I haven’t been able to post anything for quite a while. Bella’s death opened up the huge abyss of abandonment.
The session with Caryn was tough. I started in my corner and crying. I wanted to ask her what was OK crying and what wasn’t but somehow it got lost. (In an earlier session she had let me cry and then said I needed to stop going down the well-traveled Greek tragedy path, needed to make a different choice. It left me with the feeling that crying was wrong, but I don’t think that’s what she meant.) I was feeling so alone and isolated. I told her the image of the flat glass floor, black with grid lines, and the people all isolated in their squares. I also talked about being down in the well. I felt unable to climb out, I felt angry and frustrated. Just now I imagined myself getting comfortable at the bottom of the well and the walls dissolved. But then I just felt awful and stuck and angry with myself for doing this again. I tried to just “be with” myself but couldn’t do it. Finally I tried “Take a big step back… here’s this woman she was a —— where was I going? I had a thought that being angry at myself for being depressed was unfair and useless. I didn’t choose to be depressed and I can’t choose to be out of it, so being angry at myself serves no purpose. It doesn’t give me energy to change anything. Accepting myself how I am and bringing compassion is really the only thing that makes sense.
We spent most of the session working on emptiness, trying to be with emptiness, trying to accept emptiness, which also to me means meaninglessness. If everything is emptiness why go on working to get through the day? At one point I said “Having nothing to live up to could feel like freedom.” The existential question — what if there’s no meaning for our lives in this place? I look out at the chickadees coming to the feeder. Then I imagine a great, glittering, spiral galaxy and remember that it was created by a process of self-organization, and the same process created the chickadees and the person sitting here writing. There is meaning in that process — self-organization leading to more complex beings, leading to consciousness and compassion. It’s not a random process. And finally it has produced these creatures who are self-aware and can choose. There is meaning in the choosing. I create the meaning by choosing. I remember when I thought about the God of Love and the God of Power, and that if the God of Power was the greatest, I would still choose to give my allegiance to serve the God of Love. And now, after looking emptiness in the face, I still choose compassion.