I wasn’t born understanding how to connect to my own feelings.  It’s a learned skill and I’ve worked hard to earn a deep and powerful toolset that fits around it.  It works incredibly well, if sometimes slower and with more effort than other people expect.

So when I find myself suffering in ways go on for too long and don’t match with what I know clearly to be my own internal state of needs and feelings, I know I am entangled with someone else’s stuff.  It’s a real situation and it manifests in genuine physical and emotional pain.  And the tools for dealing with it are entirely different than the ones I use to deal with my own stuff.

It’s a concept I started to learn nearly 20 years ago during a brief “fuck the corporate man” phase when I left my job at Microsoft and became a broke, sober, vegetarian massage therapist.  The last two things are a function of the first, btw.

In working with other people’s bodies, if you are open enough to be guided in how to help them, you are open enough to take on their crap.  And the closer to them you are, the harder it is.  In my first few years of practice I couldn’t work on my mom or sister without leaving the session with whatever physical pain they brought into it.  They’d feel better and I’d leave wrecked, in exactly the way they had been a couple hours before.  And it is something very common in that job – something we studied and learned about. It became a very specific awareness and toolset, and one I still am not great at.  But it was an undeniable and very physically manifested truth, just like getting dirt on your hands and knowing you need to wash it off.  While the nature of it remains mysterious, the truth of it was nothing short of practical.

But in normal daily life, it isn’t a muscle most of us need to be flexing.  So I forgot about it.

And when it hit me this time, it took some weeks to figure it out.  I didn’t want to deny the somewhat mysterious process of grief, loss, rejection, failure, and all the embarrassing and uncomfortable things that come with the end of relationships – especially very complex ones like the one I just left (which is a story I will tell one day, but not yet).  I sat in those feelings and combed them out.  I did the work.  I had help.  I saw things get resolved quickly and cleanly.

And then I watched pain I couldn’t put my finger on return and take up residence in my body and heart.  I did the work I always do, but this pain was slippery and elusive.  I couldn’t connect to it.  The guidance I rely on was muddled.  It was exactly like the radio channel of my own internal space had been hijacked by another, fuzzy, screwy broadcast.  I chalked it up to grief or some new feeling just now finding me.

It changed flavor without incident.  For a day it was one way, then it would shift to another.  It was pulling me around with it.

As I watched my tools fail, I finally recognized that this wasn’t mine.  Someone else’s stuff had moved into me.  In this case, I knew exactly whose it was and once I recognized it, it was like turning on a reality show into someone else’s life.  There I was in the middle of crap I couldn’t do anything about, watching it roll, getting pulled around by the shifting energy of it.  I could have told you what was happening in their house almost by the hour, good, bad, and mundane.  It was all hitting me.

So I changed toolboxes.  Started drawing psychic boundaries only to watch them blown out.  Set up fortresses and defenses, which seemed to only challenge it.  Went into full scale battle at one point, which worked for a day and then became useless as the nature of the energy changed again to something else and moved back in through a different path.

And it got worse.  My friends commented and showed concern.  Parts of me were falling off and dimming.  I heard “withdrawn”.   Offers of help.  But there was nothing to talk about.  My own stuff was in order.  I knew it was.  I was just under a heavy blanket of something else.

I reached out to the big guns.  I have a person for this.  I didn’t explain a thing, but just asked about her schedule, which was locked.  And I went about my day, dreading whatever ocean wave was about to carry me away to whatever unknown current once more.

And then suddenly it was gone.  GONE.

I had had a good workout.  Maybe that was it.  I had had a tremendous conversation with a wise friend.  Maybe that was it.  But it was physical.  I could breathe again.  The pain in my gut was gone.  My eyes were clear.  I was light and felt like myself, which hasn’t been true for weeks.

“Did you have anything to do with this?” I reached out to my big guns once again.  She did.  “You are very welcome, my love. I instantly saw you and what needed to be done and it literally took me 30 seconds.  No reason for you to suffer any longer.  It’s not yours.  You got entangled in their projections.  So it went away easily. <3”

And I slept and dreamt and woke up free and back in my own world, peaceful, and with my channel playing my own songs without interference.

Grief and loss are real, mysterious, and take time.  But when you know they are done but the pain keeps increasing, maybe that pain isn’t yours.  That’s real too.  And not seeing it for what it is can lead us on a wild chase through our own internal environment looking for some non-existent source.  Then when we can’t find that non-existent source, we eventually invent some new dark garbage just to have some way to try to deal with it.  And that is the beginning of making ourselves crazy.

I’ll take a mysterious solution that works and makes sense over a futile journey through some invented darkness that I don’t need.  So goodbye, my lovely and complex friends.  We’re finally all freeeeeeeee.  I love you, I’m grateful for you, and see ya laterz, because I’ve got shit to do, and you do too.  <3