During December, 1988, I had begun setting time aside almost every day to focus in on my fear and allow it to surface. This process gradually turned into a kind of inner journal which finally became a preliminary to the trip to India. I need to put it into the account on that basis, just as I wrote it down at the time.
Thursday, December 22nd, 1988. My first fear is of not being real, of manufacturing an identity because of the sheer love of the drama, and of then becoming lost in it. My second fear is of actually mistaking my own creation for God, for beginning to identify myself with God and begin speaking, thinking, acting ex cathedra. My third fear is that loss of creature comforts, pain, deprivation, cold, loneliness, any or all of the above plus a myriad of other adversities I haven't named will cause me to come off the fantasy of loving God and I will find myself in a black hole of no-love, no-hope, no-connection - hell, in other words - the "sin against the Holy Spirit."
The last one is akin to all of the above, being - or experiencing - a sense of utter helplessness to come from a connected center, feeling in a sense out on the periphery through a kind of centrifugal force over which I am powerless to struggle, just finding myself there willy-nilly.
Friday, December 23rd. I am afraid of being alone in my vision of life, which comes from the poignantly tender moments of the past, including the love I have for the poignant experiences of people in so many, many stories - that, to the extent to which the vision cannot be deeply shared and fully experienced by those I love, it will be lost forever&emdash;which feels to me like a loss of paradise on earth! This is a deep, deep fear coupled with an equally deep longing and wish. Losing it feels like losing life itself. In a very real way, it holds my soul itself.
Saturday, December 24th. This one I had better call my "Pound of Tea" fear - the sense of total one-pointed focus on reaching a distant goal through sheer will combined with a gut level knowing of how to surmount the dangers, winning through a prolonged sense of total panic yet holding to the objective, only to be brought up short against my hybris in having ignored some simple factor - and the shock of realizing I was taking on a feeling of being God or being in the hands of God, and therefore invulnerable - only to discover I was wrong, and God is not protecting me, which feels like a punishment for hybris.
This one has a lot to do with my father - both my internalized father and his way of operating as a source of a sense of invulnerability - and also because of my very imperfect trust in hi - total because mindless and unwarranted because of the shock of repeated betrayal - which then gets transferred to God. My impulse is to sit in the lap of that power I have come to know as God, to learn to invest my trust through the wisdom of my body.
Retrospective note: the designation, "Pound of Tea," represents the dénouement of an episode which occurred a few years ago when I took money given to me by my mother to buy a "safe car," by which she meant virtually anything more solid than the VW Beetle I was driving at the time - but preferably a Volvo - and bought a cruising sailboat, and my husband Bill and I sailed it triumphantly across the water between Freeport (Maine) and Harpswell Sound, in through the Sound to our own boathouse cove off Prince's Point, and anchored it in the spot, as exact as I could make it, where my father had kept his own sailboat moored! Hybris! Well, on the trip back to the boatyard the following morning, we had to beat against the wind down the entire length of the Sound, and it took virtually the entire day - but finally rounded the Point and began the long, long run across the open water back to Freeport.
Quite soon it became clear to me - but coming as a shock - that we were in real difficulties here because of on-coming nightfall and the danger of running up on a rocky reef in the dark, should my plotting of our compass course or chance deviations from following it accurately during the run from Harpswell Point to the opening to Freeport cove be off by too much, lacking visual confirmation. I knew we had to locate the bellbuoy off the opening to the harbor before we would really know if we had made it. We flew over the water, heeled way over, with Bill checking the depth finder at frequent intervals - a good thing, because we did in fact come too close to a reef area at one point, but managed to avoid going aground on the rocks! At best, however, it was a real race with nightfall, and the light had already begun to fade by the time we finally heard and saw the bellbuoy, which felt miraculous, a realization that we had actually made it in time and weren't going to die after all!
It was only then that I realized how much terror had been driving me at a fever pitch of intensity throughout the entire run. We slipped quietly and gratefully past the black silhouette of Pound of Tea, a small hump-backed island on our port side which guarded the harbor, and made for the yacht basin, passing a black can buoy to starboard. CRUNCH! Suddenly, there we were, brought to a grinding, shocking halt on a hidden rock ledge! What had happened? Only one tiny detail I had forgotten to keep in mind : "Right red return!" - that's what! I had left the can buoy to starboard instead of to port - which is tantamount to running a red light in automobile traffic rules - and had paid the penalty. So much for the pride of navigational expertise!
Monday, December 26th. I guess what happened was that instead of taking time to work with the fear that came up on Christmas - fear connected with family, in other words - I acted it out with Bill and then expiated it with the family during our time together, including Bill. I think most of the day was really spent living out various manifestations of family guilt, in other words. This is a big one!
Even now I am not really getting to the roots of the issue, but am in a sense emulating Freud with his outward semblance (outward also to his own inwardness, of course!) of objectivity toward his own inner passion. Having just watched the final scene of Freud's life on TV makes this coping mechanism even clearer. I seem to want to keep the opposites in their places unreconciled, the yang and the yin, perhaps, the "adult" and the "child" parts, the "rational" or thinking part and the feeling, fearful, hurting part. It leaves me feeling flat and alienated, distanced from people I love and who love me! The struggle is between the ego and the part that longs for merging. I think the fear is of reliving the helpless, hopeless longing for the bliss of my mother's love and comfort. It feels safer to seek that bliss through pleasing a man. I feel a coldness toward any comparable reaching out toward a woman. When I think of resting in the lap of God, God is always a male principle. I think this must be a very basic fear, and I seem unwilling or unable to feel it fully. I feel cold inside, to myself.
Tuesday, December 27th. The anxiety persisted throughout yesterday, and I found myself bingeing on alcohol and chocolate last night, as I have been doing in the past few nights, bedtime being the worst.
In the middle of the night I woke and felt the answer to the pain of the anxiety, in not having taken care of myself, having given way to the guilt, which then fed the anxiety, which enhanced the guilt. I think the expiation rite pattern as a way of defending against guilt that I have engaged in all too often following on a bout of attacking must be very deeply ingrained in my habit repertoire. It sets off a really painful cycle of body response which segmentalizes me and renders me totally vulnerable to either rejection or affection. As a defense against either of these experiences, I tend to withdraw into a kind of ashamed growling acknowledgement of relationship. It's a big cycle, and I'm not sure where to break into it. Help me, dear God.
Wednesday, December 28th. Woke up this morning seeing the danger of acting out a fear of not having human contact, including sexual contact, if and when I allow my body to feel alive, which I began doing in my sleep. I realized clearly how easy it has been and can be to enact this fear, and by doing so, jeopardize the mutual integrity of what he and I have when we are both centered!
The feeling in this case is a body feeling of hunger. I have been unwittingly trying to appease it with food, chocolate and alcohol! Coming out of that compulsion feels wonderful, restores me to my body as a center, restores my confidence. I hope I can renew it whenever I start to "shut that door." Best way is to be aware! And to reach out to other people, and to move, physically.
Thursday, December 29th. This is such a big one, I am having trouble staying in touch with the feeling of basic fear! It feels tied into the very first right, the right to be in incarnation! Not to feel that is to regress to before the gulf loomed, and so not feeling that fear is a kind of denial of the split. On the other hand, healing that split, which involves letting go of it, feeling the fear, replacing it with total knowing that the healing is not only possible but infinitely available and is my heart's heart's desire! - that is who I am, wish to be, totally here on the earth plane!
I have not yet articulated the content of the fear. It is the fear of losing my center in my relationship with a man because of the belief that doing so, merging with him, is a way of restoring that state of infant bliss which held in my earliest days, weeks, months before my mother's milk ran out and I starved. It is a denial of the split! And it is somehow tied in with my belief that it has something to do with my being female, perhaps through the knowing that my mother knew that my father had wanted a son. Or at least there are a lot of baby beliefs tied in with this ontological fear, doubt and despair. I want to heal this, dear God! Help me. An unacknowledged choice not to feel this one results in a kind of superficial selfhood which in actuality rests on enacting the issues unresolved and left over from my childhood, so that I am no longer "current," as it were, but am unconsciously bringing into the present moment the old projections and unresolved conflicts - love, loyalty, introjected beliefs, dependency, false selfhood borrowed from the dominant personas of both parents - all of the childhood rubbish into the moment and then am left feeling the unresolved and unresolvable pain of helpless attachment. That pain can be exquisite. It can only be worked with, I see, in terms of the fear behind the fear. Feeling that fear may seem like staying safe, but it's not! That passage opening out of the "harbor" has to be activated every moment, in order for it to stay open! Inshallah!
Sunday, January 1st., 1989. This one looms so huge as it surfaces from deep in the water that my whole being cries out! It feels like being poised on the pivot Qayyum [a dear friend who was an alcoholic, and also a very sensitively attuned Sufi with both Irish and gypsy ancestry who lived among us for a while before his body left the planet] talked about between the agony and the ecstasy. The poignancy of the moment is so acute, the fear of losing its ecstatic immediacy so intense, the longing for the fullness of its entirety from moment to moment so great, I find it virtually impossible to experience its absence! It feels like me, and losing it feels like losing me! Yet when I compare this experience of the timeless continuum of now with the one I fell into after David [my bioenergetics therapist in London who ended up as a treasured friend] flew off toward England and I was left alone again, the quality of the experience is less totally on the pain side, less embroiled with hopelessness and more nearly round-outable in a reasonable time frame. It seems the kind of fear one can only sense by falling into it unbidden, but when I called it up, it came almost at once and with full intensity. I think it must be a very salient fear indeed, and life without it would be total joy! I think . I'm not sure I feel its truth yet.
Monday, January 2nd. I am afraid that I won't want to call up this fear, and I am afraid to feel that fear of not wanting to feel it. It seems like an infinite regress of fear leading to and culminating in cosmic annihilation, like that LSD trip on that issue in which Lucifer appeared in the driver's seat - in dissociated form, projected onto Bill, when the horror of my total destructiveness on a cosmic level had finally burst forth already having taken place ! Too late I learned what my fear had done! Dearest God, I thank you for being other than myself as I was in that event! Lucifer, you are too bright! Your light dazzles but does not illuminate! I fear you but I think I am in the process of learning not to fall into identifying my Self with the doubt and fear engendered by your presence. Please, God, help us to protect ourselves from his influence.
Tuesday, January 3rd. I have a fear of losing my joy, my élan vitale, if I withdraw from a shared life to one of inner solitude. I can then only live in the images and memories of joys past. This feels ghostly to me. I do not want to lose my center when I am in media res, in the midst of things, people, activities - but isn't losing one's sense of self through activity a way of being most totally alive? What I want is to dance in both worlds, the inner and the outer. For this to happen I need a kind of anchoring in infinity, in timelessness, in the bodiless state, a pure energy state - except that what I want to be is to be in this state while in my body, which means allowing my body to become the vibratory instrument it really is! And that does mean allowing God to be at my center, to be my center! Mashallah! Inshallah
Sunday, January 8th. My fear is that I will say no to more pain and split myself so as not to feel it. My fear is that I will forget that You are God and write the cosmos into my own name, as I have done before - as Lucifer does. Dear God, help me to stay small! It's not an easy task, is it. You know my parents, and they aren't here to keep me down any more. I'm alone, and afraid my self will run the show, pretending to be the Self. I am glad Your "Wheel" turns without my influence!
... So now, early Saturday morning, as I sit in the window seat watching the dawn come on apace in the east with its clear palette of merging colors in the lambent air above the black silhouette of the horizon, beginning with deep burnt orange and rising up through golden, ruddy flame through to pale gold, then greeny-gold to the aquamarine upper air, finally blending back into the deep sapphire blue of the zenith! - I am ready to take on my fear of being excluded from true belonging, of being denied the sense of having a right to claim family kinship. That one has so many roots, both in this life and in those others - the Eskimo man, the South Sea island woman, my Columba monk, my Marguerite, the young man who died in the dungeon, my little Francis lover monk - maybe all of them, with only the Swiss child and the Jewish boy as exceptions. And perhaps they escaped simply by dying so young!
[Actually, since then I have explored that boy's death on the Titanic, and realized that it too was death by exclusion - excluded by his father from the right to leave on a lifeboat with his mother and baby brother, on the grounds that he had had his Bar Mitzvah and so, was now a man! And then apparently deserted him, so he died alone.]
Amazing! What a joy it would be not to be driven by such a fear! I think that is what I am going through just now, learning I can get the sense of being cared for and about in the caring community we are and have become - to which we all belong, as much through my insistence as for any other reason, when I look at it. Participation, you might say, in learning to live the total joy of knowing God's grace is all about us like a sea of blessing! Deo gratias! Mashallah! Shalom!
Wednesday, January 18th. OK. My fear. Oh - that I will find myself drawn further and further into the trap of catering to a man's infantile hunger for mothering, which has such a real twist in it, the psychopathic self-deception which ends up deceiving the woman as to his ultimate male-female values, as happened with Bill - that he will render me helpless through his unconscious masochism and passivity, in saecula saeclorum, amen! And that would come about in me because of my own lack of inner worth, my own need for dignity and self-esteem, which ends up denying my divinity. We need to smudge in group!
My fear - and it is an intense one, so intense I can usually experience it only through projection, onto other people in relation to myself - is that I am a bad person, one who is quite capable of the most hideous atrocities simply by either establishing categories of belief about persons - like Stevie Zottoli, my nephew, or my twin brothers - or by just turning my mind away from noticing! And in some ways that - the latter - is the worse of the two for me. How does one move out of the "safety of the cove" [an image for the willingness to leave one's habitual definition of security behind in the search for God, as suggested by brother "Bartholomew"] with such a fear, so long as one continues to act in certain ways, and thus go on re-creating the ambivalent split image or else the "room" in one's inner world which is so shut off from scrutiny as to go unnoticed, unacknowledged by the self? How? That in itself becomes a real dread. Perhaps only by becoming a Mother Teresa? And yet, to attract followers whose narrowness of viewpoint permits the kind of neglect of elementary safety precautions that has led to the death of relationahips, and even to premature death itself! - how, do we come out of this labyrinth of guilt and unfelt pain?
Friday, January 20th. Oh boy, oh boy, what a relief. From what Bill had told me, I had thought Ellen [my daughter] was leaving Sara and Nic [her children] at home while she and Mark vacationed for a week in Florida! After agonizing about calling her, I finally did it this morning! No - they are going along! They're going to leave them with Mark's parents while they visit Bill in Melbourne Beach [where he was visiting an old friend]! A very short time.
The intensity of the dual fear that brought up is of abandonment and of being a bad person, and helps me to see the link between the two. I must have believed my parents left me because I was bad, when they went to Texas for a week when I was quite small, perhaps three. I know I suffered a lot. Boy, do I want to learn to live without that one!
... I am now ready to let myself feel the fear! What came up was a feeling of not having an identity, and it feels like being out there in the deep cold and blackness of outer space, turning end over end, falling into the sun! The response is to react very strongly, to implore, to weep, to protest that it is too terrifying, that I cannot be there alone, that I need protection, please don't make me, I can't! The same reaction as when I had to try to swim, as when I had to lie back in the tub and have my hair washed, as when I smelled the "green gas" from the mummies at the museum and couldn't stay. Intense fear at being asked to do something that really frightened me, a feeling that I had no right to say no, a feeling of being between a rock and a hard place - I can't! Please don't make me! All this distracts me from the actual experience I am defending against - of having no "me," no "head."
Monday, January 30th. Start with the fear. At the moment, it is losing touch with You, God, Who have been sustaining me through this dark, dark passage. When the pain grows too great and I erupt into violent, helpless rage and give in to the temptation to smash things and drive away the comfort of human contact, and the utter breakdown - breakout - into hopeless sobbing from the abyss, then I seem to go through a reaction of feeling blocked from the source of love, and the pain wants to sit on the shelf. I wish I didn't tend to resort to wine and food to comfort myself at night! And the dreams, crowded with people, in buildings I find familiar in kind but not home, semi-public, filled with the lives of other people. Gives me the feeling, "I am not from here."
The grief is always there, waiting to be triggered off. Where is the joy? Shall I ever feel it again? The fear is that this is the rest of my life, far, far from home! The fear of being shut out, of being excluded, of not being one of The People, of not belonging. And yet, last night everyone hugged and kissed me! The feeling comes from my own inner sense of not completely "being here," of not having been totally born! I am stuck in midpassage. Chris tried to birth me yesterday but could not. So here I am! Perhaps this is the place I have been waiting, struggling to get to, all my life until now! God give me strength to come through!
Tuesday, January 31st. Dear God, I am so afraid that we won't have time to work this all out and be able to do our job as a community! I keep waiting and waiting, and then I fall into my own dark pits, and doubt my ability to prepare myself or to persuade others to do the same! I sometimes begin to feel superior and then feel totally helpless and unworthy!
The vectors on the earth plane are from right to left, on the spiritual plane from below to above. I have been struggling on the earth plane, and have received notice of having acted hastily, deceiving myself as to my motives and creating worse problems than before. The message is to wait on the Tao, to integrate.
On the spiritual plane, the way I have been operating has created a situation in which the darkening of the light in relationship has occurred. It has pointed to the necessity of facing up to the death of my marriage, invalidated by growth.
The Tao of this plane is leading to disruption, to radical discontinuity. It operates through the center, the CENTER, which is the blank Rune.
The status described by the Runes (above) got acted out on the following day, when I went into a complete panic attack, and tried to jump out of a car in which I was a passenger when the driver and the passenger in the front seat would not take my expression of extreme fear seriously. [Retrospective: this total panic comes from the years of my childhood when I was a helpless passenger in the car driven by my father while he was in a towering rage. It would happen every time we drove anywhere with him - to the beach in Duxbury when I was between three and four years of age - to the movies on those rare occasions when he would take us all to see a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd movie - on the summer camping trip we all took in a Model A Ford stake truck outfitted like a Conestoga wagon with hoops and a canvas cover on the back in which we children all sat on boards set crosswise from side to side, my parents in the cab. Since my father was essentially a rageaholic, this happened many, many times during the two months of that trip, and each time I was sure he intended to kill us all! At the time, however, this memory was not salient to me - I simply felt trapped and totally terrified!]
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