Everywhere I look people seem to have vasanas (1) exploding. Everything’s coming to the surface – we’re told – to be cleared.
I’ve been immersed in vasanas all morning so deep I felt depressed. My wife D’Arcy is handling her own version of it. I can’t say what the issue is. Confidential. Let’s just say relationships gone awry.
D’Arcy and I worked on clearing the vasanas and bit by bit we’re emerging from our general despondency.
On our conference call this morning, the InLight Group challenged me to source (2) this depression online. They suggested I had been sourcing others so why not source depression? That was a hugely challenging assignment because it would have to be done from a non-blaming place. But vasanas are almost always either about or involve blame.
I notice that what depression really meant for me was a complex, compound aggregate of vasanas. D’Arcy assisted me to pry one layer after another off my face like the science officer prying the placenta off the crew member’s face in Alien.
Vasanas of betrayal, resistance, guardedness, hurt all around relationships – work and personal – that had gone awry. And to add to it all, I’m supposed to be some kind of wayshower. Poor excuse for a wayshower today. No way to cover for my felt inability to crawl out of bed, metaphorically speaking.
I was going to take a day or two off “work” and just hide away but the InLight Group invited me to turn and face into the wind.
And I don’t get the sense that I’m alone. I see or hear lightworkers shooting themselves in the foot, collapsing in hurt, lashing out, as our deep wounds are brought to the surface or our emotional boils are lanced. One lightworker friend keeps reminding me that we agreed to this before we were born. Cold comfort when you’re thrashing around in the deep.
When I was deeply depressed this morning, I couldn’t generate enough caring to be kind or considerate. I just wanted relief or isolation. I tried to hide away, tried to avoid our InLight conference call. But they sent out a search party and discovered my hidey hole.
Listless, emotionally bedraggled, despondent, for the first time in years, I protested, worried that I would drag the entire group down. But instead they gave me a wonderful listening to and I reached the point of seeing the first break in the clouds. Listening is wonderful, the best gift I can think of.
Afterwards, D’Arcy and I took turns seeing where these emotional wounds were properly located in the distant past. She found a girlfriend who had stolen money from her, one who had agreed to be her bridesmaid and then copped out, her mood lifting as she recognized each ancient hurt.
I saw people at school or work who had betrayed or manipulated me, a friend who was sleeping with my first wife, a university editor who laid a trap for me which I blindly walked into, etc.
There’s a TV ad where the star of Casino, the ultimate dark figure, Nicky Santoro, is insulting some girls at a party. The girls say they are models and he asks them what they model. Gloves? His friends haul him away and give him a Snickers and he turns into his loving, youthful self again and the friends say, “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry.” Well, I felt like Nicky Santoro.
Out of it all, I get to see that depression is simply more vasanas than we can sort out alone, compressed, tied together, and seemingly unmanageable. But taken one vasana at a time, depression too can be gotten through.
I don’t say I feel fully recovered. I may take the rest of the day off as I intended to. But I do see daylight and can probably source the rest of the vasanas myself.
But what a burden it is to be a “model” when you’re out of sorts. I just want to turn around and snarl.
And what a time it is! Summer in the city. The heat’s on all of us to get through these hidden, subterranean leftovers from more vulnerable times.
No paparazzi please. I’m having a bad-hair day. Stop the world. I wanna get off. More work to do. Cleaning away the debris, putting my life back together again, picking up and carrying on.
Footnotes
(1) A vasana is an habitual reaction pattern triggered in the present but anchored to traumatic events in the past. It is “sourced” or completed by being with and observing the upset and finding the original incident it’s tied to and completing one’s experience of that.
(2) To “source” an upset means to get to the bottom of it, to experience the original incident connected to it so deeply that the upset disappears.