Birthing a Dragon Pt. 2


 
 
 
 
On Monday, August 1st, having been back for 5 days, this is what I woke up to:

I’m going to try writing my way through this.  Paralysis.  Feel SO alone.  I replay my interactions over last week.  Only remember the ones that felt painfully disconnecting.  Think about the people I feel closest to.  They feel so far away.  This feeling like, “How can I even…?”  Tears roll down my cheeks.  Actually, I’m encouraged by the tears.  It’s the numb heart I fear.  What one little thing can I do?  I know that staying home and finding something to occupy my mind, avoiding this feeling, these feelings, won’t help.  What about all those who sob and don’t know why and come up with their own worthlessness?  Do I believe that I sob because of my own brilliance?  Honestly right now it sure feels like brilliance.  It’s very hard to look directly at.  Having relaxed some, there’s a monolithic quality.  Like the feeling of a rock on solid earth just after the single thud of it’s landing.  

I don’t sob.  Usually I just leak tears, sometimes they stream.  But body-wracking sobs are like a hundred-year flood for me.  Maybe a 5-year flood.  That morning I had to reach to find the reasons for sobbing.  I noticed the reaching and paused.  My sobbing intensified, felt so alive.  Then that monolithic quality.  I wasn’t able to stay with that space.  That’s not true—I stayed with that space for about 3 hours or so.  It felt so subtle and heavy yet delicately balanced. 

Then I hibernated.  History of the 20th century documentary on youtube, the rest of the day (I started in around 12 noon).  The next morning, right when I woke up, I felt the moment of gap.  “How will I engage today?” which soon became, “How can I possibly deal with today.”  Back to documentary land.  Also cancelled lunch with a good friend who I hadn’t seen in a long time.  All because I was ashamed of how I felt.  It felt so dead.  No possibilities.  I wish I could remember what I did to become unstuck.  But that’s the dragon.  Trusting basic healthiness so completely that strategies are irrelevant, like cut hair fallen on the floor.  The way to do that is called rousing windhorse in the Shambhala tradition.  Suddenly letting go of what I think I know, my heart opens and possibilities appear like stars on a clear night.    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wearing out the shoe

Image
I spent this last weekend at Karme Choling in Barnet, Vermont.  I was there for a leadership intensive with Shastri* Nick Kranz focusing on the practice of social meditation.  Already, I can feel myself being drawn into the role of the slightly detached explicator as I write this, wanting to explain the word ‘Shastri’ and what the practice of social meditation is.  That role is very comfortable to me.  I think I actually do that with myself as way to distance myself from difficult feelings.  Information and it’s accuracy is soothing to me; it’s how I get ground.   Last weekend was hard.  Social meditation is about creating a culture where the norms and customs nudge us toward being genuine and awake, in touch with our humanity.  Doing this practice and being around 55 other people doing it too makes any disingenuousness on my own part vivid.  Not always clear.  I didn’t always have a clear idea of what was going on, I just knew that I felt this pain.  I should also say that it
Read more

Thirst

I've been feeling like I should write for a few days (or maybe weeks) now.  Going back to the practice of 'manifest spontaneity', what arises? I'm tired, but not sleepy tired.  I'm tired of avoiding my experience.  And I've been doing a lot of that lately.  Reading lots of sci-fi and stuff on social-emotional learning, but not what will help me finish my dissertation.  Not emailing the people I need to email to get my data analysis rolling.  Cowering at fear is exhausting.  And so habit forming.  I have the itch to switch over to i-books and pick back up in my sci-fi novel right now.  There's something else down here too, though.  It's not just tiredness and avoidance.  Longing.  Longing for genuine connection.  Longing to be seen without the cheapness of having to confess everything I feel like is wrong with me or every stupid thing I've done.  Just thirsty for water, as opposed to a fancy cocktail, perfect latte or the IPA that gets that flora
Read more

Spiritual Practice and Mental Illness OR ‘This’ll go away once I’ve practiced enough, right?'

Image
I’m often questioning the relationship between my mental illness and my practice path.  Sitting here I’m at the end of a pretty intense week.  On Tuesday I was sobbing like I’ve never sobbed before.  On Wednesday I was mostly anxious, Thursday I was getting hypomanic and I don’t know what’s been going on today.  I would say hypomanic because I woke up about an hour before my alarm, but I had to take a nap because I was so exhausted this afternoon.  So something other than hypomanic.  Maybe today was a transition day. Why am I writing about this right now?  Well, my mood has been as the forefront of my awareness, clearly.  The second thing is that I just read a sort of micro-memoir of a pretty famous dharma teacher in which he talked about experiencing clinical depression, viewing medication as the last resort, and left it ambiguous whether practice was sufficient treatment for his depression.  The feeling I got was that he did not in the end ‘resort’ to medication.  When I use th
Read more