And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
Ray Bradbury
What is that feeling in me?
You will never guess what I woke up with this morning....so, so uncanny ! I woke up with a feeling of hope! I mean real live hope infusing my present experience of Life with a good deal of Zest. Hope and zest...wow! After all my talking about the unnecessary and sometimes unskillful purpose of hope in our lives, after feeling a bit more "hopeless" than usually with the unset of this bout of physical symptoms...I wake up to feel the energy of hope vibrating through me. I am certainly confused by it but I am also excited and enthusiastic. I have a purpose. I feel confident that I can accomplish something of importance to me and most likely many others. Why? What brought on this dramatic change of heart?
A Change in View About Hope
I talked to a non biased person yesterday about my hopelessness, about my present set of symptoms and how they were triggering past trauma and shame, how I was trying to accept all this emotional energy instead of pushing it back down, how I thought my health seeking trauma ( and that was validated by this person as something that would be very traumatic for anyone) was preventing the old stuff that so wanted to come up from doing so, only because it was in the way, blocking the exit ramp. In order to release the stuck pain energy of childhood trauma , that I feel so wants to come out, I had to release this somehow first . Of course , "release" means letting go of the emotional energy that keeps getting triggered within us, right? It does not require a diminishing or a dismissing of the experience or the emotions associated with it as if it never happened...It is simply a noticing, an allowing, an accepting and even an embracing of all that memory, all that pain. It involves a looking deeply into it...observing how it triggers us and how we tend to react and close down when we feel it. Then we learn to stop closing to it so we stop closing to what Life provides for us now . Without that energy pulling us into reactivity, we learn to keep the psyche hotel door open so all "guests" can come in and out without any notion of over staying their welcome.
From Hopeless Suffering to Hopeful Transcendence
Anyway...my point is after this conversation: I realized, even more clearly, how I tend to keep pushing it all down. With validation from a very wise, non biased person, I was able to see my experience as traumatic and "impersonal". It happens to many people. And that...lead me to say, "I am truly ready to heal from this!" And anyone who knows me, knows how I heal best...through my writing. I was inspired to go back to my novel...realizing that any blockages I have been having with the revising of the three books I have written had to do with this "most recent" trauma pain being in the way, because all three books address in one way or another the suffering that comes with trauma...more specifically...the "transcendence" that can come with trauma. One book is based on childhood, the original wounding. One is based on this health seeking experience and one is a copulation of all my experiences in order to show how we can transcend trauma and "suffering".
Unblocked and Unstuck
I was kind of stuck in the mud for years when it comes to my writing ...spinning around and around ...going back and forth from one book to the other, really feeling like I was not getting anywhere . I was sending each of them out but felt like I was sending a child to school when they were not developmentally ready to learn. I knew they all had to be revised before I could call them finished and ready. The question was: "Which one do I finish first?" Each of them, as I wrote them, offered a tremendous cathartic experience of opening up some doors so stuff could be released... but becasue of the lack of a natural flow and my going back and forth...it kept getting stuck. I would get blocked in one book, go to the other, get blocked there etc. Now I see what that natural flow is...just like in Life...I need to deal with the most recent "stuffed stuff" first ...allow that to be released upon the page...and the other stuff will naturally flow right out. I need to stay with this book about my health seeking experience until that is released in a truly healing way, so the deeper, childhood stuff can come up. So after I say, "The End!" with this book and mean it... I can go back to my book about my childhood with my late sister until I can once again say "The End!" and man it. Finally, from there I go to the book on transcendence because by then I will have more genuine "transcendence" to write about. How cool is that?
Inspired
So yesterday, after my conversation with this lovely and skillful communicator/listener I felt this great inspiration consume me. I went to back to my book and I sat down with it for what I thought was an hour... only to discover I hadn't moved from my chair in five hours. Five hours!!! That is inspiration...that is zest...and why? Because now I have hope. As contradictory as that sounds in regards to what I tend to think and write about "hope"; even though it makes me sound like a big fat hypocrite...I have "hope" and it feels good!
Yes I have that future, confident focus of "completing" this "goal" but mostly I just want to write and heal in this moment. That is what is so exhilarating for me. I have happily jumped into the river, with my feet up, and I am allowing it to take me to wherever it will take me with this. I am enjoying just being in the river, having that freedom of being unblocked and having my writing flow freely. . But I also have this feeling at the same time, that it is taking me to a pretty good place.
Everything from the restlessness I had a few months ago to the chest pain...and the triggered memories to this renewed inspiration has been guided by something amazing and invisible. I know that. All my suffering over the years has lead me to this point where I am right now. I am supposed to write!!! That is what I am here to do!!! I am to write the story of " one person", offer the puny experience of one little being who comes from a race of 7 billion to the world, just so the universal nature of the human experience can be recorded in some strange way, observed through a few insignificant words and then maybe used to help another human being somewhere go, "Oh! I see!"
I am so grateful right now, so very, very grateful.
This is hope.
Back to the book!
All is well in my world!
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