Selves

I have some interesting nights.  Clearly, something in my early past just overwhelmed the nervous system circuits, and blew them on both ends.  This is what creates dissociation and is an effect of trauma, aka PTSD.  But I am increasingly realizing this shaking (and other symptoms) is a part of me that is trying to establish communication.

And pondering this, I was reminded of this Sufi story I posted a year or two or three or four ago: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2009/02/paradise-of-song.html

I think on one level it represents spiritually something like Plato’s Ideal, as applied to our selves.

But I move all day long along emotional/sensory continuums.  I do Kum Nye all day long.  I generate and expand experience all day long, while breathing it in. And today it struck me that if I have an ideal self, it would look different than this self, which is struggling and wounded and often ineffective.  On some level, this thought is a natural corollary of the idea of the Spiritual Self which they teach in the Hoffman Process.  I have multiple selves, even understood purely psychodynamically.

[Edit: what I intend here is that I am repressing both my spiritual self, which is otherwise available: AND my–oh, hell, let’s call it the IT (Das Es, kids), after Freud.  I write enough that it should be clear what the range is which I intend.]

The important point, though, is that it is both OUT THERE, and already arrived.  Then: why would not my wounded self be the same? My dark self?  That part of my psyche–where you locate it–which is not readily available to my conscious mind, but which still must be accounted for? Is there not some skeletal, half dead, starved, sick version of me wandering in the rain with a crutch?  Is some equivalent of Miss Haversham (read or listen to Great Expectations) stuck forever in a room with halted clocks?

Would this self disgust or terrify me, if it presented itself directly?  And it occurs to me I need to learn to–am learning to–welcome my nightly adventures.  Just last night I expanded the whole thing mightily.  I was able to take the external shaking internal, so that it was really a species of energetic vibration.  And it seemed it went up, from my navel center, to my heart, to my throat, where it stopped.  I could not pull it any higher.

And of course, there are strong parallels between what skilled trauma practitioners see in treating trauma, and what Kundalini Yoga teachers see in helping facilitate that form of energetic awakening.  My view would be that the two are closely related, with each side seeing the same coin from a different angle.

You cannot reconcile “selves” rationally. That is why it is so hard to learn there.  Rationality can guide you, but you cannot learn an emotional lesson intellectually.  This should be obvious, but it obviously isn’t, to many.