Difficulty Letting Go

(Written in January 2005)
Spent most of my time with Karen crying — tried really letting go of everything: Neskaya, Bella, Eleanor — I see that I’m always carrying responsibility in some way.  It’s not that I worry consciously — the sad thing is that I don’t actually do any good for these things that I care about, I drain my own energy to no purpose.  I see that my inability to let go is based on two very deep beliefs: that they can’t take care of themselves, and that there’s no higher power, spirit, god, no being bigger than I am who cares for them.  So if I let go, they will fall into outer darkness, chaos, the Void.  No wonder I can’t let go of something I care about.  O yes and I guess I’m also afraid that if I do the wrong thing, the beings that I love will be hurt or damaged somehow.  I can see that these beliefs are “wrong”, that I learned them growing up in an alcoholic family, but my faith in a higher power is shaky, weak, and intermittent.  I do at least have intellectual conviction — I didn’t use to have even that — that I can hold on to: that the Universe is founded in Love, that we are all held in a huge Compassion, that all things DO work together for good in spite of the chaos and suffering we see around us.  This I “know” in some way — how do I know it?  When I check with my body it’s that sense of a “floor”, of something under me that supports me, of my body as solid, weighty, and all-of-a-piece.

Asking myself how I “know”something, and that sense of a “floor” are new skills that I learned from Somatic Experiencing.  The “floor” especially, is a very new learning.  Before Somatic Experiencing, when I fell apart, I felt like the pieces all scattered, I was afraid that they would just fall into the Void, into Outer Darkness.  This is one of those things I wasn’t really aware of until it suddenly felt different: my image of “falling apart” now contains a “floor” that would catch the pieces.

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