I awoke at 4 am and made sure to keep focusing on the breathing in and breathing out which is something that for years I could not do. I would just like there tensed like a steel wire due to the chronic PTSD condition from my two accidents often for hours and hours. Lately through my work in therapy and by studying my reactions to others I am realising how much grief and fear lies at the heart of what I have gone through and how I have reacted in my life. It is sad but somewhat liberating to recognise this now.
I got some insight into panic attacks watching a show in which a person was held and comforted in the middle of one such attack, soon enough he broke down in tears. It is something that happened when a neighbour turned up at my door a few weeks ago, I could not breathe but in time with her encouragement my painful past was pouring out and so were the tears, I literally let myself collapse into her and be held. I am crying now writing this. I am crying to think how long I held in those tears especially from all that happened to me following my accident, Judith’s aneurysm and Dad’s death from cancer and I am thinking of the scene in This Is Us where the character Kate says to her brother that if he doesn’t allow himself to grieve their father’s death it will be like holding his breath for the rest of his life.
I have also been contemplating my 16 month journey with Scott, and seeing the shadows of how I reacted in other major relationships of which I have had 6 prior to connecting with him last year, covering a 40 year period of my life. I was thinking of how the planet of wounding and healing Chiron too has been triggered by the new moon in Leo yesterday and I have felt a lot of that deep pain over the past week in my female relationships too. My Chiron rests in the 7th house of relationships and most of my pain has come through close interpersonal attachments as it has for so many of us. Luckily being able to work through my issues of fear, doubt, suspicion and mistrust in this relationship has highlighted my issues and I feel in this way Scott is a twin flame of mine for he has triggered so many of my fears over that period.
I am so grateful that each and every time I have lashed out at Scott he has always with no exception been non retaliatory and loving and that is because he asked for my help and put me in a very difficult position by doing so. Some people I know think I am mad for helping but I know this is my soul task for now. I just trust now that our connection is deeply soulful and spiritual because of the way I react as soon as he is even thinking of messaging me. My body just ‘knows’
I missed him by a short margin this morning. The final money got through this week which is amazing with Mercury retrograde two transactions got mixed up and one only resolved on the day Mercury turned direct again in square to Scott’s Sun Mars Venus Uranus conjunction in Libra. We only found a new way to get it through on the day Mercury turned direct too.
Anyway back to the love and fear issue. I remember a quote of C S Lewis who wrote after his wife died, “I never knew grief was so much like fear” it may also feel like a part of us is dying when someone we love leaves or dies or abandons us. In two days it is the 15th anniversary of my ex husband leaving me. I think of the dark void I fell into on the day he left. I drove him to the airport and at the airport he gave me a little metal tin with 200 dollars in it for a horse ride on the beach. If only he knew, I needed him to stay and together we could face the grief of losing both our fathers but Jonathan would rather shut down his emotions. I was ‘killing his spirit’ and he ‘wanted back the happy girl he married’ my trauma was emerging after 10 years of sobriety then.
Mine has been a grief journey and also one where I could not find the place to express it. So I ran and I did smash up again on the back of that grief, the grief was also over the lost years following my first accident that took me out of school in our final year and saw me never graduate with my class mates. I am looking forward to our 40th reunion at the end of this year so I can catch up with them all, but I missed that final ending and then I was forced into a career I never chose by my father. That did a lot of damage but I was not conscious throughout it all because I was drinking and taking drugs and undergoing my silent rebellion caught up in my addiction from 1985 until the year I got sober 1993. I call those the dark years of my unconscious descent. The years from 2004 to now are the years of my conscious descent and lately I feel myself emerging back into the light
In the inferno Dante wrote “in the middle of my life I found myself in a deep dark wood” that is the personal and collective Underworld so many of us visit as we seek to bury the corpse of our previous life, as Jungian analyst Murry Stein expresses it. There is a deep mourning that accompanies this passage and in a culture that would rather numb and medicate us through it many die before they get onto the deeper individuation pathway.
I also believe that though some say such a journey may be self involved and selfish in the end it moves us back into community a deeper relationship with our soul and with all other souls (both living and ‘dead’), for as we have the courage to explore the deepest wounds and blessings of our humanity we also recognise our kinship with everyone else. I think its only those who deny their pain and vulnerability or grief who stay apart in their consciousness.
In times of darkness it is our soul which must allow us to shed light on our wounds. The healing love we need needs to come from supportive midwives or mid husbands but it also in time needs to issue from our inner, higher or witness self which is an inner force which guides and oversees the entire process. But many of us with a lot of inner psychological damage will need help with the other voices and selves that may try to barr our way back to relationship and love and keep working to barricade us inside our fear.
I believe God does willingly accompany us on such a journey if we reach out in love and ask for freedom from or courage to face our fears. most especially for those of us who have been wounded OUR FEAR OF BEING FULLY SEEN AND LOVED AND THEN LEFT AGAIN (which we always will be at some point, except by ourselves). Only those who are able to allow us to embrace the full totality of ourselves can really accompany us on this pathway. There will be those who reject and shame and judge us along the way, but over time we will often understand that such reactions often issue from a lack of deeper empathy or insight.
It takes courage and humility and undefended wholeheartedness to embrace others in both their full brokenness and their mystery. But in the end it is the highest gift of love, we can give both to ourselves and to our fellow humans. And to know love we have to become intimate with the ways of fear…. for fear will try to keep us safe (and rightly so at times) but it may also block us off from greater gifts just waiting for us to receive them once we can become open and vulnerable enough to embrace love and move through the blockages of fear.
Emerging From The Dark Night 