Deeply resting, deep down settling inside while it freezes outside. I feel a precious sense stability just now, as I remember that it is all okay. Better than that, it is as I would have it. There is a magnificent peace in wanting exactly what you have got.
Even this nose operation experience, it is actually a joy in a strange way, to be dealing with something real, and not a made up interpretation or a manufactured hardship. It is healing well and I get the stitches out today. Still sore, nippy, and I register a fear about more pain getting these out, but I can feel my centre, the still centre of the turning world strongly just now, and so the fear is experienced but is not becoming larger than it is.
I have needed this week of relative solitude, of not being around people and the habitual interpretations the conceptual mind makes up in response to the need to talk and describe. Instead I have been designing gardens. And taking T to work and back most days, doing a little food shopping. Enjoying looking after myself more than usual. Even a bit of cleaning around the house. The men are off and so the stress of the on site activity and all I have to do in response is not present.
Getting comfortable with insecurity is something I set out to do from a young age, probably aged about 15. I had been reading Light on the Path ( nothing that is embodied, nothing that is conscious of separation, nothing that is out of the Eternal, can aid you) and had an insight that there is no such thing as security at least from the personality/body/ego viewpoint. I saw that those I admired so much for their seeming confidence and ease with themselves were acting and that below the surface we are all insecure, that anyone who believes that they are separate ‘me’s that are a ‘body’ were bound to feel insecure.
The only option on the level of separation and ego, is to get used to that insecurity. It is not an insecurity that the real us experiences. The real us knows we are safe. So the only way to feel secure is to fully realise and integrate the real me, that is also you and everyone and everything. And that is the journey. The journey going nowhere. Only home to where we always were and have forgotten.
Another useful way of looking at it (that I learned from Prof Paul Gilbert) is that we are dealing with a brain and the results of an evolutionary process which has endowed us with an older prinitive part of our brain full of fight and flight and easily triggered to a state of self concern as well as a more recent higher more evolved brain. The higher parts of our brain can supersede those primitive impulses, by us learning to gently soothe ourselves. If in childhood those primitive impuses were stimulated by abuse to some degree (i.e. most people in my opinion, though my psychologist friend says only about 40% of us were emotionally or physically abused to the point of developing an insecure attachment style. However most people I know were smacked and that amounts to abuse to me). it can be more conscious work to soothe those fight/flight responses of the so called reptilian brain.
So soothing the easily triggered primitive scared bit of myself and entering into the world where nothing is scary. And entering that world where nothing is scary requires that I experience and walk through everything that can possibly scare me. That is initiation of old times 🙂
Learning to Rest with it All 