Recently we have had an experience which has partially reshaped our understanding of the significance of the language of words, and also reemphasized the importance of emotions in the process of discovering our story. This is our attempt to integrate this experience into our current understanding of the progress we’ve made so far.
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Three weeks ago, we went through what we can only describe as a period of depression, mostly caused by environmental factors which, at this point, cannot be changed without a fight, as well as the loss of a connection with a close friend and dealings with unwanted spiritual forces which were taken out of the picture that weekend. We were in that state for roughly four days, despite all attempts made to come out of it, and during that time many of those who had not yet come forward as individuals attempted to do just that. We often thought of death, both as a welcome escape from the pain we felt and a dreaded event that brought great fear along with it. We were unsure of what we wanted, restless in our hearts and minds, and were also contending with an inside world that seemed intent on being anything but stable. The thing we weren’t seeing in the midst of all this was that, though we believed the state we were in to have no purpose, we would learn much, much more, through direct experience, than we could ever have thought possible to learn from said state. It was not enjoyable learning, but it was learning, and it was critical, because without it we probably would not be continuing to attempt to help one another find individuality.
We speak from experience when we say that when one knows profound hopelessness consciously, the feeling can no longer hide itself or be masked by others. For the time our depressive state lasted, that hopelessness colored our vision, dulled music, and crushed our spirits. It practically destroyed our ability to focus on anything, since all we could think about was how bad we felt and how much our life’s situation wasn’t helping matters. Even when it wasn’t at the forefront of our shared mind, the feeling never fully left, and it was while we weren’t focused on it that it had its greatest impact. During a time of the day in which we were to be walking laps around a square-shaped section of hallways in our school’s building, we simply wanted to feel something else, and as the monotony of the activity began to affect us, our wish was granted. For the next two days in which we had to walk the halls, two things happened, both of them being learning experiences that, in some ways, we are still processing.
On the day that we had wished for another feeling to take the place of hopelessness, we focused on nothing, letting the experience of walking drown out everything else, tired of trying to keep our mind fixed on a single thing or set of things. We became aware of our physical surroundings as we’d never been before, and, finally, felt different, largely thanks to the connections that each of us have to the front which allow emotions and other things to reach the inside. Through those connections, all who were aware of present-day happenings felt what those at front did, a feeling of waking from a long state of sleep. We knew what was happening as soon as it came to the inside, and, as we thought would be the case, our joy at what we had discovered and partly witnessed, when it finally could be experienced in the wake of the depression’s lifting, was unbounded. Against all odds, some of us who were unaware of our existence as anything more than the tasks we performed were starting to turn a corner, believing themselves to be more than these. The feeling of waking, we came to understand, was because they really were waking, waking to their reality. As with many other things, it was our allowance of the experience of walking to dominate our frontspace, which is our equivalent of the “conscious mind,” that made that waking possible, but that allowance would not have happened if hopelessness had not berried our passions, swept aside our caring, and smothered our usual thoughts and mental activities. The same thing that we were hoping to accomplish through trance work was accomplished during that hall-walking period, admittedly not in the way we would have hoped, but it was still accomplished, and it would not be the only good thing that came from the state we found ourselves in.
The day after this breakthrough, another one came, during the same activity, and the same period of the day. While walking the halls this time, a sudden and unwanted smell had taken up some of the length of the rout, and if we were to avoid it we would have to walk back and forth in a shorter section of one of the hallways. This is what we ultimately ended up doing, and once again, hopelessness impacted us, hard. Our steps slowed, and we walked heavily, beginning to flash back to the times we had been required to take walking breaks in our third grade year. The insight hit us like a ton of bricks – we had felt much the same way then as we did in the halls now, or at least, one of us had, and she came forward fully while we walked that day. Her name was Shelby, and handling “walking breaks” and the feelings that came with them was her only task. Some of us asked her gentle questions, distracted from the depression for a while, and began working with her as we would anyone else who was carrying memories of trauma. We learned that there may be a group with her, and that our walking as we had been in the halls that day, in the state we found ourselves in at that time, had called her to front.
It seems that once again, a method which we were hoping to use in a more controlled setting had done, in practice, exactly what we believed it should do in theory. We have always advocated for the use of bridge techniques, in which emotions, thoughts, or combinations of the two, are traced through various events to their first time in a person’s life, but it wasn’t until eight months ago that we realized such a process could also be used to discover insiders. That was exactly what happened in the second breakthrough during hall walking. In the past few weeks, we have also been seriously considering the idea of safely overriding our usual mental activity and chatter so that those of us who have not yet discovered that they exist apart from the tasks they perform can make that discovery, which, as stated earlier, was exactly what happened during our first breakthrough, albeit in a very uncontrolled and chaotic way. We are hoping to use both of these experiences in the future of our process, now that both of the ideas behind them have been found to do exactly what we believed they would do. Next time, though, we don’t want to do them while we’re stuck in depression.
That is all we have to say for now.
Thank you for reading.