the knot of uncertainty

it crept up on me because I never actually realized how deeply in the gut it lay. It was always there. From the beginning of my memory it was manifest as a feeling, the vague taste of queasiness that tinged every discomfort, but it was so pervasive I didn't know what to identify it or recognize it as. It just was what I prefer to avoid.

The precise shape of the conditions of what I prefer to avoid is mostly cosmetic, I realized, everyone experiences this constant vague discomfort that something is missing, or not quite adding up.
one day I recognized it just as that, a knot of uncertainty that is formed by all our little fears and anxieties, habits and impulses. They all tie into each other until it's such a tangled mess it just feels bad, and we avoid the "feel bad cluster" of stimuli that makes us feel pain.

When I was forced to face the "feel bad cluster" for years I'd recoil as if suddenly burned by a candle flame. I knew I could not face this knot alone. But I felt all alone. So I grabbed the first opportunity I noticed to a destructive impulse before it happened and stopped it consciously. That experience was a revelation that holy crap! I really can change my thinking. Consciously. Intentionally. With effort. And the desire to help that helplessness inside me and every other person.

That single event had a series of repeats over the years and reinforced into a pattern of slow-triggered anger, but still feeling disconnected from the anger and not really able to express it safely where it would be received with the gravity I felt it had within me.

The world is not always a kind place, and my world was more often than not unkind to those around me. I'm sure you can relate to that. Seeing how deeply the pain goes, from mistreated animals, to people thrown out of their homes because of a society gone mad, there's a kind of powerless feeling of the one-in-a-million that sinks in. What could I possibly do to make a difference in this ocean of sorrow.

I used to have dreams of being a nymph by the water, my feet grown into roots in the ground beneath me, and I was heartbroken weeping reaching out for the water, wanting so desperately stop the current of pain, but there it was the river, just moving away from me. The feeling was one of losing my most beloved child to the water's inevitable flow.

I'd presented these ideas to my therapist in the form of drawings, I had never known the language of dharma even though I knew its experience. So she noticed there was a kind of "obsession with threes" in all of my visual representations. Today I realize it's an imprint in my mind of the triple gem. Threes are also very important in the dharma because of what they are connected to.

and here I come back around full circle to the knot of uncertainty. the pain that horrendously paralyzed me by the river crying tears for my million losses, I realized wasn't even mine. I was simply caught like a fish in a net dreaming it was a god who could hold rivers from flowing.

The knowledge that the knot of uncertainty was just a really horrible taste in my mouth, but wasn't actually my mouth, I picked up some mind-mouthwash, and have been washing the taste out of my mouth with the beautiful rich taste and quality of the whole range of existence.

when you feel the knot of uncertainty, grab your mouthwash, it's just a really horrible taste, but you are the one who can change how you think, and perceive.  Tastes come and go, but your being "in a natural state" remains.

Most essentially, you can be truly who you are.