What is happening in my soul right now, in the here and now?
Right now, in this moment I feel tense. I don't want to reveal the ugliness of my resistance to grow. My pathology has a firm grip at the scruff of my neck and anytime I step towards the truth there is a strong yank. I wimper and submit.
Submit to what?
Submit to a life that is ruled by hiding and by lies.
Every breath I make. Every step I take is inundated with tension. Tension is the whoremaster that keeps me on track. The track is deeply rutted in worldly affairs. Doing the right thing is the only voice in my head. Throughout any given day, the voice holds me hostage and I, the puppet, respond, react.
Concrete examples will help to illustrate:
This morning I wrote an email stating that I did not want to write, that I felt too vulnerable to share with anyone who happens to read my webpage that I am in a dreadful, stuck place in my inner process right now. This evening I force myself to write because I don't want to be the only one who has not written an updated personal statement. It is not an inner desire that motivates me, but an external one.
Also today, I challenged myself to do my homework consistently, every 5 minutes for a half hour period. I did it twice.
Today I had the opportunity to have 3 hours at home while my children were in school. I wanted this very much - both to take care of some business and to spend time writing. Instead, I decided that it was more important to 'rescue' my 5 year old son from a somewhat uncomfortable ride home and added an extra hour and a half driving to my day and no time at home alone.
I played tickle wrestle with my son, all the while thinking that I should be cooking dinner, cleaning up, making phone calls, etc.
I could go on, but it is time to share my most recent dreams:
Teepee structures being erected. One is enormous and has huge branches protruding from it at unweildy angles. The man and woman erect it anyway. I am beside this structure and it collapses. I freeze - can't move. After a delay I run and scream but noone gets hurt. The dream shifts and I am in a church/cathedral, looking for something.
The teepee structures represent the unwieldy ideas and thought processes that are described above. Thank God they are collapseing, but I react to the collapse by being paralyzed, tense.
My second dream:
I enter a room with red carpets and high ceilings. There is a man in the room whom I think is tired. I enter another room and there is a group of children playing music. A baby, a baby that is, goes up to the drum and starts jamming - awesome rhythms!
Why do I think the man is tired? Because it is an ingraided, automatic reflex to project onto people that they are needy so that I can take care of them. I am a pervasive caretaker. This allows me to keep the focus on others, which is just where my pathology wants it to be. The drumming baby is my primal, healthy self, ready to absolutely boogie!
My homework from these two dreams is to "Acknowledge when I am in 'teepee world' or caretaking. Then go to the church and be aware of the drumming boy" and to do this every half hour.
The first part of the homework is easy. I am always in 'teepee world' or caretaking. Every time I do my homework it is obvious to me that I have drifted off into some abstract ideas, worried about what someone is going to think of me, what the 'right thing' is, etc..
Although the second part of the homework is the juicy part, I have a much harder time doing it. It is easier to stay in the horid muck than it is to move out of it.
This is why I did not want to write this, because this is where I am right now. Still stuck. Still tense.