My fear feels overwhelming to me now. I've been recommended to say, to affirm to myself, that instead of repeating that sort of thing (as if I am chanting it into construct), to say I am strong - I am able - I am wise -- asserting and affirming my own power that is within. To not give it that power away. I have given so much power away for so much of my life to those who are willing to take it. To those not even of the awareness that they are. I have been that person, too. I have stolen others' power -- those whose power felt stronger than my own.
I have been coming to the realization more and more of the depth of my family members' societal programming. This is not their fault. I feel anger towards society for weaving this thick web in the minds of the people I love in this world. Of weaving it into so many people's minds. It is so thick that there isn't even space for new information to enter. The thing that pervades this, that feels like this growing web of darkness that I can physically feel within my mind is the darkness of my deepest fears coming up, and the sense-making of all of it in terms of the karmic scheme of things. Even that this is my 29th post and I am 29 (almost exactly 29 1/2 -- it is said that Saturn returns at just about 29 1/2 years) is a trip to me. I feeling hesitant to write much here because of my deep distrust in the "powers that be" in terms of our society and knowing that this account is linked to my email. I would like to start a new blog soon under an anonymous name. I see so clearly the dysfunction of our society, how sick everything and everyone (especially here, in this culture) is. The way that our society perpetuates the "rat race" so as to keep everyone from being disconnected from truth and their own personal power. For those "powers that be" have no power if its citizens come into their own strength, their own personal power.
It feels close to impossible -- as close to something as another thing can get -- to recreate my experience, even just today, via words. Perhaps I can say it is impossible to fully describe it, because it is a comfort. We can never fully describe our experience because language simply falls short. But the language of experience speaks volumes, and I know that when others know deep pain or abundant joy, that the sharing of this comes closer to allowing us to know one another than any words -- a human construct -- could ever allow us to come. I know that I outlined some key points as to my day yesterday to some so deeply cherished, supportive friends yesterday. I continue to label it "absurd" that through this experience of having what I consider to be visions, I still want to write everything down, to record it all. It is what I consider the Writer within me. And I know that it is also my inner Healer (Penelope would often describe this experience, even in those early months of this year, as "birth of a healer" -- she knew it.) Or perhaps this desire to share my experience comes from the scared, alone little girl in me -- I want to comfort her in ways that she can't find now, and she -- I -- have always been writing. (I just often did not know how.) This little girl is still within me -- she is a part of me, just as everything is -- and she is there just in the way that there is a little one within each of us in need of some form (and varying levels) of healing. See, the way I just wrote that sentence? That is my inner Teacher. I am trying to teach others what I have come to know, even throughout this. How am I doing that? It's because these figures are within me. And also, the one desiring to record all of this is the frightened Experiencing-Human I am embodying right now, the one grasping and desperately trying to control, the one I feel in such need of others to witness. To be able to more fully understand. But I know that my Healer wants others who are suffering to know that someone out here understands, has been in this dark well. I am still in it. I can say that I'm not in it, and it can feel true for a moment, but if I am being honest, my day-to-day experience exists in this well. What is underneath this well, or around it, or below it? It is held by something. If these things that would elicit the pain that I am so terrified to experience come to pass, I know the well will get even darker. I wrote two days ago about what we do to remove ourselves from pain, what we do to avoid it, even preemptively. Last night I sat and looked into the darkness of this room and found some comfort in it. Granted, I had taken some Klonopin for relief (which it did offer, especially in terms of physiological systems) and some Ambien for sleep. I felt that I needed rest, and so I gave in. I am not sleeping without Ambien, currently. And last night, I was scared to go to sleep because I was scared of what might come in dreamtime. I have heard of people who pass on visiting their loved ones in dreams. I was scared this would happen last night. I am also scared to name who that is; my current deepest fear, and perhaps one that I hadn't been able to even touch before wading through what I thought was my deepest fear (that of losing my mom) is now pervading my experience. I don't think I can name it here, explicitly, in words, but it's in losing the person who is the most dear to me in this world, the person who I know is simply pure good -- she is so wise, she is compassionate, she is understanding and she is so strong: she is coming into her power, and she gives me hope every day. Without her, I am scared to feel the feeling that I will actually have lost all hope. I'm not sure I can do this without her. She is light. She is happy, at her core. She doesn't need the antidepressants that these western professionals say she does. What she needs is to experience love, to experience herself. She does experience joy -- when she laughs, everything lights up. That's how I know that she is not depressed -- that it is simply her conditioning that has brought her to that "diagnosis". Really, I believe that we all are full of abundant joy, actually -- that we are all GOOD. I know this to be true. I recognize, though, that most of us wear our thick programming like armor without even recognizing we have it on. Hers, though, is porous -- like mine. This is the beauty of sensitivity, of porousness. It is through those holes that we can let the light in, that truth seeps in, even though other stuff gets in as well -- and that other stuff is what makes, for us, life feels far harder than it should be.
Catching glimpses of enlightenment these past few days has been terrifying for me because it's come alongside these "visions" (imaginings?) that elicit such deep and paralyzing fear. My mindset with that is that if I am waking up, seeing sacred geometry pulsating around the setting sun while sun-gazing [I will mention here that a doctor who I knew would not be able to help me who I went to see today for the second time at the behest of my mom who has claimed he has studied "vedic sciences" and then it was "vedic arts" (which is it?? Sciences feels sterile and inaccurate and Arts feels like a way to flimsily and whimsically label what is truth rooted in ancient human-as-spirit-being experience) did not know what sun gazing was when I mentioned this to him, and instead said that I should be hospitalized. Which I will say here is what another friend said to me yesterday, a friend whose advice hasn't felt appropriate in a long time. I wish things were that simple. I wish that anti anxiety and pain meds didn't suppress what is trying to come and instead simply delay it.] I also saw some other crazy patterns [what is referred to in our culture as "sacred geometry" as it makes up the blueprint of the universe -- for those who may be reading this who haven't heard of this term -- you should look this up. Across time and space these sacred geometric images have been found in humans' physical recordings of them on land masses, buried deep underground, in the very shape & construction of the pyramids] when my eyes were out of focus at night on the way back to my parents' house from my sister's apartment two nights ago. That whole day preceding was a trip of trying to bust through the fog of a sleepy society, and that night when I returned back to the house, I felt I was failing a test because I asked to go over to Hope's because all day I had found it so hard to be alone -- relying on her rather than simply myself. The reason it felt so scary is because of this "vision", this deepest fear that I have. Regardless of timing (and it may be obvious that what I fear coming to pass feels like it will exist in a much shorter timespan than what one would or could ever want or feel capable of accepting), we are all alone and for each one of us, all we have is what we do with our aloneness.
One of my dear sister-friends in Boulder said to me, amidst other words of deep and strong support, these words:
"I feel like we are sisters in arms, in our locked mortal battles. We can't fight the demons for each other, but we can buoy one another when one is faltering." I am trying to stay strong. I read about the "shaman's journey", that the first "demon" someone who is being called into shamanism meets on this journey is fear. I don't know where I read, that is was at some point in the last 6 months or so. I would imagine the second demons the would-be shaman must learn to befriend are anger and then sadness. There are no words for this. Having "almost too much water" in my astro chart, as my friend Kevin puts it, is creating a deeper well for me here. But, as I came upon many years ago when I still going to Marissa for support, pain grows along with joy. These are just words until one experiences it. The deeper pain carves, the deeper the joy can go. I have experienced this in action, but I have not yet experienced the joy coming into the canal pain is carving now (through fear). Can fear be classified into the category of pain? I think it may be the other way around -- that pain comes from fear. I do feel that I'm in pain, but I know it is nothing like the pain I will feel should any of this come to pass in physical reality. It is currently just fear, although my body often physiologically responds like I am already experiencing the trauma of this pain. I wonder if I could meet fear and conquer it without these things coming to pass. Perhaps, yes. I do know that Dr. Charles told me that, if I am to be a healer, how would I know another's suffering (and, presumably, be equipped to truly help another through their journey) without knowing that sort of suffering myself? The greatest healers have been through the greatest struggle. I don't currently feel equipped to be thrown into the fire (though that is precisely what I did when i chose ceremony in December of this past year.) There is karma tied into this -- that I can see. How it looks in physical reality I don't yet know. Through this, I find myself deeply drawn to my strongest friends -- those who are truly grounded in their power. Most of them have lost someone close to them. My friend Eryn, when I started to move into fear around my mom, told me in April "I thought I would die without my mom. I thought I would die." I looked into her bright eyes and I knew the fact of truth within her words.
My comment about conquering fear leads me to this:
I read a quote from the Dalai Lama within the last week or so from an article that someone sent me, I believe. The part I am remembering now goes like this: "This is why we practice." So that when things come up in our lives that throw us off, when pain comes in, we have our practice, our ritual, to fall back on to hold us. My practice is faltering now. I am seeing how this society provides anti-pain medications so as to replace practice. If we continue to feed the pharm system, we continue to feed The System, as they're all, of course, intertwined. Even that dark web is connected to the web of light. Humans have built it on the surface. What holds all of it, the web of life (of light) is there underneath, and it is stronger. I have to believe that this is true.
A selfless, kind friend who fed me and offered me safe space a couple nights ago, the night I sun-gazed and watched as a pulsating geometric pattern surrounded the setting orb, witnessed these words as they came out of my mouth: "How do we learn to accept the pace of things? We often so want to speed things or slow things down." I am quoting myself because that's what I said. That thought came from noticing how quickly the sun went down behind the building next to his. I was out on the deck and sat -- and then stood as the sun continued to set so as to catch some last glimpses of it -- how quickly it went down. In our society's concept of time, it was simply a few minutes. That is how quickly the earth passes through each day, every day. But we notice the pace of it during the sunset, or at least I did. It feels metaphorical: I don't know how much time i have left, but I do know that we notice things more towards the end. This is a lesson for living, and I have done so much wasting of my time here. As my friend Alix says (yes, her name is spelled that way as well), "the blessing of your beautiful life" -- we know pain is on its way at all times. How do we hold that knowing and still live in joy? Due to the acuteness of my fear (and also a very triggering, frightening astrological forecast that was told to me of late), I am overcome with it. I have experienced moments of abundant, pervasive joy in my life. Some people don't get any. I will say I don't feel that I have experienced enough of this, simply relative to what I am able to understand in my head (though have not practiced enough, therefore do not yet consistently embody). I do know that everyone has a set of circumstances that we enter the world with (genetics, biology, physiology, etc.) but we also have a set of circumstances that we are put onto us by our setting and society in which we're raised. Waking up in Western society is harder -- and those of us who know this know why. Constant distraction, constant games set up like they're important (i.e. everything that's on TV, and therefore TV itself: it is quite literally the food being spoon-fed into our psyches), constant interference keeping us from ourselves, from our true knowing, our true essence, from truth. The rat race. The trick that we are making money for ourselves so as to live a "happy" (comfortable) life while turning away from other humans (e.g. the banks taking people's houses away, often leaving them in poverty and on the streets) in exchange for what we believe to be the value of money, and the reality that we are never actually making this money for ourselves, since all we actually do have is something we can't touch. So to distract from the pain that comes from this knowing is this: the more we have that we can touch, the more we are associated to believe we are living. Is this truly living? Touching all these things without touching our own true essence? Without connecting with others, with love? If touching love is how we truly live, and there is light behind everything, then it is only through seeing this light, that is, finding it within ourselves, where are true essence exists, that we can experience the pure joy that can be aliveness. I would like to embody this knowing. Truly. Aho.
Through writing this, the fear that I've felt surrounding me is just slightly lessened. It is slightly less.
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