The middle path

It is not easy to find a place of neutrality in todays world. The middle path, as they say, is a beautiful place to walk but it is not encouraged or talked about often. Our current world is constantly trying to push us towards the extremes and we are all losing access to this soft and sweet middle ground.

This is something I know. It is something that I think about so often. Yet, I fail miserably more often than I care to admit. I get swept up in temporary emotions and allow them to color my reality as if it is a permanent state. I get pulled in one direction or the other and forget that the nuance lives in the middle, the proverbial gray area.

I know I am not alone in this. In a sense, our society puts so much pressure on us to move towards the ends of the spectrums. Knowing this helps me to feel less shame. I am not weak because I get pulled into this undercurrent; I am simply human. It is my mind doing its best to stay afloat in this messy world we inhabit. I often wonder what damage we are inflicting on our bodies by existing in this current paradigm. I don’t think we will fully comprehend it until it is too late.

To be a deeply feeling human in today’s world is a whole vibe. I can feel the collective energy more than I care to admit. I sense fear, unrest, division, anger, exhaustion and hopelessness all expanding and overwhelming the collective consciousness. Most people are unaware of how much this undercurrent is impacting their daily lives. I am not.

It grates on me with a constancy that is unparalleled by much else these days. It feels as though I am atlas, being crushed by the weight of the world on my shoulders. It shocks me that others do not feel this immense pressure building all around us. I sometimes wish that I could turn it off. A simple flip of a switch and I could lose access to this vast undercurrent that is the collective conscious. As much as I know it is a gift to be attuned to this energy, it is also making living unbearable at times.

And I would honestly consider myself one of the lucky ones. At some point, when I was much much younger, I figured out how to flip the switch. I turned off my ability to sense into this energy because it overwhelmed my little mind and body. There was a price to pay though, that I am still sorting through in this moment. To turn off this connection required me to turn off all communication between my mind and body. I survived by becoming numb. I lived my life in a state of dissociation.

It has become one of those things that is very clearly a blessing and a curse in my life. I was able to exist in a world that didn’t always feel great but because I couldn’t feel a damn thing. This is the gift of dissociation. Everything feels neutral. I appeared to always be on the middle path. I was called grounded, calm, put together and easy going. And often times, those descriptions felt accurate. But there are many other times where my mind and body were messy and chaotic but I had no way to feel or express it.

It was like living inside a statue. Not knowing how to express when I was sad or having a hard time. Also not knowing how to emote when I was excited or filled with joy. The neutrality that was my mask of stone was unbreakable for so long. This unbreakable mask kept me going. It kept me moving forward during times in my life where I didn’t have the strength to hold the world.

As I grew, in strength and wisdom, I discovered there was an entirely foreign human form that existed beneath this stone exterior. The chiseling away of this stone took so much patience, energy and time. Sometimes it was painful and sometimes it was exhilarating. Moment by moment, I began to feel the world again. My mind and body slowly began to communicate and connect.

There were moments of excitement as well as times of abject despair and everything in between. I cannot tell you how hard it is to learn how to feel the complete spectrum of human emotions as a fully fledged adult. Something that usually spans years of development collided with me so quickly. My world of stone crumbled and gave way to a technicolor reality.

The colors were bright and chaotic but it felt like the first time in my life where my inside world matched my outside world. I could express what existed within rather than numb myself from it all. But when the floodgates of color arrived, I now know that the colors I experienced were not mine alone. Reflecting back, I can see so clearly how I became so overwhelmed because as I began to explore expressing my inner world outwardly, I also began tapping into the collective undercurrent of our world unknowingly.

I wasn’t only processing all the back up of my own energetic sludge, but also being asked to become aware of the crushing weight of the world that sits on my shoulders. To do this all at once was too much. It is one thing to awaken to your own inner world and see reality in a new way. It is another thing to do all of that plus begin to tune into senses that you didn’t even know existed and still aren’t quite sure how to operate.

Fortunately, Gus (god, universe, source) placed a lot of people and experiences in my life to guide me towards understanding this new side of myself. I found people who felt what I felt and understood that everything is energy. That when one person suffers, we all suffer. And there are many ways to communicate beyond the realm of words. This undercurrent of energy, what some call the web of life, is a network of communication similar to the mycelium network that is nearly constantly running through the soil beneath our feet.

This network of mycelium, the web of fungus that makes the soil around us alive, is how trees communicate with each other. This may sound like fantasy but in fact, this is simple science. Just because it operates in a way that is a bit foreign to most human minds, it does not make it less valid. What I am learning is that this mycelial web, a huge reason why I have such an obsession with mushrooms, is something we all have access to.

Our bodies are designed to connect and communicate with everything around us. We are made of energy, so is everything else in this world. The illusion of our solid bodies is a weird trick our mind plays on us. We expand much further than our fingertips can reach. And through this expansion, we can collect data and information about our environment. In a way, we all have the ability to perform the classic care bear stare. Our heart space is where we connect and collect, just like the mycelial network.

When my body was made of stone, I did not have the capacity to expand beyond my mask. All the energy of the outside world could not penetrate my solid exterior. I was protected from the intense experience of feeling so much. But because I wanted more from my life, I decided to set down my stone mask. I could no longer exist in this world dissociated from it all, I had to actively participate. By making this choice, I opened myself up to sensory overwhelm from every direction.

I am slowly moving through how to navigate this new energetic world. I am learning how beautiful it can be to feel and experience far more than I ever thought I logically could. I can witness pain from thousands of miles away. I can hear a whisper of a thought as if someone is speaking clearly into my ear. I can feel the heaviness of grief in a bone crushing way. So much beauty and so much pain.

As our world continually falls into a direction where many people are choosing to become stone, I am choosing to staying soft. I want to be affected by it all. Even when this choice makes me feel like I am drowning, I know I cannot return to stone.

What I am struggling with right now is how to become neutral without returning to stone. How can I continue to feel it all and also know that I do not need to continue to feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. I can know it exists, but I do not need to claim ownership.

When I move towards a space of neutrality, my body is triggered as if I am returning to stone. It is a fear that pulls be back to sensing into the colorful reality I now know. But I am at a loss. How do I allow the colors to exist, but slide towards the gray area? That sweet middle path that cultivates ease and peace.

I have been doing a lot of work in an effort to discern what energy is mine and what is this undercurrent. It is something that I actively have to attend to often because it is a new skill for me. I am fumbling through how to know what is what. I cannot say I have a simply solution for this, and I’m not sure I ever will.

What I do know is that our bodies are always pay attention, even when our minds choose otherwise. And we always have a choice. To see and hold the crushing weight of it all, turn to stone and be numb to everything, or find a way to witness it all without holding anything. This last path, the middle ground. The realm of neutrality. This is where I want to move towards. Slowly, steadily, I am making progress. I will not return to stone. I will not be overwhelmed with the weight of it all. I will bear witness with absolute neutrality.