In the field beyond

I awoke this morning after a day of intense emotions experienced towards a disappointment with an essential person in my life with a feeling of deep, deep relaxation and peace.

This is a new feeling for me as often I awake and a startle response follows as I check out inwardly how my legs are positioned and struggle against a huge force, a critical re-enactment of my past trauma.  But today there was no struggle, just such a deep and oh so profound feeling of tiredness.  It was the kind of feeling of exhaustion that comes after you have touched base with grief so deeply, after your need has been thwarted absolutely, then anger has come and you have fully faced your powerlessness over another person’s response and reaction to you.  On some level you find yourself in a new field, a place very different to where you were before.

The background was that yesterday I had struggled to make a therapy appointment and could not get there.  I had felt a particular need for it as tomorrow I have to undergo a further series of tests to see if a patch in my breast is cancerous.  My sister underwent this exact same scenario two months ago and was diagnosed with breast cancer, she had her breast removed at the beginning of December.

When I found out on Monday I ran the full gamut of emotions, grief, fear, apprehension, worry of how I will cope if I have to undergo an operation with no support.  Over the past two days I have pulled myself back from projecting a scenario that may or may not unfold.  I was just longing to be able to connect with my therapist to sort this all through but the natural flow of my day prevented this.

In the midst of a huge panic attack I tried to ring my therapist on both the landline and mobile (cell) phone, to get no response.  I then texted to let her know what was going on and asked if we could talk.  The response was a text saying “that must be difficult, I’ll be pleased to hear how you get on in our session next Tuesday.”  After I received the text I felt punched, I just lay on the floor and cried and cried from the pit of my tummy.  I felt the most terrible sense of powerlessness, hopelessness and aloneness, after some time of sinking deeply into these feelings, rage came up.

Lately I have been reading about flashbacks.  While all of this was going on I was aware that I was probably in a flashback, that this lack of being met and responded to in the way I wanted (with a return phone call) was triggered all those other times of trauma when I was alone waiting after a terrible event, waiting for someone who promised to support me at a critical time of need, not showing, all those experiences of abandonment when I was left after being slammed with a judgement.

As it was going on I just let myself have all the feelings I was having.  I spoke to my inner child and even to my young adolescent and adult self, explaining to her how I understood where her grief and anger was coming from.  I concentrated on my breath.  I looked around my living room to find something beautiful.  I was still flooded though.

I am aware that all of my Saturn Mar Moon conjunction issues are being triggered at present as the Sun passes over this placement in my chart and of the upcoming Venus Pluto conjunction with speaks of deep longing that is thwarted or frustrated which pushes us inside to examine the buried experiences and feelings of unrequited longing.  And also that Mars at present is only a degree away from my Natal Neptune in the third house, which is a time of will and action meeting a huge field of emptiness.

These later realisations came today as I was considering everything in a surrendered state.  I was prompted to pick up a book I have had for some time by John Welwood called : Toward a Psychology of Awakening : Buddhism, Psychotherapy and the Path of Personal and Spiritual Transformation and I began to read the chapter on Ego, Strength and Egolessness.

In it he contrasts Western psychological and Eastern spiritual ideas about ego.   He speaks of ego as the part of the self in us which acts as a closed fist trying to cling onto experiences and ways of being, and the state of egolessness as the open hand which can receive all things.  I thought of how when I had decided I could not push myself to make the appointment with my therapist my body had relaxed.  I then thought of how when I sent the text explaining and received her response how my body clenched again and contracted.  I thought of the anger I felt after the grief and how that tightened me further (though I will say it was good to let it out and recognise it).

Just prior to sitting down to write this blog I read this in Welwood’s book.

Ego, in the Buddhist sense then, is the ongoing activity of holding oneself separate, making oneself into something solid and definite, and identifying with this split off fragment of the experiential field.  Continually maintaining this identity project perpetuates a division between self and other that prevents us from recognising ourselves seamlessly woven into the larger field of reality.  And the more we hold ourselves apart from the world, from our experience, and from the naked power of life itself, regarding these as other, the more we fall prey to inner struggle, dissatisfaction, anxiety and alienation.

In other parts of this chapter Welword refers to egolessness as a kind of open field that lies beyond the separate self of ego and I.  He does not negate the necessity of ego in the development of the self but he sees its development as only one stage.  Where ego based psychology fails is in recognising that there is a field beyond this state of ego where we can feel a connection to larger energies.  In some ego psychology opening to this field beyond is seen as a kind of madness.   But it seems to me what we find in this field beyond has a very rich value.

Yesterday while I was having the experience mentioned above and was feeling anger and disappointment with the therapist I was also able to step back for a moment.  I saw I had been denied something that I really needed and there is a lesson for me in that.  At the same time as I recognised her real limitations, a time a few months ago when she had accused me of a regression when in fact I was deep in the thorny wood of working through and integrating powerful emotions, I also reminded myself that she sees her role as merely professional.  She is not a friend who can be there for me and that is probably just what therapy is, you show up at allocated times, what happens outside and during the in-between you have to report back on, which is hard, in the midst of it you have to cope alone.

I realised all of this at the same time as seeing what has not been working from me, the struggle and the grasping was only one part, for deep inside I felt a need for letting go.  How many times have I held onto something that was not working, changing myself, battling not accepting? And how many times has this not helped me but driven me to a reaction that was damaging?

My recognition this morning was “many”.   Within this recognition was a deep sense of letting go.

At some point in our development, it is time to let go of the fabricated control structure once served us so well.

In the end resisting and trying to change and control what hurts is useless.  Far better to face our true feelings and accept them.  And then let go of the struggle.

Although this all seems very unformed, I am sharing my experience in blog form today.  To have or to have not, to be fulfilled or to be frustrated, which is better? Does it matter?  Or can good developments come out of not getting what we most need?  These are some questions I have.  It seems that I am so used to being frustrated (Saturn Mars Moon) in my emotional need that then I just give up.  This time I don’t want to and on some level I guess I am needing guidance, while trusting that if I stay with this quandary an answer will come.