Continuing the piecing together of my trip to the
Underworld (aka the deepest, darkest places of the psyche), I will go through
the notes I made while in that state and try to elaborate on their meaning and
the feelings I was experiencing at the time.
***If you are
confused, please read the first part of the series Letters from Hell – Part I (Waking Darkness) and the second
part Letters from Hell – Part II (Manifesting Oblivion)***
I’ve kept the original bullet notes and then expanded on
the idea below.
I remember stating repeatedly during this time that
commonly people think that hope is the opposite of despair, but I have
discovered it is not – serenity is.
Despair is the totally lack of hope and emotion – a completely apathetic
place. You may argue that is not the
Oxford definition of the word, but as someone who spent a lot of time in the
state of despair, I tell you it is. Much
like love and hate, despair and serenity are so very closely connected that it
is impossible to know one without the other.
As I reveled in my despair, I came to know the serenity of being alive
in a single moment – still hopeless, but at peace. There is great peace in foregoing hope. I
spent a lot of time finding serenity in despair – the joy of literally not
giving a fuck about what anyone thought.
Nothing in the world seemed important to me and in that came
freedom. I try to remember that feeling
when I begin to drift back. It’s
grounding.
- Trust v. hope
I talk a lot about killing hope and this will be no
different. I really hate hope. It is awful!
I’ve abandoned this misleading notion we call, hope. Hope implies doubt. I have come to trust. Trust that the universe will carry me safely
down the path I am to follow. Trust that
what lies ahead is what I am supposed to do and that all things will happen in
their time. Hope is stagnant. Trust is active and alive. Trust is present. Hope is living in the future. Worrying about what might be. I’ve come to realize that life has become
much easier since giving up on hope.
Instead of fretting over what decisions I should make based on some
theoretical future I hope to have, I make choices based on facts that are
presented to me in the present and trust that those will be right for me – and
to tell you a secret, they always are. I
spent so much of my life worrying how my story would end and trying to
manufacture the path to get there, that I didn’t even notice the soft grassy
trail under my feet. Maybe I won’t get
married or have kids or a house or many of the other things I spent so much of
my tweens and twenties dreaming about, but I will have the life I was meant to
lead.
- Serenity w/
surrender
Part of moving from despair into serenity was to make
peace with an absolute surrender to life.
Accepting that I had no control over the events that shaped my world was
hard to swallow, but necessary. There was no energy left in my body to fight
the tide of life. I was spent. I didn’t
have any “fucks” left to give, so I gave myself over to the world and said, “do
as you will.” And that’s where I found
true peace. It was a wonderful state of
being. I try to remember that feeling
often and carry it with me throughout my days to keep me grounded and
present. Accepting that I don’t really
have control has been the most freeing revelation I’ve had. It keeps me in the moment. All I can do is react to what it in front of
me and carry on. On a side note, I may
have swung a little too far to living in the moment and have started to drop
the ball on things that need to be planned ahead, but I hope to find balance
soon.
- Living in the
darkness
Oy! This is a hard
one to describe other than the absolute epitome of giving no fucks at all. This is the part I wish I could get back to
the most. It was truly amazing. Every movement of my body was so heavy and
took so much energy, that everything else in the world seemed trivial and
irrelevant to my life. I honestly and
truly just did not give a single damn about anything, but not in a “I won’t
participate” sort of way, I still went about my life and worked, but any issue
just rolled off like water down a duck’s back.
It didn’t phase me at all. I
dealt with things, but was never affected by things. We had a crisis at work during this time and
funnily enough, everyone was so impressed about how cool and level-headed I was
throughout it all (which in my line of work was a tremendous asset). And it’s not that I didn’t care, it was just
that I knew whatever was happening only affected the present moment and it
would eventually be done and gone and everyone and everything would
continue. It would either go well or not
and then we would deal with that. It was
incredible. I am still so fascinated by
those feelings at that time. As I’ll
cover in the dichotomy of emotions, it was paradise and hell all at the same
time.
- All the dreams –
mapping the psychic dream world – lucid dreaming
I’m a person who generally remembers their dreams, but
this became something else. My dreams
became so alive and vivid that I often had a hard time waking up. When I did wake, the reality of my dreams
seemed so much more real than waking life.
It was confusing at times and I would attempt to go back to sleep to
re-enter the world of the subconscious.
The thing that I began to notice in my dreams was my lucidity. It was like I was building a map. Sometimes I would be in a place where I had
dreamt I was previously and be able to recall the last time I was there and
what happened. I could also remember
other dreams that happened elsewhere, but close by to the location of the
current dream. I would stand in a city
square and be able to tell you directions to different places where other
dreams had occurred. The directions
wouldn’t necessarily be linear, either.
Sometimes walking one way would take you to the bottom of one place, but
if you turned around and left the same way, you would go to another place –
strange, but the connections to the various areas made complete sense because I
was so familiar with it. I had lived in
all these places. I was also an active
participant in my dreams. I could
rationalize some of the events and pick out things that were not accurate even
within the dreamscape. Recently, the
lucidity of my dreams has faded and I wake having trouble recalling what they
were about, though I know that they are still happening quite intensely, because
I wake with the essence of them still lingering, yet I am immediately so
present in this world, it takes a while for it to register that I should
attempt to remember them and by that point they are gone.
- Dichotomy of
everything in the world, life and me – two equal and opposite emotions/thoughts
existing at once within
The most prominent thing that came out of this experience
is the dichotomy of life. Everything has
two equal and opposite parts. Much of
the time in my “hell state” I oscillated between fits of extreme happiness
accompanied by unstoppable tears and uncontrolled laughter in times of great
sadness. I was almost manic. It took
some time to adjust to. This was also
hard for people to grasp, how can you be happy and sad to such extremes at the
same time? There is no real way to
describe it other than saying it just is.
When I faced the deepest despair, the future actually looked the
brightest I have ever known.
- Dancing with life
– jinx & superstition, not giving honour to the universe for the gifts
given to you
I had a conversation with a friend around this time. He was having great things happening in his
career and I was overjoyed. “This is
YOUR year”, I said to him. “Don’t jinx
it!” he replied. That was when I
realized how my perceptions had changed.
I couldn’t fathom the idea of “jinxing” something anymore. I was dancing with my life. I could feel the flow and I either made the choice
to go where it took me or resisted it.
If it brought me happiness and prosperity, I gave thanks and celebrated
the moment. I have no idea what may be
coming in the future, so it is important to relish in the delights of today
while they last. There is no such thing
as “jinx”. Taking pleasure in today’s
accomplishment won’t ruin my chances for future success. If the universe has given me a gift, I will
celebrate it.
- This too shall
pass… I am here.
For the first time ever, I was present in every moment of
my life. I felt everything
viscerally. I could feel my body and how
it moved. I could even feel the passage
of time. Each moment was just a moment. For as much darkness and despair I felt during
that time, I was aware that it too would pass away for other emotions and I
would feel those just as deeply. Life is
just a compilation of present moments and each of those pass away just as
quickly as they came.
Again, I wish I was able to journal about this time when
it was happening. For the past year, I
have slowly been working away on these notes while trying to accurately remember
what it felt like during that time. This
is the best account I have been able to give.
My therapist practices HEP (Holistic Experiential Process). This basically means reliving all past trauma
and reprogramming the way you deal with it.
It starts with some mild talk therapy, but as we have moved through the
process, it has included a lot of various body and energy work, group therapy
and anything else under the sun to bring me into myself as a complete and whole
person. I’m now moving towards the end
of the process, but what I have described in the series “Letters from Hell” describes the rock bottom of the process – the part
that is like a living death, only to be reborn later. It was by far the most difficult and intense
part. I still get angry when people say “they
understand” or “have been there”. It is
like a soldier coming back from war and describing the horror they saw only to
hear someone say “yeah, I saw a guy get mugged at gunpoint before, totally the
same.” That’s the best I can come up
with to express how difficult the therapeutic process can be. On the other hand, it is totally worth
it. Standing on the other side, I am so
grateful for the life it has given me, I fall to my knees and cry.
I did manage one post during this time, you can read it here (Rip Me Out).
No comments:
Post a Comment