Here’s a rough transcription of what came out:
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So I’ve been thinking to myself, oh man, it’s really deep -- just going through my process and saying, OK, I connected to the process in myself that wants to destroy everything in my life. There are a lot of competing forces that I wanted to have dialogues with because they’re not working together very well. So I decided to connect to the part of myself that wants to destroy and sabotage my life -- it tells me it’s the same part of me that enjoys being a trickster, glamourbombing, throwing things out of sorts just for the sheer pleasure of it. It delights in the unusual and unexpected but it’s also the part of me that will create pain and suffering to get me to see -- it’s telling me it has a message for me. As long as I’m not willing to accept the part of me that is willing to destroy everything -- I guess that’s Kali energy -- it’s the same part of me that had dreams when I was younger about smashing down malls with baseball bats. It’s the same wanting to break free I’ve always had. And then these school dreams that keep coming up... this part of me that wants to sabotage my life is a part that wants to break free from constraints, to be consequence free, to let go of the pressure, and just be free.
But that doesn’t mean I have to break everything. Ultimately, this part says, it doesn’t matter if you break anything or not. As I write this, a part of me really wants to smash in the window of my car. That would certainly be unexpected and a stepping out of ordinary boundaries. Am I going to do that? No. On the one hand, what amazing power it would be to fuck up something in my life like that, so easily. Creating pain. I don’t know why I want or need that, but this part of me is saying, you need pain in your life to grow! It says: it doesn’t ultimately matter to me if you break a window or screw up a relationship or don’t check your business emial for a week. I mean, yeah, I want you to do something scary and dangerous with your life. Breaking a car window is certainly a metaphor of that! I want you to go out there and take risks and say fuck you to the naysayers. That’s what I want! I want you to just be in yourself, be who you are. Be who you fucking are and don’t give that up. Just be that! It seems like the way there for you is breaking things, getting in trouble with the law -- it’s all about breaking things, never a wanting to hurt another human being. It says to me, that’s not beneficial. It wants to screw things up in my life but it doesn’t want to hurt others -- it might disappoint others, yes, but it would never intentionally hurt them. It wants to destroy things and structures and create pain for me in a beautiful way. It’s not trying to kill me. It’s trying to get me in touch with what really matters and what really wants. It’s trying to connect me with what really matters: to destroy my relationship with that school I found myself in in the dream, to just walk out, burn my bridges, and live my own life! And to get there, maybe it’s just part of my makeup -- I need to be a rebel. I need to transcend boundaries.
It’s also really turned on by all of this stuff. The dreams of smashing things in the mall were actually really erotic. And now it’s like, what is left but to break my whole fucking life?! I made a list of things I need: one other thing I need is, to go through a really powerful experience, maybe a metaphorical experience, an ordeal, I suppose. And I’m going to seek all sorts of ways to create that rite of passage for myself -- ways that may sound kind of silly, like intentionally destroying my car window. Re-enacting past trauma in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. And now I need a ritual, an ordeal, a rite of passage, in order to satisfy this part of myself -- it doesn’t really care whether I really destroy my life so as to shock myself into making changes, or if I go through some sort of ritual which I can then integrate into my life. I’ll get to the same place in the end. And it’s what BDSM is, too -- feeling all this stuff in a highly charged metaphorical way, and integrating it.
Create or destroy something with a really big, magical, powerful ritual process. One of intentional destruction and letting go. Ritual pain, perhaps. Symbolically going through this process will have the same effect on the trauma as actually playing it out.
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There is trauma in my back, mid to upper spine, and when I shake it out, this feeling of terror comes over me. If I want to feel this primal terror all I need to do is wiggle my spine back and forth and I’ll get there pretty quickly. How odd. I first noticed it when I was rolling around during the shamanic process at the retreat with Jon and LJ. I went into this terribly vulnerable rebirthing experience which was probably prematurely interrupted. This is a key to releasing it, if I want to. Keep shaking it out. I get numb when I shake, too, so the numbness is connected to it. It feels connected to why I feel myself in a double bind, unable to make decisions about anything, feeling so stuck, the dream of being stuck in school, etc. If I can pay attention to this, and start to work it out, who knews where it will take me...
Last night, I smoked about the last of the marijuana that I had, and I stood there in a position that released some of the trauma in my spine. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, for a half a second, I blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was falling down. I stumbled from here to there, trying to get myself not to fall -- being terrified of falling, of losing control, of possibly hitting the ground and making a loud noise, waking everyone up, etc. So here was the battle, between the part of me I have no control over, and the ego trying desperately not to fall and lose control. And it was like, I just fell, and I lost the battle. It’s like the part of me that I dialogued with above orchestrated this fall as one way to experience myself as not in control and to surrender to that experience. All of a sudden, I was on the floor, and I had to accept that. I had fallen. In an instant, I DID lose control of my body and my actions -- I fell down -- and there I was, lying on the ground, having gone through the experience, and feeling somehow okay about it. I surrendered something. Somehow this fall had shaken something loose in me. It was terrifying, blacking out and then being in a place of just trying to stay up and realizing I had no choice but to fall. There is so much metaphor in that! I’m reminded of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: his discovery that so many of our accidents are coordinated by our psyches. Well, this fall feels that way. It was, as in the dialogue I had with the destructive part of me, a way for me to grow and let go of old forms.
I got myself to lie in bed. Then, I had this blissful experience, that wasn’t just fleeting, but a sense that I don’t know who I am at all, and it’s okay, and it doesn’t matter. I just couldn’t connect to the part of me that thought it knew who it was, it all felt illusory.
And it was like, ah, at last, I’d gotten there, to the other side! The other side of what, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I was on the other side of something. On the other side of all my resistance, maybe? I had spent so much time terrified of losing control and then I find myself right in the middle of a situation where I do fall and it turns out okay. Was this the other side of my kundalini crisis where things would unfold more easily from this point? It felt like the energy had shifted to the left side of my body. I kept getting these symbolic messages that something had shifted and in some sense things were going to be different now. What am I on the other side of? And the sense of the energy moving through me suddenly changed. It was this warm, electrical erotic energy that started flowing through me, not connected to anything in particular, but just an energy moving through me. I feel it right now, this warm erotic cleansing energy, a lot more than the tension and blockage that I had experienced before.
And today, too, I kept feeling this erotic energy flowing in the world and interacting with life and the ego normally in control just wasn’t really there. I kept seeing these images, these scenes, in nature, and it would fleetingly occur to me: “Now this reminds me of being in Michigan,” or “Now this reminds me of a moment I had with Crystal,” or “Now this reminds me of Anna,” or “Now I feel like I’m right back in Ireland.” It was as though everything was reminding me of all sorts of times in my life, and I was just noticing this. I didn’t feel traumatized by it, I was just noticing how my experience of this moment took on so many different forms. And yet, I was also present in the moment, to the scene that was happening. And then, I started thinking about this sense of being on the other side again. What am I on the other side of? About a minute later, it made sense, there was a big rainbow, I could see from one side to the other.
Somewhere over the rainbow? Of course, this was my next rainbow, and it made perfect sense that this would be the time that it would emerge. I was SO connected with all of my past at once as all these ways of seeing scenes emerged for me. And it’s somehow out of that, that rainbows decide to take shape. I drove to the park and found myself standing pretty much at the middle of the rainbow. I walked towards some water, stood near some robins... I bowed in the midst of the rainbow, but it didn’t feel any more or less amazing than anything else in life. It just was.
And right now I don’t know what any of this means except -- something *has* changed. I feel more integrated, somehow. I am experiencing something really big, something too big for most people to understand, and that can be lonely. I don’t know where I’m going. But at the moment...