In my bedroom lamp’s soft glow at two in the morning in 1991, I was opening a folded note my writing mentor, Pat, had handed to me as I left her workshop for my nighttime drive home. I read of her encouragement to begin my own creative writing workshops (using the word support), fully caught by surprise as I didn’t have an M.A. in literature as other Amherst Writers & Artists’ facilitators had. With an audience of semi-dark bushes in moonlight watching through the window, I felt flooded by joy and excited in anticipation, thinking of how. A year later, Pat told me that from what she’d heard of my workshops, she was referring people to mine, suffusing me with gratitude, for I had proven myself.
Believing in the spiritual healing work I was doing (my teacher, David, had told me that I wasn’t going to fail, but that I had a fear of failing), one of my workshop writing exercises was a magazine page of a tall cliff with a boat passing by as it headed out to sea in the dimming light. The words I offered with it were: lonely or alone, and for twenty minutes we wrote.
Now, more than nineteen years later, I’ve returned to my old decision not to say I feel lonely. When a friend wrote that she found walking alone to be lonely, it dawned on me that I had subconsciously created a fear of feeling lonely and not of actual loneliness. In a big, comfortable chair where I end each night, I said for the first time, “I feel lonely.” It was true at that moment and had been during many previous moments. Yet I’d been afraid to say so. I understood it was not the natural feeling of loneliness I’d just released, but my fear behind it. In my intuitive counseling practice, I’d described feelings (or emotions) as clouds that come, pass, then go, and I’d received an insight from my own teaching.
My realization is, “Once we let go of fear of feelings and emotions that may persist, they may inform and guide us in seeking new steps to take.”