Now I Get It

Sometimes it takes me awhile to really understand what I’m been hearing. For years I have been processing out beliefs by following phrases, or feelings and memories that leads to phrases, that I can then use to release the emotions associated with them. I have been doing that for so long that I seem to have virtually every last one. That’s what it feels like sometimes. The other day it finally hit me that the energy that can set up residence in my body doesn’t necessarily have any words attached to it!

This came up around discomfort in my neck. What I always thought was funny about it was that it only bothered me when I was meditating. For may years, it was there all the time, worse when I was under stress, but for the past several years it had almost completely disappeared. Yes, I had used all the tools I had on it, but nothing would make it stay away. It was a slippery beast until the lightbulb went on and I tried processing it as pure feeling. Then I made real progress.

When you get into habits, it hard to break them, and this was no different. I was difficult to process, I kept, instinctively “reaching” for some words to invoke the feeling, rather than just letting the feeling invoke itself. That sounds odd. It was like diving into a pool of pure experience where I had to resist the impulse to let the voice in my head talk about and describe what was happening. That pulled me out of the experience.

I’m just realizing now that I probably couldn’t have done this process before. It’s taken me this long to be able to quiet my mind, to a sufficient degree for this idea to work. You get what you get when you’re ready to get it, not before.

My life has been tough lately, and sleep doesn’t always come easy. I’ve been using specific meditation techniques to turn off the jabbering in my head and allow me to sleep. It helps a lot, but there is still something going on inside my head that I don’t understand, so I have to use it over and over each night. I have realized that when I thought that I wasn’t sleeping, I was actually falling asleep and waking up, over and over each night, and, each time I had to go through the whole process all over again. When I didn’t realize that, it seemed like the whole exercise was pointless. The question now is, why do I keep waking up anxious, over and over again? Is there something going on in my dreams that brings it all back up? I was thinking about this last night and early this morning, and I noticed that something did seem to be going on, on a deeper level that I could only just get a peek at.

All in all these are more questions for another time. Every time I figure something out, it leads to more questions and more things to deal with. It seems endless, but when I find myself talking to someone and realize where they are and notice how far I’ve come, it makes it somewhat better.