I haven’t posted for a while, because I’ve been having serious trouble verbalizing my experience. It’s been about developing a relationship with a very early fragment of myself. It started with recognizing that the non-verbal, scared experience that I’ve been having for a couple of months, is not some new phase of aging. That was my biggest fear, that my loss of confidence and verbal skill meant that my aging brain was beginning to malfunction. Now it looks like what was going on was the awakening of a very early part of myself. My experience, over the last couple of months, has been largely that of an infant, probably who I was before I got traumatized. I say that because it was my first intuitive feeling once I got that this was not me now, but another part of me from the past.
Driving home from grief group, suspecting she was a very young part of me, I tried reaching out to her. I felt my way through what felt like very dense, almost solid, fog. pushing through layers, I finally came to a crack in the rock. I started in, it narrowed to something impassible, but there was a sort of shelf to the right, a small cave broken into the rock. I reached in and found the baby, and started swimming home with her.
Once I got back to my rooms, I found a baby doll I had used in some of my early work with an inner child. I got her out and sat with her tucked into my chest, next to my heart. I could feel she was afraid, so I said to her “It’s OK that you’re afraid. I wish you weren’t, but I’m not going to push you away. I’m here, and I’ve got you.” When I had to get up and do something, I put her in a box, cushioned and wrapped up in silk and flannel, with the box partly covered so she was hidden, but could still see out. That’s how I’ve felt the safest.
I’ve started to have the odd, uncanny experience of feeling like I was new here, seeing things for the first time. Also experiencing more beauty and richness. Once I even had a sense of the gift of life, something I’ve never felt before.
Now, as I go through my day, I say the loving kindness prayer like this:
May I be held in lovingkindness.
May we be held in lovingkindness. (meaning both me and the baby)
May all beings be held in lovingkindness.
Sometimes I have the sense that I’m holding a newborn. Sometimes she looks out at the world with delighted curiosity, sometimes she buries her face in my chest. I feel a lot of love.