Suicidal Thoughts, Distractions, enlightenment, dark night of the soul

Have you ever had the experience of watching your own actions and hearing your own words, and observing these as well developed repeating patterns? I have been experiencing this on and off for many years. Lately, my conscious watching and listening has been very keen. I know many people have written about this phenomenon of self-observation, I’ll leave the details of that to your own reading list for now.

I am giving a little back story so that I can share how I came to see the ways of distraction. Suffice it to say that I have been in a deep process of self observation for several years. Also, I have recently moved from one city to another, thereby separating myself from familiar people, places and experiences. I had an intention to change my behaviors, change my life.

Pretty much immediately I was challenged to notice my perceptions and reactions to people and events. This has been an intense journey. I would love to write about it, but not today. I will say that I have had a first hand experience of what I think it might have felt like to journey alone through the desert for 4o days and 40 nights, sit under a tree and welcome the demons to tantalize me….if you get my meaning. This is where the metaphors begin and end. I am a contemporary gay woman, living in the U.S. My demons are unique. My demons have the names and faces of family members, lovers, friends. My demons look and sound like me.

I am thankful to the people who have willingly and unconsciously helped me face my own ‘enlightenment’. Without them, I could have continued to smudge my personal imagery so that I could go on believing that demons are others, outside me.

And I have done quite a bit of spelunking…into depths of my self, and also the collective self. There were times that I wanted, truly, to end my life. Again, I will leave this part of the story for another time. I will say for today, that thoughts of suicide did not come from that deep place, as many myths and stories may suggest. These self destructive thoughts are more like a swarm of killer bees, buzzing from, in and around the mind…not the same as depth work at all. Rather, when I got to the suicidal stage, I had wandered too far away from body mind integration, and my thoughts were attempting to save themselves in one last ditch attempt to avoid the overthrow of their power over me. Well, I won. They lost.

It was a fair battle, and I have needed to spend precious time in rest and recovery. And then, as many people throughout history have probably experienced, after fighting inner or outer wars, I must look toward the future. How will I fashion my life, after having endured such a harrowing experience, after having won? How do I pick up the pieces of my life, while building new and inventive aspects with the knowledge gained and all that has been lost in the melee? How can I act graciously toward the losers? (My own thoughts).

And this brings me to the present inquiry. What is my path in the way of distractions?

Come to think of it, I am talking about something that is sooooo personal to me, yet we are all experiencing it on the plane of real war, aren’t we? I love when that type of synchronicity reveals itself. It is Golden.

What do I mean by distractions? Good question. The answer is a vast chasm. Today I want to talk about distraction as a way to avoid my own truth: deflecting my real goals, and veering away from direct interactions with other people, because I am feeling attacked, afraid or unsafe.

There are myriad tactics that I have developed to distract myself. Prioritizing mundane daily chores over passionate adventures or artistic expressions. Looking at my body as an unfinished and inferior beast of burden, rather than a sacred vessel brimming over the with ability to create beauty, experience, relationship, peace, thankfulness and passion. Acting in accordance with the belief that money is power and without it I am powerless. Pining for love and self expression, and then stuffing myself with inner and outer ’stuff’, so that there is no room for anything or anyone to come in or go out. This is the short list.

Does any of this resonate for you?

What I want to say about distractions is that they are not all bad. I have come to see the inner workings of my reactions and behaviors. I have come to see how they began, how they received positive reinforcement to continue, how they became symbols for my ‘branding’ of my identity and of reality (please refer to the blog, “Reality is a bandwidth…”). I and my thoughts have been supremely creative. Even as I have gone through what some have called ‘enlightenment’, others the ‘dark night of the soul’, I continue to observe my distracting ways. As I observe them, I am thankful to them for having protected me, and for giving me comfort, and for helping me to feel secure. Yet, they are still distractions, the ones that lost the war, and they need to be employed differently in my new inner world order.

As I said, this is a vast chasm to travel in one sitting, and I want to hear from others, who may have been in the wars or are in them now.

The war metaphor seems valuable and I’ll speak through it. Remember I said that I noticed that I use distractions to avoid my own truth. This is another topic worthy of more in depth discussion. For now, I am thinking of how much I have acted from a deep belief that I was unsafe, and could not speak or act out of my own truth. Many of my distracting ways have been employed because I have felt that war is the order of the day. Can I disagree with this person? Can I say what I want? Can I get what I want, even if this person will judge me or hate me, or not get what she wants? Can I hear this other person, really listen? What does she want? What does she want from me? Am I willing to give it? Do I choose to give it? These are all very possible and practical ways. Yet, if I believe that relationships are always hierarchical, and that one must win, while the other loses…

Do you see where I am going? I must respect myself and must respect the other. Also, I must learn to do this within my inner ‘wars’. I must respect my ‘distractions’, not only because they were once mechanisms that I created to protect (and define) myself… also because they present a dialectic. “I can go this way, or I can go this way. Which do I choose? And when I choose- rather than perceiving that I am choosing an authentic way or a distracting way (take away the hierarchy), there is a relationship between the choices that is offering me an opportunity to know myself better. Whichever way I choose, it is I who have chosen, and I who act on the choice and I who I bring with me on the journey. I can respect and listen to my distractions, even as I can respect and listen to another person.

So, distractions are not necessarily taking me away from myself. They may be ways for me to understand aspects of myself that I have not yet come to know or accept.

Whew! This is leading to unchartered territory for me, in that I have not hitherto attempted to verbalize this. So, I hope to get some folks to read this post, and help me- ask questions, share insights and experiences.

Out you go—

Reality is a bandwidth, what’s your channel?

Hi.

I have been in this inquiry into the ways people construct the social bandwidth we call reality. Also, selfishly, I have been wanting to understand what it means to find myself, walk my path, manifest my destiny.

So here is a smattering of little bubbles of revelations, chronicles of my intermittent search, and a baby step toward sharing myself with others.

As a child I used to astral travel in my sleep, and all throughout my life I have been sensitive to what I call other realms of existence, as well as subtleties of my own environment. As I grew older, I was relieved to find that the bandwidth, the ‘reality channel’, changes with region, culture, religion and across history. Being a somewhat logical yet intuitive thinker, I understood that ‘reality’ is a social agreement. Nonetheless, this intellectual awareness did not diminish my discomfort of feeling like an outcast in a culture that did not agree to accept what I saw right in front of me.

Through the years I have met people with whom I share some of the same sensitivities and abilities. What a relief! Finding ‘kindred’ certainly facilitated my further growth and development, but I can not say that even these temporary communities helped me to gain enough confidence to accept my own perceptions. I have always envisioned myself a freak, and my associations with other ‘freaks’ did not necessarily help me to see how my gifts of vision had any personal or social usefulness or purpose. When a culture agrees that something does not exist, it also takes away its validity and its necessary employment within that same society.

So, basically I have felt an inner tension about being ’sensitive’ or ‘deep’ or ‘intense’, words people have repeatedly used to describe and often disarm me. For some reason, this is how I felt other people’s reactions, as forms of attack.

I share this about myself, because I now realize, pardon my using a word that sounds so similar to the topic, that my experience of feeling like a freak and feeling like I am being attacked for telling my story is a commonplace experience. I am not suggesting that everyone has been in this space, I am reporting that I have met thousands of people who have been there, and who exist there, or shall I say here?

In other ways I have crossed the line (what line?). I have acted as a highly functioning member of work groups, creative groups, as a teacher, student, partner, ensemble member. I love the collaborative dynamic, especially when there is a unifying intention of building something. Yet, I have often felt ravenously hungry and malnourished, as my inner world and vision was not being called upon. My inner and outer experiences became so dichotomized that I began to categorize everything inside myself as one world, and what was happening via earthly social agreements as the ’surface world’. When I felt unable to thrive on the surface, I retreated to the caves.

Now I am telling you very personal stuff, but I have come to believe that it is better to share my most intimate stories to the public at large. When I have revealed these aspects of myself in personal/intimate relationships, the negative and fearful reactions have hurt me. This is another dichotomous situation that I am working diligently to shift, but you gotta go with where you are and what you know.

This is where I am going, with today’s little salty appetizer of what I am presently seeing as the nature of reality.

Gastric juices awaken, I will leave the main course for another day. It would be good if we take some time to get to know one another.

One of my ’sensitivities’ is that I am able to ’see’ energy, and even as a young child I experienced other people’s ‘dis-ease’ when touching them, being in the room with them or as a thought popping into my head. As way leads on to way, I eventually studied various forms of bodywork which helped me to understand, structure and refine, what I am now calling my palpation skills. Several years ago I began my training as a Certified Core Synchronism Practitioner. This work has been monumental in helping me to be more and more effective to see disharmony in the body and facilitate relaxation and the healing response, It has also been one of my most profound teachers in the reality quest.

When I put my hands on a person’s body, I am following protocols that look for relationships of subtle movements in the bodymind. Over the years I have developed my palpation skills so that I can perceive 5, 10, 15 movements at the same moment, without moving my hands. Feeling these movements in my hands has been a factor that has improved my acceptance of my own gifts. Perceiving subtle energies through the physical sense of touch continues to build a bridge between my inner world and outer worlds. It has also been of great value to convene with dozens of peers every year and be reminded that there is an ever growing community of people who actively practice the development of their sensitivities, who contribute their skills to society and who are employed to do this.

So the bodywork and my personal integration work has been seeping some kinds of new awareness into my mundane get up and go to work meet people and socialize stand in line at the grocery store and wonder what it all means parts of life.

Basically, this is what I see today. Everyone is right, real and essential. All realities exist. Reality is limitless.

This sounds exhausting. Doesn’t it? What to do?

Focus.

To go back to the example of the Core Synchronism, in my training, I have expanded my vision. I have learned to feel things that five years ago I didn’t even know existed. That’s golden. When I am working with a client, there is usually a presenting symptom, or complaint, such as a headache, neurolgical imbalance, you know aches and pains. So, I focus on movements that I have been taught may relate to that symptom. I am able to feel 15, but I may only focus on 4-5, as they relate to that client’s presentation.

Yes, it is obvious that this is how we do our work, but remember, this is a story about the nature of reality.

So, what I see now is that we are all these little worlds, spiraling around each other like atoms. If I were to zoom out I would see the universe, in its limitless dynamic beauty. This idea is not new or extreme. It is reflected in the origins of most spiritual practices. What I understand now is that as one of those worlds, my existence is an integral part of the universe. My unique way, my visions and perceptions and contributions keep the universe alive, as do everyone’s. If I express my SELF, I thrive (a concept and way that is greatly beyond health, maintenance and paying the bills). If I thrive the universe thrives. It is pretty, much and simple…

…and it has taken me decades to feel this truth, like the grains of sand at the margent of the sea, through my fingers.

Assuming that you can fathom this truth, how does this relate to manifest destiny? Well, this is a very good way to start the ball rolling, don’t you think?

I was indoctrinated into the Catholic church. I was taught that there is a god who lives outside of me that knows the truth and reveals the truth. Skip ahead thirty some years… and now I see that I am an essential being, a member of the universe. The truth or nature of reality is being created by me, and everyone else.Of course we want to make group agreements. Yet, too often these agreements forget that everyone is included.

My destiny is to listen to my self, to find and express my unique reflection of reality, a highly creative and artistic act, while also associating with others and choosing which group agreements I will enter. The more I relate to others, the more of the dyanmic puzzle of the universe I see and hence have at my disposal. The focus on self does not deny everyone else. I present my SELF, like the symptoms that clients bring with them. This is what I am focusing on.

What a simple way, yet a very complex labrinth of twists and turns to have even gotten to this understanding.

And this is where I will leave you for now. I hope you accept this fodder to chew, digest, fill your belly, or whatever.