At one point, I lay down on the floor, because the bed was too far away. I pulled a towel out of a nearby bag to use as a pillow, and stared at the dust bunnies that had gathered under the radiator. When the floor got too hard, I crawled to the bed and pulled myself onto it, and collapsed.
I’ve been on my knees, been in so much pain that the only lifeline I had was the repeated question, “What is the message of this suffering? What is asking to be healed?” What I notice about illness is that the world becomes very small; I wonder if I will survive, or if the world will just go on without me. This felt different, as if the funnel-tip of a giant tornado was boring into my chest, and the tornado contained the entire collapse of everything I’ve been taught to believe constitutes a future for myself, for my family, for my culture. Like a vortex of nihilism, this vacuum sucked my center into a pulsing dwarf star of near-infinite density; a strangled core in which anguished cries are choked into silence.
So often, what has come through for me has been: patience. But in this moment, the message was different: action. When there is no clarity, I try to remain alert to the signal for the opportunity to respond. When I am pushing and pushing against an amorphous blob of resistance that feels like a moldy mattress stuck in a stairwell, it is time to stop. But there are moments when the path opens up, where the way is sharp and defined, and the resistance is internal. In those times, there is a pull forward, but the barriers are erected of fear and refusal to consider possibilities. When that happens, the imperative is to respond in the affirmative, and the fear shifts from not knowing the way into not knowing the consequences.
That doesn’t mean I know exactly what to do; it means I need to lay out every option I can imagine and then keep digging until I find all the ones I’m pretending I can’t see.
I read an article the other day about a study that looked at three groups of people with tendencies towards anxiety and depression. One group was the control and kept their current patterns. The study groups were giving different assignments; one group was instructed to apply positive thinking to general outcomes, and one group was instructed to apply that mindset to specific tasks. Of the study groups, the latter saw improvement in their mental state, but the former got worse. Telling a baloney story about how great life is, if you don’t believe it and don’t have any hope of moving in that direction, just separates you from reality and pushes you further and further from improving your situation. But when there is one step, one little step, that you can take, and say, “I trust that my life can improve if I keep taking action,” then you can move into the reality that your mind is creating.
When the conscious and subconscious are dissonant, they are at war. Knowing what to do to bring them into coherence is what creates the abundant and fulfilling life you are made for.
How? There’s no sage on the mountaintop, no drop-out retreat, that will deliver that answer. When I am looking for it, I start by disrupting the pattern, even if it’s something small. I find the things that feel like impossibilities or imperatives, and pick one that’s not going to be objectively catastrophic to add or drop or modify, and commit.
It should be a challenge but not a nightmare – you need to be able to stay with it, and keep yourself accountable to it (or get me to do that part!)
The other day I encountered these wise words, “where there is no solution, there is no problem.” I don’t know if that is a quote or a truism, but it struck deep and I mused on it for a long time. When Byron Katie exhorts us to “love what is,” she is not saying that we must find the world to be always cuddly. What is, is. If I can embrace it fully as the reality of experience, then I can begin to parse out what, truly, is within the domain of my control.
We suffer from the illusion of influence. When I was on my knees, writhing in the torment of cyclonic fears, I was overwhelmed by a feeling I’ve experienced many times in the past few years. Forces either indifferent to, or in favor of, my destruction (or defeat), possess terrifying strength, and I am powerless to fight them. Again, and again, I hear that cry around me, “I feel powerless to stop this evil, this malevolence, this ignorance.”
Yes, they do, and yes, I am. These can’t be problems, because they don’t have solutions that are within my control. How much does it serve me to perseverate upon them? The illusion of influence is the grappling hook that tears at my flesh and drags me back into the arena to be torn apart by lions, while the hideous manipulators laugh at the spectacle from the comfort of their luxury boxes, knowing that, even if I slay the lion, nothing of importance changes.
For them. But for me, I am wasted in the fight. I drain away my potency on quixotic jousting rather than contending with the realm of my real influence. Can I stop the juggernaut? No. But what I can do is identify what it might take to survive, and what it might take to triumph, and look with clear eyes at where I am, and make a plan. Make a thousand plans. Make a million plans. Conjure up every fantasy and every obstacle, identify every edge and every fear, look inwards, look outwards, and act.
I’ve been on my knees. I know what it means to be so weak it took me an hour to brush my teeth, so tired that I needed a nurse to help me change my shirt, so defeated that I wondered if it would be easier to just fade away. But when I feel in my core that there is a way forward, and I must find it, I’ve always recognized that there is at least one problem, somewhere in my immediate orbit, that has a solution I can enact.
Are you on your knees? I promise you, there is a next step, and when it is time, it is TIME.
Here I share my own healing journey, and I’d love to offer everything that I’ve learned, and used, in service of your process. If you’d like to learn more about my Navigating Your Healing Journey program of homeopathy-driven healing, growth and self-discovery, and how you can follow these steps to feel better and gain greater access to your intuition and process, please click HERE for your FREE Embark on Healing call. Current and recent clients receive 10% off this transformational work. I am offering you the Irresistible Invitation to Surrender. Will you accept it?
I have battled a lot of that darkness lately, or more, exposed it. Because it can turn your life to shit if you aren’t hearing it and it’s playing in the rafters. But once you put attention on it and really hear it, you can discover whatever lesson or medicine it has for you. The tendency is so much to override it with bullshit and fake positivity. The fact is, that as long as it’s part of your experience of being, and you ignore it, you are just denying a part of yourself. That’s not to say it is who you are but it comes from some part of you that could change it’s tune once you actually give it your attention. Otherwise, or in the meantime, you are just covering it up with a big blanket while it still stinks up your life.
For me, it comes down to applying the metrics outlined-is it actually something I have any influence over? If the answer feels like yes, then I can respond to it. If the answer feels like no, then I have to make the best peace I can with it and focus my attention on where my energy will yield results.