I am coming up with some awesome blog entry names lately, aren’t I?

Had therapy today. ^[1] And it was a good session kind of by accident.

I shall explain.

See, I forgot and/or neglected to eat before I left, so I had pretty low blood sugar going into my session today.

And that made me feel very raw and cold and vulnerable and numb. So a lot of that ended up kind of spilling out as I got talking.

This eventually led us to realize that maybe my Paxil dose of 50 mg is too high. That it makes me too numb and interferes with my healing.

I sure as hell have felt hella numb lately.

And trapped. Paralyzed. Like I want to get up, get moving, and get going. but the energies necessary are trapped at the bottom of a frozen lake and can’t escape.

So when I try to engage my motor, the engine just makes a horrible noise and then stops and shuts down again.

And I can feel the ice. In my veins, in my chest, in my hands. I can feel it like it is a physical coldness flowing through my veins.

Scientifically speaking, this must be engendered by a chemical imbalance of some sort. My therapist and I talked about serotonin versus noradrenaline. and how antidepressants that raise one suppress the other.

That made sense to me. After all, the idea is to fix a chemical imbalance. not cause one. So any antidepressant would have to maintain the same total of the two.

And who knows – my ice might be noradrenaline. Or something that does the opposite of the adrenaline response, anyhow.

It’s like there was a massive heat wave and I responded by installing air conditioning so powerful that it’s like winter in here.

I overcompensated, is what I am saying. And now I am stuck thawing myself out piece by piece and suffering through the long slow springtime of the soul when all I really want is a hot summer day to melt it all and bring the flood.

But how do you start the flood?

You surrender all form, all structure, all shape, and let yourself dissolve in the deep dark well of your own emotions.

It’s a lot like death.

But it isn’t death. It’s renewal. With form and structure and limitations gone, the soul is free to make the changes it needs in order to heal and evolve past its pain.

To transcend it, in other words.

I never believed in transcendence until quite recently. It was too abstract and undefined. What, exactly, was happening? How did it work? You have shown me the caterpillar and then the butterfly, but what happened in between?

But I get it now. Transcendence occurs when the energy of an emotional crisis is transformed into the energy needed to completely overcome a spiritual problem via the very sort of formless transformation I described above.

And without this possibility. we could never truly grow as people. Like a snake who can’t shed its skin, our growth only causes us more pain as we, in our blindness. struggle to hold ourselves together when what we really need is to fall apart.

Hence my repeated reference to feeling like I am barely holding myself together. Like I am a gut-shot soldier in a bloody and brutal war movie who has jammed his fist in the hole to keep his intenstines from spilling out.

Sorry for that harsh image, but it’s how I feel. I have a lot of darkness in me that needs to come out if I am to heal, and well, it ain’t pretty.

But maybe that is all wrong. Maybe what I should do is let it all go so I can ditch this goddamned coccoon and become the big beautiful butterfly I was meant to be.

Because seriously – fuck this chrysalis. My larval form ended a very long time ago and now it is time to stop fucking around and ducking the truth

I don’t tget to become a butterfly without having to become goo. Like I keep saying, for every butterfly born, a caterpillar dies.

From the caterpillar’s point of view, transformation is death. After all, that which emerges from the coccoon will be radically different from that which went in. The caterpillar will be gone forever.

If that’s not death, what is?

The answer is that it is only death if the caterpillar defines itself as “everything that I am right now, no matter how trivial”. I fthe caterpillar can expand its mind to the point where it can see that its true sell cannot die and that it will only be the illusions of self that will change, then the transformation can be seen as what it is : transcendence.

Or evolution, if you will.

And I think i am getting to the point where I am brave/reckless enough to initiate my transformation. It’s my usual sort of kamikaze bravery where I get to the point wheree I just plain don’t give a fuck about the consequences, I just want to dive into the deep dark pit and see what happens.

Banzai, motherfuckers. See you in Hell.

I find it funny that in order to be brave on a personal level, I have to essentially work myself up into a maniac frenzy. It’s the only way I know of to overcome my usually cautious and “sensible” nature.

Well actually, the other way is to get seriously pissed off by something. I am brave when I’m mad, too, or when I feel there is a real threat to me and mine.

Then the brahmin bull in me comes out and I go into Raging Ogre mode.

And I suppose those are the only moments when bravery is actually needed.

So I guess I am pretty brave after all.

When I have a reason to be.

Now I am going to lay down and think formless thoughts.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.