What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
Everything I’m afraid of.
So I’ve found myself in this uncomfortable pattern lately here on the blog. It’s like I can’t stop alternating between two widely separated points on my personal continuum.
Either I’m letting you spy on my process as I do some deep, personal work on my stuff… or I’m ranting at you about whatever the latest thing is that is currently making me froth at the mouth.
And I suspect that this pattern — like so many of the ones I’m working on right now — has to do with pain.
Partly it’s that dealing with physical pain has seriously lowered my annoyance threshold. But another part of it is that I’m processing my pain here with you.
And now we have to talk about fear.
A couple of people mentioned how relieved they were, while reading my last post about working with my pain, to realize that yeah, I get scared of things too.
I had to think about that, because of course to me it seems as though I do nothing but talk about a. how fear works, b. different ways to interact with it and c. the things that terrify me.
But for whatever reason, maybe it still seems as though I’m over it. So let’s be clear about that. I’m not over it. Fear? I know it pretty well.
And even though I have long conversations with it sometimes, that doesn’t mean it’s lost the ability to scare the living daylights out of me.
What am I afraid of . . . ?
- I am afraid of having to leave Hoppy House.
- I am afraid of getting burnt out in my work and that my arms won’t start working again and that everyone will say “I told you so”.
- I am afraid that my tired, overworked gentleman friend — who already is burnt out — will have to quit his job before my business can fully support us all comfortably.
- I am afraid that I might never get over the death of my friend and the pain that goes with it.
- I am afraid that I will one day get over the death of my friend. That I will forget.
- I am afraid that the next time I go to Berlin I will just stay there and not come back.
- I am afraid of the possibility that I might never heal.
- I’m afraid of remembering things that are repressed and forgotten for a reason.
- I am afraid of the part of me who craves new experiences and I’m afraid of the part of me who craves safety and comfort.
- I am afraid of turning into my parents.
- I am afraid that if I talk candidly about my fear on the blog, some kind, well-meaning people will try to fix it or solve it for me and then I will feel annoyed and resentful. Not that that’s ever happened before.
But I am not impressed by these fears.
Not that I don’t have days that include cowering on the closet floor, because I do and I’m human and it happens.
It’s just that — and this is the biggest thing that’s happened to me around fear in the past five years of having “working on my stuff” as a full-time job — I’ve stopped thinking that having fear says something bad about me.
I still get freaked out. I just don’t get impressed by the fact that I freak out.
Four things I need to say about fear.
Not to preach. Not even to teach. Just to talk out some of what’s in my head.
Fear is legitimate. Always.
The more I fight with it and resist it and struggle with it, the louder it gets.
But every time I remind myself that I’m allowed to be afraid, that it’s temporary and that it’s normal, the easier it is for me to come back down.
It does not matter whether or not you know why it’s there or what it’s about. Giving it the legitimacy to be there is what makes it easier for it to leave.
Fear does not have to be “rational”.
It really doesn’t matter how rational it is. If you’re afraid, you’re afraid. That’s just where you are right now.
Trying to talk yourself out of it (or someone else trying to talk you out of it) generally isn’t going to work until you’ve acknowledged its right to be there.
For example, my fear about having to leave Hoppy House isn’t actually grounded in anything. The owners have no reason to sell right now. No one’s buying in Portland anyway. I could buy it myself probably if I wanted to.
And anyway, there’s time.
All of those things are helpful after I’ve calmed down.
But when I’m right there in the fear, the best thing I can do is give myself permission to have a fit.
That’s when I realize (again) that this isn’t about Hoppy House. It’s about my stuff.
It’s about my history of loss. It’s about having moved countries three times. It’s about grounding and my love-hate relationship with roots.
And then I’m don’t have to be afraid. Or, I’m not so much afraid as curious.
Admitting fear is a strength, not a weakness.
I have a huge crush on Jennifer Louden. And one of the things I love about her is her complete willingness to engage with her stucknesses.
If she wanted to, it would be so easy for her to hide behind the super famous self-help author been-on-Oprah thing. To do the whole “Ah yes, I was once like you too” routine.
But Jen is so cool that she can post about her terror of being outed as a big fake. Which is awesome, because in my mind she’s pretty much one of the only self-help-ey people who isn’t fake.
Case in point: she’s consistently an inspiration to me through reminding us all how human she is and using her vulnerability as a practice. When I can’t put you on a pedestal, it means I have a chance of getting to be where you are too.
We’re teaching together at her Get Your Writing Done While Laughing Your Butt Off and Maybe Crying a Little Too Writer’s Retreat Week this summer in Taos. Am I scared? Oh, totally. I can come up with a hundred things to be afraid of. But I’m also excited.
Because she models the thing I admire most. Knowing what she’s working on and meeting herself there. And I get to watch and learn.
You don’t have to calm down until you want to.
When I was working on my Emergency Calming Techniques kit (or, as Stu, my voice-to-text software calls them, my Emergency Combing Techniques kit), I really didn’t want to call them that.
The way I saw it, when you’re in freakout mode, the last thing you want is someone trying to talk you out of it and make you calm down.
And the product I was designing was all about teaching people the trick to dissolving the fear while still allowing yourself to have it.
So I wanted to call it something like “Letting Yourself Be As Afraid As You Want For As Long As You Want Techniques“.
Which didn’t exactly go over well in the initial uh … market research. Everyone I talked to said “benefits benefits benefits” and I ended up going for catchy.
It still works. I still use it on myself. And I love reading the notes from people who no longer live in anxiety-attack stress-distress-worry mode.
But I still wish I’d had the nerve to give it a name that made it clear that no one is going to make you calm down. And that you’re allowed to just not be in the mood to calm down.
And that you can use it as permission not to calm down.
Yet again, this post is way too long.
I know.
And I still have a hundred other things to say about fear. Luckily, it’s not exactly a topic I’m going to stop writing about.
I’m going to keep having fears. And having a relationship with my fears. And talking to them. And reporting back. And getting scared about what will happen when I report back. And then finding out.
The “I don’t have time for social networking” thing.
Okay, at least four times in the past week or so someone has actually said to me that they don’t have time for “Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and all that stuff.”
Right. All that stuff.
They don’t have time for it.
I have a few things to say about that.
Huh. I can’t wait to hear what your plan is.
I am convinced that these people who “don’t have time” are mostly the same people who come to me wanting to know how to get people to read their blog.
Well, let’s just say that there’s a pretty large overlap in the Venn diagram.
Here’s what they want me to teach them:
How to get traffic. How to get readers. How to get comments. How to remind people that you exist so that they’ll hire you and buy stuff from you.
Uh ….
I can’t help you.
Because normally a big chunk of my answer to all of those things would be: Twitter*.
*If you haven’t read my post about how Twitter actually works, you might want to do that.
But you don’t have time for that. Let’s talk about what you do have time for.
That’s cool. Let’s talk about time.
So I would normally recommend that you spend 5-10 minutes a day on Twitter, but you don’t want to do that.
Let’s see then. So as far as I can tell your other options are:
- Spend half an hour a day leaving smart, insightful comments on other people’s blogs. No, wait. That actually takes longer.
- Spend three hours a week crafting careful, deliberate, strategic letters to other bloggers trying to convince them to let you guest post there. And then another few hours writing said guest posts. No, wait. That actually takes longer.
- Go to two live networking events each week. Let’s see, each thing is probably at least two hours, plus another hour to get there and find parking.
Plus another hour to shower and decide what the hell you’re going to wear. Plus another hour to transfer the contact information from people’s business cards into your [whatever you use for that]. Hmmmm. 8-10 hours a week. I’m going to go out on a limb and say: that actually takes longer.
And there’s no guarantee that any of those people you meet will end up reading your blog or leaving comments or buying stuff from you, so it’s not only a large investment of your time and energy, it’s also a huge risk.
But I get it. Not everyone has five minutes to hang out and goof off online.
Alright. You don’t have to do any of this social networking stuff.
But there’s a catch.
There’s a story my parents delight in telling — despite their complete inability to apply the point of it to their own lives — about me going to the doctor.
I was little. Little enough that my memories of this exist, but only somewhat vaguely. But here’s the story.
I was a strong-willed kid who didn’t like being sick. And refused — vehemently — to take medication. My parents tried every trick in the book and I fought back with new ones.
Eventually, after all of their cajoling and threatening and bargaining didn’t pay off, they took me to the doctor in the hopes that this figure of authority would tell me I had to.
It didn’t quite work the way they wanted it to — I was both vindicated and thwarted.
But it did get the desired effect.
Here’s what the doctor said:
You don’t have to take the medicine. But then you don’t get to complain.
I took the medicine. It was worth it not to have to stop complaining.
You can decide that you’re not interested in being on Twitter. That “all this” social networking stuff is not for you. But you don’t get to complain that nobody reads your blog. You don’t get to complain that people don’t come to your website. And you don’t get to complain that you don’t have any clients or customers.
This metaphor starts to get weird, though, because Twitter is actually not like medicine at all — it’s crazy fun and I would do it if it had no impact on my business at all.
Why it’s important.
I heard Seth Godin say once that you need to have your presence reflected equally in different spaces. Well, he said it in a much more articulate way than that.
The point, though, was that you want to be giving people the same message across the board. Being on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is a way that you tell people 1. yes, I exist and this is a real thing, and 2. this is who I am and what I do.
It’s about being present and consistent. Which are two of the most important qualities you need (or at least be working on) if you want to get results in pretty much anything.
It’s as true in business as it is in a meditation practice.
How much time it actually takes.
Not. Very. Much.
Obviously, your mileage may vary. But there’s no reason to spend an insane amount of time on “all that stuff”.
And you know what? It’s not even “all that stuff”. These social networking tools or whatever you want to call them are drastically different animals. You don’t have to use all of them. And different people use each one differently.
Let’s talk about how much time it actually takes. Or at least, how much time my duck and I spend on each one.
LinkedIn:
Maybe five minutes a month. I don’t really use it. Some people like it. I’m not one of them. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s about owning your name and owning your brand and showing people that what you do is a real thing.
It is absolutely worth investing at least half an hour or so in writing a good profile. Kelly Parkinson from Copylicious has a terrific post about how not to screw that up.
(You’ll also want to read her post about how she used LinkedIn to get a 41% response rate and six new clients. Uh huh.)
So I’m probably a complete idiot for not using LinkedIn more, but that’s where I am with it.
I only connect with people on LinkedIn when I actually know them well enough that I would recommend them to people in my network. If you’re a blog reader and want to hang out with me, don’t approach me on LinkedIn. Twitter. We can hang out on Twitter. I’d like that.
Facebook:
Between two and five minutes a day, at most. I don’t use Facebook for business, though it does sometimes (accidentally) have that result.
On the other hand, I know lots of people (thinking of Dana the Spicy Princess right now) who use it successfully as a way to stay in touch with clients and customers. Which is great.
Personally, I’m only interested right now in using it to stay in touch with old friends. I connect with people on Facebook when I know them well enough that I don’t mind them seeing pictures of me from fourth grade. For me, it’s more of an intimate space to keep in touch with people I already know really really well.
Again, if you’re a blog reader who wants to hang out with me, not Facebook. Twitter. Let’s get to know each other there for a while.
Twitter.
I love Twitter. I’m only on about 10 minutes a day because I can’t use my arms and I need people to help me do it.
I would pay for Twitter. It is where I goof off. It’s where I complain. It’s where I have fun. It’s where I remember why I do what I do.
Oh, and it’s also where I make about a third of my income.
Don’t get me wrong here. I would still hang out on Twitter if it had zero impact on my business. In fact, I would still be there if it had a negative impact on my business.
Because it’s just that great. It would be totally worth it to me to lose clients and customers by being obnoxious on Twitter.
But here’s what actually happens, I get clients from Twitter. I fill classes on Twitter. The “where did you hear about us?” box in my online shopping cart more often than not says Twitter.
Most of the people who comment here …. friends from Twitter.
But I get it. Who has time for stuff like that?
Oh, time. I have issues with it too. And yet …
You have time to write a noozletter. You have time to deliberate over what typeface you’re going to use on your business cards. You have time to have coffee with that guy you met who maybe knows someone at that one place.
But you don’t have ten minutes for this.
Here’s what I think. It’s pretty hard to be successful online without hanging out there.
It doesn’t have to be a lot — a few minutes a day will do it. Of course you can choose not to. You can decide you don’t have time. You can decide that it’s not your thing. You just can’t hire me. Because the first thing I will do is make you get on Twitter.
Working with pain.
I have been wanting to do some writing about the realizations I’ve had while working on and through the pain in my arms.
It’s just that I keep getting tangled up around how to start.
It’s hard to draw a map of the healing process when you don’t have arms that work.*
*Also — when you’re me and you get kind of grossed out every time someone uses the phrase “healing process”? It’s even harder.
And it’s hardest of all to explain something like this to people who aren’t familiar and/or comfortable with the idea of doing deep, crazy internal work on their stuff.
This is very hard for me to talk about. But I’m going to try to do it anyway.
Steps.
There are a bazillion threads in any “healing process” (I said it again, I know), so I won’t be talking about all of them. I just want to track the understandings that are helping me interact with my pain and rewrite the patterns that are related to it.
I’ve known from the moment it started that this pain had serious emotional components, and that my body — usually my greatest ally in these matters — just didn’t want to talk about it.
Since I’m used to getting a lot of information from my body, this whole “we’re not talking about it” thing was almost as painful as not being able to use my arms.
Following the thread.
What am I holding on to?
The first thread came out of a conversation with my massage therapist. He described the tension in my arms as being like a desperate grip on something.
As those of you who work with my Procrastination Dissolve-o-matic program know, when you’re working on a pattern, any thread can lead you to the heart of the tangle.
So I decided to start my work with questions about this thread:
- What am I holding on to?
- What am I not letting go of yet?
I took these questions into my next acupuncture session as the intention I would set in my heart.*
* Translation for non-tree hugging hippies: I determined to have these questions in the back of my mind while the needles were doing their work.
The very first needle went right into a heart point. I burst into tears and didn’t stop sobbing for forty-five minutes straight.
The information I received:
- There is a part of me that’s afraid that if I let go of my hurt, pain and anger, I’ll forget about it. This part of me thinks I need to keep my pain with me as a reminder.
- And a new understanding: “I’m allowed to have the memory of experience without having to have the pain of it.”
What am I protecting?
I took the new understanding into an intuitive healing session with Hiro Boga, whose work I can’t recommend highly enough.
She had all sorts of mind blowing insights, but the thing that really rang true for me was this:
My arms were covered with heavy, old, rusted armor — cutting into me and weighing me down.
Of course!
I’ve written so much about the way that something intended to protect us (like fear) can actually have the reverse effect. So much of the work I do is somehow related to deconstructing these false forms of protection and connecting to a deeper place of safety.
So now I had new questions, another thread:
- What am I protecting?
- Can I find protection in a new form that doesn’t involve pain?
I took these questions into my next massage session as my private intention — but even though I had planned to tell Chris what I had learned from working with Hiro, for some reason I didn’t.
But it didn’t matter.
He’d already decided we needed to try something new, so he used a technique that involves tapping stones against each other to create deep vibrations in the muscle tissue.
Closing my eyes and listening to the steady rapping of stone on stone, and feeling the emotional resonance of the pain I’m carrying (yes, clearly carrying), I had a fleeting sensation — almost a memory — that my armor felt cared for. That I had found the right blacksmith. And that this was the sound of something really old and stuck letting go.
Who am I protecting?
The next series of realizations were all about the connections between my pain and my defensiveness.
I started uncovering bits and pieces of a pattern where my urge to defend someone triggers a flood of emotion, which in turn leads to frustration and shame over not having a kinder, gentler way to be protective and caring.
This in turn — combined with a serious hot buttered epiphany following a ten minute Shiva Nata practice — gave me a ton of information about my mechanisms of internal criticism.
And how I’ve traditionally dealt with internal and external criticism. Or not.
I shared some of this with my acupuncturist so that we could work on it together, and here is the realization that came from that session:
- My arms hurt because they yearn to help everyone and know they can’t.
Intellectually, I know it’s not possible to help everyone. I know that it is detrimental for me to even try. But my body isn’t there yet.
I felt deep grief and sadness and helplessness … and then I watched them leave me.
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
This was the next realization, and it actually made me laugh.
It’s the name of a book I reviewed a while back, and though I didn’t like it much, that title is brilliant!
Every illness I’ve ever had has come at a point of transition, and every recovery has launched something new and crazy and exciting. I know that I am on the verge of something big. I can feel it.
And at the same time, I know that all of this clearing out is useful. Obviously I’d be a lot happier if it didn’t hurt so much, but I can feel how important this is.
My sense is that I can only become or access this new thing once I’ve cleared out my old patterns of protection and resistance.
They can’t coexist with this new thing — and yay new thing!
Vulnerability is power.
The next insight came to me in meditation.
My new armor will not be armor — the thing that will protect me the most will be openness. Not hiding.
Ironically, this is also something I’ve written about in the blogging therapy series.
I’m experimenting with different ways to apply the concept in my body and in my work. To use light and space instead of metal and chains. To let my relationship with my weaknesses become my strength.
This is about time.
And then … more sessions.
More meditation. More acupuncture. More massage. More Hiro.
The more work I did on this, the clearer it became that the core of this whole thing is time.
Time and my relationship to it.
My hands hurt when I try to slow down my progress, to keep time from flowing the way it wants to.
My latest understanding is that I can be more generous with giving time to myself. That one of the accidental benefits of this pain has been the amount of time I have given to working through it.
That this work is valuable enough that I cannot just give it my morning meditation and my afternoon yoga. That my priorities around time need some attention.
Okay, a lot of attention. My relationship with time… needs time.
In one of my conversations with Hiro, she told me that the thing I am working on needs more time for gestation and that I can stop pushing so much.
My arms are happy to hear that.
When I learned how to drive, my father would sit next to me, his foot madly pumping an invisible brake. That’s what my arms have been doing. Stretching out, full of tension, trying to slow it all down… and at the same time trying to hold and push things into place.
But this is not the time for that. This is the time to wait and breathe and let things happen at their own speed.
This is where I am right now.
Six weeks of insights. It’s a lot.
I don’t think I need to understand it all or be able to fix it all right now. Every time I learn something useful about my pain, I get that much closer closer to releasing the things that block me.
And every time I release a new piece of stuck, I’m making it easier for my body to get well again.
It’s a matter of time. So time is what I’m working on.
A note about comments:
These posts about my meditations and my talking-to-stucknesses are a way for me to let you to hang out in my process-thing. They are not an invitation to tell me what you think I “should” be doing to work through my stuff. They are a way for me to model one possible version of how someone might interact with their stuck.
You’re more than welcome to leave comments about your reactions and about your own stuff and about whatever else comes to mind. Please remember though that this is a highly personal experience that I’m sharing, and that I’m not looking for advice or how-to-ishness. Thanks.
Friday Check-in #34: “Arriving by Iron Horse” edition
Because it’s Friday AGAIN. And because traditions are important. In which I cover the good stuff and the hard stuff in my week, trying for the non-preachy, non-annoying side of self-reflection.
And you get to join in if you feel like it.
Has it been a week? Seriously?
I’m confused.
Oh, well. Let’s go.
The hard stuff
Ow. My arms. Still.
We’ve been making pretty solid recovery. Or at least giant steps in that direction.
But you know what? I am so over not being able to do things.
Everything takes a thousand times longer. I get impatient. I get frustrated. I am not fun to be around.
People saying, “Have you tried …?”.
Yes, I have.
Or, I would, but it comes in a container that involves twisting the cap and I can’t twist caps so I can only take it when someone opens it for me.
Or no, I’m already on six dozen other treatments.
And I have two acupuncturists, a massage therapist, and three healers working on me, in addition to all the deep emotional healing work I’m doing on my own.
I know everyone really wants to help. Which is generous and kind and beautiful. And makes it even worse, because then I feel bad for not feeling grateful. But I really, really wish that people would say, “Wow. You have no hands. That must be really challenging for you.”
And then leave it at that.
Writing is my entire day.
Talking a post out with Stu (my voice-to-text software) or dictating it to my brother or my gentleman friend takes at least twice as long as typing one.
My personal stuff about time and needing more of it, or needing to use it more efficiently … buttons being pushed here left and right.
Haven’t solved this one yet, but something’s got to give.
Really soon.
I had to go to the mall.
Blech.
And there was no way out of it.
Nothing like forty-five minutes of soul-sucking empty-minded trapped-in-a-windowless-hell to trigger my most claustrophobic misanthropic semi-deranged mental ramblings.
*shudders*
The good stuff
Meeting! People! In real life!
One of my wonderful At The Kitchen Table With Havi & Selma members was in Portland for a thing and — very enterprisingly — set up a dinner with some of the folks who are local.
And oh wow! Somehow I hadn’t realized that we had a pretty decent chunk of Table people right here.
Or that I’d never actually met any of them except for one.
So Selma and I went to dinner with all these people and each one was as lovely in person as online.
And there was macaroni and cheese, which makes me happy. And I baked. There’s even a picture.
My arms. They are improving.
Despite all of my complaining, the moaning-in-agony part of my hurting-healing arms is actually over.
Because I made a salad this week! My arms worked well enough to make a salad!
Well, not a whole one. I got almost to the end and then I had to stop. But chopping happened. And slicing.
Considering that two weeks ago I could barely brush my teeth without yelping in pain, huge huge huge change for the better.
Hiro. I love that woman.
One of the people who has been doing magic on my arms is Hiro Boga, who is also one of my Group Leaders at the Kitchen Table.
And it’s been phenomenal. I am convinced that I am going to come out of this pain with so many new skills, insights, understandings and wacky magic powers that I won’t even know what to do with them.
But I’m ready to find out.
And Hiro is doing an incredible job of facilitating this whole healing thing. I cannot recommend her work highly enough.
Lots of calls.
My duck and I taught a class this week on the basic self-work principles that I think everyone should know but actually they don’t. And it was hot.
Then I interviewed Naomi about money and strategizing and coming up with a work-able vision for your business. And that was hot.
Then Molly Gordon interviewed me (and Selma, who didn’t say anything) about dissolving procrastination and general destuckification. And that was hot too. Molly is so great!
So I kind of feel as though I spent the whole week on the phone. Which normally is not my thing, but it was just so much fun.
It still amazes me how much useful information is out there and how many smart people I know.
My favorite uncle!
Came to visit. Actually, he sent an email saying “Arriving by Iron Horse” and we walked to the train station to pick him up and find out what his plans were.
And since he never has a plan — which I adore — we had adventures.
I should say “our” favorite uncle, since my brother feels exactly the same way, and my gentleman friend loves him too. So a dose of Svevo is good for everyone.
We went on long walks. And did yoga together. And talked about the value of not doing (he is my role model in every way).
It’s so great to have someone in the family (aside from my brother) who I can sit with and think, “Yes, it actually does make sense that we’re related.”
I love him so much! Especially for modeling what and who I want to be when I grow up.
And … STUISMS of the week.
Stu is my paranoid McCarthy-ist voice-to-text software who takes pleasure in misunderstanding me.
Some of the gems from this week:
- “ex-Journal of cleaning” instead of external clearing.
- “how to snack helpfully” instead of how to snack healthily.
- “that’s the turf in question” for that’s a terrific question
There are more, of course, but I can’t find them. Though my gentleman friend — in a Stu-ish moment — did call me an unpredictable wench. A huge improvement on Boldy McSchmoldy which was what he called me last week.
That’s it for me …
And yes yes yes, of course you can join in my Friday ritual right here in the comments bit if you feel like it.
Yeah? Anything hard and/or good happen in your week?
And, as always, have a glorrrrrrrrrrrrious weekend. And a happy week to come.
A gigantic block. And some destuckifying.
Here we go again.
If you’ve been reading this for a while, you know that I have long conversations with my stucknesses. I meditate a lot. I talk to walls.
And I occasionally let you eavesdrop on my internal dialogue.
This is because I have no boundaries secretly hope that you’ll be able to benefit from some of my crazy insights without having to go through all the hard stuff.
I also secretly hope that you’ll be so intrigued by this whole working-on-your-stuff process of learning about your patterns and how to change them that you’ll start building your life around this learning, instead of around resenting your patterns for being there.
But enough talking about my secret mission. And more about this gigantic block of mine, and the extremely weird things that happened when I took a look at it.
The wall of resistance.
Encountering the wall.
At the moment, I’m dealing with a considerable amount of physical pain. And my body has been pretty clear about the fact that it is not ready to go through the process of healing yet.
So the whole point of yesterday’s meditation-thing was to get some more information about that resistance. About the stuck.
And yet again, my block was a wall. A gigantic wall of resistance. It circled my body. It was just high enough that I could see over it if I stood on tiptoe.
Not that there was anything to see since everything else was pitch black.
And it was at least a foot or so thick. Gooey and gummy in consistency.
Darkness all around. Darkness and this never-ending Nothingness. Like a wall in the middle of outer space. Composed entirely of resistance and struggling-with-the-way-things-are.
When I tried to touch the wall, it was slimy and pulsating, with this zappy, almost electric energy. It was unpleasant being by my wall.
Letting the wall be the wall.
It was hard to figure out anything about the wall when the darkness around it was so thick and overpowering.
I said, “Let’s have some light here.”
The light came. It was just the right amount of light. Not harsh or intrusive, but not too soft or ethereal either. It was a sensible sort of light.
The wall tried to hide from the light. It was not liking the light. It couldn’t hide so it got all writhe-ey and wiggly.
I said, very firmly, “Wall. Listen to me. I am not trying to destroy you. I am trying to find out about you. No one is going to make you disappear. You are allowed to be here. We will even help you stay grounded for now, but we need to shed some light on this.”
The wall was still wiggling, but much more half-heartedly. More like a kid shifting back and forth on his feet than a full-on fidget.
Me: “Wall, you are safe. Here is what is going to happen. We are going to ground you and I am going to look at you. You can stay for as long as you need to stay. I will not try to hurt you.”
And then I had chords of light stream down from above to center it, and come up from below to hold it in place.
(This is not my style at all, but it’s a technique I learned from Hiro Boga, who does astonishingly powerful work, so I’ve been experimenting with expanding my repertoire of wacky.)
Seeing the wall for what it was.
Now that I could really see the wall without all the distractions of the darkness and the zappy, pulsating, fidgeting stuff, I discovered something.
I realized that my wall was translucent.
Beyond a dirty, grainy outer film, it was almost clear. And with all the light coming down now, you could see right inside of it.
You could see what was inside of it.
Because right there, trapped inside of the wall, was an enormous clock. I knew that clock too. I knew what it meant.
Oh. Stupid symbolism.
“Oh, wall,” I said.
The wall didn’t say anything. It kind of shrugged.
“Oh, wall! This is how you keep me safe. You have frozen time for me so that the bad things that are sure to happen won’t come.”
The wall stopped pulsing. It waited.
I said, “Wall, do you know what’s really happened as a result of your trying — which I appreciate — to keep me safe?”
The wall looked suspicious.
I said, “Wall, I also want to be safe. Here’s the thing though. Time doesn’t work for me. Time has become so constricted and constrained for me that I feel as though I never have enough. This wall is keeping me from what I need to accomplish.”
The wall was very still.
I said, “Wall, are you sure we need to wall it off from me like this? What if we didn’t have to stop time? What if there were another way of protecting me from things that might go wrong?”
And that’s when the weird stuff started.
The wall began to shift and soften — just in that one spot — as though molecules were scooting around in new formations.
And then the clock popped out of the top of the wall and came to rest in a new little indentation that hadn’t been there before, clicking and whirring happily and then POW!
The clock exploded and its little pieces went everywhere.
I was (forgive me for the awful pun I am about to make but I crack myself up) alarmed. No, it was scary. But only for about a second.
Because then there were these tiny, pretty golden flecks everywhere. Little fragments of time.
And I remembered that there will always be enough for me.
My whole body softened. I could breathe easily again. The wall didn’t seem as high. The dark wasn’t as dark. The light wasn’t something I had called upon. It was just there, lighting up the wall so I could see all of it.
And the wall itself seemed friendlier. Now that it had released the clock, it wanted to show me everything that it was hiding. It pulled me along to different parts, pointing out the stuck bits and revealing what was there.
A lot of stuck.
Next was the bag. The guilt/shame/money bag that taught me that collecting and saving are things you have to be ashamed of.
Once I’d looked at the bag, the wall released it. I said, there is enough. And breathed that enoughness into my body.
Next the pool cue that taught me that trying new things is bad. I cried. It came out of the wall. It split into pieces and disappeared.
Next a picture of a box. A cardboard box taped together and crumbling. It was underneath the bed of my ex. A reminder of broken-heartedness. Of hurt. The wall let it go.
And then there was nothing left inside the wall. And the wall opened up and made a space and a little round room appeared there. Like a room in a tower. A tiny little house within the wall.
I went in.
A place to breathe and learn.
At first I didn’t like being in there. There was too much pressure from my wall of resistance on either side and I was afraid it might accidentally crush this new space.
But I said, “Wall, you are hurting me. I need protection that doesn’t come with pain.” And it stopped.
I sat in this new space (on a red cushion, yes, I told you it was weird) and I said, this is where I will be able to learn about time, money, space and love. And about trying new things.
I said, this will be our new protection. Our safe space to be curious about these things. And this safe space will be there until it is no longer needed.
And then the wall was gone. It had somehow drained into the space below it … and all the resistance was cleared away.
The only thing left was this little Häuschen. This mini-sanctuary. Rotating in the orbit that was once the wall that surrounds me.
And I watched my sanctuary pod spinning in its place. Until I was done watching.
A note about comments:
These posts about my meditations and my talking-to-stucknesses are a way for me to let you to hang out in my process-thing. They are not an invitation to tell me what you think I “should” be doing to work through my stuff. They are a way for me to model one possible version of how someone might interact with their stuck.
You’re more than welcome to leave comments about your reactions and about your own stuff and about whatever else comes to mind. Please remember though that this is a highly personal experience that I’m sharing, and that I’m not looking for advice or how-to-ishness. Thanks.