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Tired. Confused. Scared. Excited. Scared.
I am taking seriously Saniel’s recommendation that we do “as little as possible” during the rot. I lay in bed at night and allow myself to feel feel feel with as few distractions as possible. I do my best to relax my body into the bed, luckily my yoga practice helps me do this easily. Then there IS nothing to do but feel….and then sleep…fitfully.
Rotting can feel quite painful and scarey and overwhelming. I feel very lonely at times. I feel like a little bitty cog in this giant universe machine. And I sometimes feel like every cog knows his/her place and understands their function – except me. Except my little befuddled, anxious cog-self.
My latest Rot symptoms are lethargy, fatigue – oh yeah, that lack of interest in past practices and disciplines. I mean, my God, I almost ordered a hamburger at a diner Saturday night!
But I like the title of this blog (oh, how I love Eric Clapton) because the Rot is evolutionary progress, right? I mean, right? Yeah, it is, right? It’s a comforting thought when I’m laying in bed just allowing the feelings I’ve spent my whole life repressing to surface and express themselves.
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Yes, it is a bit scary isn’t it, this Rotting thing with one hand around my throat and the other about three feet lower, both with what feel like death grips around my life as I know and cling to it. It feels like a tightly wrung towel which runs the length of my torso that some unseen force is squeezing tighter and tighter. The torque can feel unbearable at times. But all my age old, tried and true strategies to avoid and escape the big, cosmic squeeze don’t seem to be working so well anymore. The superfical futility of them is seen through in a flash of recognition which knows there is no turning back now, that there is nothing to turn back to–at least not anything real. The old ways fall with a thud into the well of a heart that has little room for the inauthentic stratagems of lies gone by.
Like you, Lisa, I often feel the most unpleasant sensations (or am subjected to the most torturous internal conversations) when lying in bed trying to sleep. I used to get up and walk over to and up Stone Mountain to gain some semblance of relief, or at least a bit of breathing room. But then one night as the big sqeeze was toying with my will to live, I found myself taking deep breaths and then just saying “Yeessss…” with each exhale. I think it was at this point that I became the experience and owned every atom of Rot that was pulsing through my system. It seemed that there was something (or samething) being the Rot, watching it and holding it all at the same time. It had no fear of the Rot. It was actually celebrating the bare fact of its burgeoning forth in the bleakest midwinter of my life experience.
Since then it has become easier and more natural to just “relax into Being” and to trust the intelligence that has brought me to this point of flame and shining forth into something heretofore unimagined. I see this as the flow of Beauty in action, and it absolutely refuses to be anything but Beautiful regardless of what I call or think of it. It is sufficient, and for that I am gratful.
Comment by Walt January 13, 2010 @ 11:51 amLisa and Walt,
Thank you both for what for me are precious tranmissions of one’s opening into the Rot.
I find myself currently gripped by what seems like personal stuff, both from childhood and from the present, and oddly enough keyed by watching a TV show I never watched before, even as a child — Bewitched! Just the intro music pulls it all out of me so darn profoundly, whole-Being style.
I am learning not to analyze this as something to fix, nor as something that is simply broken zone material, but slowly allowing it to be a facet of the Rotting process itself, something like the compost of an older fantasied way of life, very very deep stories (of a hyper-masculine sort), that I cannot imagine ever having surfaced if not for this Rotting process. Just amazing, if uncomfortable; as both of your pointing out instructions are a true inspiration and blessing, an energetic holding, helping to open the Space of this emergence and allowing.
With deep gratitude to all,
Comment by Michael Schwartz January 15, 2010 @ 1:50 pmMichael
Rockin musical reference! Sly reworking of the lyric. Wonderful!
Reminds me of another Clapton song I’ve been using to help me through lately. Not sure what it’s called but it goes like this:
“Life is what you make it.
‘Least that’s what the people say.
If I can’t make it through tomorrow,
Better make it through today.”
Rot on.
Comment by Dave February 5, 2010 @ 12:25 pm