From my journal for Wednesday, June 16
“May this energy go to where it can be used for the highest and best good of all.” I woke at about 4:20 and felt the burning energy in my heart and elbows. I realized it’s not so much fear as stuck energy. Trying to talk to parts was not helping, so I worked on trying to find the best words to send the energy out to do good in the world. I saw images of very strange dark unstructured places, maybe slums and hippy houses. I didn’t try to figure anything out, just kept saying my prayer. The heat faded and came back many times. Finally I began to feel empty and cool and quiet which was wonderful. It certainly feels like this is the right thing to be doing. In some ways “stuck energy” is the definition of trauma. Maybe I am helping the collective trauma by doing this work. I certainly hope so.
The heat in my heart and elbows was familiar from something I felt a lot during the Summer from Hell, after I had freaked out on Paxil.
“Unstructured” is a word used by Matt Licata. Something I expected would make me uncomfortable, but in this work I was so focussed on sending the energy out that I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the images.
From my journal for Thursday, June 17
OK whoever you are. I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you by playing puzzles. No wonder you’ve been coming on stronger. I just got a new post from Matt. I went there, and he’s talking about grief. he speaks of “the forgotten, broken-hearted orphans” and I feel tears come. Perhaps you are one of those. I wonder if you have something to do with the heat I was feeling yesterday, perhaps you are the one who lived through the summer from hell in 1996. The words “fear is a choice” come. I remember how the woman said that at Jalaja’s Circlework Training, and how my fear went through the roof. It took days to talk myself down. I feel your fear, and that you are afraid you are never going to come out of it. I tell you that we, or I, come out of it over and over. You, as a frightened part, may be stuck in fear. But fear is not a choice, unless you choose to tell yourself scary stories. You are not doing that. Something truly fearful happened to you, I don’t know what it was because there are a number of possibilities. Your experience was truly overwhelming, your capacity to process it was swamped, and so you experience it as present reality. But instinct, not cognitive choice sent you into a place of frozen terror. I am so sorry that happened to you, that the psychiatrist who prescribed the Paxil didn’t believe you when you said you were afraid. It wasn’t until Char said “You wanted to be un-depressed so badly that you kept on taking it, even though you were scared out of your wits.” There, there. I hold her and rock her, tears in my eyes. “It was not your fault.” And because of it, you were unable to take in all the goodness that was there at the Circlework Training. That deserves grief, it is not wrong for you to grieve that that happened to you. You have a right to grieve all your unlived [unloved] life.
My journal writing these difficult days has been full of wrong words, left out words, mistakes that make sense… “playing puzzles” must have been a memory of when I used to play solitaire compulsively. The word unlived was rejected by my spell checker and replaced with “unloved.” In some ways both are true.
Disclaimer: I usually try very hard to make sure what I’ve written is understandable. Today my brain is not working well enough to have any idea of whether this post is understandable. You could see it as an example of living with PTSD.