(Written in October 2008)
Feeling cranky and irritable. I felt this way yesterday and Sunday too. Bored. Dissatisfied. What’s that like in my body? Slight tension, slight discomfort. Hard to get a handle on. Not as clear as fear or depression. Frustrating. The discomfort tends to drive me to do something — even the computer solitaire which is how I noticed it on Sunday. I feel hateful, bad. I don’t feel loving. And I don’t want to be bothered. I don’t want to have to be nice to someone. I want to be able to disappear into a murder mystery. Paying attention, I notice that there is some tightness in my breathing. There’s actually quite a lot of tension. And the sores on my tongue which I’ve had for several days now. It’s possible that I’m worried about seeing the doctor today, worried that he’ll try to bully me into doing more than I want to. What is the need behind this feeling? Solitude? Be able to focus on my own needs? Put myself first?
Feeling cranky, irritable, dry & thin. What’s Jack Kornfield’s acronym? RAIN: Recognize, Accept, Investigate, Non-identification. The last one is the hardest: of course this is me. I try to separate from the energy, see it as someone “other”, and up comes an image of one of the children in the book about the Montessori classroom: running around the room pushing over other people’s projects. This is a child with a lot of energy who has not been allowed to express herself, to do things her own way. She wants to have friends, she wants to cooperate/collaborate with other children on projects, she wants them to help her with HER project — but she doesn’t know what that is, she’s never been allowed to find out, and she doesn’t have any skills for relationship. I wonder if this is the creative part of me, angry and bored because she hasn’t had a chance to do anything creative in a long time? I did manage to cut some strips of cloth, take everything off the Moon Woman, and separate a piece of grapevine to wrap her body. I wonder if, instead of playing solitaire, I were to go upstairs, and start the “pointillist” work of dipping my fingers in the paint and making dots?
With Karen I talked about how, on Sunday, I had recognized the tension and not allowed it to drive me into overwork and collapse. I think this is the first time I’ve been able to be conscious of that energy instead of letting it drive me down the path of action and only waking up when I collapse. I was feeling it as a tension which I just couldn’t relax down any further. I could refuse to let it drive me, but I couldn’t make it go away. Karen made the nest and I sat down in the middle of the cushions. I enjoyed the resilience and softness of the pillows, pushing at them with hands and feet. Then I was able to relax. I did some stretching, reminding myself of the tension-relax technique. With Karen’s support I was able to accept the tension and allow my body to negotiate — bits of relaxing with bits of tension. We also talked about how this time period involved re-negotiating my boundary, how I had made an absolute NO while I was in trouble: NO to requests for money and action, but now as I’m feeling better I’m more willing to start doing and giving again. But each one needs to be negotiated with that feeling inside that I’m really beginning to pay attention to.
RAIN The Wise Heart p101