I’m going through intense emotional spaces these days. I think my space matches what I see depicted in the media. The public is getting excited and mobilized and I’m getting excited and mobilized along with it.
The most difficult of the spaces that’s coming up for me has to be existential loneliness – loneliness independent of the circumstances. It grows each day. But self-doubt also arises. Self-recrimination. All of this from nowhere.
The emotions coming up are new to me. Let me give the example of fear.
Watching the torching of American cities, two fears are arising in me: (1) a fear of annihilation and (2) a fear of impoverishment.
Neither of them is true. I know darn well that none of us can ever be annihilated. And Michael is not going to leave me impoverished. These fears arise independent of any present truth. I imagine they’re ancient vasanas (or core issues).
Needless to say, I think we’re getting down to the deeper layers of our vasanas now, if my experience is any indicator.
Getting back to the loneliness, I find it the hardest to bear. I ache when I feel that way. I don’t like the feeling.
I’m seeing people. It isn’t related to seeing or not seeing people. It’s existential. It’s more basic than the merely social.
I use the upset clearing process on it.
Having named the feeling (loneliness), I ask my mind to send me up an image or word that identifies the origin of the vasana attached to the feeling.
The first thing that comes up is I see myself looking out of the window from my brother’s apartment in 1968. I had just received the news that my Mother had died. In a housefire. Smoking in bed.
I was looking out the window and could not believe that the buses were still running, people were still walking, and my Mother had just died.
Yes, a lot of the existential loneliness comes from that moment. I’m having a good cry.
I look to see if there is any residual holding in the musculature and I find none.
I don’t detect mental or emotional residue so that must be the origin of my existential loneliness – the death of my Mother. The truth will set you free.
OK, that’s the second emotional storm today. And the night is still young.
It must also be the energies.
The energies are slowly rising and I think we’re watching our really-deep unresolved issues rise to the surface, to be acknowledged and let go of.
We can’t go “through the eye of the needle” (1) unless we divest ourselves of them.
I feel very uncomfortable. Some of the emotions that are surfacing are feelings that I usually shun or run away from. I haven’t even named them all yet. I return to experiencing them through to completion, the last step in the upset clearing process.
Footnotes
(1) I.e., ascend. But “the eye of the needle” makes it sound onerous and rigorous and I don’t think it is. Nevertheless the image is helpful to picture trying to drag our gunnysack of resentments through a small opening.
We can’t take our old baggage with us on this next part of the trip.