Fatigue returns

I feel much more tired tonight than I did last night. Although it would be good to observe that, last night, I sat zazen far too late and nodded off a few times. I'd like to get to it no later than 10:10. I want to wake up at 6:30 tomorrow so I have time to sit, run and make breakfast before driving off to work at 9:20. I can do it.

Again I feel fuller than normal today. Without much planning, a large percentage of my diet has suddenly become sausage. I'm doing Slow Carb right now, with notable exceptions, and I figured since pork and turkey is on the diet, pork and turkey sausage is okay. My huge complaint, which I got sick of writing on the 4 Hour Body bulletin boards with no response, is that there is no discussion about how much fat content your food should have on this diet. Sometimes it seems fine and sometimes it doesn't, with no rhyme or reason. Anyway, based simply on how I feel, which really is the best indicator, I'm feeling like maybe I ought to cool it a little with the cured meats, at least on days where I'm not exercising so much.

I got to reading a huge chunk of Sex, Sin and Zen today. It brought up a lot of feelings. There is a chapter on how zazen is an effective and safe way to help people deal with traumatic memories and learn how to let go of pain. As I read about trauma victims, people who have had far more damaging experiences than I have - so damaging they are qualitatively different from most everything in my life - as I read about this I began to feel that, nonetheless, I am not fully experiencing all my emotions, and this is a serious problem. I'm not stating this as a factual judgment; I'm not sure. What is true is that I stuck to this narrative, that my emotional life is hopelessly incomplete, and I got to feeling almost a sense of panic - panic that I am hopelessly cut off from a primal source, from the core of my being.

I have to acknowledge that sometimes I feel wholly myself and wholly capable of making decisions and living my life and sometimes completely detached, flawed, broken, incapable of real knowledge, real experience, real feeling. I know in my mind that it is not true, that there are things I can do to make the bit by bit improvements that are the only real way to find myself (and this blog is a record of that), but in my heart I still weep for myself, pitying how inadequate I am.

I could immediately judge these feelings as pointless self-loathing, but I'm just going to let them be for now. Part of what is objectively wrong with my patterns of living is that I have to judge every feeling I have; I can't just let them be. So a part of me is "just self-deprecating." So be it. I have to allow it if I am going to understand it.

There was another contributor to the chapter on zen and sexual trauma who described a habit of fearing feelings of excitement. Her description was extreme, but I could identify it at least in character. I absolutely have those tendencies, to be afraid of excitement and over-stimulation. It's nothing dramatic for me, just a grating friction that prevents exuberance from emerging more than it ought to. It's still there. But this is something to look into.

Yes, it saddens me even further as I write that paragraph; knowing how true it is, how much fear of excitement dominates my character. It saddens me, and it hurts.

If I cannot get comfortable with excitement, I am not going to fully experience my feelings. This is a fact.

What can I do to work on this? Maybe trauma work would actually help me a lot. This is not a new idea. Alexa suggested to me that I could benefit from trauma work, she too, even though neither of us had actually experienced significant abuse or anything like that. We just seemed to have personalities shaped by difficulty in experiencing things fully.

Something to think about. The timer has beeped.

Good night, all.