For the last few days, the negative voices in my head have been very loud. It's the usual litany: it's too late, what's the point, you aren't good enough. By this time I know those voices don't describe reality; they aren't connected to any "truth." I know that I can detach, put space around the voices, distance myself so I can have a different perspective. I'm aware it's possible for the world to look very different if I turn my vision just a few degrees, lift it up to that place beyond my shame and fear.
But there are days, like the last few, in which I'm powerless over the voices of my despair. They produce feelings in me - oppressive, debilitating - and I can't rouse myself to act in spite of them. They have me in their grip and action, any action feels beyond me.
I no longer think something will happen or I'll come across the magic formula and somehow days like this will never come again. It may be my metabolism or genes or a hard childhood - whatever the reason, I accept that sometimes I stumble into, if not the abyss, then onto the stairway leading down into it.
The question is how to get through. One way is to keep repeating to myself things I know that push back the negativity: reminding myself it isn't "real," it's only a part of me, a part I can bring down to size; other feelings are possible if I turn away from the mesmerizing voices that want to bring me down. I can look for the places despair sinks down into my body, focus on them until I feel it dissolve away. I can close my eyes and look for the place of letting go. I can reach out to the benevolence I believe exists outside myself. I can try to connect.
The answer is always spiritual. I can act as if I'm not bogged down in the muck but it never gets me very far. Just as you can't cook a stew until you light the gas, so I can't get up and do until I feel deep in my body the connection to a power, a force greater than myself. Even to search for it is to begin to find it and although I may have to take minuscule steps I can be headed in the right direction.
My spirit wants to move that way. I want to be free.
Writing these words has made me feel better. They come from deep inside me. They move me toward connection.
There are "frameworks" and "contexts" which are the opposite of what interests me. Many contexts grow out of rigid ideas - the orthodoxies of organized religion, political ideologies, conspiracy theories. These are closed systems and their main characteristic - and failing - is that they don't allow for new information and ideas. Everything that might be "new" is made to fit a locked world view, interpreted as further evidence of the rightness of the particular set of beliefs. These systems constrict rather than expand, limit rather than increase.
All beliefs - those that constrict and those that expand - are just that, beliefs. For a long time, I believed every negative thought the voices in my head shouted at me, believed that I wasn't good enough and was doomed to frustration and unhappiness. I thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, some flaw I couldn't see. And because it's hard to act against that tidal wave of fear and doubt, the facts of my life lived out those thoughts. I was frustrated and unhappy, felt alien and isolated; I censored myself over and over again because, since I was doomed to failure, what was the point of even trying to achieve and connect? These self-loathing, self-lacerating beliefs ruled me and turned me into an emotional anorexic; I was starving for connection and purpose but I couldn't feed myself. I was living in a closed system of negative beliefs and everything that happened was proof of the rightness of those beliefs. How could it be otherwise when I myself was the main witness for the prosecution?
Then something inside me began to shift, and the closed narrow ideology of my self-loathing and fear slowly, very slowly showed enough cracks so that the light of hope, at first a despairing kind of hope, could come in. A flicker of possibility, the merest shadow and I grabbed on to it. I didn't know it then, but I had come a great distance in order to begin, to climb out of the bushes and step on to the path.
Questions worth asking:
If belief, meaning and value are conferred by us through our interpreting consciousness, how do we know what's True with a capital T? Does Truth even exist?
How can we create a new context through which to judge our experience, transform a context that constricts into one that expands?
How do we move toward freedom?
