Tied in a Knot

(Written in December 2008)
1PM.  I’m doing pretty badly, I’m tired & cold, and I feel like a total failure.  I read the Jack Kornfield chapter on emotions and he says no emotion lasts longer than 15 to 30 seconds.  So this cold ache and stony heart I feel must be resistance to emotion and not emotion at all.  What emotion am I resisting?  I read something about grief and started to cry so I thought maybe that was it.  I listened to the Belleruth Naparstek piece on grief — but it didn’t really help.  I did cry but I think it’s the helpless crying.  It’s possible that I’m angry but it’s just triggering helplessness instead of energy.  I have a headache from crying.  I tried listening to a Napier tape on compassion, but it just made me feel more like a failure so I stopped.  It’s probable that I’m really angry at myself for being such a failure, and then making myself wrong for being angry.  That could certainly tie me in a knot which is how I feel — knotted tight.  I did call Karen but haven’t heard back yet.
One thing that makes me feel like a failure was the time with K when I was trying to validate my difficulty knowing what my limits are, and I started to tell the story of when I was seven, and she said “I’ve heard it before.” I started to shut down, then thought Right, I don’t need to tell the story and changed gears.  But what I failed to see was that I was hurt, and interpreted K’s remark to mean she was tired of listening to me, even though I also thought that wasn’t true, that we’ve been working on stopping each other’s stories.  But I didn’t see that what I really was needing was empathy for my pain and confusion, and validation for how hard it is for me to know what my limits are.  Then there was also her question about whether sitting with depression “worked” which unfortunately triggered self-doubt and making myself wrong, and what had been working to manage the depression — being with it without asking it to change — was suddenly lost and I was back at making myself be wrong and bad and a failure because I couldn’t make the depression go away.
Karen called while I was writing.  She suggested that I needed to find a way to ground myself, that K & L were not safe for me right now, that I had to let go of trying to make it better and just focus on doing what I need to do to get myself to Kripalu safely.