THE BONDAGE OF SELF

The bondage of self...prisons of our own making...it's very true that each of us is an interpreter of her own experience.  The information that comes to me through my senses, the thoughts and feelings it gives rise to, are all filtered though the whole of my consciousness and then it is I who assign it meaning and value.  I grew up with a mother whose anxiety undermined me and whose certainty that nothing good could ever happen filled me with despair. That insecurity and despair became the deepest part of me. Freud talked about drives, the inner unknown compulsions and reactions which unconsciously control what we do, what we think, what we believe. Insecurity and despair were driving me. They were the oldest part of me, and they colored everything that happened to me. No matter what happened, I found a way to turn it into proof of all my failings and that I was doomed to be alone, unloved and unfulfilled. There was the bondage of self, the prison of my own making.
     I used to blame myself for the black cloud that seemed to follow me around.  "All right, I see the insecurity and despair but I can't seem to get past them. I'm too weak, too resistant; I have a fatal flaw I can't even see much less do anything about. I'm fairly sophisticated about psychological twists and turns; I've been in therapy; I've studied the great universal spiritual principles that human beings have turned to to quiet and comfort the turmoil.  So I must be to blame that none of that has taken away the darkness at my core."
     But somewhere along the way, I began to understand that the core of darkness wasn't solid, real, written in stone.  It was entrenched but as ephemeral as the lightest idea, a snippet of song floating through my head. I began to imagine it as the purveyor of bad news, a witness for the prosecution, a broadcaster with a very faulty signal. I saw it as something fluid, amorphous, viscous that I could move and shape. I began to understand that what we call reality is only the product of our imaginations. That was the great insight, that all my dark thoughts and feelings had no reality but the one my  interpreting consciousness gave to them.  That core had given me a very harsh view of my reality but I could create a new way of seeing. I myself could bring down the prison walls.  
     Change comes in fits and starts, sometimes with a rush and a sense of exhilaration.  Sometimes I feel I'm a rabbit in a burrow, nosing a rock inch by inch that completely blocks the way ahead. But I keep pushing, in the hope that the rock will fall away and a wide vista will stretch out before me and I'll know that I am heading where I want to go. 
     My daily life goes on and some days are good and some days are bad. But behind all of it is a hard won bedrock faith that change is possible. even for me.