April, 2009
Dream: I am walking in the woods. It is winter but it is a warm day. There is no one physically there. It is all familiar and at the same time it is all alien. It is like I have landed on another planet and I am exploring. Even though I am physically alone, I do not feel alone. In fact I have never felt so held in so much presence.
Having this kind of grace inside of me is something I have only ever felt for fleeting periods of time. A few months once, and a few days here and there spread over a lifetime. I am learning now to live with this grace, day in and day out.
It is funny to say but it is excruciating to live in the world with his presence in this way. The outer world is so full of pain and disappointment. I have always wanted to find a place in the outer world where it felt safe to have a bit of grace, where I wasn’t physically alone, where some one else gave me permission to be true to myself.
My pathology has fed off this desire. It has always made me believe that to feel this way I needed someone else to share this with. I now know otherwise. While it may be true that “Where two or more gather in my name, I am there”. Even that takes two people, each of who are willing to stand in their own knowing and truth of themselves and of the divine.
Recently two of my closest friends fell in love. One of them lives in an apartment in the front of the house where I currently live and the other was moving in with her. It was a good deal all around for me. They were both blossoming and as a result I had more with each of them and both all at once. It was fun. Well at least until it wasn’t. He moved back out and along with feeling the pain of what had happened, I felt a particular devastation inside myself, like there had been a brightness in the world and someone had taken the light away.
This has been one of those places where it has been excruciating to be in the outer world and stay with myself. It has been excruciating to stand with them each and not really know how to be there beyond standing there with the love that I feel for both of them.
I could see how my pathology wanted to use what had happened to take me out of this place. My pathology has always wanted me to believe that what I felt was dependent on things working out a certain way in the outside world. I went to bed a couple nights later and I had this dream:
I am at my office with a man talking about what has happened with my friends and about the pain I feel around it. When I stop he pushes me down on my desk and lies on top of me. I feel like a kid as I sob and feel the pain and the relief of what is happening inside and with not having to figure anything out.
There was something so miraculous and yet so ordinary in this dream. Here I was struggling someplace beyond any outer edge of my capacity to stay present and he came to me in this place to help. So miraculous because he is there for me when I need him, so ordinary because in this place I have learned to let myself need him before and beyond everyone and everything else.
My commitment has evolved in my ten years in the work. My first commitment was to expose all that stood between me and the truth. I worked for years and continue to work to expose any ways that pathology wants to come through me. I have had to learn to feel on a level that was beyond anything I could have conceived of when I did my first session a decade ago.
I made a commitment a decade ago to myself. I made a commitment to get out of my own way and to find what there was inside beyond all the “lostness” that I had internalized and in which I was proud to live.
I did not know then what that would mean. I did not know how much I would have to literally pack my bags up from this world and move to this new world inside, where his presence is not just there in my dreams but in my life every day.
A dream: I see a man like the man from the dream where he lays on top of me. I get it, in the dream, that he is the divine and I just want him. I run up to him and grab a hold of him and as I do everything shifts. Suddenly he is inside of me facing the same way as me and we are facing out into space. We are moving so fast and yet because we are in space there is no reference point and so it is as if we are still all at the same time.
I had this dream after I wrote the first part of this piece. It speaks to the other part of why it is so excruciating to be in this place. It is vulnerable to let myself want him this way and to really let in how much that he wants me.
In this place everything shifts. I move and at the same time I rest in a way that is beyond my own conception of what movement and rest is. In this place I feel myself in a way that is beyond my own conception of who I am.
My commitment is to continue to let myself want him in this way. My commitment is to grow into what he is showing me in this place.