Last night, I had a strange anxiety dream. I was with a group of people on a hiking trip. We were staying in a cabin, when it was time to hike, I decided to stay behind and sleep in the cabin. While I was there, a wild bear came charging out of the woods and tried to maul me. I beat him off and then shortly afterwards, a tiger came charging out of the woods and tried to eat me. I beat HIM off. By this time, I was in a pretty bad state. I was bleeding profusely and had a lot of rips and tears in my skin. This is when a big, black dog came and tried to bite my hands. I somehow got away from the dog.

Eventually, the others showed up, and I explained to them what had happened to me. They tried to get me to the hospital, but they couldn�t get organized enough. They kept going off track and losing focus. It took them so long that I healed on my own, and went to work the next day (Monday).

The dream takes another turn after that. It was still vivid and incorporated anxiety, but it wasn�t as terrifying as the first part.

This dream sticks out to me because it doesn�t follow the same patterns as my other anxiety dreams. I�ve never been attacked by animals in a dream before.

Although, this dream was kind of scary, it wasn�t AS bad as some of the dreams that I have been having the past few weeks. Saturday morning, I woke up sobbing.

The past few weeks, ever since I came back from the monastery, I�ve been meditating as regularly as I can. I also meditated quite a bit at the monastery, so I already had a lot of momentum from that. At first, I was dealing with a lot of anger. That anger then turned to depression. I think my lowest point was late last week. My self-loathing was out in full-force.

That shouldn�t have surprised me, but it did. I wasn�t so much surprised that I had self-loathing, but that there was so much of it. On a day-to-day basis, I wouldn�t say that I�m very much aware of hating myself. I suppose it�s one of those things that implants into the brain when a person is very small and it festers there over years and years. Yesterday, I listened to an interesting call-in radio show about self-judgment. It had the usual interesting stuff that you might expect to hear on a show like that, but one nice little quip someone made was, �All buried emotions are buried alive.�

Forget burying them. It seems like you can�t even kick a little dirt over them without them coming back with a vengeance.

This kind of explains why I�ve been in such an anxious and depressed state during the past several months. Self-loathing is probably the most destructive emotion that a person can have. It�s tricky, too. It doesn�t want to be recognized, so it�ll blame everyone and everything else, to make sure you never identify the real problem. It actually protects itself so it can�t be easily be eradicated.

This weekend, for the first time, in a really, really, really long time, I actually started feeling a little bit like myself.

I also started having a little inkling of feeling good. By good, I don�t mean that I was enjoying a distraction, I wasn�t merely having fun and I wasn�t congratulating myself for being accomplished. I felt a little, tiny bit accepting of the universe and my place in it. It was a real and solid peace of mind.

I wasn�t fantastic or anything, but there was a little vague glimpse of it, and I recognized it immediately. I remember.

0 comments so far