Alex – I too struggled and even fought to find a way out of the misery I lived in. I can only share some of what I found that may helpful.
In 1900, Charles Richet a French physiologist gave information by saying, “The living being is stable. It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. Everything in our universe strives to reach a state of Homeostasis or equilibrium. This principle applies to single individual entities to massive complex systems either metabolically, physically, socially or psychologically, even spiritually. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its responses to the stimulation. In a sense it is stable because it is modifiable – the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.”
It took me a long time of searching to find, in my own way of life, the wisdom in those two statements. It took me even longer to learn how to apply that in my life. When I did an extraordinary process revealed itself.
I have written elsewhere about suffering depression and terrible exhaustion in my twenties and how I found my way out of it. And it was through dreams and life’s little secrets stated above that it was done.
In searching for relief from misery I tried many different things, relaxation, yoga, meditation, fasting, and diet among them. They promised to be helpful but something was missing that I only began to uncover when I started teaching relaxation/surrender. Some of those classes I taught were huge back in the sixties and seventies. To help people I would wander around the class and lift an arm or leg of some of those lying quietly relaxed. I moved the limb to let the person have an enhanced awareness of their relaxed condition. What amazed me was that often the arm or leg was so rigid with tension it was hard to move. If I let go the limb would remain suspended. On asking the person how they felt they would say, ‘Fine. Really relaxed.’ They didn’t know they were carrying enormous tensions.
Are you relaxing or suppressing?
It took me a while to realise what that indicated. You could relax surface muscles and feelings, but a mass of tensions were unconscious. Later I learned that such tensions had often arisen from difficult or traumatic past experiences, still locked in the body and emotions. By using relaxation techniques such as dropping the tension of the voluntary muscles or meditating on positive things those inner tensions were being pushed back into the unconscious – undealt with. When left at that point, relaxation and meditation were a method of suppression and control, not of healing.
With shock I realised this was true of many things that were supposed to be helpful, such as meditation and positive thinking. What they often did was to calm surface feelings by controlling thoughts and body. They did not deal with the real difficulties that had been pushed into the unconscious. Their purpose was to quieten the conscious mind and the voluntary movements of the body, not release unconscious tension.
I went on an almost fanatical search for what could be done to change that – to release the unconscious problems. The clue was, as Richet says, that ‘the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.’ I gradually realised that to really adjust to the many knocks and changes we meet in life, our body and mind need to be capable of a type of ‘instability’. It needs to be able to move, to express freely, and to respond automatically or spontaneously. Yet all our cultural training and habits are about control and suppression. Governments also sometimes give huge threats to the people if they do not conform. All in all, we have in many ways been trained to be sick – as I was myself. And, amazingly, my doctor, to deal with depression and physical but undiagnosable pains, was telling me to take a drug, a tranquiliser, to maintain the status quo.
I gradually found a way through dreams. I had been dreaming for some weeks that I was marching with troops to the battlefront. Then one day I dreamt of being in the trenches and going over the top as the bullets were flying – something I had been scared of previously.
Then having sat for months dropping my aims and beliefs, one night after going to the toilet, I was just getting back into my bed and I heard a disembodied voice say to me, “You have asked how God touches the human soul. Now watch closely.” A couple of days later, having realised all that, I got together with three friends – Mike Tanner, Sheila Johns and Chris Stevens at the Kingston Club/Ashram in Combe Martin, Devon – to experiment with how to allow this process of self-regulation to express. How did you give your being freedom to express spontaneously so it could rid itself of what it held unconsciously?
To sum up we found these things helpful –
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ and
http://dreamhawk.com/body-and-mind/the-arm-circling-meditation/Tony