Outer Space Freaks Me Out

It is Unreasonably Big

And takes WAY too long to get anywhere. I have a serious allergy to movies where astronauts float around for two hours of MY time in which they voluntarily miss several years of THEIRS while simultaneously skipping out on their kids’ childhood and eating freeze dried food. I don’t get it. I don’t even like talking about it.

No, I was not abandoned by aliens or astronauts.

As much as I am traumatized by the notion of outer space, I am obsessed with the exploration of inner space. Leo and Finn and I have been meditating every morning this week for ten minutes and writing for fifteen.

We set an ‘anchor word’.

We choose a word that we want to help ground us in the day, so we don’t end up getting blown around in circumstantial traffic and potentially knocked off balance by forgetting where we want to stand.

This started as one of my ‘mom plans’ to help guide but not micro-manage our teenage boys. How to help them look inward so that hopefully when they are forced to make difficult outer decisions, they do so from a place of inner strength.

They each have a uniquely strong sense of self but the hormonal fluctuations and developmental shifts from fogginess to clarity, defiance to understanding and defensive sarcasm to compassionate understanding can be… umm…a bit overwhelming.

It’s like living in three extreme emotional climates simultaneously.

Simply living with myself is challenging. I swing hard. One moment I trust that everything will be okay. The universe has my back. Everything is happening exactly according to plan. I may not be able to see it yet, but it is completely in my best interests.

An hour later I get a call that presents a seemingly, unmovable obstacle. I am blown off course. Stranded. Alone. Estranged from my reason-able, intuition-savvy self; stuck with the fear-based, evidential-doubt-justified self. No hope. Forget trust.

It is tiring and a huge responsibility to both BE myself and CATCH myself before I go dark.

Double that… when you are a parent whose job it is to provide compassionate consistent stability. Triple that… when you have two teenage boys both on their own personal roller coaster of reality. So, although my meditating began as a plan to help them, it has quickly become a lifeline for me. And quite interestingly all our struggles and anchors seem to be overlapping.

Today, Finn’s anchor word was space. He drew an astronaut standing on a planet with the milky way above him and wrote this: “I get so caught up in everything, that I do not give myself any room or space to think or step back from a situation.” Sometimes, life winks at you from beyond and the person you’re trying to help gives you a gift, greater by far, than the one you are offering.

I am trying to build a new relationship with Space.

In this new relationship, I am trying to integrate the outer and inner – the outer kind, which seems intolerably big and unpredictably distant and the inner kind, that is jam-packed with beauty, possibility, creativity and trust.

I believe in, and have conversations with, the spirit world and universal energy. They have given five ‘plans’ in their effort to ‘guide but not micro-manage me’. Hilarious.

1. Try not to engage with PHANTOM energies or identities either of your own making or with the ones that appear before you and TEMPT you with your OWN triggers to want to join in the FIGHT or SINK into what does not SERVEyou.

 

2. A WILL of STEEL will not get you through. It is meant to be employed for short bursts and THIS is a new life path. What is required here is WAY HARDER than will. It is trust… that IF you ACCEPT the FACT life will throw up obstacles you don’t think you will be able to get through, that you WILL BE filled with paralyzing TERROR and FEAR and IF you continue to be WITH it, to FACE it – even as the storm WHIPS your face and near DROWNS you in its swells, IF you FACE the timeless fear that you WILL NOT BE ENOUGH, then, of course, you WILL. Not because of your WILL but because you are now CO-llaborating with the universe. Not protecting yourself from it.

 

3. ISOLATION, HIDING and PRETENDING things are okay when they are not, will lead you into the caves of DEPRESSION, ANXIETY and SELF-SABOTAGE. Do not go there. And if you do, GET OUT the second you realize you’re there.

 

4. The TRUTH is that all the TANGLED-UP TROUBLES you think are TRAPPING you, are an ILLUSION of your OWN making. The coiled-up snake that is really a tied-up rope that is really a knotty branch is only able to be dissolved by ‘seeing’ it ‘clearly’ from the outside not diving into it. The trick to bending the spoon, as the child says in the Matrix says, is realizing that there actually is no spoon. Simple bend your mind.

 

5. Do not get stuck in the middle muddy murky backwash of your ego’s expectations and your OWN muscular FEAR that pins you to the mat of your own MISGUIDED EXPECTATION. Do not get REACTIVE. Do not get INSULTED. Do not get RESENTFUL. Do not get TRAPPED in your OWN imagined prison. GET OUT! Remember, CURIOSITY not fear is what LEADS to ILLUMINATION.