First Week of Instinctive Insights

What have I learned during my first week of instinctive living? I was going to update daily, but by the first day of my experiment I was filled with a need for silence. I have wanted to spend most of my days with the trees, the wind, the sky, the vast oceans of lava where nothing else exists, not even time. I have gone through moments of intense joy, of complete fulfillment. I have also experienced great uncomfort and immense suffering. All of it has been a great gift and a great lesson. You can learn more through the stillness than through any words or lessons from even the greatest spiritual teacher. So, to be honest, I don't have a lot of words to explain my experience to you. If you'd like to know how it is going I will say that it is going well. My entire existence feels new, like I'm waking up to see that everything that I thought I was, I am not. It is without a need for time frames. Where before I wanted to wake up a new person, one who simply didn't suffer anymore, there is a space in me now. In this space there is room for everything. I thought I needed to stop suffering, to stop judging, to empty my mind, but that was what was and still does hurt. The Buddha said that desire is the cause of all suffering, and I am experiencing the truth of these words. To want to be anything that you are not is suffering. If you are extremely depressed and think you should be calmer, more peaceful, happy, you will hurt deeply. I was suffering intensely a couple of nights ago. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin. I tried to make it stop. I did breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, writing out my feelings, but nothing was helping. The anxiety of facing my own self was so strong that I couldn't breathe. I felt like I needed to escape. I wanted so badly to sleep. It was late at night and I was exhausted, but my inner turmoil was so disturbing that I couldn't rest for a moment. I picked up a book and opened to a page, just to try and forget myself for a moment. The book was "A New Earth", and the random page that I opened to was about trying to be spiritual, or happy, or anything other than what you are. Eckhart Tolle said that trying to be more enlightened than you are at this moment is just another part of the ego, and it will bring intense suffering. As I read this I knew it was exactly what I was going through.(I tend to have a lot of important coincidences when it comes to books.) I was resisting so strongly to the unconsciousness I was experiencing. I wanted the pain to stop, wanted to feel good, for my mind to be still and peaceful, and I felt so frustrated. Most of all I felt like a failure. After reading just a paragraph or two from my book I felt very different. Everything I was going through felt ok. It was still there, but with my acceptance of being where I was, it transformed into something that felt really wonderful. I immediately began to feel calm and sleepy. I lied down, and for about 20 minutes I felt very peaceful and comfortable before falling into a deep sleep.


Through my attempt to get more in tune with my instincts I have gotten a chance to see how much I have ignored this most primal part of myself. I honestly thought that I was eating what I instinctively wanted when I wanted it. At first I felt very uncomfortable to truly see how I have been abusing myself in so many ways. No one wants to admit to that, but I knew it was very important to my healing. I am very conscious of the fact that most of these self-damaging things that I've been doing are deeply ingrained and I'm not comfortable with or ready to be free of most of them, and I respect that. I watch myself, in an almost constant state of terror, my breathing very shallow and my heart beating very fast. This isn't new, and I've known for a long time that I've been afraid, but I had no idea of the extent. I observe my eating habits, and I see that I rarely eat because of hunger. I eat when I'm thirsty, when I'm tired, when I'm lonely, when I'm sad, when I'm scared, and I try to stuff all my feelings deeply away, and of course it does not work. This is helping me to understand my very dysfunctional relationship with food. I also rarely eat the foods which smell good to me and that I am instinctively drawn to. Usually I choose foods for their emotional effect, especially their ability to suppress. That isn't easy to do with fruit, but it is possible.

My relationship to other human beings is beginning to feel very unnatural. Modern society and our culture has seemed alien to me for most of my life, but now that I'm looking deeper into myself I'm beginning to see that almost every way in which I interact with people seems very unnatural. Opening myself to the possibility that what I need isn't something that I have ever experienced is very scary. I'm finding that I have repressed so many deep needs, and I have made myself numb, my sense of aliveness has been stuffed into a dark place. I'm having these visions of how this world could be, and while I am not at war with the way things are, I feel like I really want to strive to live more in alignment with my inner desires. So many times growing up I would hear people say "he/she just wants attention," like it was the worst, most selfish desire in the world. I was taught to never share how I was truly feeling because to do that would mean you were weak and incapable of handling your problems. I still live this way. If I do share with someone my true feelings I immediately feel very guilty. In this ideal world that is opening in my mind I see people who are able to experience all emotions without fear of judgement. They can scream and cry, they can laugh till it hurts, they can dance, they can roll around in the grass, all without the mental judgement that they should restrict their emotions, their movement, their life. In this world in my mind, people can hug each other and touch each other without it having to be serious or inappropriate. We are all living in tiny little cages. It is becoming so apparent-can't you see? Look at yourself. Look how you hold yourself together, hold everything inside. You watch yourself from the outside, making sure that you inner vulnerabilities remain deeply hidden. You walk like you have everything under control, all emotion stripped from your face, all life buried too deep to see. I have been drawing a lot the past few days. Everything that is coming out on paper has been a reflection of this repression. I have never understood why I was drawn to painting these people who were hiding. There is a beauty in it, sort of like a flower bud. You see in these people's eyes the infinite sea of life which is within reach, just waiting to bloom, and it gives us hope.

I have been having these moments of complete emptiness-emptiness of thought, of feeling, of existence. In them I experience a wordless knowing, and all lack is replaced with a fullness, with a love so unconditional that I just become so still and so content that there is nothing else in the world. It was after one of these moments of silence that I came know what it meant to be a goddess, for me. I thought there was something we had to seek, to find, before we could truly embrace this power and divinity, but it is the opposite. When you stop seeking, when you are exactly who you are in this moment, with no resistance to anything about you or the world, that is it. In that moment you are god, you are a goddess, you are everything you have ever felt you were missing. It is in the sense of lack that we lose who we really are. We are everything and there's nothing that we need to make us whole.