Tag: anxiety

Lost and Found

A few weeks ago I had a nightmare. In it, I was that person I’ve been running away from my whole life. You know the one. The person you don’t want to be, the one you dread lives inside you, the one you don’t want anyone else to see. The one, in our worst moments, we’re terrified we might end up becoming. The “failure” who looks back and sees a pile of regrets. That is the person, the nightmare, that I was living in this dream.

I was in some drab, dark house with vague people around me and a long hallway. The feeling was that I was a “loser”. (To me there’s really no such thing, but nightmares take no prisoners.) I had zero self esteem, hated my job, myself and my life. (If ever there was a time to be confronted with our worst fears, a Pandemic fits the bill).

Someone asked me to foster a litter of newborn kittens, just for a few weeks, then they would come back for them. All I had to do was take care of them until then. I said yes and put them in a room at the end of the hall.

In the next moment, it was three weeks later and suddenly I realized “oh my God, the kittens!”. I had completely forgotten about them the entire time, as soon as I’d shut the door. In that moment was the most heartwrenching pain and realization, they had all starved to death, and now I had to go see what I’d done. I ran down the hallway crying and screaming “Nooooo! I’m so sorry!” I opened the door, horrified at what I would find. There were large pillows and sheets and blankets everywhere. I didn’t see any of them and started frantically throwing the pillows off and looking under the blankets.

And one by one, they each crawled out from under, toward me, alive! Tiny little malnourished meowing things, but oh Holy Glorious Day they were alive! I swooped each of them up, smothering them with kisses, “oh god my dear little one I am so sorry, thank you for living for me”. Then I woke up, crying tears of joy and relief. Relief that they survived, that I didn’t cause their deaths, and of course that it was all just a terrible nightmare. I wasn’t that person after all, who was so ashamed and guilty. Thank you thank you thank you. I had another chance.

We’ve been battling our worst case scenarious throughout this Age of Quarantine, in a limbo between worlds. The time has come and we can feel it, something huge is being birthed. It is now upon us. Yet Quarantine is our holding pattern, between the old self and the new.

In real life, there has been a stray kitty showing up on occasion around my block. I hadn’t seen it, but about six months ago my housemate had been woken up every night for a week with scratching at her window. She caught a glimpse of what she thought could be a kitten, as it was small, and it would run away each time she’d open the window. We had to get the landlord to install little animal resistant rubber spikes to the roof tiles near her window. After that, the kitty did not return. When I mentioned it to my neighbor, she said it sounded like the same cat that she occasionally sees on her back porch. It would run whenever she got near it.

I secretly hoped I might come across it myself sometime and try to rescue it too. Well, a few weeks after that nightmare, I was in my living room about to do my exercises. I’d resolved to have this daily practice during the lockdown, my dancer training, my yoga, my rituals, and had brought my computer to the dining room table for the videos I use for inspiration. When I opened the computer, I was facing the front window to the lawn and trees out front. And when I looked out, I saw a cat in a tree! I instantly went out to it, doubting it would come down, could this be that same cat I’d hoped to see?

I walked towards the tree, I called up to it, “hello there sweetie” and it meowed back at me. Then, lo and behold it came running down the tree and right over to my feet. A scrawny, and quite exotic looking little thing. It reminded me of a lynx, it was gray and black, with white chest and paws just like my own cat, and a white streak on it’s forehead. I picked it up and it did not struggle but instead just let me hold it. I thought, “ok, you’re coming in with me”. I had a feeling it was a she.

She jumped up on the kitchen counter and looked around, but when my housemate’s cat suddenly screeched and lunged at her, she ran into the pantry closet and hid in the corner behind some grocery bags. She had turned her back to me, facing the wall, and hissed and growled at me when I got close. “I’m sorry, I know you trusted me, and now you think I’ve betrayed you”. I put my housemate’s cat upstairs in his room, put water and food down next to kitty and closed the door to let her relax. I texted my housemate a picture, “oh yes, that’s the cat!” she said. I then put ads on Nextdoor and Craigslist and asked a bunch of neighbors if they were missing a cat. No, I waited overnight, nothing.

I’d gone back several times to check on her and she later stopped growling and let me pet her. I felt bonded to her already and was starting to feel a sadness that I couldn’t keep her. If my housemate’s cat wasn’t here, my own cat is a gentle soul, I likely would have. The next day I took her to the Humane Society, who’d assured me they’d check for a chip, and if nobody claimed her she’d be put up for adoption. They said they wouldn’t euthanize.

I put her in my cat crate and we got in the car. As we drove, I talked to her and sang to her “it’s all going to be okay”. When I parked, before going in, sitting in the car, I let her out of the crate and took her in my arms. She held on and nuzzled into my neck and shoulder, while straightening up and looking out with bright eyes at the big wide world; comforted yet dying to explore it.

I took her in and put her on the counter. They scanned for a chip, there was none. I filled out the intake form and asked if they could let me know what sex it was. They’d take her inside and the vet would check. “And do you think she’s a kitten?” I asked. “No, she’s fully grown, she’s just small”. I then said goodbye to her, and let her go, into a protected world of tameness. Now she was safe, but I’d taken something sacred away from her. They came back to say, “she’s a girl”.

The next day, I saw they’d posted a picture of her on the website, under ‘lost and found’. There she was, being taken good care of by loving humans. I’ve looked at her photo a lot since then, wanting to absorb her fierce, adventurous, mysterious energy into me.

My lucky number, the number I constantly see in moments of significance, and my birthday number, is 22. When I got back to the car that day and looked at the receipt of her intake form, on the top right corner there it was. She was number 22.

I rescued her from the wild. But did I? Is that what she wanted? I’ll never know, and part of me wants to take her back and set her free. She rescued me, from a fear I no longer need. Thank you sweet, beautiful creature, for showing up just in time. For leading me into the new wild, the new frontier, with grace, innocence and strength. Your spirit lives in me now. I will need it. And I promise, I will use it.

The Bottom Half

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“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards of us all.”
-Abraham Lincoln

Donate, protest, keep sharing, exposing and doing what you can. Do the right thing, don’t look away.

That is the top half of freedom. The bottom half hides in a dark well, looking up. Another kind of protest, a quiet conviction FOR something, a belief, a knowing that burns truth and passion into your soul. The thing, or things, the parts of yourself that fascinate and excite you, and scare the shit out of you. The heartfires you want to pursue, the love you want to surrender to, the power you want to inhabit. But you’re afraid to admit it and say it out loud, especially to yourself. Because once you do, you will have to do something about it. It commands your attention. And you know that if you ignore it, you won’t be able to live with yourself.

Eckart Tolle said that his life changing moment came when he heard the words “I can’t live with myself any longer”. The awakened question appeared, “who is the ‘I’ that I can’t live with?”

Who is the ‘I’ that’s talking to the little suffering self that I think is me?

To feel that ‘I’, that voice, the entity that’s watching, is to know it surrounds you and IS you at the same time. That voice, that feeling, knows who you are and what you’re here to be. It speaks louder and feels stronger than who you’re not, while the skittering monkeymind self runs around in a junkyard, trying to drown it out. It bangs on cans and spins circles in the garbage with distractions and arguments. But the “I” inside and all around is incessantly still and patient. It only wants your emergence out of illusion. And it won’t shut up, ever.

The trials of life, and resistance to them, of giving up and starting over, and over again, through it all I begin to hear more of what this other “I” tells me. Especially when what it’s saying pisses me off; because dammit I can’t escape it. The truth has a funny way of backing us into a corner. It nags you in the back seat, and floats around in your depths. Pull it up and to the front, let it breathe fresh air. Fight, thrash and cry with it. Your tears unleash it and will calm you down. The feelings felt, the words finally spoken, this other “I” moves in and takes charge.

Drive where it tells you, take the lid off the well. There’s nowhere to go but beyond what you were. Hidden in dark water, asleep in the dirt; you’ll wake up to the sky, in the garden.

Self-sabotage, really?

So I haven’t written all day. At the start of the day I’d thought “ooh I’ll have the whole afternoon to write”. But because I didn’t go to sleep until almost 1am last night, that meant, since sleep is also top priority, especially after the accident, I had to sleep until almost 9am. Then laundry, clean a bit, food prep, made some obligatory calls, time got away from me again. Having to go to class at 4pm was also #1 priority, my body needs it’s favorite exercise to get back to itself. So I didn’t even get my one hour meditation in, another at top of the list, just half an hour. I’m noticing while writing this, that’s a lot of  #1 priorities!

But here I am, it’s almost 7pm, went to class, then shopping for mom, now sitting, about to meditate for another half hour. (In case you’re wondering “what the hell, an hour of meditation a day?!” That is part of a 90 Day Commitment I made to myself since September 10th, 2017, during a life changing weekend in LA. I will be continuing to talk about it here. More later!)

I noticed anxiety about the dread of this. Ah shit I haven’t written today, gotta do my three pages. Three pages typed though? Ugh. Three pages in my journal is easier, can’t I do that? The pages are smaller and my writing takes up more space, ok? No, get in the habit of typing, silly. When I noticed that I was having anxiety, I pinpointed what was underneath it – the fear of how I would judge myself and feel about myself if I yet again didn’t do it, and instead made dinner and just wanted to “relax” by getting sucked into Youtube or netflix or facebook.

So of course I define doing that instead of writing as my self-sabotage again. But even that, that I label it as self-sabotage, right now I’m thinking….interesting. Because wait a minute, I was in a traumatizing car accident day before yesterday, isn’t it ok if I’m all of a sudden exhausted from the emotional and spiritual upheaval of that? Or is that yet again my excusing myself, my self-sabotage? But then, if it is an excuse and self sabotage, then, what? What that means, what that does, is it further cements my criticism and judgement of myself. What I’m really thinking in those moments of “oh you can’t not do your daily three pages because of your 90 day commitment, every one else is sticking to theirs, so I must be lame and lazy and not as worthy of being happy or successful. If I’m just going with how I feel then I will always be stuck and living a life I don’t want to live and I will never be the person I want to be! So goddammit I’m going to force myself to do this thing, despite the fact that my body is telling me “you don’t have to, you shouldn’t, I don’t want you to force yourself to do anything. I want you to do what feels right to do”. Well, resting and relaxing feels right, but if I do that and don’t do the all important writing then I won’t be able to relax because I’ll be berating myself while I’m “relaxing”, for not doing it!

But wait again. What if I just didn’t do the writing, that thing I’m supposed to do, that in my mind is what’s going to change my life? What if, here’s the key, I didn’t berate myself for not doing it, at all. Not in one tiny way. Meaning, I didn’t even have the thought of “it’s ok, you will do it tomorrow, you deserve to rest and not worry about it”. Even saying that to myself implies that when I do do it, then I will be back to being worthy and on my way to my great life. But this day, when I’m not doing it, is just me in limbo and I won’t be making any progress towards my “goals”.

No, wait a minute again! Who says that by not doing the thing I think I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not making progress, and that my dream life isn’t still on it’s way to me, regardless?! Why do I have to “work” so hard to make sure I do the things that will make it happen? Just thinking that implies the other key that lies under all of this – that thought is me not loving myself, which of course is what brings in a loss of faith and trust. I have defined my not writing three pages a day, every day, as meaning that my dream life can’t happen unless I do all the right things, first by sticking to what I said I was going to do. But if I keep believing that, I’m the jailer of my own prison. And even more to the point, why do I still have to keep believing that my “dream life” is out there somewhere, in the distance, and isn’t right here, right damn now?!

So instead, I’m turning this on it’s head. I refuse to believe anymore that I have to stick with and force myself to do things that in the moment I’m not wanting to do. What if, unlike in the past, the not wanting to do it is actually coming from even more of an inner knowing, and is actually NOT coming from resistance to being the person I want to be, because of feeling unworthy. What if, sometimes, not wanting to do something or keep a commitment is actually not about me sabotaging myself but is actually my higher wisdom saying “try something new, do what you DO want to do and….drum roll, don’t beat yourself up about it”.

This thought has only occurred to me because I’ve been making subtle strides in loving myself in the middle of those thoughts of self beratement, which is the self-sabotage itself. The increased meditation has brought on new experiences outwardly, that weekend in LA, the panic that I lost my journal (I didn’t), the car crash, which are mirroring a deep shifting. Inwardly, the frozen tectonic plates of my former beliefs are starting to move, they are restless, they are adjusting to fit a new landscape of new feelings, that come from new awareness. And this awareness is showing me, maybe that belief that if I don’t do this or that then I can’t have my idealized fabulous life and can’t be my idealized self, has had it’s day. That belief is now drowning in the choppy waters created by these moving icebergs. New beliefs that have been slowly rooting in me, sleeping, waiting to hear my call, are now ready to break off and have their own experiments in the other lakes and seas of my soul.

One of them is this; I am all wise and all knowing and however I feel is exactly right at all times, there is no longer such a thing as self-sabotage. That belief has lost it’s breath and is now headed to the bottom of the ocean of my former identity. This new piece of ice broke free before it’s mother sank, to create another adjustment within me, a looking around, swimming it’s way through the rising tides of new thoughts. And the first one it’s being swept along by is saying that the time has come, this ocean is expanding. By letting myself be whoever I am right now, and loving who that is, no memory of what self-sabotage even means, is the dawning of a new continent within the planet of my ever-exploring self.