Diving Deeper

I have sifted and sorted through what feels like the endless debris of my experience. I have delved into levels of self-awareness and self-understanding that many will never know. I became obsessed with figuring myself and others out. Obsessed with understanding what the hell it is that we are doing here and why we are the way we are. I teased out each little thread and pulled until they unraveled the mystery that was me. I demanded a level of depth from those around me that perhaps they were not always comfortable to swim in. I exuded an insatiable curiosity about people that some find intimidating. 

I sifted and sorted, I examined and turned over every single thing I could find. Then I came upon a new depth. Like the ocean when you swim out and deeper and it gets colder, below the surface, you know? What felt to me like a steady deep well underneath the swirling waves. I sat at the edge of this space, aware of its presence, uncertain and nervous of diving in. During this time of sitting, I found escape from the dysregulation my nervous system was experiencing at the fear of this unknown thing within me through the flooding of my senses with Instagram. The ever changing feed of 7 second videos vibrant with music, colours, lights, ideas, comedy became the salve I used to soothe my restless and scared self. I substituted the noise and pseudo-community of Instagram with the quiet reflection and genuine connection in my daily life, I became isolated as I pondered what this next journey within might unravel. I sat in this space for as long as my soul would allow. However it soon came time to make a choice, to swim in the waves of my existence or dive deeper than I had ever before. A choice in which there was no judgment over which path I took, each equally valuable. I chose to swim deeper.

But this time I would do it differently. I have deconstructed and reconstructed belief systems, neutralised trauma and relieved moments in my life through energetic healing enough times to know, truly know, that whatever this pool consisted of, there would pinpoint moments that I could trace back to, moments in which some part of me felt unsafe, and split off to protect itself. And that all of the various manifestations that came from that were sensical and logical and could be rewritten to take on new meaning. This time, I didn’t want to do that. This time I wanted to try something new. I knew that I was using Instagram in an addictive way in an effort to self-soothe, I knew that it was a distraction from feeling into what was going on within. And so when the choice was made I knew it was time to leave Instagram, I thought I would leave for good, but it seems I was just leaving for a time. I let go of all distractions, I moved myself and my kids back into my parents house. I needed support and love to be able to do this. 

Moving home and removing the distraction of social media opened up for me a huge amount of time and space. This space gave me the opportunity to dive into a book called Letting Go: A Pathway to Surrender. This book became my guide into the unknown. While I had been playing with the concept of emotions and clearing them from my body for quite some time, reading this book brought all of my thoughts on the subject together. It confirmed that emotions do not come from thoughts as a practitioner of CBT might tell you, instead thoughts stem directly from emotion, or felt-sense. This is why when we try to deal with individual thoughts it is like trying to bail out a fast sinking ship with a single bucket. Many thousands of thoughts, belief systems, fears, limitations and the like, stem from single experiences of felt-senses that have not been processed. If I could allow myself to do the terrifying and actually feel these emotions as bodily sensations I could allow them to finally flow through and out of my system then I could quite naturally and without force or endless deconstruction and reconstruction let go of any and all narratives I came across. A much nicer process. Though I must say it can be incredibly difficult to simply feel your feelings and accept them. My goodness. 

So what exactly did I find down there? I found an incredibly deep level of grief. Grief for a life unlived, grief for a relationship that went differently from expected and hoped, grief for the health I perceived I would never have, grief that fear had held me back from so many things, grief that I would never be loved or love myself, grief that flowed back through my entire life. Have you seen the movie Inside Out? When I watched that for the first time (and even now when I watch it again) I absolutely bawled my eyes out when I recognised that the mother is run by Sadness. It rang so impossibly familiar to me. Grief and the disallowing of that grief has been a thread throughout my entire life. A repression of this experience out of the idea it was not ok to be feeling this way. Many years of intermittent, deep, depression that came from the storing of this emotion. This time, instead of trying to dissect and examine this, I chose to simply allow, to welcome this part of me back home, to bring this part of myself back into the whole of who I am. 

Practically that looked like taking notice of what was happening in my body, what physical sensations did I feel? I even strove not to label these feelings as emotions because each emotion name has a whole string of narratives attached. And I didn’t want narratives. I didn’t want words. I wanted to simply sit and accept each sensation and felt-sense within. To fully allow and release in each moment. To constantly surrender to the feelings. This is an ongoing process and likely will be forever. There is no end point to “healing”. There is the journey and nothing else. 

In swimming in this dizzying depth I came to realise that I had been limiting my experience, waiting for certain things to happen before I started to live the life I wanted to live. My resolution in coming through this is to simply live, now. There is no guarantee of health, there is no end to the learning about myself, there will always be fear, each of these things describe what it is to be having this human experience. I can live now anyway, I can go on those hikes, I can go out on dates, I can make plans for the future. I can live now. As I said above.. There is the journey and nothing else. Might as well enjoy it.