Niggling and Strange Questions

[manitou]

I don't have the exact memory of the first imprint. I know it's definitely related to church, as I had a fundamentalist/evangelical upbringing. It can be really hard for me to draw up specific memories from childhood. I'll be happy to accept your offer of help if I can ever find that first memory.

 

 

Thank you, Lerner. I never get too much of your words.

 

Pillar, that's your problem. Right there. you have a fundamentalist and evangelical upbringing. Mine wasn't quite as rigid, but right up there too. There is a memory that probably runs through your mind often, but which often has no feeling attached to it, a memory of matter-of-fact quality. Start paying attention to those little scenarios right away; if you can, keep a pad of paper in your pocket and jot it down.

You can figure it out later.

 

Or it may be that you may have to seriously sit down and find it. Try this - sit down and write a letter to yourself as a young child. Apologize to it for some way you maybe didn't stand up for yourself, or something - anything - and just keep writing. There will be tears. There will be anger at your folks and your brothers and sisters. Don't worry about. Rez up, or Cowboy up, or whatever you want to call it and do it. You will find that moment (or moments) of humiliation, when you were made to feel like a turd because you wanted an extra cookie.

 

This doesn't place blame on anybody. Why not? Because they too were the little kids that were punished for wanting an extra cookie. It just passes on from one generation to the next.

 

Yes, please take me up on the offer. I don't charge nuthin', I just do it.

[Cat Pillar]

Thank you, Lerner. I never get too much of your words.

 

Pillar, that's your problem. Right there. you have a fundamentalist and evangelical upbringing. Mine wasn't quite as rigid, but right up there too. There is a memory that probably runs through your mind often, but which often has no feeling attached to it, a memory of matter-of-fact quality. Start paying attention to those little scenarios right away; if you can, keep a pad of paper in your pocket and jot it down.

You can figure it out later.

 

Or it may be that you may have to seriously sit down and find it. Try this - sit down and write a letter to yourself as a young child. Apologize to it for some way you maybe didn't stand up for yourself, or something - anything - and just keep writing. There will be tears. There will be anger at your folks and your brothers and sisters. Don't worry about. Rez up, or Cowboy up, or whatever you want to call it and do it. You will find that moment (or moments) of humiliation, when you were made to feel like a turd because you wanted an extra cookie.

 

This doesn't place blame on anybody. Why not? Because they too were the little kids that were punished for wanting an extra cookie. It just passes on from one generation to the next.

 

Yes, please take me up on the offer. I don't charge nuthin', I just do it.

 

I'll be keeping my Watcher's eyes open for that memory...might even be necessary to try the letter thing.

 

However...there IS a very sensitive memory from my childhood which I'm not sure is related, but I do believe it has a lot to do with some of my other issues (namely self confidence). If you can help me re-imprint that memory, it might do me a lot of good. It's extremely personal though, so that we'd have to discuss via PM.

[manitou]

I'll be keeping my Watcher's eyes open for that memory...might even be necessary to try the letter thing.

 

However...there IS a very sensitive memory from my childhood which I'm not sure is related, but I do believe it has a lot to do with some of my other issues (namely self confidence). If you can help me re-imprint that memory, it might do me a lot of good. It's extremely personal though, so that we'd have to discuss via PM.

 

Yes, please PM me - we could figure out a ceremony to re-imprint. We will do it at the same time - your end and my end - the theory being that there really is no such thing as linear time anyway so any work we consciously do for 'back then' would work just as well for now and tomorrow too.

[Otis]

Pretty common, I think. Elvis Costello has a song called "Distorted Angel" about feeling guilt over an incident of playing doctor with some girl, and realizing his guardian angel was watching, and later thinking "what a voyeuristic perv that angel is".

In my life, I call it the "invisible observer".

 

I never actually believed that the observer existed (except as a small child, when I thought it was God), but for most of my life, I had this sensation that someone was standing over my shoulder, watching everything I did. Even when I was alone, I was a little self-conscious about picking my nose or farting out loud, because I constantly felt watched.

 

Only recently have I begun to recognize that what I was feeling was not a person, but my fear of being observed. The fear of being observed, of course is an alarm which feels just like: "I am being watched". So, whenever I did something "naughty", then the alarm would sound, and I would feel like someone was watching me.

 

That led to the even more important recognition: that my fear of others' judgment was really an expression of this same fear, being projected onto other people. In other words, when I was by myself, the alarm feels like an invisible observer, but when I'm in public, the exact same fear happens, but it seems to be due to someone else, even though in both cases, it's just something that's going on in my head. It really is just self-consciousness, disguising itself as other-consciousness.

[Mark Foote]

 

Does anybody, in the back of their brain, feel like they're getting younger?

 

 

Whoa, what a question!

 

I've had several interesting dreams lately: in one, under cover of darkness I moved out of the apartments above Hamburger Mary's in the South of Market, San Francisco- key turned in, cut loose and moving not sure where (I lived there in the '80's).

 

This morning, at the end of my sitting, I felt like I was sleeping awake and it was ok to be that way. I think that's what the dream of Hamburger Mary's was about, leaving off my effort and accepting the human condition and the place I'm in (which is fundamentally homeless). That was effortless a lot of the time in childhood, but now I know that everything else is there as well, at the place I am sleeping awake. What a homecoming that is, for me. Childhood without the trauma.

[Cat Pillar]

Yes, please PM me - we could figure out a ceremony to re-imprint. We will do it at the same time - your end and my end - the theory being that there really is no such thing as linear time anyway so any work we consciously do for 'back then' would work just as well for now and tomorrow too.

 

Okay, sent you a PM.

[Otis]

For a period in my life about 15 years ago, I would have very, very vivid images of several scenes and experiences of myself dying. One involved being in a horrible car wreck, and experiencing the surreal altered state of that moment being played out. I knew exactly how this would feel, and it wasn't the physical pain that frightened me, but rather that of a violent death. I experienced the energy state of that, experiencing psychological states that I haven't in real life. I would shut down the playing out of the disturbing images almost reflexively, with a sharp intake of breath and sudden freakout level fear from this 'vision' I was experiencing, so I did not allow it to play out further to find out what came next. I would have this several times a month, and I questioned whether it was just a vision, or was past life, or belonged to someone else, or was a premonition.

This reminds me of when I first started riding a motorcycle. At the end of the day, as I lay in bed, sometimes I would be treated to horrific scenes, flashing through my mind, of what could have happened. I see these moments as just a necessary part of really accepting the dangers of riding; I think it would be irresponsible of me not to face (as fully as possible) the potential for danger, to pretend I was safe.

 

I stumbled across a very useful practice about 10 years ago, when I was walking alone in some dark and unfamiliar woods. I experienced little freak-out fantasies, plying my imagination with flashes of all the awful things I've witnessed in horror films. Zombie hands reaching out of the ground, flesh-eating insects crawling up my leg, the whole thing. What I learned is that if I allow the morbid fantasies to play out, rather than trying to turn them off, they quickly resolve themselves, and lose their power over me. It was precisely in turning away from the fantasies, that I was giving them my power.

 

Ever since then, I've sometimes found it very useful to indulge (in great detail) in precisely what I fear the most. My internal resistance was that somehow I was making the fantasies real, giving them power, by playing them out. But my experience was the opposite. The unreal never became real, and the fantasy was revealed as just that, so the fantasy never again had power over me.

[manitou]

Very interesting and creative thought, Otis...

[manitou]

What a homecoming that is, for me. Childhood without the trauma.

 

 

There's one line in the movie Hope Floats with Sandra Bullock that says it all: "Childhood is the thing we spend the rest of our lives getting over".