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Originally Posted by jexa
What if the little girl disappears when I fold up the map?
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What if?" Are you saying that did happen for you, or you just want to be prepared in case it does?
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The map disappears, too, and so when I try to sit on the map instead I am propelled downward, like I have fallen into a well. And as I am falling, I notice that the world is black. Slowly I lose the sensation of falling. In fact, I was never falling. And the blackness expands. And expands. And it is blackness and roaring static at the same time. And the blackness/static is everything, there is nothing, no voice inside of me, no little girl.
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When I've been in workshops where we did exercises like this, we've been advised ahead of time to keep distinguishing between what we experience here and now, and whatever story or stories we might tell ourselves about it. I almost always found the distinction a lot easier to grasp when it was
someone else's story being used as an illustration: "Sheesh, how could I get sucked into mistaking
that for my experience?" It was surprisingly hard when the "story" was one I was accustomed to telling myself and (I later found) I had some kind of attachment/investment in it. The story turned out to be my way of protecting myself from experiencing something: I might tell myself I was the kind of person who couldn't successfully experience something so I should, for example, stay away from situations that might trigger such an experience for me. It never felt like a story going in; it was obviously "what's so", "what everybody knows" (or should know) about me. It was only after I learned (more or less the hard way) to draw the distinction between the story and my actual experience that I could look back and ask myself, "How on earth could I have thought I 'knew'
that?"
So for you, is this an experience or a story, or are you still working on the distinction?
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It's terrifying. Nothing. Black space expanding. It says the blackness is bigger than my brain, so if I let it, it will fill all the spaces in my mind and expand even more, swallow up every last bit of me, and in the end, I will drown in it, and it will be oozing out of my ears and my mouth and my eyes..
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Going out on a limb a bit here: I say that if it's your experience, the tendency will be for you to move through it and out the other side to whatever's up next for you. If it's a story, the tendency will be for it to become more solid, persistent, believable and convincing.
Last year you turned me on to Steven Hayes and his colleagues, whom I've been reading ever since as time permits
(doing my laundry, waiting for my flight to be called...
). I was tickled to find that they draw a distinction between something they call "clean pain" and "dirty pain". Clean pain is whatever you're willing to experience, allow to happen, let go of and move on. Dirty pain is what you subject yourself to in order to avoid clean pain, and is by far the more unpleasant of the two. I hadn't seen these terms before and I know that if someone had told me earlier that I was subjecting myself to "dirty pain" it would've sounded pretty awful to me and I would've subjected myself to a whole lot
more dirty pain to defend myself from the accusation.
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This is where meditation brings me if I stay too long in it. To me it is terrifying, and what happens then is I just give up the whole thing. There is no little girl's voice inside of me, there is no me, and just screw it all. I think I'm missing something though. Some essential piece that will provide some solace, some hope.
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My experience of such "situations" is rather different. I typically find myself thinking, "I disappear? OK, I disappear! I've been creating my experience (and my story) since way back so what's one more time?"
Heck, I disappear every time I fall asleep and create myself again when I wake up. I'll bet you do the same!
Many have said this and I'm not sure exactly whom I'm quoting: the only way out is
through.
