When I was a young boy, about 4/5 years old, I would sometimes sit with my father in the garden after he had come home from work. I would sit in my little red wooden chair beside him. I don’t think we said much, but I remember feeling so proud of myself for sitting beside him.
Feeling Terror
Just over 60 years later, I am sitting in an imaginary Focusing chair next to a terrified toddler in an imaginary red chair. The terror felt in my belly feels very real. It’s a deeply embodied terror of other people rejecting and abandoning me.
It is not a word you will find in the dictionary, but the word disturbelence fits well.It captures the intense disturbance and discord the terror energy creates throughout the body and it also feeds into the the immense amount of energy that feels held within that terror.
Sitting Beside the Terror
It feels freeing to be able to sit beside the terror with its furiously fast and shuttering (a mixture of fluttering and shaking) in the belly. I can now be the father’s presence for the terrified toddler and sit beside him, just like my father sat calmly beside me in these early days.
Letting Terror Transform
The terrified toddler let me know that it likes me to feel the much slower, steady frequency of the energy circuit between my feet and the ground. And when I do, the terror energy calms down a little, and the energy trapped in the terror slowly releases as tiny shivers through my arms and legs. It feels so good for this energy to move and unwind. It seems to know exactly how to do this, and as each day goes by, it loses its resonance with the “terror,” and what’s left is just fast shuttering energy in the belly. And as it releases bit by bit, I am feeling more and more alive and expansive – trapped energy releasing and joining the river of Life flowing through my body.
The Body Knows the WayForward, I Don’t
Eugene Gendlin’s quote speaks so well of this natural forward movement of Life’s energy: ” Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move forward to its rightness.. .. The feelings of “bad” or “wrong” inside you, in effect, your body’s measurement of the distance between its rightness and the way it actually feels. It knows the direction. It knows this just as much as you know which way to move a crooked picture.”
What my mind may easily label as “bad” or “wrong” inside is, in fact, the potential energy that can alchemize into the gold of Presence. Presence is the goodness of Life that underlies all “good” and “bad.”
I was in a baby crib—a few months old—left outside in the early spring. A cat jumped on me, sat on my mouth to feel the warmth from my breath. My response was instantaneous, I can still smell it, its fur on my face. Maybe I felt my breathing blocked. I reacted with force. Get the fuck off me! It got the message and fled. I felt it gone. I felt empowered, it brought relief. In other words, it felt good. It worked and it taught me, I can do it! And I still feel that same powerful reaction inside: Something is not right here!
