Buddha Human

I feel heavy with sadness stuck behind my eyes. It’s the kind of sadness that is pervasive, long lived in me and likely long will in the future. I don’t mind it, per say, other than what it does to my energy levels. Two weeks of clear creative upsurge through the time of ovulation decent-ed downward into the following two weeks of increased internal weight and fog. This sadness, while always present like the moon, felt more deeply when the sun rests. I attribute it to varied mix of human existence — part existential, part collective and part personal. In its presence, I have easier access to the angst of not being able to truly know what it is that we’re all doing here; an eternal answer-less question of which I think I can sometimes see an inch more clearly only to be brought back even deeper into the unknown of it all. In the sadness is, too, the grief of our shared world; the misconnection, past and present, suffering in the same timeline, genuine worry for whether or not we’ll be able to discover another way. And then there’s my own sadness, the tears of old pains, sometimes quite loud in their wailing and sometimes a faint cry that I easily mistake for unnecessary cares. Today, and yesterday, and maybe even the day before, my personal sadness seems dense and foggy. I can put my finger on a few immediate life items that have my heart in a crunch and yet I don’t feel willing to get close enough to any of them to see if they’re the true culprit. In that way, I paralyze myself with my own unwillingness.

Usually, I let my sadness run. I love to cry, especially when in witness by a trusted other. After many decades of bottling them to the point of extinction, I’m rather thrilled to have learned to un-dam their flow. The only problem, I find, is that my nervous system won’t always open the gates. When certain parts of me feel threatened, my response is to batten down my hatches rather than release this trauma-induced reaction. For my personal mind/body/spirit connection one of the ways I know I’m under a trauma-response, big or small, is when my physical energetic environment irritates me. Even while in gloriously sunny Mexico, the sounds of the birds chirping loudly are a high-pitched attack to my ears. So, too, are our neighbor’s loud music, the opening and closing of doors, a speaker for ambiance right above my head at dinner. I’m surrounded with irritants, and in such a state of hyper-awareness, they irritate me even more.

Somewhat un-humbly, I’ve long thought of myself as Buddha-like. Since I was a little girl, I’ve been lucky enough to see through the eyes of truth, first in others and then more slowly in myself as I’ve peeled back the layers of my own healing. But I’m also just as human AF. No amount of vacation snacks, sex and sleep is softening this hardened part of me. While Buddha sees the bigger picture, her human-counterpart can’t quite see past this sentence. I know better than to pressure myself into relaxation or to force myself into “joy-inducing” experiences in an attempt to find more ground. Just a small portion of it is accessible right now and that’s okay. As a nod to one of my all-time favorite sayings goes, wherever I go, there all of me is, whether I like it or not.