Doing It Wrong
Dis is my feline roommate.
Last night I went to an event I never, ever thought I’d ever go to,… a new moon ceremony. Oh yeah, I’m doing all kinds of crazy things now. But I’m curious. That same curiosity has exposed me to a lot of really great healing modalities like sound healing by Kevin McEvoy. It’s nuts. I have been terrified and judgmental of these new age’y people but now that I’m hanging out with them, I realize how non-judgmental they are and that I have been the judgmental one this whole time. Anyways,… point being… it’s kind of a big deal that I’m allowing myself to attend these kinds of ceremonies and suspend my belief and allow myself to experience whatever I experience without reacting and labeling.
So last night’s new moon ceremony at Creators Space was done with that kind of perspective. I didn’t know what to expect. But it was about 45 minutes of talking about meditation, mindfulness, the struggles, and the insights. Nothing terribly triggering or pseudoscience. Then we did a meditative ritual of drawing a picture of what we wanted to let go of in the new year, drew that on a bay leaf, and burned it up.
These events I go to, sometimes I feel really grounded and my mind is quiet. But last night, my mind was really busy. When they asked me what I was ready to let go of next year, I tried to think of something but then all these voices in my head said that I don’t know how to self-reflect on demand, that my mind is broken, that I won’t get anything out of this because I’m just faking that I understand or resonate with any of this.
But eventually I felt some amount of clarity and determined that what I’d like to let go of in the coming year is my mind’s tight hold on my body and other internal experiences. My mind says NO to pretty much everything my body tells me about. Pain? NO! I’m looking elsewhere or ignoring it. Fear? NO. I’m distracting or doing it anyways. Anxiety? NO. You should be brave and push forward. My mind treats my organism like a horse to domesticate. And so that’s why I drew a saddle. I want to put down the saddle I’ve put upon my body and my internal world. I want to become a better improv artist with my body. Instead of saying no to everything, I want to agree immediately. Pain? Yes, you are… how can we stretch it out? Fear? Yes, let’s talk about it or do some breathing. Anxiety? Yes, let’s notice where it is in the body and feel it. So I was digging the symbolism I landed on.
However, during all of this, I was experiencing a split mind. Part of my mind was more or less able to focus on the exercise/ceremony but the other half was freaking out, sure that we were doing something wrong. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I felt really “triggered” and overwhelmed by these thoughts. Eventually I intuited that I don’t want to deny or ignore these thoughts, that they deserve to be seen and understood. So I grabbed my journal and wrote them down so that I could reassure those thoughts they were being seen and integrated.
When it was time to reflect as a group, everyone talked about the energies they released, the visuals they had, the insight they gained, the tension they released. I almost didn’t want to share about my experience because it made me feel broken. But hey, I’ve been realizing that doing these ceremonies is exactly what I needed to trigger my spiritual abuse. So those fears of opening up about my struggles very much reminded me of needing to mask in evangelical culture where everyone else was having these big transformative experiences with Jesus but I was struggling to convince myself he was real. Could I say that? Certainly not. I know what would happen if I did that. But the circumstances last night were different. No one was expecting me to feel or experience a particular thing. Plus, I’m at that point in my life where I finally believe myself. I believe in my struggle and I believe it’s essential and worth it to talk about it, despite any judgment or alienation I may experience.
So once I decided to share my experience, that’s what I shared. It made me feel feelings of being the injured one in the room. The one who can’t even do the most basic self-reflection due to negative internal narratives. But I did it anyways. I read out loud the thoughts I had written to the side,… the “invasive” judgmental thoughts against myself that I was having:
I am not doing it right.
It’s not doing anything.
I’m not focused on what I’m supposed to be focused on.
I can’t do this because I have questions that I can’t get answered right now.
This doesn’t make sense; I’m faking and they all know.
I’m wasting my time
I keep getting distracted. I don’t know what we’re even doing anymore.
I am not sure how those in the room judged my experience. I know one person said they resonated with it. However, another person did express out loud some shock at my mind, saying, “You’ve got a LOT going on in there.” Wooh, boy, I felt a big reaction inside of me. In their words, I could feel manifested that deep dark insecurity of my own: there is something wrong with my mind. Their words told me that by hearing what I truly experience in my mind, they have marked me as an outlier, nowhere near the average, broken, wounded, pitiful. Now, they didn’t actually say any of that. I’ve had to put in some effort since then to remind myself that my reaction isn’t to that person but to my own internal fears of … essentially being crazy or broken as a foundational level of reality. A comment like that could have sent me off on a new round of trying to create some illusion of control over my mind and body.
However, the ceremony itself was aimed at exactly that. Letting go of the saddle I put on my mind and body. Saying no to my experience of my reality. The person at that ceremony (in my head) said NO to my reality. That’s fine. They don’t know me. But I say yes. I say yes, this is what my mind is like. I don’t apologize for it. I have lived with this reality for as long as I can remember and I know deep inside me how fucking brave it is to finally say out loud what my life feels like. I don’t have much space left inside of me to care about how others see and react to my truth. I already invested so many years in that strategy and it went nowhere pleasant.
