Diary entry 10

(Diary entries are intended to be read in order)

After my experience with the “mother of all healing crises,” I was afraid to do reiki for a period of several months. I went on “reiki hiatus.”

I continued to see my psychologist, but without the aid of reiki. It felt as though the monumental shift that had taken place in me as a result of the last healing session had eradicated the source of my suicidal depression, and cleared me out enough emotionally that I could begin to intend some good things for myself without the interference of subconscious self-sabotage. All the same, I knew I had a lot more work to do on myself before I should pursue or accept a new love relationship. I was still profoundly attached to my previous love, Lucifer, even though the attachment no longer had any form in outward reality. I still felt spiritually and emotionally attached and committed to him to some extent, and couldn’t fathom how I could ever move on. Therefore, I deduced that nothing good could come of a relationship I entered or was coaxed into at that point.

I felt, however, that I was free of the bulk and most severe of my depression. This, indeed, was true, however, there was more left to heal than I had known. I furthermore realized that, all of these years, I had not been making a distinction between my depression and my anxiety; I had been experiencing them together all this time, but only thinking it was depression. However, it turns out that you can have depression and even suicidal thoughts without anxiety. I’m happy to report that at least my anxiety seemed to be, perhaps, 98% gone. As for my depression – let’s just say it was no longer a permanent state or my default response – let’s say it was 90-95% gone.

Yearning for something completely different

In my desire to escape myself and my life as I had known it, I had always known that a radical change would jolt me out of my prevailing state and possibly give me direction as well. I thought that what I really needed would be to spend some months in an Indian ashram meditating, doing yoga and learning about spiritual wisdom from yogis, so that I might rise above my emotional issues with wisdom and composure, grace and beauty, instead of the fits of shouting and tears I was prone to.

Well, I could not afford such an endeavor. Unexpectedly, I managed to happen onto the next best thing, right here in New York City. I had been looking on Craig’s List for months trying to find a yoga center where I could volunteer in exchange for yoga classes. That’s how I found a Naam yoga center in Manhattan. It was practically a yogic ashram in the middle of the city.

The center I found practiced Naam yoga, which has been explained to me more accurately as Kundalini yoga with the addition of Kabbalahic theoretical teachings and beliefs.

The benefits I derived from this yoga center, which comprise another major step in my healing and development, were in some of the different meditations.

In early summer, 2009, I had taken a Naam yoga class, in which the instructor provided a certain meditation; a certain mantra to chant and a certain mudra (hand position), which he said would increase our capacity to love and to heal others merely by our presence. His words appealed so much to me, that on that very same day, I went home and began that meditation.

I did that same meditation every day for more than 40 days. I noticed changes taking place in me as I was meditating. I could feel myself vibrating, as I did when I channeled reiki, after chanting the mantra.

As I continued the meditation day by day, I noticed myself going through a process, as if the meditation itself were setting my healing in motion, just as the reiki did, or clarifying my mind, bringing me wisdom or a greater connection with wise, spiritual sources, talking to me.

Sometimes thoughts of painful things would come up during the meditation and I would start crying—sometimes so much that I couldn’t speak to chant the mantra anymore.

After doing the meditation for an extended number of days, I began to get wonderful, wise thoughts and ideas in my head while meditating. Finally, I was getting so many, that I started a “meditation journal,” where I would write down my thoughts as I had them, because otherwise they would escape me, like smoke vanishing into the air.

Unconscious Love

While I was no longer an unconscious lover of someone else, as I had been of Lucifer (Who is Lucifer?), I was being “loved” unconsciously by several young men from afar, whose advances I had made many efforts to thwart.

But what is unconscious love? Without my inquiring, this is one of the many answers that came to me in my meditations:

Conscious Love Vs. Unconscious Love

August 29th, 2009

Conscious love is self-sacrificing,
Unconscious love is self-serving.

Conscious love respects its beloved’s will,
Unconscious love imposes its own will on its beloved.

Conscious love results in freedom,
Unconscious love results in bondage.

Conscious love is constant,
Unconscious love is erratic.

Conscious love seeks only the highest good for its beloved,
Unconscious love seeks its own immediate gratification.

Thus, strive only to love consciously, or not at all.

As someone who has been both a giver and a receiver of unconscious love, yet who has also experienced the giving of conscious love, I feel qualified to observe that unconscious love is what happens when we love someone sincerely and then pass that love through the dirty filter of our psychological, emotional problems and behavioral patterns. Suddenly, our love is not pure anymore, but becomes tainted with manipulation and selfish desires and requirements which are not of love.

I call this “unconscious love” for two reasons. Firstly, it must be called “love,” even though it may more often resemble or feel like hatred. Many-a-time, for example, I had wished Lucifer, who loved me, would have just killed me to put me out of my misery instead of continuing to love me. Occasionally I would ask him, how would he be worse to me if he hated me. It was clear in his response that he was a tortured soul.

The unconscious lover will swear up and down that he loves, indeed, when I examine myself, even now, in the times I have exercised unconscious love, I know I did love the man. I loved Lucifer, but we tortured each other.

Secondly, it must be called “unconscious,” for this is the element that makes this kind of love torturous, for both the lover and the beloved. “Unconscious,” because this love is implemented and expressed through us by means of our unconscious behavior, which has been formed by all of our past pain, beginning, but not ending with, that given to us by our parents.

The cure to unconscious love is to become conscious of and then to eliminate the causes of our programmed behaviors. This almost always necessarily involves emotional release, which is what I effectively achieve by using reiki.

This realization was important for me, because my entire life has been driven by the singular desire and yearning to find a true love with a man, which will prove impossible if I continue to love unconsciously.

Further, I have had the insight that, when you stop focusing on yourself in a love relationship, or in any circumstance really, when you let go of your self-concern, only then are you free to see the truth – be it favorable or not – and only then, if need be, can you offer the love your beloved may need.

Psychotherapy – a very slow, but helpful process

In therapy and healing, explanation and understanding for your feelings and behaviors are gradually unfolded to you, and week by week, not all at once. All my young life, I was 110% certain I was a “basket case” (as my father used to say) specifically as a result of a megalomaniacal, emotionally abusive and manipulative father. It is only to my surprise that I have been finding out through my reiki and my psychotherapy, that roughly 95% of my own dysfunction in love relationships has been passed to me from maternal neglect, and not paternal psychosis.