At The Threshold of Longing

This morning I woke up to an intense dream. Unlike most of my life since I was thirteen, recently I haven’t been able to remember my dreams very well. In this one, there was the urgency of boarding a plane whose departure had been anticipated. My late mother, my sister and a helper/assistant who used to work and live with us at my parent’s house when I was a child was there, too. What was most prevalent in the dream was the sense of urgency and concern with whether I had everything that I needed before the plane took off. I had similar, repetitive dreams while living in Switzerland, in my early twenties.

I am currently on an open journey in which planning happens daily, not beforehand. I am often asked “where/what is next”, and my response is, “I’ll tell you when I know.” The journey is beautiful and exciting, but there is a measure of anxiety, too, with so much openness, so much uncertainty, both now and in the future after the planned completion of my travels, in mid-December. Inward Ride is not only the name, but the true motto of this journey, and the moto–my beloved companion vehicle–and the surroundings, are the stage where my inward ride unfolds.

Waking up to intense, bitter-tasting dreams, before, signaled an imminent bout of depression. Today, after the dream, I woke up and felt the emptiness of life, of my life. But hold, for a moment, from attributing any meaning to this statement… 

For a number of years that I can’t count, while first opening my eyes in the morning, I would encounter a gloomy inner landscape, the often overcast weather of life tainted by a depressed cosmology. However, since the Ketamine treatment that I did, here in Portland, at the end of August, opening my eyes in the morning has been a different experience. As have other moments when I have felt waves of emotions coursing through my system.

Used to gloom, as I perceived emptiness this morning, I felt a little afraid of a looming bout of depression. But I held back from adding meaning to this spaciousness that in the past would have felt scary, deficient. I could sense the old habit of waking up to a gloomy reality avid to take root again. Since the Ketamine treatment, however, it has been almost as though old habits have been trying to recreate their previous synaptic network of a perception inclined toward suffering, but without success.

Trauma biases the nervous system toward a state of hyper-arousal in which there is a constant anticipation of threats, even when they are not present. In a healthy individual, arousal happens when there is a real threat to defend from, and it is relaxed once the threat is no longer present. A similar process happens with depression: there might not be a reason for gloom, but since gloom is the deep groove developed in the nervous system, toward gloom I slide, inevitably.

But my habits seem to have lost momentum. I, as the center of volition, have also been more successful at keeping meaning-making at bay. The combination of the two seems to be interrupting the loop that before used to rule my life. The more I see this process, the more I put energy into reframing my experience, thus strengthening the new neuropathways being developed in my post-Ketamine brain.

But I am careful at this point to issue any final statements about how the treatment has impacted me; results will have to stand the trial of time. And I will report accordingly.

In the presence of emptiness this morning, excited with what might be taking place in my brain, I wondered how to make the most of my new synapses, and I chose a different strategy. Before, when emotionally stuck, I resorted to one of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing strategies to deal with trauma. Roughly, “pendulation" is the shifting of attention from where in the body I feel the frozenness, the stuckness, to an area that feels “neutral,” without the intensity of the one consuming all of my psychic and emotional energy. According to Levine, the alternation between the locus of intensity and the neutral one, helps to regulate the nervous system and to bring it down from its hyper-arousal state.

I wasn’t feeling frozen now, but I wanted to change the object of my awareness for the sake of exploration. So instead of remaining within the physical edges of my body, I expanded its felt sense farther and farther out to include the house where I’m staying, and the property where it sits. Simply putting it, it was a cognitive command to alter my inner perception of where my body ended. I liked this exploration and I continued the practice.

Here, time moved very slowly and experience seemed devoid of unfoldment. I kept inquiring, looking for a lesson here, a cue of direction, an insight. While being still, paradoxically, the inner landscape continually shifted, and I was again aware that changes were actualy taking place.

Suddenly, slightly jolted as though having had a double-take, I found myself at a threshold: I stood right outside the engine room where the steam of longing originates and propagates from. “Wow”, I said to myself, recognizing the implications of where I stood. Still outside the engine room, in what felt like a threshold in my evolution as a human being, I marveled at what was happening here: I was being granted access to the core of my own being.

Perhaps it was the jolting of the surprise, or the wisdom of homeopathic dosage while led in today’s lesson, but the visit ended before I got to enter the room. Still in awe, I no longer had the alertness of before, and awareness shifted elsewhere to no particular object.

I have been up for a few hours since then. I have made the morning coffee and feel the warmth that it creates in my chest as it rolls down past my throat toward my stomach. I sit in my camping chair looking out the sliding glass doors and time feels still now, the only motion perceived in some grass and tree branches swinging to the light breeze outside.

While longing is often an experience of deprivation, here, in the memory of the threshold where I stood while introspecting, I feel the opposite of longing. Here, there is fullness and there is joy.

At times, I wonder if I am using my time wisely in this lifetime. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödron jokingly comments about her meditation practice: “I spend a lot of hours doing absolutely nothing; I am really good at doing nothing.” I too, apparently, do a whole lot of nothing while investigating the truth in my inner experience. At times, I fear that I am not “producing” enough on the outside, as everyone else seems to be. Other times it feels like I’ve found gold, and the eagerness of my quest is justified. But regardless of results, this is the only way that I know how to live my life, and that I am honoring this opportunity of being alive and the time that I have left here.

A barn in Gresham, Oregon, under massive, puffy clouds during a break in a storm that has been hitting the Northwest for days. ©Ciro Coelho/InwardRide.com