A New Narrative

Over the past 6 months I’ve been participating in EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing.

In layman terms, from my own personal experience, it works like this:

Audio, visual, tactile stimulation and visualization put in you a state of deep relaxation. You then journey back to traumatic events and rewrite your own history.

The journey included a host of characters, The Rebel, The Addict, Fat Martha, Baby, and Nora. This seems strange, but these “characters” are personifications of aspects of me that help/hurt me in my journey.

Through this exercise I have changed the way I see my past. The constant anxiety I once felt has eased.  To be fair, this may be because of the Synthroid and treatment of Hashimotos.

Now that I have the hang of it, I can meditate, go back in my own history, and reframe events, see them a new way, use meditation to rewrite my personal narrative. This, and ongoing practice of Shenpa has eliminated obsessive worrying, constant anxiety, and a sense of being a victim.

As a matter of fact, I know look at my abusive childhood and see that I was a hero. A little hero who stood up and fought back, who escaped to a new life, and said to the world, “I will not live that way.”

I’m still tackling other issues in my life, but with a new realization. I am Powerful not Powerless. In AA we learn that we are powerless over alcohol and our life is unmanageable. However, in many aspects of my life I have carried that thinking over to everything. That for things in my life to change (like the anxiety) I need some sort of miracle because I am powerless to change.  But that is not true. I am Powerful to change my life. My spiritual practices guide me, enlighten me, help change my perceptions. I must do the work.

When it comes to doing to work, I am determined and steadfast. I am open to the knowledge that not only is change possible, it is inevitable, and that I am responsible for guiding the perceptual changes in my life.