I just returned home after a morning in the park with Jasper and a visit to our local shopping centre where I had a coffee in my favourite café. I read a part of the novel I am currently immersed in Paris Trance by Geoff Dyer and had tears streaming down my face, as the main character turns away from the love of his life and chooses to spend his life alone. His decision is described as witnessed by his best friend so eloquently. I am tempted to include it here but I won’t, however it resonated with me on a deep level. I then went to the library, had lunch and did some food shopping and came home.
Lately I have been just observing the thoughts and judgements that run through my mind endlessly coming and going. Often the thoughts run a commentary that is endlessly criticising me, saying how I need to change or how others are doing so much better than I am. One of these moments came upon me in the park today. On Saturdays lots of couples come with their dogs, unlike during the week, when younger couples are working and there tend to me more single dog owners or those who bring the dog for the family. I started to run a judgement about how all my of intimate partnerships have failed, due to my struggle with intimacy, then I go and read about a character in the book who goes through something similar.
When I arrived home, I had one of those epiphanies that can come upon you at times, the thought that came to me was this. In life we experience an endless stream of comings and goings. Perhaps not all people have had as many goodbyes as I have with the many endings in my own life, maybe some have more, who knows? However it seems to me that this stream of attraction and repulsion, beginnings and endings, comings together and tearing apart or leaving is just part of the flow life. When I can surrender to that flow and that dance I feel a profound sense of peace and atonement.
My thoughts then led onto how the breath itself when it is functioning optimally naturally flows in and out, but when there is Post Traumatic Stress or other stress or trauma conditions present we often tend to hold our breath. We either contract or hold down the muscles in our body, or somewhere deep within we hold ourselves back out of fear of fully engaging. We get paralysed from forward movement which gets fraught with all kinds of insecurities, doubts and fears. We get blocked, our energy dammed up and constricted. Life becomes a series of defensive reactions rather than open responses. Whether we realise it or not we are trapped in resistance and constriction.
The first step out of this place of constriction comes with noticing the pain we cause ourselves when we stop breathing, constrict, pull back, run a negative ongoing inner commentary based on fear and resistance. When we can open up and just notice and allow ourselves to feel what it might mean and how our body reacts when we resist or engage in over-thinking we start to loosen the holding of that pattern somehow. With this noticing over time we get the chance to make a new choice or response, one less based in fear, one which opens us to the possibility that even though things must go, in time if we let go, then new things will come to fill the empty space that is left. Alternatively we may find that in embracing and the accepting the empty space with our full loving attention and presence we allow the emptiness, or sadness, or resistance or fear a voice to speak to us. In such a way our emptiness becomes full.
I am intrigued by what happens in my own life and consciousness lately when I embrace the feelings of emptiness, when I notice when I am running the dialogue of criticism and self judgement, when I open to the fact that deep within the so called empty self something deep lives, a state of consciousness and awareness that has messages for me and will guide me to take a certain action or go in a particular direction. When guided to that place often I find something or someone that has a message for me, or I embrace the next step of learning or am led onto the next thing I should be exploring or expressing.
Its seems in my life that a state of aloneness is necessary for me to be able to tune in at this deeper level to myself. When I am engaged in chit chat at times the voice of the deeper self is drowned out. This does not mean I never want to participate in chit chat, on the contrary, there are times I need to be ‘out’, but what I am realising is how essential quiet alone time and space is for me, on my particular journey.
Which makes me ponder could it be my destiny to be alone or to live a solitary life? I know that I cannot live a life of disconnection, that is for sure and I feel I do have a lot to give and that requires me to reach beyond alone time to engage with others for part of the time, but I also know that alone time is as essential to my soul as air is to my body and breath. Without enough of it my own life gets clogged up and constricted.
Life will at times come towards me and then it will leave, people will come and go in my life, as I will in theirs but always I will remain at the centre. I am becoming aware that the return to aloneness is only true on a seemingly physical level, at a deeper level than the purely physical I am always deeply connected with life and with others. I am never truly as alone lately as I was when I used to feel that terrible aching void of emptiness which really contained all the old feelings from my past I had not entered or processed.
Doing the deep work of understanding where the particular loneliness imprints came from in my own life and journey has returned me to a place not of loneliness but of connection and I feel such gratitude for this. Grateful to feel the peace and contentment in the silence of a cold, rainy spring afternoon, on a day when I have been able to go out and experience the sweet pleasures of life and then returning home again to encounter more pleasures of alone time.
And reading this back prior to posting I am just wondering, has my wounded inner child finally found object constancy. My therapist returns on Tuesday after a month’s break that at some level I fear I was scared she would not survive, but she did. As the final days of the he break pass I feel in a very strong place within, a strong place that rests on vulnerability rather than defence.
Emerging From The Dark Night 