Last weeks email was exploring the theme of making the unconscious conscious: the importance of looking into familiar patterns of behaviour as a mirror to then see into our blind spot. Over the last few weeks, really since the start of this year, it has felt as if the ground I am standing on has started to give way. It is a deeply unnerving experience as the sense of certainty falls away and instead there is only one emotion and then another emerging to the surface. When I first learnt to meditate I hoped that one day I would be fixed: that there would be a day when there was no more pain. This created the idea of looking into the future for some ideal me that would no longer be broken or wounded, which then set up a duality between the broken and un-evolved me here in this present moment and the ideal spiritual and fixed me somewhere in the future. 

Over the years I keep meeting the same teaching: be with the present moment as it is, holding this moment with compassion. Today as I sat down to consider the theme of this week's email I clicked on the Jeff Foster video at the end of this email. I always find he talks directly to me and my experience and I return again and again to his teachings. When I was at one of his public workshops he spoke of how he used to wake up with a sense of fear every day. This intrigued me as it was my experience also. I asked him how he responded to this fear and he said he had to learn to welcome it and hold it rather than try to push it away deny that it was there.

Recently I have been waking up with an intense sense of fear, and as I've allowed it to be there and felt into it it has become a childs voice saying "I'm scared" and then one day "I don't want to goto school". In a moment I was taken back to every weekday morning of my teenage life: the fear and dread of school. I used to have a mantra I repeated to myself as the week started: today is Monday, its already started so it is already ticked off the list of days, so there are now only three days until it is Friday and the week is over. On Friday I would think, today has started and once I get through it the weekend is here and I am away from school and the fear of being with the other boys. In this way I would make the week go by as quickly as possible. Within the week were two nights when I would cry myself to sleep as there was sport the next day and those mornings would contain even more pain as I awoke. 

This was my experience as a teenager and as an adult it felt that it was put aside, a memory. Reading the Huffington Post article recently "The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness" its description of minority stress really resonated with how I felt at school. Minority stress is where we are a minority in a majority group and this impacts on our sense of safety and wellbeing. The article went on to say that living with this constant sense of fear of not fitting in, and not even knowing there are others like me so being a minority of 1, gives rise to symptoms of post traumatic stress in adult gay men. 

For many of us who have experienced difficulty fitting in in our past it is tempting to feel that as adults we have put that behind us: the fat boy at school who was always laughed at, the girl who was ridiculed and left out of the clique of girls, or the gay boy or girl who felt they did not belong. But this experience is what we lived with day after day for years. And it leaves an impact. The tendency is to want to push away the feelings that were associated with this time but they will keep returning, asking to be seen, known and held so that we may become whole once more.

As Yung says: "what we resit persists, what we fight we get more of". So, for as long as I try only to be the calm, happy, free mindfulness practitioner all that is not calm or happy will keep finding ways to appear in my life in order to be held. Rather than seeing these unwanted feelings as a problem to be get rid of, they are more an invitation to turn to the present moment and by holding what is arising heal the old feelings that I couldn't hold at the time they were first felt. In this way life is a bit like the glitch in the Matrix where the cat appeared twice: except in this sense it just keeps appearing again and again until we become aware that it is the same cat and turn to welcome it rather than shooing it away, wondering as we do so why we have so many random cats in our life. 
 

We often think of trauma as being the result of major incidents and may ridicule our own experience as not being worthy of the name. But anything that was unwanted and uninvited that gave rise to a sense of threat or fear may be stored in our body and heart. I remember a simple example. I was about 13 and my mother had remarried. One day the 'phone rang and I ran down eagerly to answer it. Instead of it being a friend or my grandparents all I heard was silence, then heavy breathing. I said hello a couple of times.....the breathing went on. Then they hung up. This lasted perhaps one minute at most. I went to tell my mum, feeling a bit shaken. She said it was most likely my step-father's previous wife calling. I thought no more of it until latter that day when the 'phone went again, this time my heart raced, my palms became sweaty and my tummy clenched. And I left it to ring for someone else to answer. It was like this for the next 5 years every time I heard a telephone. All from a one minute experience. So what of an experience that repeated regularly or every day?

In my practice now, as these feeling arise I am exploring how to turn towards them with kindness and a sense of confidence that I can hold them now without being overwhelmed. At times it feels as if it is too much. But this is in part due to the old defence mechanism kicking in that's labelled them as too dangerous to hold. It's like when I was a child and was waking along a beach and there were suddenly signs and barbed-wire saying "danger unexploded bombs, do not enter". There are parts of our psyche where what seemed too much to endure was put, and labeled in the same way: danger, do not enter. Now, as an adult we have the choice of leaving it there, but letting what is unconscious guide our lives, or inviting it out into the light of conscious awareness. Doing this may not feel easy, as in my experience it means facing the fear that was there when I first locked it away, but it does give the opportunity to hold it; and in holding it for it to loose its emotional charge and become energy once more moving freely, rather than a pool of stagnant water one wants to avoid but which pollutes one's life with its stench. .