A deeper repression, and reflections on the past year

Lately I've been practicing inquiry in the style of the Kiloby Inquiries, especially when working with my morning negative mental state. When a stressful thought arises, I visualize it in print before me. Sometimes I tap my third eye or clavicle, to ground me in physicality. These small tweaks do loosen the velcro (as Scott Kiloby calls it) between thought and sensation.

I think a theme of practice over the past year has been a clearer awareness that I am clinging to anxiety. I cling to it because its familiarity seems preferable to its absence. During inquiry, when stressful thoughts dissolve and the tensions in my right jaw/throat/torso/arm relax, the thought, "there is nothing here" arises. Or "where am I?", "I don't know what to do," "I don't know who I am".

In just the past few weeks I've begun to become aware of a holding in the center of the chest that I'd previously been unaware of. Often, something comes into my awareness, some inner experience, some thought/sensation bundle of which I am as yet seeing only dimly, and it is immediately repressed. Meaning, I immediately distract myself from it. It is both exciting and discouraging to begin to see this deeper layer. The words associated with it so far are "No" and "Don't", uttered very sharply.

A few weeks ago Z spoke very strongly to me about how ways that I am with her are very difficult for her. It was very disturbing. After a lot of upset and blaming thoughts, I wrote down and reflected on what she'd said, and concluded that my relationship with her is indeed infused with deep suspicion, more than I'd realized before. I'd been denying the depth of it because I don't want to see myself as a bad friend. There are strong beliefs that she is out to take advantage of me, and it colors our relating repeatedly throughout each day. Seeing this provides yet stronger motivation to work through this trauma-driven behavior.

Over the past 18 months I have been receiving regular mind clearing sessions from Rovena, two to four times per month, plus we did a three-day intensive this past April. I've focused on my relationships with E and Z, mostly with Z. During my next session with her in two days, we will review what's happened this past year. I want to review myself ahead of time. There is a sense of dread because of an idea that very little progress has been made over the past year. Perhaps my measure of progress is harmony in my relationship with Z, and that does not seem improved. I bet once I do my own review, I will see that things have shifted. Because of the strong projection, there is a belief that as long as Z is unhappy with me, I have failed. On the face of it, that's a ridiculous belief! It's very strong, though.

Back in March I did some Byron Katie work on my reactivity toward Z. I paid Kay Neiminem for a video session (painful) and Ron E. did some online chat with me (not painful and seemed to shift things a little). I looked at the belief, "Z doesn't respect me". This belief continues to arise over and over again in response to things Z says and does.

Unsticking my voice

 I had a mind clearing session with R today.

I worked on feelings of guilt about something that happened two years ago between me and my tenant A.S.

I connected the situation to when I was in elementary/middle school and decided to force myself to be kind & generous toward classmates who I thought were foolish and stupid

Traced this back to thinking that my mom was foolish and stupid, but that I had to humor her in order to survive and be loved

Chest & throat felt tight, I felt stuck, angry, frustrated, I started worrying that Rovena was stupid and unable to help me

Rovena asked me "How would you describe your problem now?"  That was hard to answer but I eventually said my problem was that my throat, my voice wanted to make noise. Then I started making noises with my voice. All the while worrying that Rovena was bored or disgusted, or that I was overtime.

But after a very short while of this, I felt happy and rather at ease. The shift was remarkable: almost all the stress was gone, yet it seemed that nothing had happened, nothing had changed. I was now beneath the world of words and thought, which initially felt uncomfortable but soon felt OK. Making these quiet vocalizations, I was in a world where things were OK and felt right. I asked myself whether I had a problem anymore and there was no sense of any problem. When I thought about the A.S. episode, there was no stress at all. I could picture A.S.'s face, it was beautiful and relaxed, and she was telling me that I was OK.

Seems that as a very young one, I felt that it wasn't OK to make noise with my voice, and that somehow caused me to conclude that my mother was foolish and stupid.

Chipping away at the early trauma

Awoke this morning as usual with terror from early trauma. Went into it--I'm alone, crying out for Mommy, and she isn't coming. Why isn't she coming? It must be that there is something wrong with me.

I've felt discouraged and pessimistic lately about working through this trauma. It colors so much of my experience. It strongly shapes the way I view and respond to events. It controls me! I've returned to it and looked at it again and again, wanting to dismantle it, to soften its power. I have felt discouraged, yet I persist because living under its spell is utterly unsatisfactory to me and finding ways to escape its spell is the only thing I long for in this life.

This morning I tried approaches that I'd tried before without much success, and it felt like I had some headway. For the thousandth time I went back into that memory. For the hundredth time I tried the approach of comforting my child self.

And it seems I was significantly more successful than before. In my imagination I was able to self-soothe. I stopped crying out for Mommy. I felt the sensations in my body, and they were good. I looked around my room and saw it as benign, even safe. I told myself that Mommy had really wanted to come and soothe me but that she just couldn't--my adult wisdom informed me--Mommy was living a life that absolutely prohibited her from devoting all her attention to me, as much as she might long to. And besides that Mommy's conditioning made it so that she couldn't fully be with me on an emotional level, but that could be OK and I could be OK and I could and would grow into being with myself that way.

It seems that I had built up to this incrementally over the years, the latest bit being a Mind Clearing session a couple weeks ago during which I imagined in detail what might actually have been going on for Mom when she apparently didn't come to soothe me. As an adult I can see it is so commonplace that a parent with the best of intentions can't be their for their baby every time the baby is fussy. During the Mind Clearing session, I imagined that Mom was in the kitchen on the phone with the plumber she'd been trying to reach. She was very pregnant with my brother, and she was tired from a long, busy day, and she was in the middle of cooking dinner as well. And she was deeply disappointed, but at this point rather resigned, that she was often unable to soothe me due to my colic.

I imagined that scenario, but at the time it didn't seem to affect my child self's conclusion that there was something wrong with me. But this morning it did seem to affect it.

This morning I also imagined a baby other than myself in the same situation, imagined her concluding there was something wrong with her, and saw how obvious it was to me that her mother's non-response had nothing to do with there being anything "wrong" with her. This is also something I'd tried doing at least 100 times in the past, seemingly without effect. But today it seemed to have an effect. There was an easing of the terror and a sense of being safe and OK.

Behind the melancholy of old songs

The past week I've been re-watching the PBS documentary, The Vietnam War, together with Dad. It's in 10 parts, a total of 18 hours. As we move through the course of the war, the events increasingly are things that I have memories of. Yesterday's episode spoke of Vietnamization; I remember hearing that word but not knowing (or really caring) what it meant. It also covered the Kent State shooting of student demonstrators by the military, with four dead, also an event I have a vague memory of. The episode ended (I think) with the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, "Ohio", explicitly about this shooting. The sound of the song is very familiar to me, yet I didn't know what the lyrics said until I first watched this documentary in 2017. "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio."

Music from my past typically stirs a deep sense of melancholy for me, but this song particularly does. I'd never deeply investigated the stories behind the melancholy, but I did so with "Ohio" last night. Here they are:

Those who sang that song, those who protested, the young adults of that time are the ones who really lived! And I missed it. I was alive, but I wasn't there. I was separate from it. That was where the real life was. Why wasn't I there? I was too young. It's not like those people were necessarily happy but they were really living and I was not in it. I should have been there. If I had been energetic and smart I would have been there. But there is something wrong with me and I wasn't there and I missed out on real love and real life. I had a chance and I blew it. Why didn't I recognize what was happening and see that I was missing out? Why didn't I go there and participate? I was deficient. I didn't know enough. I didn't take action. It's my own fault.

Hmmm, sounds like a variation one of the basic stories that colors my life. Obviously this story doesn't hold water in reality. It illustrates the fantasy I have that it's better to be grown up, and that to be a child, or child-like, is to be horribly vulnerable. This fantasy drives my passion to teach skills to kids, and my occasional lack of discretion in speaking about adult topics with them. 

A possible unravelling of a subtle yet pervasive mental habit

The last few days, when awaking early with fright, I've been doing noting practice instead of giving voice to the emotion. The practice of giving voice to the emotion was seeming to take me to the same place each time and new insights weren't coming.

This morning, doing the noting practice in a half-awake state, some habit of mind seemed to drop. Some micro-habit of thought circling back on itself. There was a moment when it was observed that this circling back wasn't necessary, and the circling back didn't happen. And for the next few thought cycles (taking place every couple of seconds, perhaps), there was a sense that the circling back was about to happen, then an understanding that it didn't need to. Then, an awareness that I couldn't make the circling back happen now even if I tried. Then, a wondering whether this was a shift, an awakening. Then, an observing with wonder and curiosity. Wonder, but lacking in delight. Was this a shift? It seemed like it was. There was a sense that something had been lost. A piece of my experience, or even of myself, was missing. There was an emotion different from my usual emotions, something akin to grief. Thoughts of conceit arose and fell away: "Am I more enlightened than before? I was doubting whether my practice was effective, but this is an amazing result! What teacher should I go to to talk about this? Shaila? Christiane? Satyadhana? How will life be different? I hope that suffering will be less" And, "Oh, all of this is the personality trying to take ownership of this shift. Just like they say happens." This habit of personality was familiar. I kept watching to see if it continued to seem the case that a mental habit had fallen away, and it did continue to seem the case as I lay in bed next to Eric.

Remembering the dangers of conceit, I went back to noting practice. It seemed difficult to focus. I wasn't sure if it was because my mind was unfamiliar to me now, or because I was so distracted with thoughts of conceit. Those thoughts are so seductive.

After perhaps 45 minutes, I fully woke up, along with Eric, and moved into the daily activities. Now, everything seems the same as yesterday, though as I wrote the above, there was a sense that a thought habit had indeed dropped.

Either immediately before, during, or immediately after this insight, I had a dream that I was in a situation with a couple, a man and a woman, that I was newly acquainted with. They'd been talking about some situation regarding other people rather vaguely for the previous 24 hours or so, and finally something happened that made me feel I'd had enough and that I really wanted them to be more clear with me about what was going on. I pleaded with them, and finally they began telling me. But before they had made it all clear, the usual background din of noises from nearby airplanes intensified, and the sound of one plane in particular became really loud and we could see out the window that it was extremely close to us. Then something hit me in the abdomen. It didn't hurt but there was a sense that it had really harmed me and I thought, "Oh! I didn't realize it until now, but before this moment I was considering this whole thing to be an entertaining game. Now it's real; this is a real life-changer."

Resistance/discomfort on inhalation, on vocalizing exhalations

I  haven't been writing. But my explorations have not diminished in intensity. Every so often I feel disappointed that I haven't been recording my explorations. I have more free time than ever before, but somehow writing has not occurred.

The morning negativity still happens every single day, and even more intensely than before. It often awakens me as early as 3 a.m., or perhaps even earlier. I rarely look at a clock when it happens; I usually stay lying down with my eyes closed in a half-asleep state and either work with it, or, more often recently, resist it and struggle with it. I still think of myself as a good sleeper, easily getting 8-9 hours sleep each night, but in fact most nights the second half of those hours is spent working with the morning negativity.

Given that I am working with it several times a week for several hours, the results, if any, are subtle. Sometimes I wonder if I am crazy to continue with this inner work. There are some things in life that one might make progress in only slowly: improving at a musical instrument, athletic training. But the slowness of my progress in this arena seems an order of magnitude greater even still. I wish there were a way of measuring it. Am I closer to awakening? I cannot know. Is my daily life  more free of suffering? I don't think so, but some patterns of reactivity are beginning to unravel. In particular, in recent weeks I've exposed some supporting beliefs andfound myself more often and more quickly letting go of stories that fuel reactivity.

Just a half hour ago I was lying in bed doing this inner work and the urge came to write about it. I was feeling into the sensations behind the negativity, and, as has happened dozens or  hundreds of times before, I proceeded into a state wherein I was vocalizing on each exhalation. And I started to tune into the thoughts and sensations that occur on each inhalation and each exhalation. And I saw that there was discomfort and resistance with each. And also that there was pleasure, joy, with each.

On the inhalation, there is resistance, especially I think at the beginning. I've known for decades that I resist breathing in, but I've never explored it in detail.

On the exhalation, the vocalization is uncomfortable, especially initially, and I suspect that there is fear of making noise.

Throughout the process there are very brief moments of pleasure, easy to miss.

I began trying to explore the resistance but experienced strong doubt. "I'll never be able to see it clearly because it is so fleeting, occuring only at the beginning of each inhalation and the beginning of each exhalation." "This whole project is a waste of time; it's not bringing fruit in daily life."

That's when I thought of writing about it.

I'll now go back to this exploration.

Writing after Mom's death on May 7, 2016

I wrote the following to my Liberation Unleashed guide on the LU forum:

Dear Ghata,

My mother died five hours ago. It was a good death. I was privileged to be by her side every night and most of every day during her dying. My brother and I were with her when she breathed her last breath. This is the first time I have witnessed a person's death. I gave her the scheduled dose of morphine. A minute later, her breathing slowed dramatically, each breath coming about 10 seconds after the last. Then ... the next breath did not come. We sat with her body for over two hours, then the mortuary people came to take it away.

These last few days have been tumultuous, with emotion coursing through the body much of every day. Many friends and relatives coming by to visit. Priests, hospice workers. The staff at Mom's dementia care home offering us food and coffee. Witnessing the grief of others. Sleeping on an air mattress on the floor every night, waking when staff came to adjust Mom's position. Anguish when Mom cried out and pleaded for help at being adjusted. Working to reduce her distress (this has been a continuous endeavor for the past five years) using physical, social, and pharmaceutical methods. Struggling with a complicated narcotics control system to keep enough morphine on hand. Selecting a casket. Maneuvering the experience of grief, shame arising at showing grief to others, allowing that, seeing that it is not fully allowed, accepting that.

I have wished for my mother to die. There has been so much suffering for her in this disease (Alzheimer's). It has been very difficult for me to see that I have not taken her suffering away from her. I was angry with my mother for allowing me to suffer as a very young one. Seeing that I now have allowed her to suffer has enabled me to fully forgive her for allowing me to suffer.

Three years ago we learned she had breast cancer. I steered my family toward choosing not to treat the cancer, thinking it would be better for her to die of cancer than to die of Alzheimer's. And this is what happened. I have heard that cancer can be very painful, but in Mom's case, somehow, it was not. There are many things I did that did lessen her suffering, and this was one.

Last night I noticed the Observer, expressed appreciation for her, and asked her if she was ready to loosen her grip over my experience. She said she was ready. It had something to do with the passing of my mother. Something like, "if she can go, I can go, too." She was just a little sad. I told her that we could work together as a team, as we'd discussed before. We're both quite anxious and sad about such a change.