Alchemy

Do you ever wonder why, even when you know a feeling isn’t healthy, you still cannot shake it off? You can tell yourself, "Don't feel it," until you are blue in the face, but it persists.

Why is it that when you work through emotions, knowing the emotion and naming it isn't enough to make it go away? My teacher used to say a wound never permanently goes away and will always be painful when it comes up. But I am realizing that the body has an amazing power to digest emotions. It almost feels like an alchemical process.

I don’t feel it happens overnight, or that it makes it completely go away. But in the throes of something that affects your daily life, I believe it can be neutralized into something manageable, and the good news is you have control over your own internal self.

I started experiencing this process at meditation retreats. In my teens and through my twenties, I had a debilitating anxiety disorder. Sometimes I was so afraid I thought I might break down. I would worry about psychosis, especially after a good friend of mine had a psychotic break.

Then my worst fear came true for someone else while at a meditation retreat. I was standing outside the retreat center when I felt dizzy and had to sit down. Something in the atmosphere felt off. The next thing I knew, my teacher came down from his house on the mountain and asked if everything was alright. He had felt it too and was checking on everyone.

Later that day, we were all rounding when someone in the group started laughing in an unnatural way. Then they started making other exaggerated noises that I cannot remember. I became fearful; something was telling me this was not a natural state of meditation. I had been meditating with this group for about 15 years when this happened, and no one had ever disturbed the silence before, except for a sneeze or getting up to use the bathroom.

When we all took our 15-minute break between rounds, one of the students started taking off their clothes and saying strange things. I realized they were having a break from reality. I knew this could happen sometimes if meditation were not in check. But our teacher always had a good hand on the rudder, and everyone was pretty grounded.

In the end, an ambulance had to get them and take them to the hospital. I felt so bad for the person, mixed with my own fear of losing it, that I started to shake internally. When I sat down to meditate again the next day, the fear felt as if it was permeating my entire being. I wasn’t sure I could let go and meditate out of the fear of the same thing happening to me.

I told myself I needed to go deep into this feeling of fear that was consuming me, and that I had nowhere else to go. I let myself fall into the abyss of this entity that had followed me around my whole life up to that point. At one point, I wanted to get up and walk out of the hall, but I knew it would follow me.

I sat with it, and I sat with it; I thought I would explode, then out of the blue it disappeared; it fricking vanished. I was left with this immense gratitude; I couldn’t believe it worked. I felt solid and empowered. This was a deep-seated fear that started in childhood that I still carry today, but it does not debilitate me anymore. It comes up every once in a while when others might think my opinion is strange and give me an “are you crazy” look, but I have realized I may not be the crazy one. I say this because I am not afraid to explore what most people want hidden.

However, new childhood traumas and beliefs still come up all the time, especially in today's world. I have started working through this process of letting the fears and anxieties churn inside me like soup. They meld together, dissipate, and return. Sometimes I wake up at night with a deep feeling of emotional pain and have to start the process again. I feel that once we dive into these unconscious fears, they start getting triggered more quickly. Because this has been happening to me a lot lately, I have thought the process feels like a type of internal alchemy.

I don’t understand it completely, but I wanted to write about it because I don’t think we should be afraid of ourselves. As I have written before, this is about the human process, and on some level, as my teacher has said, we are all crazy. Once we see it, deal with it, and be with it, it transforms.