Knowing
I'm thinking about how we know each other. I'm thinking about how I know myself.
I've just spent 200+ hours with a group of people in which we said, aloud, intimate and sometimes alarming things about ourselves. We worked to bare our rawness and beauty and were seen, so closely, by others in the room. And here we are on the other side, and I am thinking: do I know them? Do they know me?
Even the people with whom I felt most bonded, who most held me and who sought me out and I held them and sought them out, I'm thinking -- what do I know about you, other than I am interested and so are you? What about each other makes us interesting to the other?
I'm inspired to make lists of all the people I've just spent all this time of, to find a collection of facts about them to sit with and wonder about. I doubt this will help me though. I already know those facts -- that's why I could make a list of them. The clue I'm attending to here is that I already know them -- they're already in my body and I could make them come out of my body so that I could look at them with my body again and let them come back in in a different way, and would this regurgitation actually lead to more digestion? What feels like it's missing such that doing a thing like list making would fill in the hole?
I guess the question is really: What do I know about myself here? What new things have I learned or uncovered? How has this regurgitation of myself created relationships amongst other people who were also, in the same time and the same space, interested in regurgitating themselves and then sorting through the bits that came up and saying to each other, "Oh! Look at this interesting thing that I found! Let's poke at it together!"
I feel regressed, which is maybe the same as noticing the emptiness and chaos of my regurgitated self. I have all these pieces all around me, and I keep wanting to look at other people to see what they're doing with their pieces, to tell stories about their pieces, to relate their pieces to my pieces and then coo at them together. I sense all these invisible pieces laying around me that are just mine and that probably need to be sorted before I can use them to connect with everyone else and also maybe connecting them with everyone else will make them more visible? I felt these now-invisible pieces coming up. I felt the urges and the physical sensations: I felt myself wanting to have a drink at night (which is not unusual, but the way it felt to want a drink at night instead of it just being an open option); I felt myself snacking without sensing into my body to see if snacking was the thing it wanted; I felt myself grasping and clawing for relationships, feeling crushed for no apparent reason, withdrawing because I wanted someone to follow. When I started the program, I felt wise, confident, self-knowing, like a god in a god realm, and only a little confused at what I was supposed to do with all this ease. And now I feel the same, but also like I'm 12 and have no clue what's going on and please will someone just be my friend after all this? It is disconcerting.
So this in-between place, one of many, of knowing myself so that I can know others and knowing others so that I can know myself...it is a rich and confusing place in which to float around.
I've just spent 200+ hours with a group of people in which we said, aloud, intimate and sometimes alarming things about ourselves. We worked to bare our rawness and beauty and were seen, so closely, by others in the room. And here we are on the other side, and I am thinking: do I know them? Do they know me?
Even the people with whom I felt most bonded, who most held me and who sought me out and I held them and sought them out, I'm thinking -- what do I know about you, other than I am interested and so are you? What about each other makes us interesting to the other?
I'm inspired to make lists of all the people I've just spent all this time of, to find a collection of facts about them to sit with and wonder about. I doubt this will help me though. I already know those facts -- that's why I could make a list of them. The clue I'm attending to here is that I already know them -- they're already in my body and I could make them come out of my body so that I could look at them with my body again and let them come back in in a different way, and would this regurgitation actually lead to more digestion? What feels like it's missing such that doing a thing like list making would fill in the hole?
I guess the question is really: What do I know about myself here? What new things have I learned or uncovered? How has this regurgitation of myself created relationships amongst other people who were also, in the same time and the same space, interested in regurgitating themselves and then sorting through the bits that came up and saying to each other, "Oh! Look at this interesting thing that I found! Let's poke at it together!"
I feel regressed, which is maybe the same as noticing the emptiness and chaos of my regurgitated self. I have all these pieces all around me, and I keep wanting to look at other people to see what they're doing with their pieces, to tell stories about their pieces, to relate their pieces to my pieces and then coo at them together. I sense all these invisible pieces laying around me that are just mine and that probably need to be sorted before I can use them to connect with everyone else and also maybe connecting them with everyone else will make them more visible? I felt these now-invisible pieces coming up. I felt the urges and the physical sensations: I felt myself wanting to have a drink at night (which is not unusual, but the way it felt to want a drink at night instead of it just being an open option); I felt myself snacking without sensing into my body to see if snacking was the thing it wanted; I felt myself grasping and clawing for relationships, feeling crushed for no apparent reason, withdrawing because I wanted someone to follow. When I started the program, I felt wise, confident, self-knowing, like a god in a god realm, and only a little confused at what I was supposed to do with all this ease. And now I feel the same, but also like I'm 12 and have no clue what's going on and please will someone just be my friend after all this? It is disconcerting.
So this in-between place, one of many, of knowing myself so that I can know others and knowing others so that I can know myself...it is a rich and confusing place in which to float around.
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