Spiritual Rehab

The most difficult, most frustrating pattern in my life right now is my avoidance of things I truly want to do.

I have been ascribing this pattern to the combination of a decade of depression and an almost equal time of being stuck in day jobs which frustrated me and kept my focus on non-creative, boring, and/or aggravating tasks. While I actually did accomplish a great deal during those years (significant spiritual education and initiations, earning a Masters degree, publishing a book, and etc.) a lot of time was spent sunk into self-numbing activities because I hurt so very much. 

Since my healings at the beginning of the year that pain is gone, and I have mental and physical energy I'd been lacking for a long time. But it's been proving very difficult to move forward, despite a list of projects I am truly excited about. I still come home from work and get lost in solitaire games or social media scrolling or other mindless distractions.

But this morning Odin gave me a new, very helpful perspective: I should look at this particular stage of my life as rehab time. I may have finally been healed from the damage I took (and, to be honest, made worse) from LM's death, but that doesn't mean I'm back to my full capacity. It doesn't mean my maladaptive coping mechanisms, the avoidance, the self-numbing, the fear of pain from engagement, aren't still part of my psyche.

"You need rehab time," He told me. "The wounds are healed, but your systems are not yet back at 100%. You can't go from struggling to perfectly functional so quickly." [Insert image of warrior with a scarred leg needing to exercise it slowly before he's back in fighting shape.] 

My psyche is still in the habit of feeling wounded and compromised, and so the projects I want to engage with feel overwhelming -- frighteningly so. Pretending otherwise doesn't help. Wanting to do them doesn't make them less scary to the part of me which has been so very, very tired and sad for so long. It hasn't had time to fully realize that those chronic conditions have been healed.

Giving myself permission to go slowly, and to treat myself gently while pursuing my goals, feels very, very helpful and reassuring this morning.

If I Can Define It, I Can Manage It

This afternoon I spent I-don't-know-how-long listing the various things I want to work on right now. It's a longish list, and there are a couple of extremely complicated entries.

What was unexpectedly helpful about the exercise was clarifying what type of "to do" each is. Most are projects, according to the formal definition of the word: limited time efforts with a distinct end point. I have a tendency to think big and to overcomplicate things -- and I have a Sagittarian tendency to be very good at starting things but less good at completing them -- so being reminded that many of the things I want to do are by nature limited duration efforts was very helpful. 

In complete contrast, a couple of the items are -- for lack of a better term at the moment -- lifestyle commitments. The ones on my current list are spiritual practices and long-term engagement in spiritual and mission-based Work. (Personal mission, not evangelism.)

And then there are the two biggest, most complicated items: each of which is made up of multiple intersecting projects and which may or may not eventually become lifestyle efforts.

Most importantly, I identified which of the to-do's are directly related to/an expression of/in support of my personal mission, and which are outside of it. The outsides ones are still worthy of effort, still things I expect to enjoy -- or at least derive satisfaction from completing -- but they have an entirely different quality to them than the mission-based ones. That was far more helpful than I had expected.

And then I realized (probably not for the first time) that another challenge of the past years has been the sense that my life largely consisted of doing things I didn't want to do while in pain. Several of the most important aspects of my identity were wrested from me and I was unable to reclaim them. Creating the project list today gave me a long-absent sense of being centered in my authentic self, not driven by or at the mercy of external forces.

Another way of putting it is of gaining control of my own narrative again -- which I realized also relates directly to my journal project.
(I suspect there's a fairytale metaphor for that project somewhere. . .)

We are never fully in control of our own lives, but in my experience having a strong sense of self and my personal narrative, my personal constellation of meaning, goes a long way toward increasing my quality of life.