Processing emotions

Shadow Work (The Less-Than Whisper)

/ Twist the Leaf / 2 Comments

forest

Once upon a time there was a young man deeply in love.  He and his love enjoyed each other’s company and spent hours on hours together creating fictional worlds and beautiful stories together with their friends.

The young man, naive and trusting, had a great faith in humanity and the goodness of people.  He believed those around he and his love when they spoke of friendship and trusted them wholeheartedly, allowing them close and opening his heart to them on many occasions.

Then one day, out of the blue, a shadow figure appeared.  Witness to things the boy and his love could not see, this figure shared what had been seen.  Harsh words and plots hidden behind closed doors were revealed, and the true nature of those around him were put on display. The wicked witch and her crones exposed.

These others were not his friends at all, but instead aimed to split him from his love and steal his love away, expressing a desire to toss him aside as insignificant and as inconsequential as a wilted leaf in the dead of winter.  His trust crushed, the young man felt a tear rip through his insides, and a wound was created deep within his soul.

He and his love moved on from these people, yet the wound remained.  The young man buried it deeper and deeper, trying to find a way to make it smaller, make it less, and yet it remained… and remains.

That young man is me.  Was me…. somewhere around eight or nine years ago.

And still the wound remains.

dark

I tell myself all the time that that witch was a jealous cunt, and that her and her friends just wanted to try and separate us because they were jealous of what we had… and STILL have. And yet, it’s like in the back of my mind there’s this -knowledge- that I’m irritating and insignificant to others. Like a gnat.   Knowledge that isn’t true… but knowledge that my mind and heart refuses to allow logic to refute.

That whisper within my head uses words like piss-ant and insignificant and annoying and know-it-all and “special snowflake” (sarcasm).

I have tried for years to bury this whisper and smother it out, I’ve tried to pretend it doesn’t exist and ignore it… and yet it is there still. Insistent and persistent, it works its way back into my ear from the hole I bury it in. An insidious whisper, always there like the slow drip-drip of acid, keeping the wound just fresh enough to remain an open wound.

In our discussion on Monday night, you asked me to begin working on this shadow.

So I’m going to begin a weekly practice, and with it a weekly update post. Some weeks, I might have not much to say. Other weeks… maybe I’ll have a lot. But, each week I’ll go through the details of what I’m doing, and I’ll use this blog to keep myself accountable and on track as I work on this for a bit and see if maybe I can start the healing process.

I do not believe that this will be an easy process, or a quick one. I also don’t believe that the wound will be banished entirely, although perhaps it will begin to heal a bit… and maybe, possibly, start to scab over. The scar is sure to remain, but a scar is an empty echo… whereas the open wound that’s there now is much louder.

My first post, written here today, is an expression of my intentions.  It is a cementing of my will to move forward with the process, the first step upon the path, and an acknowledgement of the whispering less-than aspect of the shadow within, an aspect that I have tried so hard to ignore for so long.

Let the work begin.

 

Choices… and Perspective

/ Twist the Leaf / 1 Comment

I may have stumbled upon one of the new perspectives that my Self Care Saturday spread from earlier this week was referring to while I was in the shower last evening.

Fish

Sometimes in my mind I gripe about the shit I don’t like… as I’m sure most people do.  You know… not the people per se, but like the soft water in this house that has a weird taste and makes it fucking impossible to rinse all the conditioner out of my hair.

And then my mind kind of wandered on to thinking about my shower at home, which has much harder water and you come out of it feeling much cleaner.  And in the middle of this thought, I had a memory of when my aunt and cousin came to visit MY home for a while and how she had complained about my water being too hard.

And that got me to thinking…

Would I rather have her (or them) visiting my home?

Or would I rather be a guest in her home?

Her home.  Hands down, 100% completely her home.  That’s the answer.  I don’t like them in my home.  I don’t like any of them in my home. I don’t like them touching my stuff, putting ass prints on my furniture in odd places, or mingling their scents into the familiar scent of my home. I don’t like their energy mucking up my space, their dirty dishes, or their constant disturbances, or the need to feed them or entertain them.  I hate it.  All of it. I really do.

If coming here now and again keeps them from coming to my house?  It’s worth the discomfort.   Absolute, completely worth every little shred of the discomfort of being here.

And that is an entirely new perspective on visiting family that I hadn’t thought of before. So there you go… there really is gold at the end of the rainbow, you just have to dig in the mud to find it.

Unpacking the Chest

/ Twist the Leaf / 1 Comment

Today’s meditation was twenty-five minutes long, and was not a guided meditation.  Instead, I did a retreat into my “mental safe place” for a time.   I will do a post about this in the future to fully describe it for you.

Essentially, though, what this meditation entails is immersing yourself into a daydream.  Specifically, a daydream that you use to find peace and calm.  Your personal paradise, to be exact.      You then spend the time exploring this place, including touching in with all of your senses in the process.

Today’s draw was (instead of IS, because it’s now the very end of the day today) the King of Brine (aka the King of Cups).  This card is traditionally a representation of a projective alpha energy, personality, or person in the area of emotions, creativity, relationships, and intuition.  It follows along the themes of authority, as all the kings do, but in the flavor of diplomacy and emotional balance. Among other things, it can also indicate a time of inner work on the self or that emotional manipulations are afoot.

When I looked at this King of Cups card this morning, what stuck out to me was the baby crocodiles and the delicate shells tucked in the upper and lower corner.  When you think of the crocodile, thoughts of tenderness and nurturing are not usually a part of that equation.  And yet what you see here is delicateness that is existing alongside the “brute” of the full grown croc.

Like most King of Cups cards, the representation in this King of Brine card makes me think of you.  Your power  and your dominant nature, and the tenderness underneath that allows for me to learn and grow in the area where my knowledge and experience is at my weakest… my emotions.

I met you when I was just 19 and when most are just starting out at life.  I’d already been on my own for just over three years and was very much getting my ducks in a row.  But I was emotionally stunted, as I spent the majority of my life closing myself off to my deeper emotions.  You held the key that opened that box I had buried so deeply.

I did not understand the depth of this card when I saw it this morning.  But since then, I’ve done a reading that clarified it much better.  I will include a summary of that reading at the bottom of this post, but suffice to say that the appearance of the King of Brine today is a reminder that your support is there for me whenever I need it, no matter the depth of that need.

The Reading:

I did the #TarotForGrowthSeptember prompt from Instagram.

Question: Where may it be beneficial for me to ask for help?

Reading Summary: There was once a very hard working man that thought he knew everything, but he really still has much to learn in the area of his emotions.

Take Away: This is pretty much the story of me when I met you. I worked hard, and I thought I had everything worked out and under control. Then you arrived and showed me that there was an entire aspect of myself that I’d buried and ignored. Eleven and a half years later, and I’m still unpacking that chest I’d once buried so deeply… and I still need your help to work through it all.

With the series of drops that I’ve been going through lately, and the family matters that are coming up at the end of the month, I’m sure I am very much going to need help emotionally in working through what comes up and learning how to deal with it and balance it all into the rest of my life.

Decks Used: Stolen Child Tarot, Morgan Greer Tarot