So, I'm at work doing my usuals, dealing with cranky clients, and nicer clients, but lots of peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies. More so, what our work is at a psych unit like this, is holding the space for people who can't do so themselves, the psychic equivalent of what it would be like to be the skin on someone else's body. It takes a lot of effort sometime, and if you're feeling raw yourself, it can be a LOT of work.
Today, I woke from a series of dreams about misery without relief. Seems like they were stories of both other's suffering (an Indian peasant?) and of a birds eye view of suffering per se. I'd watched a string of cop shows last night (NYPD Blue, Milch's early drama), where the detectives are constantly having to negotiate with profound suffering, usually by hardening to it, or shuffling it off in dark humor. So the pump was primed for my dreams.
I've been reading Wilber's "Integral Spirituality," an astounding book that essentially lays out a system of seeing reality as a prism of perspectives, without any primary perspective, that reality is actually the simultaneous coordination of 8 primordial perspectives that cannot be reduced to each other. Reality, in his model, is the arising of all these perspectives at the same time.
So, then waking, I did my usually morning meditation, and saw into how this "suffering without relief" is a particular perspective, one way of framing or narrating the world, a particular story which is true as far as it goes, but not the primary story.
But when I came up from sitting, what was left was this story which was struggling for primacy, not wanting to be held by anything larger, insistent that it was the base story that all others led to. Curious. It seems to be something that has been emerging for perhaps the last year or two, like undigested gristle. And I've been noticing how the tenor of my time at the half-way house has also changed during this time, where the suffering of people here has become harder to hold. Perhaps as I've gotten more sensitive, or more embodied, it pushes me towards this early perspective/story which inherently denies other perspective/stories.
It's trick, holding stories that then bite you because being held itself is an insult. Being held, the story then converts into it's basic experience, being pain and contraction, which the story is there to suppress or avoid. So it doesn't want to be seen for what it is, while at the same time, secretly, every contraction yearns for release.
