Holy Cow! I cannot believe what a ride. Expansion after beautiful expansion, each followed by a contraction. The contractions seem to feel more horrible each time. Like a Parthian shot, the old patterns seem to announce in a Monty Python voice, “I’m not dead yet!”, an insult to the beatific and spacious expansions in my meditation and therapy sessions. Tight contracted weeping and fear.

Moods swing wildly between “there’s nothing to fix, all is well,” and “the world is ending tomorrow (or sometime soon after)”. This is punctuated by periods of extreme listlessness and tension, and an inability to take action on much of anything new in an organized way, and then blessed moments of feeling grounded, inspired and alive. It comes in spurts. House painting, journaling, exercising, reading, gardening…but no recognizable rhythm to any of it. Sleep is all over the place, energy is all over the place. I still can’t stick to a regular bedtime or rising time. Yet, I’m eating well, keeping moving, still meditating, and moving forward. I can still feel my body in ways that never were possible before. I’m still curious about the relationship of all this new sensing to living, and pleasure, and sex.

I see people doing things I want to do, having it all together, and feel jealous, hopeless, defeated. Then I take inventory and find I don’t really want those things at all, and feel terrified, because I used to want them, and I still have no idea what will fill its place. If I can’t sustain any energy to BE SOMEONE, or ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS then what’s it all about? I am closer than ever to just moving through life as it directs, surrendering to the obvious, doing what I am clearly meant to do, and dropping ideas about image, success, and the regard of others. Those things haven’t gone lightly or willingly, though. They are the cost of doing business in this awakening game. I can no longer sustain the energy to pursue them. I can only pursue what is genuine in me. I know what that is by how I feel when I stray from it – like being dead.

My work with clients, though, has never been better. It is stupefying. I feel so incredibly strong and clear in the space of the intention to support others. If I can hold my seat on this roller coaster ride, I’m hoping it will level out a bit and I can feel more settled in my own life. The panic of “there’s no safe place anywhere” is becoming more and more clearly understood as a pattern rather than a reality.  It provides a doorway for me to access the unfinished business as I faithfully continue BCST and SE sessions in a less desperate and more knowing confident way of feeling the coming to the end of the most serious work.

I’m reminded when I feel intensely unsafe that I have a way to connect to Source, through my body, in a reliable way. I can just sense it there. Interestingly enough, it seems to follow the length of my torso, from the top of my head to the tip of my tail – the sense of something bigger than me, inhabiting this form in the center of my body. Yep, just checked – it’s still there. Even when I can’t stand to be in my own skin because it is so uncomfortable, I have a sense of “everything keeps changing”, and a knowing that the desperate impulse to change my external surroundings will not fix everything. And yet, my deep longing to be nearer nature, with less noise and artificial light, persists. It has been with me ever since I remember. It is a part of my me-ness.

This change process seems to require the courage, dedication and conviction of a warrior. I get the Bodhisattva meaning more than ever now. Holding my ground as everything falls away, no belief left untouched, as though I’m on a little iceberg in the middle of the ocean, and it’s melting. I know I can swim. I know I have beautiful friends in the ocean. A part of me longs to be one with the great dark aliveness of the water, and let the current sweep me away in its embrace.

I write this to you, my Friends, because I don’t think anyone ever talks about this part of the process. They always talk about the pretty parts. The pretty parts are indeed very pretty, for sure! I’m writing to you from this moment of “all is well” to tell you I really do think it will all be well. This is what change is like. This is what it is like to allow healing and awakening to have its way with you, to surrender body, mind, soul and emotions to the uniquely divine purpose of your being. I had no idea. How could I?