Rewards, Glory, and Honor

Rewards, Glory, and Honor

I love to have adventures. I put the responsibility squarely on my dear dad who read me adventure stories for years before I went to sleep, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe.

Adventure! The lure of discovery! The discovery of hidden treasure! Clues! Surprises! Excitement! Rewards! Glory! Honor!

So how did a girl with a love of adventure, but with a tendency to depression and anxiety satisfy that urge for adventure?

By going inside.

Indiana Jones ain’t got nuthin’ on me.

Inside, into the labyrinth of our minds. Infinite possibilities for exploration, the discovery of who we are deep inside, the recovery of treasured memories buried under incomplete junk experiences, the completion, and therefore elimination, of traumatic experiences. The clearing out of subconscious material can that make living easily and well so challenging. Coming to understand just how deep and complex and amazing we are. Learning to value our own selves, to feel self-respect for what we’ve come through. Oh, yeah, that’s my kind of adventure!

One of the marvelous things about going inside is that, on some level, I know I have already survived everything in there. Unlike Allan Quatermain, or the Jules Verne characters, I’m not facing unknown monsters. I may have forgotten, but never completely.

And, while I am the only one who can dive into the depths of my mind, I can always have a person whom I respect and trust topside,  on the surface, holding a safety line for me.

Sometimes, when I go inside, I discover an incomplete traumatic experience that involves someone else. In the outside world, that person has moved on, changed in ways I may know nothing about, but inside, they are frozen in time. And I am often stuck there with them, locked into that moment in our relationship, replaying the experience again and again, retraumatizing myself again and again when the memory, often out of my awareness, gets triggered by a smell, or a random thought, a snip of a song, or something else.

Definitely Jules Verne territory, so very SciFi.

As the intrepid explorer, I grasp that slippery thought, and follow it in, safety line clipped to my utility belt. I observe the thought, I have emotions and feelings about the thought, and now, because I am living in the present, I can feel all the way to the end of the experience and let it go, sweeping the ashes into the dustbin of oblivion. Ahh.

Now, when the trigger fires, the memory may flare for a bit, but the punch is gone, and it’s just story. I have reclaimed part of my soul. I am freer than I was, and I have more room for joy. Talk about rewards. Talk about glory. Talk about honor.

And I have changed my attachment to that person, clean it up, released resentment or fear or anger, and made room for more clean love. Talk about rewards. Talk about glory. Talk about honor.

How have I changed from ignoring my past to recognizing it as the key to my best life?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 10172013