Last night, along with Bound Lotus and the Moon Kriya, I did all of the meditations we'd done in the Sat Nam Rasayan sequence with Mahan Kirn Kaur at Solstice. I also did a meditation to "Aadays Tisai Aadays" for releasing fear and balancing the emotions, one to "Aakan Jor" for releasing fear as well, and a short for creating security and balance. I felt like a million bucks!
Today, teaching class, I felt myself lose the flow, and dip into anxiety several times, but each time the balance came back. In the past, if I slipped into anxiety, it would be more like falling headlong with no way back up. Today, I was blown away by how much I could see happening with my students. I used to flounder around in anxiety about how to best assist someone, and I just seemed today to intuit where I needed to be to be of help. With a student's headstand, I knew instinctively when I could move my arms and place a hand above their feet to press into... This is mind-blowing! It is like someone other than the person I know as Phoenix is teaching the class.
At home, reading "Dibs in Search of Self" again, I find this:
"Dibs was certainly on his way but I wouldn't say that he had found hmself yet. He still had a way to go. His search for self was a tedious, troubled experience that brought him increasing awareness of his feelings and attitudes and relationships with those around him. There were no doubt many feelings that Dibs had not dug out of his past and flung out in his play to know and understand and control better. I hoped that he would find experiences in the playroom that would help him know and feel the emotions within him in such a way that any hatred and fear he might have within him would be brought out in the open and diminished."
I'd say the 'hatred part' is getting addressed too...
It is hard being different. It is hard being treated as crazy and sometimes stupid just because you are high-anxiety and have poor social skills, as well as major difficulty functioning in the average person's world because it feels so strange. It is, again, interesting that doing Bound Lotus eases my anxiety in ways that other postures, and other things do not. I feel like the discovery of so much about myself being in keeping with what is true about the world for those with Asperger's is tremendously calming. I think of that movie from the 70s: "Return to Witch Mountain", and I feel like the kids who are from another planet. People have made fun of me for years, saying I'm lost in my own little world, but I think, like most autistics, high and low functioning, my world is so much more rich with detail, that it is overwhelming. I think I've resorted to talking so much as a way to 'filter' what comes through, so it doesn't overwhelm me. Language is definitely a filter.
In Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation", the section entiltled 'Words Get in the Way', explains much, for my world was visually richer in both color and visual detail when I was a child who barely spoke, and also the year recently where I kept mostly silent, and spoke to very few people. What Temple has to say I think is very important. Very relevant.
"Research shows that language suppresses visual memory. This is called 'verbal overshadowing' and is a well-established phenomenon..."
Temple explains that a group of test subjects were required to view a videotape of a bank robbery, and then some participants were asked to write descriptions of the bank robber, while others did not. Fewer people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick out the robber in a photograph. But that isn't all!
"These studies have also found that language doesn't erase visual memories for good; it just suppresses them. When the researchers asked the people who wrote descriptions to do something nonverbal for a while, like work a puzzle or listen to music, their visual memories came back, and they could identify the bank robber's face as well as the people who hadn't written descriptions in the first place.
"I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don't have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do too."
During some months in 2007 when I spoke and interracted very little with people, but walked in the park and listened to the birds alot, I saw the most glorious detail in insects, leaves and flowers. A rich tapestry of color, detail sharperthan HDTV, dragonflies like stained-glass and exquisite filigree, birds singing absolutely beautiful compositions with melodies, trills and baselines from other birds. But also, sirens were excruciatingly loud, and I felt the pain of people in their voices and expressions. I literally cried with the trees in the park when some of them had to be cut down because of an ice storm. The birds, I swear, were singing dirges.
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