I was reminded of a conversation at Serious Coffee in Esquimalt as I started writing this.

I thought I knew what I meant seven months ago.

It was about an image of the self, beyond the shell of our thoughts and feelings, who we ‘think’ we are. An image of a wave emerging from the ocean of awareness, and that being what is behind my eyes. And behind yours. Our imagined selves.

A great image. A good talking point. Head-stuff. It had the ring of truth to it, something I could point at. I did not know much more about it at the time, except it resonated with a lot I had read and kinda ‘felt’ right. My how things have changed…

This seems to be a truism about life. You know if you are growing because what you thought and said in the recent past feels embarrassingly naive and limited.

Usual caveats apply. Open Kimono, vulnerability, not pulling my punches etc… Growth involves being willing to let go of the old, and at times smash it into a million pieces so it can never be put back together again. Evolution is not a smooth process. Life occurs in leaps, bounds, sparks and sometimes crashes…

This is about a crash. Letting go of an illusion. Owning it. It is my illusion after all…

At the outset of this year I made a few bold declarations. Getting published was one of them. Operating in engineering from another level. Creating some amazing relationships another. My coaching practice breaking the banks of the river that I had placed around it and flooding my life. Speaking. Writing. And a new relationship with myself.

Yes. That.

The last few years have been marked by some massive highs and crashing lows in my experience of my life. Over the last two years I seem to have got adept at moving pretty fast from one state into the other. I wish I could say ‘consciously’. As close friends will attest; I can hit ‘low’ pretty hard. And on a high, I am on fire. I have written before that, seeing this pattern I started looking for a new way through (see working with fire). I thought at the outset I was trying to ‘kill’ the lows, amputate that part of me that seemingly kept holding me back.

Something happened when I was very young. I have pinned it down to when I was under three I do not have a lot of words about it. Something happened that made my world very unsafe. I reacted to that. My earliest conscious memories are of lying on my bed with my back on fire with an intense case of shingles. Around that point in time a part of my psyche got ‘stuck’ in this old emotional wound; despairing, lost, desparately sad. That brilliant part of me invented some stories to keep me safe. Things I should or should not do, how to respond to the outside world and follow a safer path; a safer program. Some rules to live by that would, if I followed them, stop me hitting the tripwires of these intensely emotional states.

The trouble is in the here and now, I am breaking all of those rules – ruthlessly. They are in the way of what I am here to do. Needless to say that younger part of me has been going several inventive colours and textures of apeshit.

A way out has been working with a therapist using EMDR to aid me in being with the strong emotional reactions when they get triggered, not getting taken over by them as I have been in the past. De-sensitizing from the trauma. After all, this old wounding has been in place for some 46 years and I have built a life around avoiding what triggers me into these reactions. Strategies. A game plan. ‘Resistance’…

And on that word, this all pivots. Resistance.

In the most recent session I had with my therapist, we deliberately worked together into the emotional space of this young wounded self. His reactions came up strongly; the kleenex was invoked. And we kept going. At one point my therapist had me pull back, seeing I was over-identifying with the young wounded part and was getting stuck. We re-set and continued. Then something new came up; the anger. The part of me protecting that young vulnerable self showed up full force. I would put this part of me at age around 7 or 8. I have met this anger and intensity of rage many times before, but not so clearly, distinct and in relationship to the younger wound. So these two parts were both present; both in the conversation.

I got crystal clear. I was there too.

And in a moment I got a glimpse of what was going on and chose a whole new doorway.

An adage I have heard many times in transformational work; ‘what you resist, persists’ (so just stop resisting and everything will be fine, right 😉 Easy to say…) I saw something deeper than that. My resistance was the actual act of creating and infusing these parts of my psyche with life. Giving them energy. Giving them reality. Not only does my resistance give them strength. My ‘resistance’ is their life force. It creates them. No resistance; they literally do not exist.

Back to that ‘waves on the ocean’ analogy. My ‘resistance’ is building the wave(s). If I do not resist, no waves. Just awareness experiencing. Nowhere to find an ‘I’. I resist, I create an ‘I’ to cling to like a liferaft in the pounding waves – the waves the resistance also creates. It creates the wounded self AND the interpreted experience the wounded self needs to defend against. All of it. The whole canvas all at once.

Clearly seeing this, I got that it is futile. Unwinnable.

My practice is now acceptance; radical acceptance of everything that arises. Bringing awareness to everything and stepping outside of the old stories of judging it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I have seen now, finally, with much gnashing of teeth and more boxes of kleenex and dented punch-bags than I care to recount, that old game is done. Dead. Over. Time to play a bigger one. The one that started happening when I gave up the fight.

When I let that drop fall back into the ocean.

When I gave up on figuring out who ‘I’ am. Deciding to Love all of it anyway.

Work in progress. Early reports are I am reliably having one hell of a lot more fun and not taking half as much shit so seriously. I am liking it.

Watch this space…