Being With

A couple of weeks ago I made a choice. This choice still continues to change my understanding of myself and my experience of who I am.  It’s very exciting for me. It was a risky and painful choice, but, as many of us know, most of the worthwhile changes in our lives usually come with the likes of risk and pain. Maybe you can relate?

I’ve always, as long as I can remember anyway, had a feeling of pain in my heart. It has always just been ‘a-part-of-me’.  Of course at times of hurt, loss and grief we can all feel pain in our heart.  My guess is that it’s duration and intensity varies from one person to another (maybe not?) and is something familiar to all.  For me it was always there; certainly flaring up and intensifying when hurt, and yet never fully subsiding upon recovery.

Until…

A familiar, ongoing issue in my life reared it’s ugly head once again. Stab stab, pain pain – here it is again in all it’s soul-sucking glory!  This is when I made my choice to sit down and face that sucker and deal with it.
* * *

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, settle myself, exhale and      begin.  Inwardly focusing my attention and breath on my heart, I do my best to Be With what I am experiencing. No avoiding, no pushing or explaining away.  No wimping out.

Visually I see my heart, grey, with a sharp, bright, jagged spike buried deep in the upper left quadrant .  The flesh surrounding and adhering to the spike as if they are conjoined twins;  a good indication of just how long they have lived together.  Pretending, hiding, avoiding, cowering, excusing.  Oh, the skills they have developed in order to survive together!

What to do?  Only one thing really; begin the extraction.  No surgeon or therapist can do this for me – this is something I have to do myself.  With my thumb and index finger I lightly pinched the fat end of the spike, which was close to the surface of my heart, and began to slowly pull.  I feel the centre of my heart being tugged along, adhered as it is to the length of the  spike.  To rip off the band aid, or not? Do I slowly, cautiously, inch the spike out, doing my damnedest to {painlessly, haha!} separate skin from metal? Or do I risk yanking out the deepest, rawest insides of my  heart?  I end up doing something in-between; a steady, even,  medium speed, complete extraction.

Blood. Lots of blood. Gushing, spurting red blood. Everywhere. And guts. Heart guts. Lots of heart guts.

I felt myself dissociating; leaving my body.

My default mode is flight.  Numbing out, head getting light, thoughts fading, spacing-out. Always has been; especially with this particular kind of pain. Nothing I can do, so might as well leave and not feel anything at all. The fear of annihilation, of not existing, not being real; this is my nemesis, my Achilles heel, my great fear.  We all have/had one. This is mine.

          I drift towards oblivion  

Fear-stay in control  <versus>  fear-beckoning annihilation.  Both equally expecting my undivided attention and complete compliance.  A very familiar dilemma, I’ve been here countless times.  I usually just waffle and end up…? nowhere.  This is my usual wimp-out place,  terrified to move forward / terrified to go back – leaving me feeling awkward, embarrassed and even ashamed. This time I make a choice;  ANNIHILATION  it is. So be it.   Is this what surrender looks and feels like?  I’m dissi p a t i n  g,  a  cloud,  a  ghost,  a  wisp,  a  lower-case  u n r e a l  nothing.  Empty,  formless  no thing.

Curious. This isn’t so bad, feeling like nothing.  Feeling unreal, un-real, not real, nothing. I am no thing…and I kind of like it.

I am not  getting to enjoy my newfound no-thingness for long.  I am being sucked back in the direction I just came from; my place of fear-control, my false-real, pretend-real.

At the same time, my lower-case  u n r e a l  self , as I am being drawn back, is morphing into my  REAL  self . This is the best I can describe it – I am morphing into my upper-case REAL  self.  I feel solid, I am solid, and bigger, and stronger.  I am bringing my REAL self, from my place of annihilation, back to my place of fear-control.  I am bringing my REAL self back to my physical reality, where once only my  u n r e a l  self resided.

Hallelujah!!  It only took me a lifetime! (The only one that I can remember anyways).  You may now understand why I said this was a  “…choice that continues to change my understanding of myself and my experience of who I am”.  I’m now not exiled between REAL and    u n r e a l, trapped in one or the other.  I can be REAL in my physical body as my physical ‘self’ and leave/be unreal if and when I want. Experientially I know the difference – neither is terrifying.  I just proved to myself that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Cliché, I know, yet that’s what it feels like to me.  Instead of being extremes that could never exist in the same universe, REAL and  u n r e a l / spiritual and physical, are now connected and flow together like an infinity∞symbol.

                        ∞ ∞ ∞