Never Ending Terror
Weekly Reading Topic for July 25, 2020:
Well, good morning, love! I just opened a Reading for you, my newsletter subscribers and here’s what I heard in answer to the following:
What do my readers most need to hear this weekend? What is the most important message to send to my beloved readers?
The answer was: “Never Ending Terror.”
Oh, my!
What follows is your weekly reading, dear one.
Weekly Reading │ Never Ending Terror
Q: What do we need to know about “Never Ending Terror?”
A: Stop, children, what’s that sound? A sort of thin whimpering wail that builds every once in a while into a full-throated scream — hear it? The sound tears tissues as it exits your skull. As you swallow to try to soothe the ache in your throat, an involuntary sobbing starts.
This may be inaudible most of the time. You might be only hearing it in the dead of night when you startle awake for no reason whatsoever.
Or you might hear it all day long, every day of the week.
Maybe you’ve heard it all your life.
Or maybe you only heard it that once, long ago, before you made it SHUT UP.
That’s the sound of Never Ending Terror. It’s the sound children of abuse hear in their hearts, the sound we would do anything to replace.
Once you hear it, though, you have to address it. Turn up the volume. Be with that voice that is crying, because otherwise, she or he may go quiet. And that’s when the trouble starts.
All around us is proof: living with silent, screaming Never Ending Terror is a Bad Idea. It’s always lead humans to madness, denial, divisive nastiness that just doesn’t add up to Who We Want to Be.
And because we can’t hear our own terror, because we’ve asked ourselves to Be Quiet and Stop Making So Much Noise, we don’t even realize that we’re mad because of the Never Ending Terror that is radiating out through our tissues, streaming through our minds, nourishing every cell in our body.
We just keep making noise, listening to anyone but our own Self, because our Own Self Is Screaming.
And we aren’t listening. We’re stonewalling our pain, asking it to stay away, under, behind. We think we’re doing the right thing by not “indulging ourselves” or “focusing on the negative” or “engaging in blame and shame.”
But all we’re really doing is prolonging the original terror. The thing that caused this pain, this fear, is long gone. But we’re still here, being tortured by its ghostly screaming.
So what do we do when we discover Never Ending Terror inside our mind, or in our emotions or body? What do we do in the face of that cosmos of fear and pain?
We take a deep breath, steel ourselves, and … listen. With compassion. To our own Never Ending Terror.
Because here’s the thing: terror actually does have an end. Like any other emotion, it’s more like an ocean current than a mountain. Emotions shift and change. When you step into a body of water (any body of water) there is warmth in some places, then a cold spot, maybe a cool current, and another surprising patch of warmth. You may stay still, but the currents move around you.
That’s exactly what emotions are like: currents of water. Pockets of wind. Ever-moving. Ever-changing.
Wind and water are NOT INTERESTED IN STAYING STILL.
Your emotions are not interested in being trapped.
When you sit and listen to the screaming, especially when you do something to encourage it to move about (oh, there are so many techniques for this!! And so many therapists who are excellent at facilitating it!! EMDR, EFT, certain styles of bodywork, especially Asian methods that focus on energy movement! ART OF ALL KINDS!!!)
When you sit and listen to the screaming, and encourage it to move about as it wants to, as it intended to before you Decided It Was Too Scary to Hear and Made It Go Quiet/Away/Underneath, you develop an important skill: compassion.
It takes strength and courage to sit and be with yourself when you’re in pain. It can be so difficult that it’s rewarded with sainthood, like Mother Mary in Catholicism.
Or, Kwan Yin, in Buddhism. Kwan Yin is a bodhisattva (enlightened being), whose name roughly translates to She Who Hears the Cries of the World.
So even if YOU haven’t been listening to yourself, SHE has been.
So you have some company.
Imagine that Mary, if you are of a certain bent, or Kwan Yin, or any other compassionate figure, sits next to you on your bed, putting their hand on your shoulder. She bends her head toward you and listens intently.
And when she hears the wailing start, she draws you in, whispering “good child, let it go, let’s hear what you have to say.”
And she holds you, feel it? She holds you and strokes your hair and back as you whimper and wail and cry. You deserve this time with Mary or Kwan Yin or Someone Else Who Loves You Wholeheartedly. Take all the time you need.
There is nowhere she would rather be than right here, listening to your heart wail and scream. She will listen with you until you feel the sounds start to falter, to die down a little, to taper off. There is a whispering whistle, now, and now a rattle of ragged breath.
And she still holds you, letting your heaving shoulders relax, all your muscles untensed and melty, as she holds you, letting you puddle into her.
She loves you. And the Never Ending Terror is gone with the current, leaving you curiously empty. Curiously peaceful.
As if you can hear, for the first time, other sounds you haven’t heard in so long:
The thud of your heart’s ventricles, and the whisper of its valves, and the curtain whisking back as its atria pulse.
The creak of your ribs as your lungs expand and then deplete.
The snap of your toes as you shift one leg to the other.
The click of your eyelashes as they break their crust of salt to let your eyes peer over her shoulder at the outlet on the wall.
And still, she’s with you, holding you, letting the solid bulk of her body be your pillow, encircling you with her arms so you know that the Never Ending Terror isn’t nearly as big as you thought it was.
You thought the Never Ending Terror was The Whole World. It seemed like it was everywhere, in everything. There was no getting away from it, it was bigger than you, bigger than anything. It was everything.
And now, in the circle of her arms (or the arms of your loved one, or the arms of your own self, or the cuddle of your dog or your blanket) you can feel your own boundaries, you can tell, now, for the first time in a long time that the Never Ending Terror was not bigger than you, it was merely Something That Happened To Touch You.
And it’s no longer there. You’re no longer carrying it, like water trapped in a thousand balloons and stuffed into the cracks of your mind. You no longer have to worry about popping a balloon and spilling all over your life.
The water is set free, it never liked being in your balloon filled body anyway, that’s a stupid place for water to live. It doesn’t like it.
Water likes to flow, down, down, down, and then travel across or through the ground until it finds more of itself, deep under, and then swims through the rocks deep in our world until it finds another place to exit, a place far from here, where it can burst forth and be in an ocean, or a lake, or a stream, and keep going, explore everything, and if it gets trapped again, it doesn’t want to be in a balloon, no, it wants to become gas and rise into the air and see the world from a great height, like a hot air balloon adventurer, and drift about the planet sightseeing until it decides to visit a new place and drops out of the heavens, back to the planet’s surface and pools and starts everything all over again.
And yes, water likes going into our bodies, and exiting in all manner of fluids, because water, like emotions, likes to be useful.
But water, and emotions, are not Things Capable of Making Decisions for us.
And so stop, children. Stop, everybody, and look around. See what’s coming down.
Our Never Ending Terror is Totally Willing to Be Recycled As Rain/Wind/Ocean.
We just have to cry the tears and scream the screams, so it can be on its way.
And once we have, and we have rested in the arms of The Mother, we will find ourselves naturally, easily, coming back to our own time, our life here and now.
And we will sit up, and rub our eyes, and smooth our hair, and say “thank you for being there,” and drink some water, and have a piece of good chocolate, and start to think about What’s Next.
And oh, dear one, when you are able to contemplate What’s Next without that infernal screaming, what amazing ideas you have!
How wonderfully quiet your mind can be!
Today we are all facing many troubles, and nothing seems to be going Exactly Right, and we are starting to acknowledge that What Before Was Will Not Likely Be Again.
And that very quickly, quite suddenly, can start that internal noise.
So give yourself the time to listen, with compassion.
We are curiously reliant on ourselves these days. There is no hero who is going to solve all of our problems. So … we are left with our own strengths and the wisdom and company of the saints and masters and bodhisattvas.
Which is maybe the best place to be.
So children, be still and listen.
I am always here to serve in any way I can.
Much Love to You,
Molly
Want Your Weekly Reading Delivered to Your Inbox Every Saturday Morning?