THE BONDAGE OF SELF, AGAIN

I've been thinking all day about the bondage of self. It's been one of those days when I believe what the voices in my head are telling me. One of those days when I am nothing but resistance, against all the things I need to do, against moving in any way, internally and externally. One of those days when I can't seem to fight against shame and the spectre of a hundred failures. One of those days, despite my believing so deeply that I'm constructing a prison of my own making. I alone confer meaning on my experience. I know this in my bones and still I have days when I let my harshest thoughts become "real," as if they are beyond my control.

     The bondage of self...sometimes I feel I can break the chains I bind myself up in. I imagine soaring like an eagle, riding on gentle breezes that will never fail to keep me aloft. I imagine that freedom will last forever. I imagine I won't have to work for the only freedom I will ever feel.

     I know better. I, very few of us, will walk into another dimension where all will be free and easy. So I remind myself that the eagle must look for food, as I must look for ways to chip at my chains. Sometimes I feel like a rabbit in a burrow, pushing a rock forward inch by inch, unable to see around it. Then the rock falls away and I find myself exactly where I want to be, or maybe it's better to say I want to be exactly where I find myself.

     Then the cycle begins again. I build another prison and work to break free. Even on days like today, when I'm nothing but resistance, I know great wheels are turning inside me and I'll be willing to push the rock again. Not like Sisyphus, as a punishment, but as a woman who knows from direct experience that the rock will fall away, that moments of freedom are possible for me. 

          

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.