From my journal for June 15, 1996
[A friend and I are doing co-counseling, each speaking for 20 minutes]
I really enjoy watching this wonderful process of “organic thought,” how it starts out meandering and groping, and yet seems to come full circle in the specified time. This experience is giving me more faith in the process, that we don’t have to “know,” that we don’t have to be direct and logical, we can just let the process take us where we need to go.
“We can just let the process take us where we need to go.” I think about how long it has taken me to be able to say “Thy will be done.” I needed to change my image of God to a compassionate being, not the “capricious, malicious and willful” being based on my alcoholic parents. One stage on the way was the mantra they gave us at Kripalu: “I offer myself to this process.”
What did I do in my turn? O yes, I also wanted to talk about my vision, or lack of it, for my life. I didn’t have the journal notebook, so I tried to repeat what I wrote over a week ago and read to Sybil last week. I said I wanted to be engaged with my life (and thought as I said it how that was what was so wonderful about Thursday — that I felt really rooted in my real life — and what’s so painful about losing it to the airplanes.) I groped around to express my vision of the Divine, the Deva who could support me in my individuality, the one who is not malicious or mean, but who is wild, enormous, unpredictable, creative, beautiful, and glorious, and who would satisfy my soul’s longing. I ended by feeling the shock of airplane fear in my gut and saying “But I lost it all, it’s gone, I’m just scared of the airplanes and back to my litany. I say to myself:
It’s OK to be scared.
It’s OK to not know.
I’m not supposed to know.
Things can get better even if I don’t know how to do it.
There are an infinite number of second chances.”
My litany is a series of phrases my counselor, Karen, gave me for dealing with my fears of not knowing what to do about being triggered into terror by the sounds of the airplanes.