My life is an alternating current these days. Good day bad day good day bad day. Yesterday was a bad day. Today was a good day. I know pretty much from the instant I wake up. I open my eyes and I check for the buzzing. If it’s there, bad day. If it’s not, good day. No buzzing today.
I had my second meeting with Wiggles 2.0 today. He’s very interested in the buzzing. He asked me a lot of good questions about it. “Can you make the buzzing start on purpose?” No. “Can you make it amplify?” No. “When did it start?” About a year and a half ago. “Did you ever have it before then?” No. I’d never asked myself those questions. I was especially interested in his question about whether or not I could amplify it intentionally. I’ve never tried. I assume I can’t, but I don’t know that. He said I should play with the buzzing, that next time it comes I should try to make it more intense, or move it around my body, see what kind of control I can have over it, even if I can’t make it stop. That’s a good suggestion, I think.
I explained to him that when the buzzing comes it’s like I’m not fully here, like I can’t get my feet on the ground. I can still look and act like me, but I’m not here, I’m just watching. If you’ve ever seen a girl deep in the grips of anorexia, you know that the girl dies months before her body does. The girl in there is gone, destroyed. What’s left is a disease that is a perfect mimic of the person who used to inhabit that body. It will walk the same way, talk the same way, make the same jokes, laugh at the same things, tell the same stories. A perfect mimic. But the girl is gone. There’s no one in there. You just know. It’s intensely creepy to see. That’s how I explained the buzzing to him. Like I’m gone. “The buzzing pushes you out of the way?” he asked. “Yes!” Yes, that’s exactly it. The buzzing pushes me out of the way. I felt pleased, like we’d made progress. Like we were getting closer to someone else understanding this.
Later in the day I headed to the gym, to meet up with my trainer for the first time in a month. It was good, actually. I was able to do most of the same weights that I’d been doing before, without a lot of trouble. My abs have gone downhill big time, but everything else was still in decent shape.
After the gym, I went to Yoga Nidra with Trish again. Yoga Nidra is basically yogic meditation — you do some basic stretches and then you lie down and the instructor guides you through a body scan and helps you to relax. I still didn’t fully relax, but I felt like I got closer than last time, when I spent the entire guided meditation crying into my eye pillow. I was able to follow her pretty closely with the body scan, and I got little glimpses of this “third eye” she kept referring to. It’s pouring in Seattle, and we could hear the rain drumming against the ceiling. “It’s spring,” said the instructor. “Mother Nature is cleansing us.” Oh, yeah. It’s spring. For a split second, I got outside of myself and into the universe. I hadn’t even really processed the fact that it’s spring. Not really. I live in a little navel-gazing world where the seasons are determined by the mood of my brain. But there’s a whole world out there. And it’s spring. I got it, just for a second, and then it was gone.
At the beginning of class, the instructor had us set our intention for the meditation. There’s a yoga-style word for it, but I forget it now. But basically you set a goal for what you want to get out of the meditation. I decided my intention was to be so centered that the buzzing couldn’t come back tomorrow. So that I could have two good days in a row. I’ll let you know how it goes. :)
