Resistance and Breakthroughs: 800 is the magic number

Yesterday I wrote the first nitty-gritty, difficult stuff since beginning this challenge; the stuff I have hesitation to publish and resistance to writing, which ties my guts in knots and stifles my breath with even the intention to start typing. Even as I recognize that actually moving the events onto the printed page is an exercise that can relieve and release me, that in fact is paramount to my well-being, (the ancient egyptians believed that if you died with emotional issues unresolved you would be unable to enter the afterworld), there is this resistance which intrigues me.

One might say that waxing philosophical on the resistance aspect of the exercise is tantamount to avoiding it altogether - it does, after all, stanch the flow of the discomforting verbiage and take the focus in a different direction. This thinking is probably spot-on.  I also believe that making friends with this resistance will shed some light, otherwise inaccessible, on the entire process.

Let me be clear that I have volumes of personal journals detailing many of the same childhood events I intend to grapple with here, in this more formal setting of intentional authorship.  Once pierced, the quivering membrane that holds “it all” in and keeps it from spilling into my everyday existence ruptures like a water balloon and soon my rice paper pages are dripping with ink and tears  (I suspect it’s the same thing that happens when I flip into my fear response; there is no such thing as a slow leak).  So it’s not a general reluctance to broach the subject that keeps me bound in hesitation. 

It’s probably, in part, an irrational expectation to be punished for “speaking my truth” (as overworked and approaching cliche as this phrase is, there are some circumstances where it is precisely what I mean, and so...).  I’ve spent decades keeping it under wraps, forging cordial relations with the parties involved instead of the confrontational ones I tried in my earlier years.  When I attempt to discuss the events from those trying times, I lose my grip on the spanda-karikas’ admonishment to turn within when emotions hit an elevated pitch; things spin out of control, I lose my mental footing and things start moving so fast that my brain feels like someone’s injected icewater into its convoluted folds.  Not willing to initiate another such episode without professional mediation, I’ve opted instead to just skate along on good manners- chomping down on the groove in my tongue until I can get home to make my rice paper soggy once again.

While writing it all down in journals feels liberating in one sense, there is another aspect of the practice that feels like I am just moving from one cell to another in the same prison: still, nothing is resolved.  There is no real freedom because in my journal I am the only audience.  Though I feel spent, shaken, and in some important way hollowed out, the vociferation and the catharsis it announces is nonetheless all in my head... nobody has heard me.

In making friends with my hesitation I realize it also has to do with the fact that I am someone who understands the power of words.  For whatever reason it’s long been clear to me that there is no static reality for which we need but find accurate descriptors in order to communicate.  The fact is that reality is a dynamic, continuously unfolding event to which we are steadfast contributors whether we use this power mindfully (as we are implored to do in the yogic texts) or whether we let it go on autopilot (which regrettable consequences we see all around us).

Because it is my experience and conviction that when we focus on a thing we breathe life into it, that we become like that upon which we meditate, that when we call a thing by name we draw its closer to ourselves (this is why every tradition has a praise-singing component), I fear delving into this work because I don’t want to add to the burdens of the planetary psyche by contributing more “difficult stuff”.  Because the magic of creating reality through our words also works to compound our misery, isolation, and delusion when turned in the wrong direction.  Why would I want to breathe life into a childhood I’ve been trying to escape for more than 40 years?  Why would I want to become more like my abuser, molester, or the child that went through it?  And why would I want to draw the victim role closer to myself?  Unless...

(Cue Angelic Chorus, Beams of Light From Above and Within)

A great being once said, “you go through the breakdown to get to the breakthrough”.
A mere 6 words from the designated 800, the hoped-for epiphany has been dropped upon my head with a “pop” and a cascade that reinforces the water balloon motif like a literary bonus pack.

I revel:

What if I focus on the breakthrough? On rescuing the child rather than just repeating her story?  What if I meditate upon a woman with the strength and resolve to walk through this fire and come out glowing? What if I call out, not to victim or antagonist, but to the survivor and the supporters, some of whom I’ve yet to meet?  What, for that matter, if I write each day until my eyes are brimming with the warm tears of breakthrough as they are now?  If I take them as my morning ablution to mark the day as sacred?