I have recently emerged from a deep void space.
It was a complete loss of orientation that has been calling me in, for years. A reckoning of sorts, that I had avoided up until that point, having built an astronomical amount of mental defence structure around it.
I said to a soul friend while I was in it:
“This is the spot that used to unhinge me.”
All I could do was focus inwards and downwards. Every time my mind tried to drag me up into it’s wittering and panicking, I oriented down, down and down.
It really humbled me, because I realised how much I’d still been trying to manage myself into a “higher” state. How sneaky that control pattern is. And how it just wasn’t an option anymore.
The only authentic thing was to stay, unmoving, inside the void. In a place that offered no relief. Just the truth of the body and the truth of the moment.
The only thing I had left, was this unconditional resolve to be in the darkness without projecting anything onto it. And my resolve to stay outweighed the fear.
The breaking point (and the single biggest breakthrough I have possibly had) came, when the deepest part of me remembered how to “let go” as a continuous state of being.
This remembrance has been slowly reorganising my system for the last year or so. But it still felt like I was trying to “mentally” re-enter the state. Trying to mentally manufacture feeling states has been my fucking kryptonite. A maddening compulsion. A crazy making by-product of a labyrinthine mind.
And the poignant longing of a body that never learned how to feel safe.
That didn’t know that it could, and eventually would, be a safe place to land.
Something quiet and so delicate emerged out of those days of holding the line, in the dark. A stripped back, almost naked presence.
(I say “almost naked” because my experience is that “fully naked” is like taking a hero’s dose of mushrooms and I don’t quite have the infrastructure for that yet haha)
A thing I’d had in glimpses, that finally had space to integrate into my nervous system, as a new baseline.
And a knowing - that anything outside of that presence was a performance. A protection pattern. An armouring.
And that this was fine, too. Because I can allow it. I can allow the grip. I can allow judgement. I can allow the mind. It is all allowed. Nothing is in exile. I allow it and it washes through me.
And the sweet relief that a once incredibly afraid part of me was utterly desperate for, was and is found, in the complete release of needing it.
Of needing anything to be anything other than what it is.
Right now my heart feels stretched. Like it’s not used to being this open. Like it’s straining against an old layer of protection. It feels intelligent and like a slow titration that I wouldn’t have had the patience to sit with, once upon a time. (See under: the time I meditated myself into a near-psychotic break at a Vipassana retreat.)
In my darkest moments, I thought that there was always going to be a way that my mind could trick me back into a corner.
What a WILD inversion that was.
When the truth is that, there is nothing that cannot be allowed. No mental corner I can be backed into, that won’t crumble into allowance. Into the endlessness of the creator that is always and infinitely bigger than every prison my mind could build.
And that this is wholeness. This is what it means to have permission for it all.
This has been just as much a physiological unwinding as it has been a spiritual one.
My body had to learn. It had to learn that it was safe to let go of control.
And it is by no means the end of the initiation.
But what I do know, is that inside that void, I gave myself permission to exist so wholly and thoroughly that the compulsive internal checking that made me feel like an alien inside my own body, lost its propellor.
The contract broke.
I am so grateful I stayed.
#pleb #nostr #GM #void #spirituality
