The Possible Project

When you've touched the bottom, the absolute bottom before it falls away, and climbed back, it makes you certain.  Certain in ways that is very difficult for others to understand. Difficult in ways that define your knowing in a manner that tries to "fix" people. Learning to hold a position of equanimity is the path. That IS the route to giving people the space and time to understand their own energy, their own drama.  Articulating this when under attack or framed as a cause for feelings and negativity is only learned through walking the same path and being held by someone who could also hold you. It's love under circumstances that create suffering and it's the souls last gambit. Or is it just an elaborate lie to be told for one last time by an ego holding on for dear life.  Maybe the thoughts whirling around my head are pointing to something else. Even holding an ounce of what it was that contained you for the journey of release is a capture in itself, a method to...

One of the hardest things I've had to come to terms with in dealing with the healing, with the full immersion of self into pain, is the state the pain creates and the mind's, or ego's approach to protect the self at any cost. You cannot trust what you think when you are under duress of this kind. It serves you nil. It serves those around you nil. The cumulative impact of listening and projecting is pain, loneliness and regret.  This feels easy to type now. Being 11 years into this process (and less acutely before then) gives you a good and reliable map of behaviour and outcomes, and even then, when you can see it so clearly, the ego will step in and tell you lies to keep you away from acknowledgement of your own pain. Imagine a mother trying to stop a baby burning itself. The ego is the mother, the baby is the self. At some point the baby must experience a pain to stop it carrying out the same thing twice.  As I sit here today, it's taken me a failed marriage, loss of f...

For 11 years I have seen my sister as a victim of circumstance. Things that happened to her. Things that were out of her control. For 11 years the feeling of anger, betrayal and hatred were buried deep inside me, where they would allow me to paint my world with tinges of red, black and putrid yellow. Of course I didn't know it. Not then. Not 11 years ago, 5 years ago. 2 years ago. 6mths ago.  Then it passed over me. I was lying in bed, my wife was exhausted. Her breathing laboured as she too has reached the end of the emotional pool that is it possible to reach. There is nothing left. I saw her stressed and recalled the support and efforts she has made for me, my family, since my sisters death by suicide in May 2015.  As it passed over me, I thought the people who gave up, who stopped coming, who didn't want to be around a house of grief and sorrow. Deep, inexplicable grief is not easy to sit with for anyone. It's a lonely place. I thought about the price my dad paid, my mu...

For weeks now I've had a pull. I ignored it. Then I was driving out to volunteer for a local group that provides emotional support for young people who have experienced the loss of a parent. The route I travelled took me past the point that was pulling me, namely the walk from my house where I lived between the ages of 3 and 7, to the primary school I was at for the same time. I have many sketchy moments from that time, mainly painful, losses and trauma caused at the hands of my parents.  I woke up on a rainy Saturday morning and I knew that was the day. The day to walk the path I'd not trodden for over 40 years. I've excavated and processed through 27 layers, real identification of psychological adaptations made in the young self to survive what he was exposed to growing up. 27 is a lot. I am tired, my wife is tired. We're all shattered by the taking away of life caused by exposure to unsafe life growing up. Almost tired to the point of the relationship, the last thing...

One of the hardest things about dissolution, the dissolving of the self is being nowhere, no-one. Nothing.  At least when you were adapted and blind, there was a you, a pattern playing out in your world that people associated with you a personality, a person, "there's no-one quite like Richard". My relationships, I have understood relied on the energy that moved through me and into my world to remain afloat. The kind one, the funny one, the crazy one, the one with no limits, the one that would bring every ounce of himself to every engagement. The remnants of this remain as the void starts to take over and the old self hangs on to provide some ballast to the floating in your own space.  This period is also the loneliest. Perhaps the quietest so far, as the need to perform abates and you feel the grief of the self that was and is no longer. The pain is deeper but less violent. It is surrender from within. It is forward motion and sometimes that's all that matters. Today...

Grief hits people in different ways. To me its a definite process. As I write this I sit within it. Like a tree with its core hollowed out. It feels personal and lonely. It is mine.  My recovery is not special but it is complex. My trauma has been interlaced with loss. Loss of a sister to suicide and the loss of a father who I never had a relationship with and who caused a lot of the family pain. I am coming to a place of peace. The journey to get there has been brutal. Physically, mentally, within and without. Family, friends, work colleagues have to exist in the field you create and when the material you are carrying overwhelms, there is only one place it can go.  How do I know I am coming to the end? I am highly tuned to my process after 11 years of cyclical behaviour that has increased in intensity over time. As I have, in parallel built the capability to carry my pain, the emotion has stayed within to be processed, not released (as much) outwards in tears or migraine. The...