Terror at intimacy

In couple counseling last week I looked at the deep terror I hold regarding intimacy. I still feel as though giving to others, or letting others in, will lead to my annihilation. I hold both hopefulness and hopelessness about ever getting past this. It's curious that I can hold both attitudes simultaneously. I wonder why I still have this terror when I have worked so hard and so sincerely to get past it for so many years. I don't just wonder, actually--I feel sad and self-critical about it, and long for someone to tell me that it's not my fault.

More fear

I've continued feeling deeply into fear. Very rewarding and freeing. Most recent example: sitting at home at my computer just now, looking up driving directions for my outings and errands today, noticed tight heavy feeling in chest/throat and gloomy mood. Took a break to feel deeply into the sensations. It only took a few seconds of gentle, focused attention for me to get beyond the tightness and heaviness -- which, I think, is a fighting of the deeper feelings -- and relax into what I call feeling deeply into the sensations. This feeling deeply is not entirely comfortable, either, but it's much more dynamic and much softer. As I do this "feeling deeply into" my body rocks slightly in response to what I feel, and where there was painful tightness, there's now pulsing and release. The pulsing moves through my throat, chest, and upper abdomen (all on the right side).

As I continue this kind of close self-attention, this "feeling deeply into", I frequently (every second or two) also feel an urge to stop, to escape, to move on. Physically, I notice this mostly in the arms. When I feel this, I ask, "why", and the mostly-empty messages bubble up: "this is a waste of time", "you don't know what you're doing", "this is dumb", "you need to get something done", "you need to take care of others". It is awesome to become more and more convinced that these are mostly messages from my very long ago past, from early childhood, and to release them instead of cogitating on them!

As awesome as this process is, it's not accompanied by feelings of joy. A veneer of gloom blankets the process. I look forward to investigating that, as well.

Almost every hour of every day I reflect with anxiety on the slowly accelerating aging process that is undeniably taking place in my body and mind. I so long to get past this fear and reclaim joy before I am quite old. As I ponder this longing, I see that I am also afraid of reclaiming joy. It is unknown territory; the spaciousness I imagine seems itself terrifying. Perhaps this fear, too, is an echo of early childhood, of thousands of experiences of being abandoned or punished for exercising my will.

Fear

Since my last post I've been continuing to look closely at fear. This morning I did 40 minutes of metta (lovingkindess) meditation, followed by 20 minutes of looking at the sensations of fear in my right throat and torso. I noticed more clearly the thoughts that happen when I put attention on these sensations: I should be doing something different. I don't know what I'm doing. I should be doing something else. I should be doing what someone else tells me to do. I don't know where this is going. I'm afraid of curling up into a tiny ball.

Actually, what I noticed more clearly was the emptiness of these thoughts. What I noticed was how little basis they have in reality. Very exciting.

I made a commitment to stay in the present moment throughout the day as much as possible--to never consciously escape, and to use the reminder that appears every 20 minutes on my computer screen. What I've noticed most in the 100 minutes since then is fear, and the associated thoughts. I've been noting the thoughts as a way of dismissing them.

It's remarkable the extent to which my actions are motivated by fear. It's wonderful and amazing to see this more and more clearly, and thus become more and more free.

Reliving trauma

Over the weekend, I was unexpectedly called upon to help out in a situation that triggered me. I was attending a weekend orienteering meet for which Eric was one of the organizers. I learned when I arrived Friday that he had not yet produced the hundreds of maps needed for the event, and that help was needed all night Friday and all night Saturday. As the map productoin work progressed, new, unexpected needs made themselves known, and throughout, it seemed that I was the most appropriate person to fulfill most of these needs. So I did so. The first night I worked most of the night together with one to three other people; for the final hour (4-5 am), I worked alone. The second night I worked all night with Eric until 4am.

Throughout all of this, I experienced anger and resentment. My mind kept wanting to dwell on strategies for revenge and for avoiding such situations in the future, along with self-loathing for my emotions, for my circular pattern of mind-states, for allowing myself to be in this situation, and for not having a generous attitude.

I have been in many similar situations before, and in this one I was more objective about the situation than ever before. I was more successful than ever before at repeatedly removing my attention from the thoughts and placing my attention on the physical feelings. These feelings were located in my right throat and torso, specifically in the lower right chest and upper right abdomen. The sensations were more well-defined than usual. When I tried to describe them to myself, the word "panic" came to mind. Whenever I didn't have a handle on what the situation was, and especially whenever Eric took actions without explaining to me what his intentions were, the panic rose to fever pitch and I felt that I could hardly stand it. The mind was flooded with thoughts of violence and escape. The sensations and thoughts became most intense just as the situation was about to close: it was 4am on Sunday, the work had been completed, and I was sitting in bed waiting for Eric to join me. As is typical for him, he did some additional tasks that he hadn't explained to me before coming to bed, and as I observed this I felt utterly beside myself. In the past I would have raged at Eric or physically escaped. Instead, I stayed still, focusing my mind on the sensations and verbalizing them to Eric. My verbalizing was a mixture of objective description of how I was feeling ("I'm feeling really horrible, it feels awful, I feel crazy, I want this to stop, I don't know what to do, I can't see a way out") and blame ("I want you to tell me what you're doing. When you don't tell me what you're doing I feel horrible. I want you to stop acting like a crazy person. I want you to act more sanely and stop harming yourself by depriving yourself of sleep."). I felt that if I didn't verbalize the blaming thoughts, I would be shouldering all the blame myself and I would have felt completely hopeless. At several points I began sobbing and a couple of times I vocalized the thought that I wished this life was over because it seemed like I was never going to find a way out of being repeatedly retraumatized.

The next morning I slept until noon. When I awoke, I felt depleted.

The more I refrain from rage and escape, and the more I focus on the physical sensations, the more I believe that I did experience trauma as a child. On a gut level, however, I find this very difficult to believe. I wonder whether it would seem more real to me if I were in a support group of survivors and/or if my friends, relatives, and associates knew I was a trauma survivor, but I feel very uncomfortable about "coming out". On a gut level, I fear that people won't believe me, or will make incorrect assumptions about me (e.g. that I was sexually abused), or will give me attention that's painful to bear, or will think less of me. I feel angry and disbelieving that Trip, my therapist, had no information for me when I asked if he knew of support groups for trauma survivors, given that he is a specialist in working with trauma survivors. I just now searched the web for "survivor childhood trauma" and felt very unsatisfied with what I found, though I am not sure I know what I was looking for.

During this weekend's internal ordeal, I reflected on other situations in my life where it seems I am triggered, and found an incremental amount of new insight. I reflected on how I feel when I witness the anger of others, and it made more sense to me than before that I absolutely cannot be present for such situations. It's not a matter of trying harder, it's just not possible for me right now, given that I can barely be present for my own anger. It also makes sense to me that I can't be present for Rosemary's adolescent suffering, since it is so similar in character to my current suffering. Today, after I awoke at noon, I spent about 30 minutes sitting in bed and gently directing my attention toward the sensations, which are still present and which can be further activated in a fraction of a second simply by reflecting on the experiences of the weekend. I found (as I'd found in the past) that it was very hard to keep my attention there. I was distracted by fears that I should be doing something else, that I should escape, that I should be fulfilling the needs of others. I kept bringing my attention back, and even then it was challenging to bring the attention deeply into the sensations--I kept wanting to absent-mindedly float on the surfaces of them. It is richly rewarding to attend deeply into the sensations, but it takes a great deal of patience and focus. Of course, it is much easier to attend to the sensations now, in the absence of triggers, than it was last night.

Right now, as I write, I notice a self-critical attitude for spending my time here at this task ("when the sun is out!"), for slouching, for still being in my pajamas, for not having groomed myself, and for allowing myself to be alone instead of attending the orienteering event.

Unusual, uncomfortable physical sensations

I haven't felt motivated to post lately because meditation has become a much more ordinary experience than it had been during the three months after my Forest Refuge rereat.

I think I've written before about unusual sensations in the right side of my body. These sensations are uncomfortably strong today. I would say that I don't feel well, but I wouldn't say it to many people, because it seems unlike what people usually mean when they say they aren't feeling well. It's a set of physical sensations for which the physical cause is not apparent. The sensations themselves are not painful, but somehow they are quite distracting and seem to trigger pessimism and an urge to make them go away, to squeeze them out or cry them out. The most prominent sensations are tension in the right jaw, a mildly pulsing pressure throughout the right side of my throat and upper chest, and a tension in the right trapezius that I can only describe as an urge to bring my head toward my right shoulder. There is also mild tingling and tension over a broad region of my right abdomen.

Often, I can alleviate pain and other physical discomforts by putting my attention upon them in meditation. This allows me to see the sensations in fine detail. They are seen to be a series of distinct sensations, several per second, rather than a single uninterrupted sensation, and one notices that the distinct sensations take up less than 50% of the time (this is often called noticing the "spaciousness" of the pain). The theory is that pain is magnified by fear and other aversive emotions, but that when the pain is seen to be discontinuous, much of the fear dissipates and the pain becomes less bothersome.

But these sensations are not yielding to this approach. I think it is because there are several neighboring centers of sensation. I can place my focus on only one at a time. The others are so physically proximal that neighboring ones continue to bother me while I am trying to focus on just one.

I've had days like this several times over the past several weeks.

Although meditation feels ordinary and often uninteresting, I still meditate every day, although frequently now I will meditate less than an hour in a day. A week ago I was inspired to practice disciplined noting, and I did so with enthusiasm for several days, but now I feel unenthused about that.

Subtle ripplings

I am noticing a somewhat painful physical/emotional reaction to small physical movements, such as moving my mouse wheel or keyboarding. It's initially felt as a tingling in the fingers. With mindfulness, a fraction of a second later I feel a kind of longing rippling through the right torso.

Anicca

Anicca is the Pali term for "impermanence" or "inconstancy".

In recent days I've noticed an increasing sense of bodily inertia, especially during meditation. During meditation, I just don't want to move my body at all -- don't want to move my arm to check the time on my phone, don't want to lift my head to improve my posture. A couple of nights ago I realized the reason: each bodily movement is now accompanied by pain. The pain is not located in the part being moved, but in the torso, and it is akin to sadness.

Describing this to Eric after dinner last night, it occurred to me that this might be the sadness of loss -- of realizing, with each tiny movement, the impermanence of things. The sadness of saying good-bye to one bodily position as I move onto the next. The sadness appears at the tiniest movement, even at the moment I tense my muscle in preparation for movement. In other words, the inertia might be an insight into anicca.

Last night I awoke around 3 and sat up to meditate for 90 minutes. I chose to experiment with this phenomenon. When I noticed my posture was slumped, I very very slowly exerted myself to sit up straight, paying close attention to the sensations of sadness in the chest. Following Daniel Ingram's suggestion on the Dharma Overground website in response to my description of my practice, I paid special attention to the vibrational quality of the sadness. Although the sadness was uncomfortable, it was also a relief to look directly at it.

As I became more and more aware of the sadness, I wanted to let go of it. At one point, amidst this desire to let go, I felt heat gather in the chest, and over a period of perhaps 20 seconds, I felt some of this sadness drop away. This was accompanied by a letting go of my monitoring, journaling mind.

I moved into a state that felt like nothingness but which I imagined was not actually nothingness but just the unfamiliar absence of my usual monitoring, journaling mind. I had been feeling this monitoring mind (which seems about the same as "the chattering mind" and "the mind that wants to be special") as a burden that I've increasingly wanted to drop, and I've been seeing it intellectually as something that must be keeping me from being fully present. The monitoring mind kept wanting to re-activate, so I shifted my attention to the urge to re-activate. This was interesting and satisfying. The state that I describe as nothingness only appeared intermittently and for very brief (1-2 seconds) periods of time.