Attachment-Based Yoga & Meditation by Deirdre Fay

Author:Deirdre Fay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

SOME PRACTICALITIES IN WORKING WITH DISSOCIATION: FIRST STEPS OUT OF DISSOCIATION

Everyone has patterns and ways of being that make life easier, more comfortable, and more enjoyable. Then there are those patterns that make us feel stuck. Caught. Trapped. Like life will never change or be different. These patterns are so comfortable that even when we don’t really like what we’re doing we continue doing it anyway. Some even describe it as compulsive, not being able to do it differently, like wearing an old, worn-out piece of clothing that we’ve had forever and which we don’t want to shed. These strategies and ways of being can keep the demons away, keep the painful feelings out of consciousness. Mostly what these habits do, though, is keep us in relative psychological safety, in our comfort zone. Nothing is wrong with that, but if we want to change any part of our life, we will reach a point where that comfort becomes restricting, suffocating the new creative urge to develop. At their worst, these patterns lose their effectiveness, no longer soothing as originally devised. When they get stale, we feel trapped, stuck. We’ve forgotten we created the now constricting pattern to soothe us. Instead, we feel deadened. That’s the point where we seek help, looking for a way to get out of the old stuck places. The first step, then, is to observe and explore the habits of mind and body that make the hated, stuck life so comfortable that the person is loath to change.

Prana, in its relentless quest to return us to True Nature, insistently flows and moves in and through the energy/physical body. Defenses, or samskaras, are psychically concrete, not easy for prana to move through or around. Caught against the samskara, prana pushes against it. Inside the samskara, the caught energy longs to be free of its knottedness. Over time, especially as prana pushes against the outside of the samskara, the ache gets louder; it’s harder to push down or quiet the longing. The impulse becomes stronger, to break out of this old way, yet without something stronger calling to us it is hard to find a way through. The person reverts to the old ways of being. The longing is there, but caught in the stuck pattern. Unable to figure out how to get untangled or how to explore new options, the person reverts to the old familiar pattern. Sometimes someone tries taking a step or two outside the comfort zone but when their effort doesn’t immediately yield a positive result they collapse back into the old. This reinforces the belief that reaching for something new is not only uncomfortable, but also subject to failure and disappointment. Thoughts and feelings of humiliation and distress percolate, gathering evidence from past experiences or inventing sorrowful pictures of a future remarkably similar to the past. In that conundrum it is hard to reach toward the new. The skills of unpacking the fast-moving states pauses the fluidly morphing packets of information that find the client set in patterns of experience.

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