Space Inside Me

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I have heard the expression "Listen to your heart" since childhood. I intuitively understood that this ability is the way to get out of difficult situations in which it is difficult to make a decision with the "head". But no matter how I didn’t twist this expression in relation to myself, how I didn’t try to "hear" my heart, nothing came of it. For me, this process was like a magic box, which contains something of value. Once you open it, and my eyes will see the truth, which will dot all the "i". Time after time, in difficult situations, I took this box out of the closet, blew the dust off it, opened it with reverence and hope and … Each time I was disappointed, not meeting in its bottomlessness nothing but fog, in which you could not see anything.

So I could sit over her for hours, straining my brain, trying to separate and recognize the silhouettes flickering in the darkness. I knew that many, opening it, found what they were looking for inside. Not me. I racked my brains trying to figure out how I could hear my heart. Disappointed, he threw this trinket back into the closet. From behind the locked door, eerie sounds were heard, the house vibrated as during an earthquake, cracks crossed the walls. I wanted to close my eyes tightly, cover my ears with my hands, try to forget about the existence of the box, and, opening my eyes, discover that all this is just a nightmare. But earthquakes occurred more and more often and cracks spread like giant spiders around the house. I needed help.

So I ended up seeing a psychotherapist, a gestalt therapist. Then I was 26 years old. And then, for the first time in my entire life, I was asked a simple question: "What do you feel now?" Misunderstanding, freezing, freezing. I loaded my brain and gave explanations, interpretations of my condition, explained, clarified. Thoughts rolled over one another in a stream, I built logical explanations of my state, but I could not answer an essentially simple question.

I gave up, looked for other ways, but every time I started over. At first, listening to my bodily sensations, with the help of a psychotherapist, I gradually learned to name the feelings that were encoded in my body by ancient hieroglyphs. Opening the box, I discovered my ability to see clearer contours and shapes where blurry silhouettes had flashed before. Surprise, joy, anxiety. It turns out that it is not empty inside, there is a whole world, a whole universe! And how easy it is to get lost in it, when you do not know the landmarks, when you are still a stranger in it. Anger at yourself, shame. Shame for not being able to even notice anger when it is so needed, when the time comes to say your word, so as not to disappear, not to dissolve in the stream of life. Sadness, sadness. That he knocked on the wall for so long, did not notice this explosion of colors inside, about the time spent outside this world.

Now I hear my heart more and more often and more clearly. I can make out the language in which it speaks to me. A language that, no matter how hard it is, it is impossible to understand with your head. The language that we know from birth, and instead of using it to address the world, to conduct a dialogue with ourselves, we forget as unnecessary.

Now I am not a stranger in my universe. Yes, it is endless. And that means there are still infinitely many unexplored roads in it, leading to no one knows where. But if you know the language, you can always ask about the direction. And first of all, for myself!