Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth

Today I fill my paper with the breathings of my heart. 

As I have written several times over the last month I have been feeling restless and "disquieted" somehow.  I also mentioned that I believed that feeling experience was caused by some unexpressed emotion that I was resisting through repression.  I knew expression and change of some kind was required of me. I just didn't know what or how.

Feeling particularly restless yesterday afternoon I decided to just sit with this feeling and meditate on the cause of it.  I asked this question: "What emotional experience am I resisting and what life change is it requiring me to make?"  I meditated on the same question before I went to bed.  I woke up with an answer...a very clear answer this morning. So here are the breathings of my heart:

The Breathing of My Heart

The emotional experience I am trying to stuff by shoving into some mental trunk for weeks now...is fear.  I held it, stuffed it, pushed it down so I could close the cover and keep it away from my conscious awareness but it is still very much alive.  It is still thrashing about, banging on the walls, and screaming at me to hear it.  By repressing it I only made it angry and restless.  That is where my restlessness is coming from.

What am I afraid of? 

I fear that this pelvic condition may be life threatening.  There I wrote out what my heart was breathing. It is not the first time I felt the borderline fear of a possible impending death because of a specific physical condition.  I feared the breast lumps I had...especially the first few... could be life threatening.  (There is some rational reasoning to that: my sister has stage 4 breast cancer and my aunt died from breast cancer.  I have been referred for MRI's and biopsies by radiologists).  I feared the 8 month course of sore throat and hoarseness I had a few years back could be life threatening.  (There is also some rational reasoning to that: my mother died from throat cancer at the age of 44 and 8 months is a long time to have a sore throat. Laryngoscopes showed I had some spots on my glottis that eventually went away).  I also feared and still do to some extent that this cardiac condition may take me early.  (The rational behind that is self explanatory to anyone who has followed my blogs). 

So there were other times I "wondered" if my life would soon be coming to an end because of something specific my body was doing.  I "wondered".  I did not obsess.  I did not freak out.  I did not stop living...I wondered and some times that wonder bordered on worry and fear.  So when they all proved to be non life threatening  I was so relieved, obviously, but I also learned to distrust my fear and any rational explanation for my physical symptoms. 

Though all conditions could be objectified as being real, there was some shaming involved (both the external and internal kind) for my  presentation .  Ironically shame is the emotion I am most resistant too.  In order to push shame away I had to push away the idea that "I was afraid..." for I believed that it was not okay to be afraid. So I learned to "stuff" my fear, delay seeking help for abnormal functioning of the body, and underplay and dismiss my understanding of pathophysiology. 

When this pelvic condition made itself known months ago...I told myself from the beginning that it is just a flare up of endometriosis prior to menopause...(which it very likely is).  Of course with the breakthrough bleeding, the abnormal amount of pain, bloating and now I discover weight loss...fear started to resurface.  I stuffed it down...again and again...I stuffed it down. Instead of just letting it be heard, listened to, supported and then let go...it festered in this mental trunk getting uglier and uglier.  I didn't push for answers because of the shame and the lack of hope that I would get one (stuck in my past experience of getting help for my heart). It has been nine months...nine months of a festering physical condition and a festering fear.  The energy I tried to repress is becoming a cyclone inside of me.  That is why I am restless. I have to let it out. It all begins with naming the emotion and expressing it.    I fear that this pelvic condition may be life threatening.  I feels so much better just by writing that.

As I look into this deeper and meditate on it more I realize it is not the particular  condition...not this one, not the others...that is the cause of my repressed fear based restlessness.  It is not the condition, nor the very common fear of death that is the source of my present suffering.  It is my resistance to fear that is the problem.  The fear of death is a global fear, is it not?  I am not alone in experiencing it. Where does this fear come from?  It comes from a belief system so prevalent within me...within many of us if we take the time to look... that it controls how we live. I have come so far in my understanding of truth but, I sadly realize today that I am still being governed by fears and limiting beliefs.  Working on it but I have a ways to go.  I fear because I believe.

The irrational Beliefs Many of us Share

I still fear death. The fear of death comes from a universal belief that death is real...that the death of the body is the ending of everything. Despite my seeking to get beyond this notion I still believe, to some extent, that life is limited by time and other things of the physical world. This belief comes from an even greater belief that the physical world and what happens in the body is all there is to life.  How many people believe that? I tend to expand on this notion in a personal sense.  I believe, I  do not deserve to live as long as other people.  Believing that, I  personally fear that my time is running short and I will not have the time to complete what I am here to do, that I won't fulfill my calling, that I won't make a distinct and positive difference in the world, that I will leave people needing more of me( my children)...and that I won't do what God wants me to do. That adds a fair amount of "pressure" to my fearful mind.

I believe the world is full of suffering, illness, death and loss and it is spread out in allotments according to who deserves these things more.  Because of who I am, I believe I need to take on more suffering than others to make up for my time here. I am afraid that God wants me to suffer even though it sounds so absolutely ridiculous as I write it down.

I believe the world only has so much love,  health, joy, abundance and blessing to pass around.  These things are limited and must be distributed to the people who deserve them most. I believe, I am not worthy of the good things in life so if my life starts to get good ( Don's presence in it has lifted so much stress from my shoulders), the good  will be taken away once it is realized that the wrong person has it. My getting really sick is one way the universe can take it away...thus my fear of and possibly my creation of a physical illness

 I know as I write the beliefs out that they are irrational and not based on evidence.  They will be easy to  challenge, disprove and restructure once they are put on the table for examination...as I am attempting to do...as we should all attempt to do. .  These beliefs, however,  lay so deeply in the subconscious they are hard to recognize let alone access and manipulate.  But if we want to change the way we feel, and therefore change the way we live these precious lives we have been given, fulfilling what we are here to do...we must recognize, accept, express , own and release our feelings and the beliefs that are responsible for them. We need to go to the trunk and open it up. 


Unexpressed emotions will never die.  They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
Sigmund Freud

All is well in my world.