Mostly, my experience these days of being alive is less as a person and more as a series of actions, animated by a collection of feelings, emotional states. They seem to have substance to them, but then I play with them, talk to them out loud and identify their different aspects, and they crumble into nothing, down to one obviously false belief.
Is this what Jed meant by the ego and personality gets more insubstantial?
It seems fruity to put it that way. It still seems like a life, still seems as if this could simply be mental illness, or if that's too harsh, a single woman with cats getting older and more shut down, estrogen decreasing and consequentially simply not giving as much of a sh*t as she used to.
But there's this aura of weirdness, of something solid in a center somewhere, that is me, but I just can't quite embody it, be it, and then there's all of these feelings and actions that seem to crumble when I look closely. What does it mean?
I get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch tv, go to bed. I deal with back pain and joint pain, digestive pain. I do yoga and walk and the 5 tibetans. How is this different than most humans narrow slice of awakeness? Does everyone experience the Pointless Joy that is the backdrop for it all?
There's been so much change in the past couple of months. Huge change. I know that part of what's going on is simply the body and mind and heart adjusting to the new environments.
I experience a tremendous amount of anxiety at work. Not panic attack level, but enough so that I walk around in a state of fear most of each day. A lot of it is simply the basics of what's actually occurring: I'm in a new job in a new area of a field that has a language of science I haven't spoken in a few years. It's a new social culture - very different from the stressful, sarcastic, social services front lines, high emotion one of Hiveworld and Cubicleland - it's cool, collected, happy faces, smart, sharp, a little arrogant though super friendly. (My natural personality default is a kind of goofy oscillating enthusiasm and blankness that I'm aware comes across as childish and simplistic and doesn't lend itself too well to a scientific work environment.) There's also the new living environment, a new home and neighbors and shopping and city/town layouts and prices and hours of operation and availability.
But the biggest aspect of the weirdness is that I'm missing some sort of social connective tissue. It's simply gone, at least in the way that other folks use it, plug into it. I can see interactions for what they really are: survival mechanisms to share resources - whether physical or emotional or emotional. That's what I see as i move through the world - the robot, the machine that people operate out of, see the directive programming underneath the program that animates face and tone of voice. And then of course there's the psychic aspect to the whole shebang which even though I keep a super low volume on, images and feelings pop into consciousness about the core programming, scenes from the life, lives, lived so far.
There's something beyond this surface feeling, a kind of love for everything and everyone regardless of what they have to offer, and that's what I feel once I get over the ego cringe of seeing the raw naked truth of quest for resources that everyone operates out of. And there's also the compassion I experience for how I see them struggling, but since the mask they wear is of happy confidence, there's no field to speak about what's really going on.
And so the anxiety roars on. In response to where the work needs me to be, and I'm rapidly getting to. And also to the usual of what I deal with around humans: having to respond to the mask while pretending the core vibration isn't pounding out a drumbeat, filling the air around us with it's pictures and feelings and sounds.
I'm so grateful for it all. Life just moved in and lifted me to a place where everything is so much better, so much easier, gentler, comfortable. All of the survival issues taken care of. Allowing me the space, time, energy, money to heal the rifts in my physical and emotional bodies.
Most of the time I feel as if it's an impossible task, that healing isn't going to happen, and that I'm going to descend into harsher spirals of pain and fear. But then I get that there isn't anything else left to do. The only thing left inside me that even might be considered ambition is a desire to do a good job in terms of the actions I put into the world, to use the specific tools and perspectives to assist others as they heal and build and clear and lighten.
And so what else to do but keep watching, applying the tool of awareness to the pain and fear? Keep showing up and doing what feels true? Even if that's mostly not doing much at all except what Life shows me to do: the work I was hired for, the exploration of the local food environment, watching hundreds of Stargate episodes, doing yoga two or three times a week.
Thank you Life . . . thank you for my life . . . thank you for what I don't understand . . .
Or maybe there is no "Life" . . . maybe it's all luck and hard work and diplomacy . . . products of being a good looking person with a graduate degree . . . maybe I'm not psychic, just delusional based out of some sort of ability to deeply read facial expressions and movements . . . (look: it's the science taking root inside of me again :)
Whatever it is . . . I'm glad for it . . . even with the anxiety and fear and pain, I'm enjoying my living . . . happily exploring these new environments with their respectful people and linear interactions . . . so grateful to be where I am, with the kitties, so weaselly and buttheaded and young . . .
I miss the Hoon, Cassidy, Jacinta . . . so much . . . I miss spending hours with clients . . . diving deep into hearts and lives and bodies . . . I miss the bright sunlight streaming in on my bed through the huge windows of my last apartment . . . and yet they're all gone . . . never to return . . . gone . . . gone . . . not even one second more to hold and love and see and experience . . .
I really don't know what any of it means any more. I don't feel superior or spiritual or anything. Just here. I'm here. Dancing with the energies. Letting lights go out one by one. Trying not to struggle too much when I walk into a room and the lights are super bright and what's inside is hard to look at.
That's it.
Pain, fear, anxiety, willingness, pointless joy.
Bright lights shining on a monster until the monster opens its costume to reveal the dustbunny inside and then I laugh and the room fades out of view.
Key lime pie and the sound of birds, kitties sitting on the window sash, coffee in a mug, the vibration of you reading this already radiating out to me from the computer screen.
Pain, fear, anxiety, willingness, pointless joy.
No . . . there, present . . . then fading into all Yes all the time.
Pain, fear, anxiety, willingness, pointless joy.
Doesn't seem like it'd be enough, but it is . . .
