Late at Night…
Yo. Today was rough. My back hurt like crazy pretty much all 7.5 hours of driving. I sent so many Marco Polo videos. A big thank you to Sean for encouraging me to leave him a 2 hour long, personal monologue. I got very excited as I neared the beach. Then I started getting that arrival anxiety. I found my room and did my new procedure of getting my self-care stuff arranged and available and scoping out all the other places for meditating. I said hello to some people. But then I just felt really stuck in my head. Like I didn’t know where I began and where others ended. That has always been true, to be honest. I am not sure but I think maybe I’m describing what a codependent mind feels like. I can’t say. I’m only just beginning to be aware of it and talk about it, so … I dunno. But I immediately felt this overwhelming desire for people to be really into me and focused on me while, even when they were, I heard messages in my brain that they were faking. I watch this line of thinking and realize this leaves me no opportunity to feel love and connection. So I’m curious about this. My brain lives in its projections of others’ psyches, assuming that everyone finds me annoying and are just patronizing me. And so being in a house filled with people is… truly hell… with the coding that I currently have. And no wonder. If that’s what my brain does, no matter why my head feels so loud when I’m around others. I don’t accept this as just “who I am”. I think it is a coping mechanism. A habitual thought pattern or process. I can’t pretend I know what to do now other than admit it to myself, admit it to you, and keep my eyes on it, even if I feel so embarrassed and like a fake. Not resisting it, I think, will lead me into actions and a lifestyle that better aligns with what I want deep underneath my reactive, superficial brain stuff.
Anyways, I dealt with my arrival anxiety by getting unpacked and then going to get myself supper and groceries. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is. I was pretty triggered, to be honest. Felt the panic of dozens of trips in my past where things started to feel out of control. Choosing to prioritize my body and my mind is what is new about today. I might have stayed at the house and eaten a bunch of junk food and watched TV until my mind slowed down. But instead I drove 15 minutes and got chicken & waffles at a 50’s diner. Then I went to a grocery store and got some stuff for the week. That is a huge success .
Heading back to the house, I was a bit anxious. I had tended to my hunger and my future hunger, but my mind was still a mess. Ruminating, catastrophizing, completely negative. So at the house I greeted a few people but then eventually went to my room and meditated for 30 minutes. What that time did for me was help me to realize just how loud my mind had become. Without judging that I didn’t “achieve” a quieter mind from meditation, I did gain a more sober perspective on the quality of my mind right now. I was suffocating on projections. I needed some quiet time so I could find my self in my mind again. I don’t know how else to describe it. It requires a bit of focus to dig myself out of the stories I tell about others and about what they’re saying about me. I’m not sure how I can get so lost in it yet bet aware of it, but here we are nonetheless. It helped me slow down and stop reacting in a panicked way to a hole in a boat. Time to get a good look at it and respond in a thoughtful, intentional way. So I asked myself, did I want to keep exposing myself to this large group of people and let my mind continue to stay loud? Or did I want to GROUND into ME by finding what I wanted to do and doing that!? YES. The latter. And so I decided to go outside and smoke while watching and listening to the ocean.
But once I got outside I saw that there was barely any light pollution and you could see the stars. I hadn’t thought to expect this, but duh! Of course! I ran back to my room and grabbed my camera, tripod, yoga mat, and blanket. Outside, I laid out on the mat, covered myself with the blanket, smoked, and imagined myself leaning against the earth (instead of laying on it) looking out into the infinite endlessness that is the true context of our presence. Suspended, looking out everywhere infinitely. It was a sacred moment and helped me re-locate my core, not in the stories of my community and their stories of me.
My brain, as is tradition, got very preoccupied, thinking that people were watching me from inside, wondering what the hell I was doing and why was I so weird? In my mind, I thought, oh, yeah, there’s that weird social paranoia we’ve been talking about. And suddenly it occurred to me. I looked up towards the house and looked inside to see if anyone was looking at me. Nope. Then 10 minutes later when I felt the paranoia, I looked in again. This time, I looked for a while to see if someone would eventually look out again. Nope. As they said, people are consumed in their own private story. My testing of this seems to prove it. And if that’s true, it means I am wasting both my time and my life playing some game that no one is playing.
Checking and seeing that no one was watching me, time and time again, I started to feel some of those neural pathways clear up. “Oh, people really aren’t always watching and judging me… I’ve checked.”. So that allowed me to experience some of that moment just present in my body and no one else’s. I stared at the universe, sometimes dozing off, but then I’d open my eyes suddenly and would be greeted by that vast dark space again, reminding me where I am and what’s important.
