Die, and breathe the clear air once more

Odd coincidences: last Tuesday, the day before it all went down, I wrote in my journal that the only thing that really could lift me out of the mental funk, the war of the monsters raging in my heart and head, was a complete death.

“This life has reached its absolute limits; the only solution is a death.”

I wasn’t talking about suicide, and I didn’t feel depressed. I could feel myself straining at the limits of my beliefs, but unable to get past them. It felt like it did six years ago right before I stopped being anorexic, but hadn’t been able to make the decision. It looked impossible, but life would carry on somehow. I didn’t know how until I really let it all fall apart.

The inner control freak

A hundred of these in my head

Since Wednesday, there have been a lot of shifts around mentally and emotionally. Sending off my first book contract, I felt as though I had at long last come back to the place where I was meant to be, what my heart sings at doing. It took a few days for everything to settle, to feel as though I was moving forward again. That sense of being trapped in my own personal Groundhog Day began to subside.

I’m still in slightly strange territory – emotionally more than anything. As though somebody just gave me a new set of legs and I have to learn to walk again. It was like this when I first moved to Manchester and my life became disorientatingly different.

I’ve been doing a lot of meditation around the inner control freak. I imagine it as being like the robot from Lost In Space, waving its arms around ridiculously and shouting “Danger Will Robinson! Danger!”

In fact, as I discovered during a meditation this morning, it’s more like there’s about a hundred of them. Imagine the scene: a hundred robots waving their outsize and rather useless arms around, shouting at everything as though it’s dangerous. I’ve been trying so hard to sit on one side of the fence or the other, but of course the answer lies in realising I am none of these beliefs or ideas, but the person experiencing them.

Exactly where I’m supposed to be?

Wednesday brought a halt to a great deal of things, including the pain I’d been in over my life. Gradually, the last few days of meditation and settling down, I could see that most of it was a feeling of having come to the end of the road but having no idea how to move forward.

Sometimes, what’s needed is something like an explosion, a crash landing that forces change. New beliefs are fine theoretically, but they only really take over when you’re forced to see the world in a new and better way. That certainly happened to me last week.

I’ve spent most of the last few years feeling out of place, as though I’ve veered off the road and can’t find my way back. The growing sense of unease, especially after I hit thirty, left me in this really awkward space. One of the freak robots was furious at me for not already being ‘there’, another saying I could never get ‘there’, and a variety of others had different opinions in between.

That’s what I was living with, and I didn’t even know it until the end of last week. This morning, I listened to some Adyashanti, discussing ‘my will’ and ‘the heart’s will’. For the first time I really played with the idea that I’m in exactly the right place, where I need to be, right now. Of course, the robots are all waving their arms and bumping into each other, but for the first time I can let them be.

Once again, I’d like to thank all those who were there for me, in whatever way you were.