June 30th, 2025

 I have realized/discovered some things, some very noteworthy things about my mental conclusions, my emotional body, the indelible recording device that it is.... about the things I, as a little boy, made up about myself and the world, in the weeks and months after my mom died:

Here is my best attempt to articulate some of these things that were underneath or mixed in with my feelings of hurt, anguish and grief :  

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These are ideas or conclusions my 8 year old mind came up with after mom suddenly left.  

1) Something like this doesn't happen to normal people, people that God favors, people who God is watching over.  So, God doesn't really think much of me and is not watching out for me.  
I can't rely on God. I don't trust God.  I'm not even sure God knows I exist.  

2) My family is not safe, the world is not safe, I am not safe.  Unforeseen bad things can happen without warning.  

3) I am powerless over the bigger things in life. I don't have choice about what happens around me.  Life is harsh, unfair, must be endured and then you die without warning.  Basically the "life sucks and then you die", attitude.  Not a great umbrella to grow up and enter teen years with. 

It's a miracle that I came to be as stable and productive a person as I am today, with all that heavy baggage I was carrying around.  I now see this is as grace.   I have been greatly blessed but at the time didn't see it that way.  I just carried on and covered up and made do.   I didn't know how to address all this.  I was just a kid and none of the adults around me had a clue either.  
 
The emotional body doesn’t seem to age like the physical body.  I can “tap in” to feelings from long ago and they are still there.  So this part of me seems to be outside of time.  

Those feelings seem to reside in an electromagnetic energy field surrounding and penetrating my physical body.  I can't see them but I can feel them.  They seem to have connection points to my stomach area and chest. Basically the solar plexus/gut area and the heart/lung area.   

These are the physical body-doorways into my emotional energy field.  In order to ‘feel my feelings’ it requires getting quiet and still.  Shifting my center of attention out of my head, my thoughts, my stream of thinking... and dropping down into my body, being more present in my body, more in touch with in my body... using my physical body as a link or connection into my emotional body.  

Being quiet,  watching, observing, waiting for signals to arrive.

It’s not an instant or easy process yet, because I guess I have spent a lot of time avoiding being aware of these more subtle connections…escaping into my head, into to listening to my own stream of mind activity and thinking THAT was the most important thing, and that voice, which was reciting my own thoughts to me, was the only thing that was important or real.  

The emotional body is more non-verbal.  Pre-verbal.  It requires using the intuition rather than the intellect, especially at first.  
I have certainly avoided feeling my own deeper emotions by numbing out- leaving my body and being 99% in my thoughts.   Putting head over heart.  I've  numbed myself because I haven’t known how to feel my feelings in a productive healing way - a way that didn't just result in me quickly being drawn down into a sluggish, uncomfortable and depressed state.
  
No wonder I would want to escape  and find some way to get away from those feelings.  

For me, at the time, my biggest escape was rock and roll music and imagining that, I too, would someday be a rock and roll star.  I smoked pot and got lost into listening to the latest album over and over again.   I remember feeling the shock and let-down of coming back into "my life" after being lost in the fantasy of what I imagined it would be like to be a rock star.  

I'm sure I am not alone in that.  But no wonder so many kids get hooked on  pot and then doing other drugs.  Fortunately- the pot I was smoking back in the 1960's and 70's was mostly the kind that pretty quickly just made me tired and sleepy.  

I got tired of feeling  tired and sleepy all the time and I just quit.  I'm thankful for that.

Now I am in the process of simply taking time to sit with myself and listen to my body and see what arises.  Sometimes it's nothing.  Or nothing discernible.  Most of the time I am aware of what starts as vague, amorphous feelings of stress or tension in my stomach and chest.  Heaviness, sadness.   When I am lucky sometimes something more defined will come forth from a deeper place.  

For now, I am learning to simply sit with and be with and passively visit with these feelings.  They have been neglected a long time.  They are not immediately forthcoming.  I have to take some time to allow them to come forth and then convey their message.   Very much like working with a severely abused dog whose tail is tucked and won't come out of his cage.  

It is taking lots of patience and ridding myself of any vibe or agenda of wanting to  change or fix or make these feelings go away.  No.  No agenda at all.  Just being and listening.  No fixing or imposing change or my bright ideas about what "healing" would look like.  My most tender feelings don't give a hoot about my mind talk.  I have to shift into passive, feminine-side, intuition and presence.  I am just here to be with my feeling body - nothing more- nothing required.  If it chooses to send me signals via intuition then I receive- but there must be no pressure to do so, or everything gets clouded over and obscured again. 

Passive....Being, not doing.   Listening, not talking... and definitely not pontificating or trying to 'wrap it all up in a bow' and be finished.  Just being humble enough to listen. 

That's where I am right now.  
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