|
tender square
|
on july 20, five days before my 37th birthday, i told my therapist that i was “soul tired.” in response she said she understood given all that had been occurring in my life; said that it was hard to feel motivated in that state, that it’s hard to try and build up your life when so many people around you are crumbling.
seeing this exchange written in my journal is giving me a whole new understanding of the crisis that i’m experiencing in my life right now and why it is happening, what it is teaching me.
*
in “the presence process,” michael brown argues that when we are emotionally triggered by situations we encounter in our lives, we’re being confronted with is “unintegrated emotional charges” which stem from our childhood. he believes that every seven years we are repeating a pattern which initially arose around age 7 of our lives; he calls this age our “emotional death.”
brown argues that the “emotional death” is something we accept as being necessary as we grow into adulthood: “our potential for our life experience is downloaded *vibrationally* during the last seven months of womb life, *emotionally* during the first seven years after birth, *mentally* between seven and fourteen years of age, and *physically* by the time we turn twenty-one” (43). in other words, as we grow up, we disconnect from the vibrational and emotional energy that surrounds us, prioritizing our mental and physical experience of the world instead.
he writes, “when we are emotionally upset by anything, we are actively remembering something hidden from us until this moment. we are energetically attached to this upsetting event, and therefore reactive to it, because it reflects unintegrated emotional circumstances from our past. we are haunted by it. this is why we react to it by projecting” (141).
*
yet another passage from “presence process”:
“we know when we have received the messenger’s message *when we feel something,* usually something perceived by us as uncomfortable. we may be able to verbalize the energetic state we are feeling as a recognizable emotional condition, though such verbalization isn’t required. feeling the energetic state is in and of itself the answer.
“through our capacity to feel, we peer inwardly at the point of causality, which is to activate insight. our body confirms the receipt of this message through *resonating*—by communicating the message to us as a tangible physical sensation. this resonance may manifest as our hands buzzing, our solar plexus tightening, heartbeat increasing, face flushing, or any other number of bodily indicators. once we have access to this felt-resonance within (or around) our body, we have received the message” (151–152).
for weeks now, i have had intense resonances in my heart and root chakras; they pulse with energy and with feeling at all times of the day, their wheels are in constant motion. sometimes the feelings are so powerful, i have to stop what i am doing and sit with them in an attempt to diminish the charge. these energies are very much contributing to the persistent insomnia i’ve been dealing with unceasingly.
in “wheels of life,” anodea judith writes that the root chakra is associated with the psychological function of survival. when this chakra is open, one feels grounded and is invested in self-preservation. the emotion that closes us off to the energy moving through this region is fear.
the heart chakra is associated with the psychological function of love. when this chakra is open, one feels peace and is invested in self-acceptance. the emotion that closes us off to the energy moving through this region is grief.
i cannot even begin to express for how much of my life i’ve been living in fear and living in grief; it’s been overwhelming. it is why my soul is so damn tired.
*
my root chakra is being activated at this moment in my life because i feel intensely safe; my heart chakra is being activated because i feel intensely loved. these are feelings that i’ve been learning to give myself freely, but they are also feelings i am receiving from the external world. it is beautiful and it is glorious.
*
i didn’t know where i stood with all the “unintegrated” childhood stuff as i’ve been reading brown’s book over the past several weeks. for the most part, i was lucky enough to be blessed with a very happy childhood. i recently came into awareness about this after completing a writing exercise in gregory orr’s book “a poet’s primer” where, over a series of days, i wrote disconnected, fragmented memories as they arose when i was in my studio semester for my mfa last fall. the memories i wrote spanned 9 ½ single-spaced pages.
after i’d gotten what i wanted to out of the exercise and reviewed what i had written, i was confronted with an overwhelming sense of appreciation for my parents, for what they were able to offer brea and i. my parents came from traumatic upbringings and broken homes—that they were able to give us a sense of safety and security when they didn’t have an example of it in their own lives, astounds me.
shortly after reviewing the contents of the exercise, i called my mother and i shared my gratitude. i thought that she needed to hear it after all the time we had been separated with covid, after all the time she has received nothing but blame from candi and terri for their childhood traumas. i think it was one of the greatest gifts i’ve been able to give her, for it has allowed my mother to find some inner peace.
*
michael often calls me “five-year-old cass” and “sparkles” for the way i look at the world with a childlike sense of wonder.
those two phrases have always struck me because engaging with wonder is not something i’m fully conscious of or that i force into being—it’s who i am. i have only recently realized that michael recognizes this quality in me because it’s different from his own orientation to the world; he’s been bringing my attention to it all these years to show me that it’s uncommon, unique even.
through my years of sobriety, i’ve discovered how essential it is for me to maintain that wonder because it is foundational for my creative inspiration and output.
*
yesterday, i jumped ahead in “the presence process,” even though i’m supposed to work through one chapter per week and absorb what it’s telling me, but something felt urgent about the acceleration. last night i read the following:
“our child self is our harbor of innocence, joy, and creativity. when we ignore its unintegrated state, we diminish our capacity for innocence, joy, and creativity, and instead invest our energy in attempting to ‘be happy’ by ‘making something out of ourselves.’
“so we arrive at another major insight: unless we reach back through time and space to rescue the stranded aspects of our child self and bring them into the resonance of the present, where we provide them with the unconditional attention they require, we can’t fully realize peace” (168).
it doesn’t matter if we haven’t experienced a traumatic childhood; it doesn’t matter if we can’t remember what happened from that far back in our lives—brown argues that we all carry these emotional charges with us into adulthood. the goal of working through the book is not to uncover the memories that are associated with the intense feelings we carry, but rather to *be* with the intense feelings unconditionally, even if we don’t understand them or have any awareness of their origins.
*
“like any innocent child, our child self perceives everything it’s exposed to as true, real, and possible. it doesn’t know the difference between the validity of what it sees on television through our adult eyes and what it experiences through us in our daily activity. it also doesn’t know the difference between what we visualize in our imagination and what it experiences through us each day of our adult life. this means that it’s both gullible and vulnerable.
“our child self listens to everything to everything we think and say. it also watches everything we do, such as how we behave towards others, and learns by our examples. when we say ‘no’ when we mean ‘yes,’ or ‘yes’ when we mean ‘no,’ it becomes mistrustful of our ability to take care of its requirements. because it’s a child, it doesn’t view our present adult self as part of who it is. instead, it perceives our adult self as a parent-figure separate from itself.
“for this reason, our intent in approaching our child self requires impeccability. this is why we attend to it *unconditionally* and *consistently.* when we attend to it conditionally and inconsistently, we intensify its current unintegrated states of fear, anger, and grief” (170–171).
writing on blather daily for the past eight weeks has allowed me to approach my child self unconditionally and consistently. this site has been so instrumental to that growth that i can’t envision my life without it now.
*
before bed last night i was trying to figure out what my seven-year pattern is, what this charge is from childhood that won’t seem to leave me alone when i thought i was done with it—you guessed it—seven years ago. i suspected that it had something to do with creativity but couldn’t really articulate why or pinpoint specific instances/situations that reflected this.
for much of my adult life, i have lived with the fear that if i were to fully embrace my creativity, i will lose everyone i love. i have no idea where this notion originated from but it’s been persistent and i have faced situations in my past where loss has indeed been the outcome, though this has mostly occurred in my romantic relationships.
surprisingly, my work with writing over the past six years has brought me closer to my parents, to brea, and to michael in ways that i could not have imagined, it has strengthened our relationships when i worried that it would be damaging because i spoke my “truth.”
i was not fully able to start speaking my truth until i got sober seven years ago. i’d have moments of clarity when it was absolutely necessary, but it was not a consistent well i was able to return to for guidance until i stopped drinking and smoking weed for good.
*
someone has returned to my life that i hadn’t anticipated.
this reconnection occurred when i shared my creative work with them, work that i’ve been wanting to generate for most of my life but have only recently realized. when that person responded with such generosity, support, and understanding for what i’d written, i told them that i had felt “seen.” i know how rare this is.
in an episode of “this jungian life” i listened to on the topic of creativity in mid-august, one of the analysists said that our art “becomes a proxy for ourselves in a way; when introduced into the collective, it’s incredibly vulnerable.” i am just realizing that when i shared my creative work with this person, that i shared the beacon of *who i am.* and that when we release energy out into the world, we are met with that same energy in return.
*
for the first time in months? years? i am reconnecting to a capacity for joy that i thought i had lost entirely.
much of this has stemmed from the person i’ve reconnected with. why? because this person has the exact same childlike orientation to the world that i do. they, too, use that sense of wonder to fuel their own creativity.
now that i’ve been met with this energy, i don’t ever want to part with it. paradoxically, it feels like it threatens everything in my life but that it also supports everything, too.
brown writes, “we confuse joy with the outer changing experience called ‘the pursuit of happiness.’ but experiencing authentic joy isn’t about feeling good. it’s about *feeling everything,* which requires emotional inclusiveness” (178).
for the first time, since i was a child, i am allowing myself to feel everything: “for the first time, in a long time, i’m talking to myself.”
|
210927
|
