Tag: loneliness

Over-thinking – threshold of insanity

Overthink not

Overthinking – threshold of insanity

When I started my EveryNow blog in 2018, I began to reread and redraft every blog before publication to make as certain as I could they make sense to others and the ideas are offered naked and free of concealed meanings, obscure convoluted expressions, or other examples of my own muddled undisciplined thinking.

The application of this methodical analysis is pleasurable and stimulating, because results come thick and fast.

I tease out into the open the logical progression of my ideas, I replace fuzzy areas of meaning with highly precise alternative words or phrases. I turn passive verbs into the active voice. I use nouns in place of -ing suffixed gerunds. I simplify concatenated sentences by trying to reduce them to simpler shorter ones each with subject, verb, object. Shake-down like this lubricates meaning and clears understanding.

The main criteria I apply is to put myself in the ears and shoes of my readers. I test every phrase, sentence and sometimes every word against its possible receipt by me as if equipped with the ears and eyes of others.

I have good reason to take unusually potent delight in this role play.

Imagine me in my late teens and for most of my twenties. I was too self-conscious of the sound of my own voice, and even of my inner voice, to be able to comfortably remain in company or in companionship. As they left my mouth, the words I spoke returned not as an echo, but with an instant direct feedback. Words from me sounded disturbing, because I could only filter my understanding through my own understanding. I could not hear myself speak as others might hear me. If I imagined my words as they sounded to others, I would imagine a room full of heads swivel in my direction, effectively shutting me down.

I guess it might end up like this for a person in long-term solitary confinement. We are all of us first and foremost gregarious. The environments with the most damaging effects on our emotional and mental health are loneliness and physical pain. When there is only one voice to pay attention to, the inner voice compensates by taking precedence, because it substitutes itself for the lack of the company and conversation of other humans.

In my late twenties, various factors combined to reset to normality the harmonious and effective functioning balance of my attention between the significant and the trivial.

(I detail one such event in this blog: https://everynow.blog/2021/02/18/a-story-of-50-years-of-redemption-and-salvation/)

From the time around these healing, self-reconciling events, I can date the beginning of my reintegration with the world of life, love and productive work. I could say I rejoined society from which I had felt isolated, distanced, unable to comprehend. This marked the beginning of a sense of a gradually rising tide of joy and gratitude for life lived.

Before this it was living to love – amusing, mildly decorative, but shallow, ephemeral, lacking in lasting significance.

After this I was, and am, loving to live – broadly capable of sensing and reaching out into the search common to all human minds and hearts for spiritual, philosophical and essential meaning to the experience of being alive.

🔶An amulet of words against Loneliness ðŸŸ¥

* An amulet of words against Loneliness *

Is it the fleeting face of loneliness I see between the laughter and the smiles?

Yes, let it have its day in the sun.

Plenty of time, oh, there’ll be time enough I say, one day to pine for the weeks spent without a hand to hold, after your life has reached an apotheosis and you have so many hands within arm’s reach of your love-filled heart.

There is no book nor physic to spirit away loneliness.

In an inevitable plurality of beings, loneliness is a fact of human arithmetic. It sleeps at the footstool like a stone lion with its eyes open!

Two things our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate.

One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.

Steer your course oh so safely, dear Shining Soul, between this Scylla and that Charybdis.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” says Julian of Norwich.

There are large helpings of power and strength in those words! You have sole responsibility to make them so.

You will go out tomorrow into the noisy crowds. And with you, you will carry an enormous cathedral-like and most noble silence.

And you will smile, because your silence is ‘grand’, and you know it is as full of hospitable welcome, as the urging daydreams of your distant distant descendents.

~ Love is present EveryNow

My Shamanic Healing

Since March 2014, out of curiosity more than from an acknowledged need, I started working with a wonderful shamanic healer.

I had no inkling I had endured ‘that childhood’ until it appeared clearly in front of me.
These traumatic strata, though buried and covered by scar tissue, I know now from my own experiences, can be identified, visualized in an adult context, lifted out of ancient hiding and, when seen in the bright light of my adult recognition, taken in both hands and dissolved forever.
This is hard work. It demands courage and determination to confront emotions which are painful and at first not easy to identify or understand.
Some who are shaken by the rise to the surface of fears and sadness, long forgotten or long since buried out of conscious sight, may not be ready to continue the work of bringing them into the open.
Their life journey has not yet reached those stations where the refreshments of friends and family have bolstered their understanding. Some may never, in their whole life, begin or accomplish the work of healing.
The work sometimes summons up nameless distress from within myself, like a child’s nightmare.
I carry my child inside me, but the difference is that it is I myself who has to show myself compassion. I have to be the one to cup my own distressed heart in my own healing hands and guide myself out into the openness of ever-present light.
At the time I began this work, the presence of “EveryNow” was becoming more familiar to me by the day. EveryNow fills me with the absence of longing, because it is a state which contains all sufficiency and all fulfilment. My way of characterising this is in the phrase, “No question; Answer is before”.
I recognised that the state of EveryNow represented the place of sanctuary, the changeless place of ultimate trust and reconciliation.
Had I not already gained an understanding of the over-arching and underlying principle that all existence is a reality not objective but encompassing both itself and me as the experiencer, I could not have successfully continued this Shamanic work.
With my Shaman close to me and questioning and inviting me to place myself in close touch – literally – with my previous selves all through the years of my life, I use a combination of two skills to power myself on with this work.
I exercise my curiosity to discover more about where I have hidden my painful past, and why, and with what ‘devices’ my former self so deliberately interred the pain.
With my intellectual reason I try to find out how effectively I can use my analytical skills to make valid connections between my adult autonomous self and my younger, unformed dependent self.
I seek out and befriend again the little person I was, who constructed all kinds of protective defences in the face of major hurt of which I as a child could have had no objective understanding and over which I had no control.
I can do all of this seeking, confronting, refriending and healing of myself because I can trust and completely rely on my guide, my Shaman, to be at my side every fraction of an inch of the way.
I continue with this work for the simple reason that it works. It is swift, effective, and the major immediate result is that it gives me is of lightness of heart.
I begin see my way of developing survival techniques to negotiate unknown fears is not unique to me and my life journey. I see clearly and with great relief that none of my difficulties, not one of my traumas is unique to me. I am not alone, not stuck on some lonely summit, or wandering in dark places. Suddenly, very suddenly, I am able to look around at last, and I see we are all beautiful doves in a flock of humanity.
One valuable certainty I have discovered from this guided work is that my body holds all the answers. If I want to know the answer, I directly address this physical repository of wisdom.
It is easier to enter and explore the body’s frames of reference while hearing the steady, quiet rhythmic beat of the Shamanic spirit drum.
There are two extremes our bodies are not naturally made to tolerate. One is to be afflicted by violence. While the other is to be afflicted by loneliness.
The strict limitations on the reach of my self healing are imposed by the needs I have as a human for other meaningful loving human contact, because my survival is all bound up with my gregarious, even tribal nature.
I willingly acknowledge with gratitude that it takes a person of rare quality to show such love as to dedicate a life to becoming a Healer in this way.
Shamanic Healing has been and continues to prove to be for me a uniquely valid and valuable vehicle for releasing and empowering a life of more abundance every day.