Helplessness part 2

Why we need to develop our capacity for it.

In helplessness I believe lies a greater spiritual truth. One that speaks to the overused term ‘surrender’. This truth - you have to give it all up, not just the bits you don’t want, but all of it - is so fundamental to life and the death process, not a single person gets to escape from it. And in what they describe as “dying before you die” These heavy structures of mind all get destroyed, and you’re engulfed with a lightness of being. We have these mini en-lighten-ments, to let go of whatever karmic luggage we carry through the portal of direct experience, all the time. Because ultimately helplessness begets flow, and the more you can give of yourself to it, the more something can move through you, like a river breaching a dam, which is what real power feels like, the deep feminine surrender, the giving up of structure and allowing whatever force of nature to move you into a different formation. And as you let go into helplessness you become aware and awake to real nature, unbound to any structure, expectation or limitation of form. And maybe you re-member with that whilst holding the human body.

There have been times where I’ve not been able to hold the intensity of the moment, I’ve noticed it most notably in fights, where perhaps through my multiplicity of venir thinning practices, the expectations pinned to these moments have simply given way and something has moved through me and done things I have not consciously known or practiced, but perhaps through an embodied understanding of the physics of the situation, the intensity of competition and pressure of survival dynamics, totally new movements have arisen.

Whenever we’re in helplessness, feeling totally powerless to do anything about a situation we’re in what’s called Dorsal Vagal Shutdown. From this position the thoughts that will materialise will be of the “I' can’t..” nature. “Not possible” “unable”. These thought structures (and we do use thought to structure and iterate our experiences in search of stability) are all symptomatic of this Dorsal Vagal Shutdown.

Our great mishap is to jump on those thoughts and calcify an embodiment loop within them. I cant therefore I can’t, and you see I told you I can’t now I see evidence of this and feel this way, so I must not be able to etc. All of this avoids experience.

Using the thoughts as placeholder for a deeper phenomenological experience, we can trace down each word to a tempo of frozen terror, quiet and subdued, we push down through fear of the fear to what could be alive and fast paced. Our capacity for adrenaline and the ability to experience this terror without being afraid of it, move with it, touch it, embody and breathe it while being totally in awe of it as a physiological happening is our key to allowing a transmutation from dense potential energy into kinetic flow.

This is what we can “do”. This is our choice and freedom within helplessness. A passionate turn towards it, into and through it, descend and sink as deeply as it asks us and be there. Focusing relentlessly with a penetrative awareness, while holding a wide open space for it to exist in, devoid of our analysis, pure experience, turning our internal eye towards while yielding fiercely the whole way down. I can feel this, I can take it, my system is built for these autonomic reactions, I accept the portals invite, I don’t have to structure it with my language, through that dark hole is an effervescent and terminal consciousness, persistent and relentless with love through which all things must pass and crumble.

There is so much will to forget this, because it’s easier in the short run. Who wants to keep death on their shoulder when our attachments have such magnetic allure? And we cannot not structure, this is what life wants of us. Yet what we call ourselves is dying all the time, Our bodies are constantly generating, and regenerating, killing off and reforming in mini waves and tiny creative acts. When you look for what you assume yourself to be, the deeper you go down into the weeds, the more you find an amorphous kind of cloud that refuses to be boundaried or seperated from the broader environment in any sensible way. Your ideas and opinions, sequences of sound waves held together in-formation that governs all your autonomic responses. And a life itself, one meta wave of human time, rising from a single cell into complex multi-pronged biological enterprise, then to a series of diminishing returns.

Zoom out or zoom in far enough and only spiritual truths really survive these aperture distortions, while human stories tend to buckle under the weight of themselves. The reality of connectedness, electricity and magnetism, black holes and light. These things are true, in a fundamental sense. And as pain arises, through no fault of our own, we have to choose it, in order for it to nourish us in the dark. There is value to keeping truth close. It will align and realign you to the forms most apt for its flow.

And that’s why helplessness wins, and why there’s value in letting it breathe.