Panic

Today was a dark day. I suffered a panic attack, something I haven’t experienced in years. I felt physically sick and emotionally feeble. I lay on my sofa for most of the day, and was consumed by my own anxiety. I have felt a rising sadness in me for some weeks now, and I think it is coming to a head with this panic. I don’t really understand what is happening to me, or why. I can’t connect the dots between the way I feel and any likely causes. I can identify some vague sources of uneasiness, but nothing so specific that I might tackle it. I will keep searching, but in the meantime I must find a way to be at peace.

I must trust in the other power. Tonight, Rena said “Hollow can feel empty, or it can mean that there is an infinite space within you.” I have the power to fill that space however I choose, or to open my heart to the universe that is already there. Right now I feel like I am sitting in a dark room all alone. I feel empty, isolated, abandoned, and terribly afraid. I feel like I have tried to venture out into the darkness, to feel my way along the path somehow. But finding nothing, I feel I have failed and started to panic. I am afraid to sit still because my rising panic chases me around. The dark world feels so empty, so lonely, so vast. So I need to sit still and trust that things will be ok. Be fearless in this way, and I suspect my eyes will soon adjust to the darkness. I don’t think the room is truly empty, I just can’t see the shapes around me yet. I think the entire universe is contained within this room, as it is contained within my own body and again within my own heart. “As it is in the macrocosm, so it is in the microcosm” says the Upanishads.

I am changing the form of my life pretty profoundly. I have entered a mysterious place that is wholly unfamiliar to me. I have been forced to embrace ideas that I have actively disparaged in the past. And I have been humbled by the blindness, uncertainty, and fear I feel now. I have been grasping desperately at the darkness around me, seeking a form I might lean on and draw comfort from. But if I do not give myself time to adjust to my new surroundings, I might very well clutch at the wrong thing, and risk being blind much longer. Still, I am terrified as I sit trembling in this darkness and I think I am only now realizing how much. I have always embraced change as a moving force, but when it requires me to sit still I am so easily cowed. I must be fearless in a new way now. Fearless like the Buddha, not the warrior. Strong like the mountain, not the river. Perhaps then I will find peace and a clear direction along this new path.