So much has happened in my life over the past couple of months that when I would think of blogging, it felt overwhelming. So it's a cop out a bit, but I have copied part of a paper that I just had to hand in for my class on "transition." It is a bit heady and out of context, so perhaps it won't make a lot of sense. But feel free to read it and take from it what you can. I promise my future post will be more down to earth.
"If I do what I really must, it will kill me; and yet if I don’t, I’ll die."
- James Hillman
My mother, sister, and boyfriend flew with me out to Colorado, helped me to furnish my apartment and then left. I was utterly alone in transitional space. I began what Bridges (1980) describes as ““the perilous passage across the ‘nowhere’ that separates the old life…from the new” (p. 14), and what Winnicott (1982) defines as “an intermediate state between a [person’s] inability and his growing ability to recognize and accept reality” (p. 3). At first, I did not mind this transitional space. It felt as if I were watching a film of my life. I mentioned this to a classmate and wondered aloud when would this transition feel real? She said it would feel real when I experienced pain. And as the life before Naropa made its gradual departure, the pain came. My boyfriend began to emotionally withdraw. He rarely called, he did not email. I met classmates, but when the events of the day were over, we all retreated to our separate caves. I had never been alone in this way in my entire life. I was deeply entrenched in what Hillman (1996) calls “the spirit of loneliness”. It felt as if “all the networking that [had] interlaced [my] extension into the world…seem[ed] to count for nothing.” I was “exiled” (Hillman, 1996, p. 54).
It was the terror of being born. I recognized the terror as a signpost of an I AM moment (Tuber, 2008), the moment when one comes to realize one is separate from the mother/other, and consequently, feels “infinitely exposed…timelessly vulnerable”(Winnicott as cited in Tuber, 2008). I needed holding and I needed it fast. I reached out to my classmates, I started vocal lessons, I reached out to my therapist from New York, and I started my daily meditation practice. These interactions became a good-enough mother’s arms. In particular, my meditation practice became a mindful attempt to create mini-I AM moments wherein I could practice tolerating the interplay between being alone and being held. I began to view meditation as a practice of re-mothering myself and becoming my own reliable “other,” thereby testing and strengthening the solidity of my True Self (Tuber, 2008). I recognized that perhaps if I could “pass” the test of being there for myself, if I could hold myself enough to realize that time and space are in fact tolerable and that I would not “fall forever,” then perhaps one day I could develop “a capacity to feel life as play” (Tuber, 2008, p. 121). This recognition did not assuage the day-to-day fear, anxiety, and what felt like intolerable loneliness. I found myself holding another paradox.
Levoy (1997) articulates the nature of my paradox clearly: “a calling…flings opposing energies into our lives: One part of us wants to awaken, another to sleep. One part of us wants to follow, another wants to run like hell” (p. 53). I was plagued with doubt. What had I done? Why had I exchanged a perfectly respectable comfortable life for chaos and uncertainty? This doubt was only intensified by the final dissolution of my relationship with my boyfriend. This man was the center of life as I understood it. Even though differences in values, communication styles, and emotional needs had reared their ugly heads time and again, we had built a life together and only a mad woman would destroy what she had built with her own hands. My life felt like it was spinning out of control. I felt utterly unable to wait for the mother/other (my new life), or to tolerate its delayed emergence (Tuber, 2008). According to Winnicott (1982), however, “this sense of loss itself [became] a way of integrating [my] self’s experience” (p. 120). Through the intensity of my grief and my struggle with the idea that “all I…got is what I have not got” (Winnicott, 1982, p. 24), I began to accept the “is-ness” of my experience. The speed with which the ground beneath me had disappeared, the excruciating pain of losing one of the most important relationships of my life, and the refusal of life to stand still long enough for me to hold it with both hands became “the unstoppable bullet hit[ting] the impenetrable wall” of my undeniable thirst to awaken. I recognized that if I could “[witness] their collision in full consciousness…juggl[e] them both… [I could] reconcile [myself]… make [myself] enormously resilient” (Levoy, 1997, p 56.)
I am not yet done cycling through the stages of my grief, but I surrender. I offer myself to this “divine progression” (Levoy, 1997, p. 56). I give the daimon (a personification of my purpose in life) permission to have her way. I make of myself the ultimate sacrifice required to follow my calling. Levoy (1997) believes “if we can let go of the trapeze platform and make our necessary surrenders, we may be liberated, but if, while still suspended in empty air, we can say thank you, we’re damn near enlightened” (p 283). I look in the mirror and see the daimon’s eyes looking back at me. We mouth the words in unison: "thank you."
