Overwhelmed

When you do nothing, you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.
Maya Angelou

I know God will not give me anything that I can’t handle. I just wish he didn’t trust me so much.
Mother Teresa

Mindfulness is the best way to be with our suffering without being overwhelmed by it. Mindfulness is the capacity to dwell in the present moment, to know what’s happening in the here and now.
Thich Nhat Hanh

It took me some time to regain my orientation one recent morning after having woken from a somewhat chaotic and disconcerting dream.

It consisted of repeated attempts, using various stairwells, to get to a specific place, presumably my office, on the top floor of a modern industrial building, like the one I used to work in for some years, about twenty-five years ago.

My attempts were thwarted, leading me each time to obstacles, in the form of major construction sites, where large numbers of people, busily engaged in the major refurbishment of entire floors, were coming and going. I knew each time that my destination could be reached by going through the construction site but those working there were either too busy to even notice me, let alone engage with me, or if they did, would not allow me to pass through, citing safety regulations. I eventually had to turn back on each occasion.

The level of my frustration was rising rapidly, since it appeared that my exertions were all doomed to fail, whatever I did. In the back of my mind, I knew that there was a way through, but couldn’t figure out how exactly to find it, with no help apparently available to me.

When I woke up, the dream not having reached any successful conclusion, I was somewhat disorientated, feeling despondent, overwhelmed, and angry. It took some time for the dust to settle around the diffuse feelings and emotions. It gradually became clear that most of them belonged to that aspect of me which I identify as my `Inner Child´. My adult self, having taken a step back to become sufficiently disengaged, could choose to become enmeshed in these old feelings, or not.

The adult in me was perplexed, as there appeared to be no obvious external reason why my mood should be so drastically changed for the worse, compared to the previous day. It slowly dawned on me that the source of my anguish lay within; it was the Inner Child who was struggling. This discomfort and dis-ease of feeling overwhelmed, not knowing why, and having neither support nor direction from others was somehow very familiar to him and yet as invisible as water would be to any fish.

On recognising this predicament, the adult in me immediately stepped in, providing solace and loving-kindness to the younger me. There was an immediate shift in the energy. The Inner Child moved from desperation, tinged with resignation, to surrender and relaxation. I reviewed the contents of the dream once again in search of clues. What struck me was the absence of any acknowledgement of my plight on the part of the construction workers. They seemed to be indifferent, perhaps because they were so busy with their work.

The second point of note was the yearning for support, direction, and guidance from another person or persons, which was not forthcoming. There was no such support available, far and wide, which struck the youthful protagonist as being unfair, to say the least. He just couldn’t understand why.

Immediately on emerging from this dream, I had the presence of mind (lovely term, that!) to gather myself in meditation, as is my practice for the first hour of every day, trusting that the Great Spirit would guide me to a healing state of alignment and the re-establishment of the state of ease.

This is how it works for me. I sit in meditation and imaging the `little one´ perched in my lap. I afford to him the empathy and compassion that I would welcome, if I were in his situation, frightened and disoriented.  

I am sitting with a cushion between my back and the bedstead, which allows me to lean slightly backwards. In this posture, I imagine that, just as my Inner Child is leaning into my embrace, the adult me is leaning into the embrace of the Great Spirit.

Now we have alignment of three entities: the Great Spirit, the adult self, and my Inner Child.

In this constellation, in which I consciously seek refuge and strength, whatever pain the Inner Child is experiencing, – as backdraught from the memory (in this case recalled in the dream), – can be `held´ without the need to feed what Eckhard Tolle refers to as the `pain body´. It can simply be there, until it disperses of its own account, which it will, like the clouds in the sky on any given day.

As the fifth of ten children, – all born within the space of eighteen years, – I had found many aspects of childhood overwhelming. As I sat in meditation, it struck me that the energy field of the dream bore many similarities to the everyday experience of growing up at home.  It is not uncommon in such a household, that the real, age-appropriate emotional needs of children get overlooked and remain unmet, simply in the light of the functional day-to-day demands of providing the basics of food, clothing, shelter, schooling, and physical health.

In retrospect, I imagine that both my mother and father, – each having been raised with ten siblings, – grew up under similar circumstances and therefore seldom had the opportunity to freely manifest child-like behaviours or have their needs recognised, acknowledged, understood, and met by their caregivers in age-appropriate ways.

What I can remember was the pressure to `grow up´ as quickly as possible. This left the impression that anything child-like was in some way a deficiency, even if age appropriate, and needed to be `overcome´ rather than entertained. The upside of this was the stimulus to learn, as a boy, to function well in the household at a level way beyond my years. These functional abilities garnered validation and even praise, which, in the light of what I perceived to be indifference on the part of my adult caregivers, was a most welcome substitute for the unconditional love that we all need.

If we go through life living off such crumbs, we begin to internalise how our caregivers treated us, practising self-destruction rather than self-care, and pass on the pattern to our own loved-ones and children. Until the hunger for what we truly need becomes so great that we are prepared to drop the self-destructive behaviours and thought patterns, and revisit the wounds of the past, we will remain stuck in the destructive spiral. When we do rise to the challenge, with the newly developed capacity to nurture ourselves that, in the original setting of our childhood, neither we nor our caregivers had, we can begin to outgrow the distresses of old.

In this process, the backdraught of feelings and emotions of childhood hit me head on, as happened when I awoke from that dream. This brings pain in its wake, an exact replica of the pain that was originally experienced. If I can simply let that be, in the knowledge that, it too shall pass, a new relationship to those distresses, such as that of being overwhelmed, can begin to take shape.

This approach is referred to as re-parenting, with me now stepping in as the responsible (self)-caregiver. It requires of me empathy for all concerned, and the willingness to forgive. We can forgive without condoning, which brings us all closer together, thus fulfilling our longing to belong.