I keep thinking of the God Pan right now.. And of its association to the words and concepts of panic, pandemic and pandemonium. I guess at heart pan is about something bridging a wide spectrum, becoming almost global. So it is with anxiety and the sense of deep unsettling it is we feel when the ground shifts radically underneath our feet and we feel ourselves falling through space. At these moments we can literally flail around like a drowning person and we, for that time, feel completely overwhelmed as well as limited in our capacity to cope. But at heart the issue of what is happening may not and is often not at all life threatening, although it can so often feel that way at the time.
Panic for me is about a loss of control, it is about knowing bad things could happen to me at any time and, most especially, that, as a child, no one would be there or notice or be able to soothe or stop the suffering and often my protest was met with mocking or people laughing at me which made it feel even worse.. Then, as a child, there is the feeling that you are hurting inside and knowing there is an adult there who should be able to help, but is not able to help or even see you at all. A child experiences every feeling as a bodily sensation and they need the adults to name it and to soothe it, but if those adults never got attended to, noticed or soothed.. what then? It all goes inward and becomes super intense, super scary and super confusing. Often the adults around those of us neglected or unseen may not make any attempt at all to understand how it is for the child, they may shut you down, punish you, send you to your room or tell you you are making too much of something and then as a child it feels like death but still we blame ourselves, even well into later life, run as fast as we can to try to stop the rising up of unbearable feelings that we do not understand, and in the absence of holding and soothing, eat over them or try to shut them down with some other kind of busiyness or numb.
There is a saying in the rooms of AA that an alcoholic will ‘cry over a broken shoelace’. I think that saying misses the point, the broken shoelace is a symptom of something deeper, perhaps of absences or losses or wounds we cannot always name, that live there below the surface and rise up feeling like they are flooding the landscape and that most probably of feelings passed down we do not have names for, nor understand, only become a kind of confusion or anxiety. And then lacking a name and holding we do tend to feel so lost.
I have heard in Jungian circles that psychological individuation work is a lot like working to reclaim land from the sea, the conscious from the deep unconscious. In the liquid of the sea or ocean much dissolves as there in that watery fluid moving substance swim around in many mysterious things hidden deep below the surface. So it is for us and maybe with us there are triggers there is an ancestral component to the thing that triggers me, especially this panic I so often feel around money or meal times, as well as a lot of anxiety over ‘food.’ And I found out this week that that same anxiety is triggered at my prebirth time. Sharing about this with another group of those ‘awakening’ this week, and saying how I heard killing voices at that time so many other people said to me ‘me too’. I was born around 5 or 7 pm and I always find the period 3 to 7 pm problematic and others there shared they did feel the same.
The sea and ocean we must mine in individuation or understanding and shedding family multi-generational trauma also relates to our cellular DNA. A good friend called me in the middle of me writing this post.. My anxiety and feelings of ancestral abandonment were so huge today due to this money issue and the fact my brother flew off for 4 months and failed to keep the necessary supports in place for me financially, going so far as to ignore my nephew’s advice to do something about it really triggered me today. So I called my friend to debrief and when I read this post up to the 4th paragraph she said to me, that ocean part is also about what we carry cellularly in our DNA.
I am understanding more and more as I navigate this deep ancestral separation wound issue that the strongest need of a human being is to love and bond and nurture and attach, to feel safe and held. But oh so sadly all of this need for attachment and love fell out of favor during the rising patriarchal heroic egoic age when conquering and separating ourselves from the primal matrix began. At that time and during what ancient Indian mystics called the Kali Yuga we turned hostile to the Goddess and to the Great Mother. We began to split off into the sky and see God as removed from nature, with dominion over nature and then nature also began to be seen as something uncontrollable, wild and chaotic that needed to be controlled or civilized. At this time the commandments of Moses came down which involved a whole lot of shaming and though shalt nots as a part of it.
The conquering and controlling extended to those more immersive cultures who did not live as split off from nature, civilizations such as the native American and aboriginal here in Australia, as well as to our most primal dark tribes.. These came to be seen as inferior in some way, in need of being over run or civilized and domesticated.. Those patriarchal forces that then identified themselves with superiority and control felt justified in treating these primal people in the most objectifying and unloving ways, taking over their lands, murdering their people, rounding them up and shackling them in chains, stealing their children, putting them on reservations, stealing the woman to be used as labor or even raped and shaming the so called ‘bastard’ children. And the mocking at times still lives on. In racial slurs calling an aboriginal footballer an ‘ape’, in judgements of a Royal baby for not being ‘white’ enough and in shaming a biracial woman with only love in her heart who tries her best to live within that loveless emotionally abandoning system, only to be taken down by it with yet more vindictive and slurs.
Last night in the talk by Lee Harris I shared online here he spoke about the need many are now feeling to stand up against these confining and deeply unjust systems. He spoke about how there will be an emerging rebellion increasingly occurring against the lack of humanity and heartlessness of it all. He also spoke of the need we have to slow down and stop the panic that ensues as we overstimulate our nervous systems coming out of the global fear (Saturn Pluto) that was a reaction to the rising up of another global ‘threat’, that we experienced from early 2020 onwards with the advent of the Corona Virus pandemic.
We are still panicked, we are still overwired by fear a lot of the time, we are still running and often from the fear of death, and the fear of threats, (even sadly the invisible ‘threat’ of connecting and being vulnerable by truly opening up our hearts). But what if in that running we just tend to become more heartless than ever? For me I know I need to find ways to slow myself down when triggered into the deep panic of fear. I also the huge weight of what I feel gets worse if others split off from noticing or understanding, then a deep void opens up and it is left to me.
I recognise it is not easy as my ancestors had a huge fight to survive and knew great hunger and poverty during the late 1800s. That panic and fight so often lives on in me as evidenced by my own maternal legacy of Mars Saturn and Moon in my 6th house of the body.. But what lives in my cells and is trying to release is not only mine, in fact it reaches over 5 generations back which is, perhaps why, at times the feelings become so global and seemingly so intense and overpowering. Writing about it may be my primary way forward but I also do have to guard against feelings of self pity at this time of year, as well as those of personalising and globalising the carried abandonment feelings I carry. Truly they are about something far wider in spectrum than just this one individual life.. For in many ways I am a carrier of it all, a carrier who in exploring it all is trying her very very best to make sense of it all and come to terms with the large legacy of global panic that I sometimes carry for the collective.. For to be shunning and not embraced does hurt us and then it makes us also turn away in lack of trust, and as Lee mentioned in this talk, trust will be one of the major issues rising up for many of us in the coming month. I am most certainly feeling that sense of not trusting coming out of that deep feeling of being ‘dropped’ by my brother.
Emerging From The Dark Night 