The pauses seem essential

Barbara Ann O’Leary has asked me for a “Making Eden Energy Medicine Our Own” Anniversary contribution. I said “yes”.

I haven’t been writing. Even now, having come to the library to write, nothing seems to be happening, or at least not much. I wrote a bit about work with someone last night. Still, there wasn’t the usual spark of discovery that I look for. No real insight jumped from the page.

Here’s the thing I think I’m trying to say. Writing has been the way I rely upon to connect with something beyond myself. That’s the spark, the energy that I look for, but found missing, AWOL.

I’ve been in a process. Likely it involves Pluto, if only because these processes usually do. I get exhausted, enervated, and unable to do much of anything. I suppose however that in that space I actually do more than I am able to acknowledge. What I don’t do in these periods is think original thoughts. I don’t put two disparate ideas together in a novel way. I don’t solve a mystery.

In that space I get discouraged. I’m like stagnant water. The only things living in stagnant water are microorganisms that you don’t want to be exposed to. I get discouraged, and then I’m discouraged about being discouraged. I have rules, which I’m usually unaware of: e.g., it’s not allowed to feel discouraged because there are energetic consequences that accrue to discouragement. I decided this year to focus diligently on keeping my vibration up. That conviction is motivated in part by fear of the possible consequences of NOT succeeded in monitoring and controlling how I resonate.

Yet when my vitality drops below a given set point I just don’t have the required resources to do anything productive to address this vibrational deficit.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could just acknowledge that I am experiencing the bottom of a constantly oscillating wave, and wait patiently until it was again on the upswing? I used to have a computer program that produced a graph of changes in biorhythms. That proved a useful tool: I could identify where I fell on that curve and anticipate when it was likely to start back on the upswing.

The problem I face is that I am unable to discern, when the curve is approaching its lowest point, whether it is a straight line curve to ultimate disaster, or there will be the usual parabola shape so that I will once again recover my usual ‘me’ --- the one that is so much easier to embrace because she is clever, and optimistic, and even has flashes of brilliance.

Donna’s Eden Energy Medicine supplies many of the building blocks that, as energy detective, I get to assemble in novel ways to make new discoveries of how to combine them, what short cuts I can devise, how much of the processes can be done internally, and so on.

But when the energy slips below that threshold, I don’t even want to do the daily routine. It all seems like too much effort. The effort seems pointless.

So far, when I get unswallowed by my period of wallowing in the nevermore, when the whale that has swallowed the Job in me coughs me back up, it turns out I was not as idle as I may have thought. Something was occurring in the darkness that I could not yet see.

So I suppose that part of that process is the very fact of not knowing that, of not being able to see, of dipping down into those primordial fears that have apparently always been part of the human condition – fear of death met by an equal portion of fear of survival. Face to face with my personal mortality; unable to decide whether to invite it closer for a more intimate inspection or to repel it more completely lest it be unwilling to leave or give me more space. The process appears to require a level of unconsciousness for it to be effective.

Otherwise, there would be no ‘coming back from the dead’.

The return trip is always full of surprises. The dark night of the soul is not empty after all.

Is there something missing in our approach to energy medicine that makes us think that we should be ready with a solution for every mood, every physical sensation, every pain, with nary a pause?

The pauses seem essential, even if unwelcome.

I have to acknowledge that I always return refreshed. And yet I never return at all. The ‘me’ who comes back is not the ‘me’ who disappeared in a fog of exhaustion and despondency!

 

~ Judith

Comments

[Lyn Milum]

Judith, I read this today before I read your article:

"I hope you'll hear what I'm about to tell you. I hope you'll hear it all the way down to your toes. When you're waiting, you're NOT doing nothing. You're doing the most important something there is. You're allowing your soul to grow up. If you can't be still and wait, you can't become what God created you to be."

by Sue Monk Kidd, in her book "When the Heart Waits."

I worry sometimes that my own exhaustion and despondency fogs signal something is really wrong within me, that I lack something essential, or that a healthy inner connection is broken. One thing I do during these times is invoke the gift of expanding my capacity to receive and maintain vibrant joyful healthy energy levels, while I'm lying in bed holding some hook-up connection.

Thanks for writing about your inner journeys and perils. You help me to also look at it as a "pause," like in respiration, a tide, a cycle ... rather than a wrongness or brokenness. That lends me much more ease in my own stagnant phase. Maybe it's my Pluto too - I've been feeling it a lot lately.

What does a phoenix look like when she rises from the depths of the sea?