You know, spending so much time in your head, on your dreams, your memories, your fantasies, your problems gets old, really old, and I've only been doing this for a year and a half. I'm already bored by myself and my problems and we're certainly still in the middle of things or even (horrors!) still at the beginining.

But I know, yes, I do know, that it's only through such painstaking, repetitive work that we'll be able to reshape ourselves into something less pain-provoking, less fundamentally painful, something essentially calmer that lets us pay more attention to the beautiful outside world of normal life.

This week, shaking again through a sieve the rocks and pebbles from the bottom of the creek, I found gold. Yes. Just as we, you and I, do find psychological gold from time to time. I found a thread that organizes then and now, that inserts real understanding into the crazed hodge-podge of my life's events and happenings. A hodge-podge that's all too often seemed just like a random collection of junk.

Yeah, I see this now, and though it's not all that complicated or sophisticated it really hasn't occurred to me before. It starts at the beginning and goes right to the end, to right now as I sit here typing this. You see, some time before I was two, maybe even one, a time when I was probably still in diapers, something happened and, as a result of this happening, several consequences ensued.

First, I knew for a fact that when I asked for something that I really, REALLY, needed and wanted, I would be refused.

Second, I knew that even THINKING about a terribly wanted or needed thing would send me into a maelstrom, a vortex of shame, self-hatred and anxiety.

Third, I knew that even CONSIDERING, even PONDERING my asking for something I desperately needed and wanted, would wind me up in an overwhelming emotional situation ending in night and day obsessions with auto-destruction.

And along came adult life and I really didn't have to ask for such terribly wanted or needed things. I had training, I had skills, I had intelligence. It wasn't all that hard for me to make a living without trespassing on the forbidden zones of "asking" as opposed to simply "being offered." I was offered. Didn't have to ask. Problem resolved.

Then came the Great Recession (still going on now). And for a variety of hard dollar reasons my practice melted away. And there was nothing for me to do other than go around with my hat in my hand, asking for favors. Job favors, employment favors, money favors. All the stuff that brought me right back to early childhood and all those awful, terrible, impossible thoughts and feelings.

I couldn't do it. Simply could not. I faded out and my world faded out to me. I lived in a cloud. A fog. And spent every day, but EVERY day, thinking THOSE thoughts about THAT out. This went on for three years. During which I was primary caregiver for my ever-loving mother, the author of these problems, who was dying of pancreatic cancer and dying damned slowly. But I did what a "good son" is supposed to do, on autopilot, navigating around and through my impenetrable fog, as the savings melted away, the investments, the retirement money, the credit.

Kurt Weill was a German composer of the first half of the last century. He composed musical shows, popular stuff, but popular verging on serious. No junk. He wrote a song, a song you may have heard, a song called "Lost in the Stars." You should hear it. That's where I was for three-four years.

I still had to do IT. I still couldn't make any real headway without doing IT, without doing what when I was two years old I believed I'd never do in my life: ask for something I really needed and/or wanted.

Then I started work with T. And we've made significant progress in all kinds of things but not in relation to THIS thing, this inability to ask for something I truly need.

And right now, right this minute, this day and hour, I no longer have any choice. Been floating for a long time and lots of things have happened, but if I want to make sure that really, really bad changes do not happen right now, today, this week, I have to bust right on through this emotional hurricane focussed on asking for things I need and want. I have to do it. I just have to do it. Can't get away from it any more. It's right here knocking on my door right now. Can't you hear it?