Pulling my bricks out of quicksand
A real-time shadow work story
My chest feels constricted. My shoulders feel heavy and hurt. My stomach wants to contract inward. My head feels contradictorily hollow yet racing. My nose and lips feel tingly. My body, as a whole, feels paralyzed- pushing toward movement yet vehemently resisting that movement at the same time.
Fragments of half-acknowledged thoughts race quickly through my conscious mind; so quickly that I barely even notice. If I don’t take the time to pause and ask myself what the thoughts are about, I will be unconsciously swept away by their effects.
Because although they seem to pass through my mind like a vapor that leaves no trace, they heavily crash into my body then sink down deep, like a ton of bricks in quicksand.
Hence, the physical sensations I described above.
At first glance, I cannot give any real reasons for those physical sensations.
My distracted mind did not notice the thoughts that caused them.
I could continue to distract myself and hope that it all goes away.
But that is just playing a fool’s game.
Because that is not how it works.
Those bricks in my body need to be found and pulled out of the quicksand. And only the light of mental awareness can do that.
Otherwise, I am left in blind anxiety and dread, born out of the ignorance of the causes of my physical sensations.
And if all I do is try to ameliorate the secondary anxiety, I will only get temporary relief- at best!
And that is a shitty deal. I reject that option.
I have and always will choose the other way; I will slow down and look for the bricks. I will stop and reflect, seeking to employ my mind in the way it meant to be used… as an instrument of my self-reflected consciousness to observe and understand.
I will ask myself what those thoughts were that passed through my mental space like vapors but condensed into heavy bricks and settled into my body.
It’s actually not that hard to re-gain awareness of the contents of those bricks; they are present within me, and I can see them if I so choose. I just have to choose to look. To take them into my mental awareness and feel them, their cracks and their nuances. To let the bricks melt back into thoughts so that my mind can understand them… process them.
I will have to leave the house today. Twice. I already left the house once yesterday. And today is Sunday, which means that the workweek begins once again tomorrow, and I will be forced to spend most of the next 5 days out of the house once more.
I used to spend entire weeks without even stepping out of my front door.
And I loved it.
I like being home. It is quiet, peaceful, filled with everything I need, and gives my body the space it needs to process things at my own pace.
Let me rephrase that: I LOVE being home, in my own space.
In my own energy.
Since beginning my “regular” job, back in the beginning of 2024, I have been forced to let go of all that, at least for now. And it has not been easy. My weekends are so precious to me. I try to keep thing-done-outside to a minimum.
But this weekend, life has had other plans. And that’s not a bad thing either.
Had dinner at my dad’s last night. A lovely time.
A work Christmas party tonight, as well as a little stop back at dad’s in the afternoon to help him with some stuff at his place.
None of it a big deal, in and of itself. But it uses up so much of the little bit of precious body-relaxing time I do have these days. Which makes me tired in advance. And deposits bricks in my body. Because I want to but I don’t want to.
I also have a weird, funky energy around what I’m doing here, on Substack.
Desire to be seen, be liked, and engender engagement clash with fears of being misunderstood and criticized. More bricks.
Wanting to simply exist and enjoy my self-expression without a thought or care to strategy smashes into the knowing that there are supposed strategies and ways to potentially work the systems by saying The Right Thing At The Right Time… and the sneaky, underlying desire to manipulate myself into being what is desired and expected by others. So many bricks.
All manners of fears… of inadequacy… of not getting it right… colliding with fears of actually getting it right and then getting trapped…
More and more bricks.
I am not doing enough here. I need to write more notes. I need to forget about notes and write more writings. I need to not write too many writings all at once because now two people are actually subscribing, and I can’t inundate their inboxes, so I need to write more but not too much.
Bricks upon brick upon bricks.
My body felt all the feels.
My mind froze because it couldn’t tell what the fuck was going on.
I sat on the couch feeling empty, anxious, and without motivation to do a single thing.
Without the awareness that I possess of my inner processes, I probably would have sluggishly dragged out my computer and put on some funny TV show to distract myself… but be too plagued by my mental unrest to focus solely on the show alone and also start playing silly phone games. Distracting myself even more deeply. (Inadvertently adding MORE bricks!!)
All so that I could drown out the awareness of the heavy feeling of the ton of energetically frozen thought bricks sinking ever deeper into my body.
Making any sort of moment even more difficult.
Heavy.
Like dragging myself through life carrying a ton of bricks inside of me.
The sad part is that this is how many, many people live entire lives. Dragging themselves through life weighed down by an ever-increasing fuck-ton of energetically frozen thought bricks.
The solution is not necessarily an easy one, but it is quite simple: self-awareness, self-observation, and presence.
We are trained/conditioned away from our self-awareness, and it takes determination to learn and choose to employ it in everyday life. It takes patience and practice. The draw to distract and ignore can be so strong, and the world around us certainly pushes us to do so.
In my case, there was really nothing to do other than see what was happening and just stop resisting what I was feeling. I have what I need to do today, and none of it is a huge deal. As far as all the fears and desires, well, they lose their grip on me when I see them for what they are. They are there, but they would only dictate my actions if they remained unacknowledged.
Now that I have seen and acknowledged them, they can be just the random thoughts they were to begin with and stop being a ton of bricks weighing my body down.
And I ready to show up for the rest of my day. Without anxiety or dread.
Self-awareness IS the key.
