A Zen Moment
I went to a recovery meeting at the Zen Center last Friday. The teaching/topic was around a spiritual awakening (or moment) in regard to one’s recovery journey from addiction or in my case from PTSD. I’ve had many during my lifetime. In the meeting, each person has up to 4 minutes to share. I wasn’t planning on speaking. But there was a moment with an extended period of silence, and so I spoke up.
The moment that came up for me was when my husband died 3 years ago.
My recovery journey started when I was 35. But there came a time when it felt like my attempt at healing was giving as much energy (if not more) to the pain/trauma as releasing (healing). In my interior world, it visualized as being stuck in a swamp of tar. I made a decision to stop. Stop the processing. Stop talking about it. Just stop. My thinking was that I needed to drain the swamp. That there would be a measure of healing by denying the trauma/pain more energy.
There was some logic to the choice. I did feel that my interior world over time began to settle. The swamp slowly drained. I equated that to a gradual release (gradual healing). But that’s not what was happening. The reality was that I was systematically rolling back the trauma/pain to places where I did not see. The reality was that too much had inundated me, and I didn’t understand how to deal with it (though I tried many things) and so a part of me decided to wall it off again.
Life continued on. And though I had a certain peripheral awareness, I unconsciously began to rely on the light of my husband to keep hidden those parts of me I could not bear. My husband carried a lot of light—he would walk into a room, and his smile uplifted everyone in the space. He wanted to see the good in people. He delighted in that. And so, some part of me decided to hide within his light. I carry a shame from that. It wasn’t fair or right for him or for me. And there was much beauty in our relationship.
That system was not perfect. But, after a fashion, it worked. Until he died.
There was 2 weeks between his death and his funeral. I was insanely busy and my mind was going a million miles per hour, and I was focused on pouring everything I could into honoring his death because it was the last thing I would be able to do for him.
The day after the funeral, the realization set in that I was in the dark.
The light was gone. All of our friends were my husband’s— I was included by extension. They disappeared quickly.
And in my interior world, a terrible, nightmarish vision consumed my mind.
From the drained swamp, all of my unfinished work emerged.
All of it.
At once.
It appeared as a legion of demons-shadows led by a Balrog and the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The shadows had begat shadows that begat more and a vast army descended upon my interior world.
I was overwhelmed.
I was terrified.
My heart raced.
Pressure increased.
My instinct is to handle things on my own. I’m tough. I’m independent. I’m resilient.
But the thought that override all others shouted, I’m fucked.
Part of my mind started guilt-tripping that I had not been doing my emotional work, that I had stopped. Part of my mind grasped at understanding what the hell was happening. During that time, I realized how I had been keeping my unfinished work at bay by being within my husband’s light. And it felt like as the legions of shadows swept toward me, shouting their messages, I’m not wanted, I’m not lovable, I’m not enough, I’m a burden, I’m broken, I’m too sensitive, I’m not fully human, I’m wrong, I’m undesirable, I have no one, I must prove myself by taking it, take the punishment like a man, and many more, hitting me, shouting at me, and that when these shadows crashed fully into my consciousness, I would die.
It was too much all at once. Because of my intense grief, I didn’t have the energy or the emotional regulation to withstand hearing and feeling the shadows (much less all of them at the same time).
And some part of me, a part able to hear God, said, you can’t do this on your own. You need help. This was the first part of my spiritual moment.
When I agreed on the need to reach out, the idea came to reach out to someone in the Mankind Project. I had not been active since I did my weekend 17 years earlier.
I made the call to one of the leaders of my weekend. A couple days later, I received a call from an area leader in the Houston community who among other things supported outreach.
The following Wednesday, I attended my first MKP men’s group.
I was desperate. I also understood that my grief was an opportunity— it had become the gateway to my unfinished work. And I was clear that the door would remain open for only so long. I had hidden my feelings. But now they were surging into the fracture.
I felt that the circle was in danger of folding. That may or may not have been the case— but, it’s what I felt.
So the Act Two of the spiritual moment came into clarity. I had to be all in or it wasn’t going to work.
Which meant I had to trust men I had just meant with my chaos, my pain, my most vulnerable shit.
My term for it was “recklessly trusting.”
So the 2nd week, I agreed to work. I did it for myself. I did it as an offering to the group to help bind it together. The energy of my grief allowed me to extend the field of my extroverted feeling to cocoon the entire group.
It was a God moment. I don’t remember much about it. The amount of emotion I unleashed was enough to shake California from North America. Mostly grief. I think some of the men thought I was crazy. I felt that judgment. But I also felt the circle had bonded in way that felt tighter.
Since then, the work has been an integral part of my life. Over 3 years, I’ve missed 2 circles; one for a MKP meeting; one because I was sick. The spiritual moment’s clarity was that I had to be all in to discover my light.
Because in my case, I never really had it. But that’s another story.
I have found a piece of it. Enough to walk but perhaps not enough to understand where I’m going.
I’m most grateful for my God moments and for the meeting in the Zen Center that connected me to that moment 3 years ago and to the moments of many others who were at the Zen Center.
For what it’s worth, I am a changed man.
And the work continues.
Breath to Fire.
