I laughingly joked with my therapist the other day about the apparent bad state of things in my life at the moment and at all the ways in which I’ve failed. I was saying that whenever people ask me questions about whether I’m doing much playing nowadays (violin), my answer is “no, not really”, and whether I’m still with Meilyr, the answer is “no, we broke up in March”, and about whether I’m still teaching at the university, “no, I’m not”, or about whether I’m doing many gigs or arts projects, again… guess what the answer is. On paper my life doesn’t look too great, and on top of all those “no’s” I also spend most of my time alone and pretty much never go to any social events or concerts or anything! (I’m genuinely laughing as I write).😆
My therapist and I laughed about all of this, not because she’s trying some brutal new form of therapy, but because she knows the truth of where I’m really at, and if people ask me those kind of questions, my negative answers give an impression that not doing those things equates to loneliness, sadness and essentially some form of failure, which couldn’t be further from where I am at. It’s just that where I’m at isn’t really measurable by normal measures of success.
The truth is that despite the ongoing sadness and stress I feel about my parents’ declining health, and the feelings of helplessness around it, (which completely overwhelm me at times, like last week) my general sense of my place in my life feels very good. It feels good to not have my energy going outwards towards much. It feels really good and really pure to direct my focus of attention towards exactly what excites me the absolute most and what I really want to create in my life, rather than feeling like a pawn in the hands of fate, which was a bit how I’ve felt in the past. I feel like I’m consciously uncoupling with a lot of aspects of my previously busy, saying yes, lifestyle and it feels really good.
I do spend time connecting in meaningful ways with one or two friends at a time or with my parents as I’m going to Halifax quite regularly to see them and to try and help them out – I’m not a total recluse, and I really value all those relationships – but for the most part, my life force is aimed squarely towards my own projects, my own dreams, ambitions and passions, my own connection to the world and to nature and my own healing process, especially in the aftermath of my relationship breakdown; and it feels really good and extremely honest, healthy and authentic. It also feels like I’ve wanted to take this proper amount of time out for years. If this is what being selfish is, then it feels amazing and I’d recommend it to anyone! I feel like I’m on a long term retreat but doing it at home and still going to work!
I used the word ‘alchemy in my title as I feel like this is some kind of process of breaking things down in my psyche and in my life, a form of distillation (Solve). It feels like taking things carefully and gently apart through various forms of daily meditation, journaling and ritual and just generally questioning myself and reducing patterns and processes down to their raw basic components, stripping away the unhealthy conditioned bits that got attached along the way. I’m also putting things in my mind and life back together, but differently (Coagula), and with less clutter and with less unconscious decision making.
It feels like my life is very different as a result and the general energy is moving in a new direction. It also feels like this past few months of exploring and peering inwards in this way has made it clearer to me who I really am, what I really want in life and where I need to focus my attention. It’s very exciting actually.
I don’t feel that I’m pushing things and people away (and I apologise if my “no’s” this past few months have come across that way), it feels more like I’m giving myself lots of space to decipher what’s really going on in the depths of my soul and to pull what I want towards me. It’s an ongoing process, and there won’t be a proper conclusion to this blog, I just felt like expressing where I’m at because it feels very pure and true and also it also feels very good, (despite all the failure). 😉
There’s a book I absolutely love which made a huge impression on me when I read it a year or two ago called “Existential Kink” by Carolyn Elliot (I’d say she’s the modern day Carl Jung!). In it she details a novel way of integrating parts of your shadow (which basically means making friends with the things you’re ashamed of or don’t like in order to release the hold those things subconsciously have over your life). I think partly from doing Carolyn’s meditations and practices, I’ve made friends with my sense of failure, also my sense of being alone forever, dying a spinster, having no social life and never making it in the world of academe. I’m cool with all of that now. 😂
I think I also wanted to get across here the point that the things that apparently are assumed to make someone happy may not necessarily be their real truth. I feel that previously I’ve just followed various paths laid out before me, with regards to career, music, relationships etc but I think I’ve been a bit blasé and unconscious about how I actually bring those things into my life, where I put them and how I express them, and as a result I’ve allowed myself to be pulled along by a current designed by other people. In fact, I think I did this in order to stay connected to other people. I realise I’ve been sacrificing a lot of my truths for a long time because of a deep fear of being alone (not in the sexual relationship sense, more in the eternal vastness of the void and what it is to be a human sense). But the fact that I’m actually very much alone currently and feeling pretty magical and fulfilled is helping release that fear, so I don’t need to be pulled along by other people’s currents anymore. I feel like something about my being is strengthening and crystalising but in a very new form because of all the shedding I’ve been doing.
In some ways I’ve always been true to myself and in others ways I really haven’t, but I think I’m in the process of turning that untrue wave of energy around to face the direction I genuinely want it to be moving in. For me the gap between what I really want, and where I’m currently at seems to be closing due to all this inner work.
I don’t think we’re really encouraged to properly break things down this way or to prioritise spending time hacking our unconscious patterns like this (I’m very grateful for having tonnes of space over summer to do this due to being a teacher and having the summer holidays free).
Society has ideas about what to aim for in life, but is that what we really really deeply and truly crave? If you take a moment and dig really deep and ask yourself some probing questions, can you make contact with that spark, that life force, and does it tell you anything different about yourself from who you thought you were? What you genuinely deeply need and want? What really lights you up? Maybe you’re already in contact with the spark and it shapes your decisions better than I was doing, in which case, great! Keep going!
Much love!
