In the Bardo?

 Right now is a bardo and has a lot of possibility for growth and happiness...It is continously arising, dwelling, and ceasing. 

Pema Chodron

What is a bardo, crazy lady?

A bardo, according to Pema Chodron and Tibeten Buddhists is a gap, an in-between state, where something has ended and something new has yet to begin.  

In her life, it came as a state of grondlessness, where she reports she experienced a loss of bearings. Part of her wanted nothing more than to go back to what is familiar but at the same time she had a deeply intuitive feeling about the possibility of it. She told herself, 

This is a chance of a lifetime...soemthing just disappeared on me and I am in this pregnant place where anything can happen, and I can go anywhere I want. I kept oscillating between the great possibility and the terror and wanting to go back

Being in this bardo, what I would refer to as the dark night of the soul, is said by Buddhist teachers to be an experience where we are  torn between wanting to leap and wanting to go back to the familiar (nostalgia).

I am not sure where I am in this dark night. I definitely feel the groundlessness of it.  I feel unsettled.  Part of me wants to run back to what is familiar and the other part of me is excited about leaping into what Life will give me next. It is like I have one foot, or at the least the toes of one foot, in the past and the toes of the other foot in the what-could-be...I keep shifting my weight from one foot to the other. 

Though I have an adventerous spirit, both my amygdala and this neurotic personality, which is always trying to prevent the samskaras stuffed within from resurfacing, doesn't like the instability and unpredicatability of groundlessness and uncertainity. It wants to go back to what it knew. 

Spirit, however, is stronger and louder these days. so though I will still empty the weight from that foot pointing in the direction of the unknown and the "Great possibility "at times, I will more often lean back on it with all my weight. Hmm! Part of me is so excited about what awaits this human there, even though she is scared sh$#less at times and still finds herself, at times, wanting to go back...both physically and mentally to what she knew.  There is no going back mentally though.  I realize that. .I cannot unlearn what I learnt Once we get this far in our awakening process, there is no going back....just forward.

All is well.