If you encounter horror, invite the monster in to your living room.
If and when something awful smashes in to your life, we can have many reactions. We can fight with it, deny it, go numb to it, be afraid of it, avoid it, get mad at it, be ashamed of it.
When we do this the monster lingers. It’s always there, creeping in the shadows waiting to come out when it’s least convenient.
When you can do it, and once you’re sure it’s truly with you, make some time to invite it in to your living room.
Stare it right in the face and watch it do it’s thing. Breathe and be present with it. Let it scream, and roar, and snarl, and be ugly. Just watch. Observe and loose any sense of time. In your seat of sovereignty you will eventually consume the monster. You will eat it whole and it will live inside you. This may seem concerning but know it is much better than the alternative. Here you have a designated room for it. It lives in containment. It still snarls, and is wild, and is ugly, but it can no longer roam free.
You master monsters this way. You both metaphorically and literally own them.
And life continues. And you are more free.
I believe Awakening to ourselves sometimes involves exploring the worst parts of ourselves. At the higher end there is a freedom, an “enlightenment”. At the lower end there is a psychosis, a hellish imprisonment.
Psychosis is a clinical term that basically means pure chaos. “The king of all monsters”. It’s the worst parts of Fear, Shame, and Anger, all coming out at once. But I just capitalized those qualities. I’m referring to their archetypes. Fear in it’s sharpest, most extreme state. Shame in it’s cruelest depths. And Anger at its brutalist. This is the state of psychosis.
Why bother to mention this (you might ask)? In presence practice we need to accept all parts of our being, even this.
