Shiftings

How to more consciously Molt // Spiritual understandings that come from a mood disorder

A nap in cold white spacious afternoon light to set everything back as it should be. First of all my eyes and head. Second of all my skin, restored to juicy bounciness, plump and elastic. Moldable and kid-like again. Balance of all systems. Including my eyes which for the first time in 5 days can see clearly again that I’m right here. I’m right in place. Not too much time has actually passed and I haven’t been too much forgotten about, my life hasn’t abandoned me as I lamented. It was the final molt covering my eyes that now allow me to see.

Each month is a molt. A quiet violent covering, all dark shadowy constrictions let loose, untied, untethered. The more I fight the more it laughs. The more I run the farther I get from home. Yet turning to face it, has actually proved as the shortcut, the glitch that collapses time from one point to the other taking ‘me’ to a place where I can remain for the molting. If only I could remember this trick each time it sneaks up on me. Turn to face it, Be present with alllllllll of it, yes all. Even the parts that make you incomplete, it’s the only way to patch up the broken stories. To listen, to bear witness, to not repeat them because when scared of them, ever more they sing cruel truth.

Time is a haunt. I can see out of the end of the tunnel of ‘next week’, I know it’ll all get set back to normal if I could just not fear the anxiety heightened in this difference of mood. Difficult → Different. Seeing out of the end of the tunnel certainly doesn’t provide details for how to get through. In fact those glimpses can feel like a sharp broken mirror I hadn’t realized was cutting into me. It’s not the Seeing that gets me through. It’s almost the opposite, The Closing. The Sensing. Me catching up with a vibrational pulse whose frequency is so low all must be turned off to hear it. Slower than I know, even if I think I know what Slow is. Sensing moment to moment the needs of my body in relationship to the ingredients around me: dirty bathroom, hungry stomach, thirsty mouth (a constant and somewhat subtle need that I think is muted because of my privileged access to water) peachy tree tops and crisp air, rhythm of the dog and how what her energy needs affects, pairs, and harmonizes with mine, these thoughts piling up and needing motion before I can lay them down, checking in with Time herself and how I’d like to commune with her in this small moment, the mood of the house as it closes its day and transitions to evening, what lamps need lighting, what room needs opening, what my body seeks for its evening, a perfect magnolia tree sitting squared in a school courtyard and the final peachy moments of a transitioning Sun waving goodbye to the strong, sturdy tree, how can I capture this moment witnessed without owning it? Gripping it? Muddling what I’ve experienced second hand? How my memories and moments latch on and stories fall like the leaves, unfolding and aromatic at the base of the tree, whispering, gathering, waiting, riding with the wind to meet me as I walk by. In Relation.

And using all my last energies to get my body to that place it needs in that moment, so she can molt all of this in as much peace as a molting can bring. It’s a death sentence to my body to be hit with a schedule, even one I so cheerfully have been looking forward to creating. On a cellular level my body is fight or flight, it’s in low-battery survival mode. The things from this life drain her faster than she’s able to ground into a charge. Anything from the adult world is a dose of panic. All that grounds it - body, mind, breath, spirit - are the basics: reading, feeding the heightened imagination with words that speak of the realms interior, sleep if I can get it - though this time often interrupts sleep due to basic disruption in the chemical mind, walking, food. Any desire during this time brings about pain, any wishes for what I want my life to be is light at the end of the tunnel as a taunting directionless path, no real sense of the word forward. I always want to send out one last wish for life because I feel it leaving from me as I sink to the bottom of the well. I can see it now as a breaking of the illusion of a life wanted in the mind, unreal pictures to begin with. Snapshots. It is important to lose sight so I move deep into the bellows of the body where real life is felt. Its raw what-is beauty and neutral violence mixing together as naturally as sand and water. It’s scary to give up the ghost.

Sight is not what it needs. Maybe in another time there would be ample guidance, space and time, helping hands to guide me into the cave, sacred rites for me to perform with others. Rituals to understand what this time brings to my consciousness. Knowledge of what a Molt means, to my body, to others who experience it, to the collective. In this world without helping hands, I struggle. I struggle hard and by surprise each month. Yet every time my reward is this: these words, these understandings.

My mind needs retreat. Or rather, my Imagination needs space and time to be. It needs to be fed and it cruelly demands it by draining every kind of meaning from my set-up life. It demands, like a vampire’s thirst, to be fed with books, dreams, walks, the odor of beloved animals, to be fed with off-ness. To be communed with without fear. When I show up running with fear, it turns into its twin Anxiety.

This time is an ancient form of compassing. Of a re locating of the internal path. It is cruel. Messy. And does not make sense in this society. It is disabling. It is meant to be disabling. Along with heightened anxiety to a degree that becomes paralyzing and scary, comes heightened imagination. Do not forget this. Heightened imagination can be unimagined heights of how the mind can be used. Anxiety and Imagination are twin flames, they are cut from the same cloth and for me, arise often hand in hand.

I can stare into my baby dog’s eyes and feel a penetrating connection that is an unbroken link that swirls and swirls, like blood flowing from veins. I notice her to new degrees in shape and form. Expression, shadow, color. I hear blues from the radio and feel two people moving inside my stomach, dancing ancient dances moving with the rhythms of the time. I see cruel endings, all of life starting and ending, a hundred scenarios for one relationship visceral in my body, paths diverting like a board game, holding it all as I sit in the tub and break my own heart ten times over. I break, I cry. How beautiful. Cruel grief is here from the ends of life, yet my body is just beginning here in the tub.

This heightened imagination crosses quickly over to the sand flames of anxiety because if not channeled, contained or grounded, it is too much to bear. It becomes a disorder. A disorder in the brain is not always a bad thing. It’s just how it affects your life. This disorder comes close to collapsing everything I’ve built internally to become a self. The hole that was left without shaping is big and laughing again. Everything my heightened imagination thinks takes a dark side and is an echo chamber of its own truths. There’s no one here to interrupt the slew of cruel stories except my self.

This part is where the healing and transformation happens. If this difference of mind was contained for a weekend, which it often can be, the hardest part of this disturbance, I could be ok. But it leaks throughout the month, it leaks in ways that come back to haunt me. It whispers at me and it starts to split my experience between present to a paranoid fear of something coming for my mind, something starting for within, a slow rising fear that is all of a sudden too hot in my body. It Follows. Interrupting relationships, mushroom trips, movies, moments. A little bit of this fear (anxiety) is probably normal for me, this having formed so long ago as a friend in disguise. Something I thought was helping shape how I could be, helping shape my ability to remember how to be someone. How to be someone that is accepted. A twisted tool in keeping track of the things I needed to do to be accepted, loved, to be someone, to be a self without having to think about being a self. This honed my already keen eyes of comparing, of noticing, of keeping track of what to do, what not to do. Of morphing. Of hiding. Of masking.

Now all is reset. My breath is deep and expansive. It is warm and regenerative. The shortcut worked: facing all of it so it wasn’t coming from behind. Able to turn and absorb with a parent present and listening ears to disentangle, to gently debate, to deprogram with intention. All with a place to ground.

How slippery this drain is though. All of a sudden one’s day is turned all the way up. All the way to an unstoppable energy coming from within. Everything must pause. I must solemnly say goodby to the world for three days as I gather my contents. Hoping not to have worried them away. Containers, Stories, Selves all need to be lovingly hushed. Care, quiet, books, naps. Gentleness.

I’ve been waiting to get back here. I’ve been waiting to understand more.

I hope I don’t struggle as much next time