Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Presence Process

I'm still here, not sure what happened there, just took a long, lazy blog break I suppose - or, ok, I got a bit scared of my own openness just like I said I wouldn't...even went in and deleted a few blogs that were particularly raw and just needed to go...

But since I just went to a job interview, I thought on my way home, hmmm..., I wonder if the people who interviewed me thought to 'google me' before I came in - as if anyone in this modern world doesn't google everybody in whom they have the slightest interest...argh, so with that in mind I 'googled me' and yes, this blogspot is like the top line in the google results; and I tried to read it like a potential employer might.

I thought I seemed OK nice and not too nuts -- well, the blog about hating my coach's time assignment might have been a wee bit unfortunate but you know what, sooner or later the truth about everyone always comes out anyway so there's something to be said for just having it out there. This has been a therapy theme in fact, the idea that being me is all I have to do. My therapist even 'EDM tapped' (Emotional Freedom Technique, do you know it?) - that fact into my body and brain and I am totally starting to believe that I just need to put me forth with as much honesty and me'ness as possible and then the chips will fall, mostly, nicely all around me - and the off-chips will have some Divine purpose that I may not be able to decipher but I will trust that they do.

I'm reading a book. A really interesting book, called the Presence Process by Michael Brown -- and it requires some serious work. Well, really it just requires that you breathe a certain way twice a day for 15 minutes - so for a seasoned meditator, like moi, that shouldn't be considered a momentous task -- but it's  hard and it's what comes up and out of the deep, dark, moist (or downright flooded) basement of the subconscious that is hard, hard, hard....

The notion is this; everything in this world that makes you emotionally upset or react, versus calmly respond, is a 'set up' by the Universe to get you to pay attention to some deep and ancient imprinting that happened when you were too little to make any sense of it...aside from the fact that you were somehow bad and basically deserved it when the world - or rather then most important people in your world - made you feel alone and rejected and abandoned and not loved and not safe.

The idea being that the guy that makes you feel controlled or unloved or unimportant or abandoned - he is just some guy you attracted quite deliberately; specifically because he had that very built-in talent for making you feel terrible just like you did when you were 5 or 4; or even so young that a memory of it can't even be accessed - through ordinary means anyway.

So rather than have it out in some dramatic fashion with the messengers that conveniently and predictably, and over and over again'ly trigger that old, awful feeling of not being loved and not being good enough for love - I am just supposed to sit and breathe into that feeling - not try to analyze it or understand it but just sit there with the knowledge that this feeling is old, this wound is old and the reaction that is coming up - and that embarrass me because it's terribly childish of me -- is exactly that -- it's just a child.

It's little me, sweet little 4-year old me, in a big white hospital bed. All alone. For weeks. It's cold and it's winter and everything is white and the ceilings are impossible high and white and cold and everything else is metal and cold and sharp - especially the needle that take my blood every day in doctor effort to find out what is wrong with me. Yes, there she is; feeling just like that, just the way I am feeling 38 years later and I look at her on the bed and I am not embarrassed that she is desperate to be held and loved and told that everything is going to be OK, that the pain will go away and that she has a right be scared shitless about going into some big, roaring machine after drinking radioactive, thick, white fluid in a glass that is so tall it's makes her gag to finish the scary, sweet liquid that isn't fit for human consumption.

I put her in my lap and I wrap blankets around her and I just tell her over and over that everything will be OK, that I will never leave her and that it's OK that she is mad at her parents and that she hates the doctors and that she is trying to be a good little girl that the nurses will like. I carry her out of the hospital where she has been stuck for 38 years and I take her home with me where she gets to be with me, in me, and I will listen to her and I will not allow anything but love to come near her ever again.

That's probably as much as I can do today. It's a good book. Amazing in fact...seeing every triggered emotion through that lens....and watching for the little kid in me and in all my fellow grown-ups around me. We all just want to be held and told that we are loved and that we are ok. Right...






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