Week 3.
Last week I was actually somewhat surprised by how easily this process was going. I felt grounded and generally happy, didn’t get thrown off by pretty much anything. I was on the lookout for people or situations that would set me off in one way or another, make me angry, make me sad or defensive or scared. I noticed very little if any of these. The one or two things that happened I looked back at and tried to understand a bit better, and I’m still willing to work on them.
This week started off with exercises in learning how to “get the message” rather than react to the messenger.
I’m already in it. What I am noticing is this ground-level basic anxiety, this undercurrent of fear. Michael Brown asks us first to identify the feeling, then trace it back to the last time we felt it, and then keep going until we can find the first time we remember feeling it. He says this may be somewhat difficult because likely the first time we felt the triggering deep-set feelings, we likely didn’t have words or thoughts that we could use to make sense of it, so we have to use our feeling body to get there.
What this allows us to do is notice that it is the FEELING we are after and its origins rather than the current shape that the feeling is taking our lives. For example, I am feeling this fear. I remember the last time I felt this was when I had a suspicion that I was being left, that someone I cared for was backing away. I was afraid of being left alone. This is a feeling I have had many times in my life. It is cold and scary and sad. And the thing is, I think most of us have had this feeling in our lives, and likely for each of us it is one of the major players in terms of deep feelings that originate from a time we were in the single digits of life – who hasn’t had that alone-in-the-grocery-store moment? Or several?
But the thing is, without having healed that feeling, without having allowed it to have its moment and become integrated into ourselves as adults, it keeps playing out again and again, like a stuck record.
So for now I’m sitting in it. And I’m doing my best to see it for what it is.
I can notice that whatever experience I am having, I don’t have to react to it from that place I was when I was a kid, afraid and panicking and reaching out and grasping for comfort that isn’t there, because ultimately the comfort doesn’t come from outside me.
Sometimes people aren’t there when we need them. Sometimes people leave. Sometimes people die when you are not ready. This is not inherently a bad thing. It just is. It’s just how life goes sometimes. What we do with it is where the crux lies, where the really juicy stuff is.
I can respond consciously to this fear. I can notice, oh look, I have this fear. I am going to breathe now. When can I remember this from before? Oh yes, there it is. I can see that. I can see the path it’s wound through my life, popping up here and there and though it seems like it’s about this one particular situation at the moment, the only thing special about right now is that I HAVE MY EYES OPEN and I am willing to respond to this situation consciously. Rather than going into the same old story of I’m not good enough, why does this always happen to me, blah blah boring blah.
Brown says that as we get more clued in to this process, we will be increasingly able to change our response in the moment, and more fully integrate these feelings so they don’t run the show.
I feel like I’m taking steps in that direction.
