Thank you Sheila for the much needed validation, support and the links. I had actually read your essay before, and found it comforting that someone else saw the connections I did.Originally Posted by Sheila
I'm still feeling awful at the moment, my brain wont cooperate and its difficult to string words together to form meaningful sentences. I know what I want to say, but I don't seem to have the cognitive energy to make it happen.
Nothing I'm doing seems to be helping to speed this process up or even make me feel better. No matter what I do or don't do, I wake up feeling like I'm being tortured (like other people have mentioned). At some point in the day, usually mid-afternoon to evening, it starts to subside. Wearing a sleep mask and ear plugs to sleep, keeps me asleep a bit longer in the mornings, but sometimes I have to get up early.
I sometimes sit outside in the sun, I sometimes go for a walk around the park, I sometimes walk to buy groceries, I sometimes take a warm bath. Sometimes it makes me feel slightly better, sometimes just serves as a distraction and sometimes makes me feel worse.
The memory of how things have made me feel worse in the past make me nervous to do them again, its like I'm constantly being re-traumatized by trying to do things which are supposed to help, and the unpredictable nature of it all doesn't help.
I'm in a really dark and lonely place at the moment. It feels exactly like descriptions of going through a dark night of the soul experience, so I have no concept of having any gifts or what my future purpose in life might be. Even though there has been some improvement physically, I'm still struggling to find the motivation each day to stay alive and keep hoping.
Chi-ball was one of the parts of my life which has fallen away. I have tried to do it at home by myself a few times, but each time, it has made be feel worse, even more ungrounded than I already am. Its impossible to find anything I'm still interested in, and I used to be interested in almost everything in one way or another.
I'm torn down the middle between thinking this is pathological depersonalization and believing its evolutionary ego dissolution. Swinging back and forth between these two perspectives is difficult. I don't see how I can see it as both though. One of them needs to be 'fixed' and the other one needs to be accepted and allowed.
The few people who remain in my life see me as needing to be fixed or changed. They are waiting for me to 'get better', which is supportive in some ways, but in another way it pulls me from my attempts at acceptance of the current reality.
I listen to a lot of Adyashanti and other spiritual teachers, seems to help to keep me calm, especially in the evenings, when I can allow myself to fall completely into a spiritual perspective, and trust, then its easier to stop the rising terror which comes from seeing myself as being sick and out of control and beyond hope or help.
You wrote that everything is happening together for a reason. I so much want to believe that. But something else which has fallen away is all my beliefs. They used to comfort me, but now I see beliefs and ideas as creations of a mind trying to hold onto an illusion of control. No matter what I think these days, I find myself caught between a rock and a hard place with no way out
It seems that writing helps, now that I've got started, I'm afraid I might never stop. Perhaps it keeps me in my head and distracted from the reality of what I'm actually experiencing. According to some spiritual teachers, being in our heads all the time is not good, we need to be in our hearts...live from feelings rather than thinking. But what if our feelings are neuro-emotions?
I journal, but some of the time even that seems pointless and a distraction from something else I'm 'supposed' to be doing, if I could figure out what that was.
I think I had better stop writing now.
