I take it down a notch, splutter, try to take it back up. My thoughts betray me often. I’ve begun an affirmation taken 3 times a day with a dose of Essence of Perelandra: I’m willing my attitude helps me live the life of my dreams.

So far, all that’s shifted is I’ve become more aware than before how often my thoughts spiral downwards. Walking in the cool sunshine of this spring morning, the green, rock-dotted foothills on my left, was I expressing gratitude? No. My thoughts went something along the lines of how I felt hopeless and how hard life is.

I take stock. A plastic Einstein statue stares forward out of his black-wire glasses to my left beside the pansies from Megan.

I need to hurl forth. I have no choice but to admit the pain that sears through my life constantly despite all good things. I don’t feel it when I am with Christopher, and I feel it less when Hannah and I enjoy life together.

But when I am alone what I hear makes me want to give up.

OK demons, voices: Please stop saying shit that doesn’t help me, okay?

I meditate and discover I’ve hated myself for getting off the path to success so long ago, when I was hurt and injured by my fellow humans. I share with this hater that the path I’ve been on was the one I was supposed to be on to become a stronger, better person. It’s not been a detour, or wasted. So, I’m not a bad person? She wants to know. No, you’re a good person. She decides to love me once more. Is it still okay to have ambition? Dreams? She asks. Oh, yes, I say. It’s going to be a miraculous rest of my life, she says. I can’t think of any other way it’s going to be. After all, we just keep opening and healing, raising our eyes to new vistas.

Gone after this exchange is the vast energy of denial saying This is not my life. This is not my destiny. I’ve been spluttering all these years at the horror of being because none of this was part of the plan.

Whose plan? Because it WAS part of the big plan, obviously. Oh yeah, right…

There are so many of these false beliefs, and they rise up and hold me hostage. Another one, right after the first, has been sabotaging my dreams for years to hide and stay safe. We discussed the nature of safety, how hiding has made me miserable, but also, how I came here to learn how to be in my power and authority and stand up for myself, so that’s what’s needed here, not to hide. Hiding won’t help.

As I wrapped the beholding meditation with this one, it felt like time to go onstage.

I resume typing. I feel overwhelmed. I’ve tried to limit my beholding meditations to when I really need them. I admit, there I grew impatient: I mean how much longer could I stand the self-defeating voices in my head? Once they become conscious, I long to heal them. Yet it’s like self-surgery in a way. And after, I wind up feeling like Frankenstein, a collection of sewed together parts. My electrical system that had a pattern of functioning now suddenly has two new transplants to deal with, aspects of myself that now want to function in a new, expanded range. I’m short-circuited. Also, my throat hurts, and my head too, and I woke up feeling sick, and my blood sugar is high and it’s been a bit of a rough start so far. And these are some of the thoughts I find I go to…I feel incredibly sorry for myself, and like I am simply not up for life today or any day.

How do I stay with this without rushing to heal it too? This suffering self, she’s the source of the bad attitude. She’s determined that we’re dying, that it’s all far too much. I feel daunted by her, unsure how to proceed. I don’t wish to be reckless. I would like to be responsible, gentle. Take this whole healing process one step at a time. Allow myself to be caught in the middle. Take some deep breaths here and just allow.

But I cannot! The sufferer rages! She demands to be heard. She exclaims “I rule you. I rule this life of yours!”

I look at her, queasy. I take another sip of tea. I know we got this. But do we address this today, or just let her take up her dark cloud on the playground and proceed with love.

“I hate you! I hate you all!” she shouts. I sigh. Couldn’t’ this wait? I’ve got other priorities. I have plans!

No, she shakes her head. Now.

I don’t want to allow myself to be bullied. Then I will get off track.

Too much to do, I say. You can wait until it’s time.

Isn’t it time when you start to talk with me and we can see each other and you’re aware of me. Isn’t it time, then? Now? Today?

I give in and behold her. (Sometime soon I’m going to put the steps of the beholding meditation on a web page.)

And this is what emerges: I have been refusing to allow for the incredible suffering in the world. I’ve fought to keep it at bay, to help prevent it, raged because I cannot prevent it, and in the end, fought with life, unwilling to accept extreme suffering as part of its tapestry.

Itell this aspect of myself that I can help others only from within each present moment in my life, that I can hardly help at all by refusing to fully inhabit my life out of this rebellion at suffering. This place in me agrees to enter life once again fully. This has been a split since I heard at 9 about the cat dragged behind a car and could think of nothing else for days and then also when I went through bullying. I took one look at the cat, and me, and all that others suffer and said, “No thanks.”

In one way, it’s good to rebel against suffering. But here’s the thing. Only from the moment can we affect change. And if we have not fully accepted that which we are fighting to change, we remain ineffectual I think. It’s like trying to box an opponent blindfolded.

So, I open my eyes to the suffering as part of life. It feels so good not to hover and fight above it all. I feel less schizoid too: Somehow healing this final place (at least for today) allows the circuits in my system to talk, to run current, to flow again.

Thank you. You are all so brave, and I’m so very thankful to feel you online once again.

Little by little, one by one, I bring all the sheep home.