I awoke in the night with troublesome thoughts. Those thoughts seemed to consider themselves highly important at 3:45AM, important enough to keep me awake. In the darkness, those thoughts seem become nearly all powerful, or so they believe. On this particular night, I was experiencing an uncomfortable but nonspecific feeling that had started about a day earlier and had been amplified by a frightening and disempowering dream I had during an afternoon nap.
In that dream, I was fighting against something that became bigger and more powerful the more I fought it, until I decided to stop fighting and let it go. The dream-thing remained awful and was doing awful things, but fighting it was accomplishing nothing. The harm was happening regardless of my actions. My choice in the dream was to be annihilated fighting the thing while not altering anything it was doing, or to step aside, get out of its way, and find a different strategy. I stepped aside and awoke feeling highly uncomfortable, drained, like I had failed. The emotional stain of the dream hung over me like a storm cloud through the rest of the day. Recounting the dream to my husband was comforting but didn’t relieve the emotion nor did it bring me understanding. I couldn’t seem to find personal symbolism or meaning in the dream. In fact, it felt strangely impersonal. Still, I felt deflated, de-energized, and disempowered for the rest of the day.
Rather than fight the feeling, I gave myself some grace and didn’t demand much from myself. I passed through the rest of that day being gentle with myself and went to bed early, falling asleep easily. However, I awoke in the 03:00s with thoughts of how bad my body looks, how old I’m getting, guilt about not writing enough, and then more distorted body-size thoughts recycled for another go-round. The words were pointless, never reaching action points, yet they persistently cycled round and round insisting they were the reason for my emotional discomfort. The thoughts suggested they were so important, that this feeling I was having could easily cycle into depression. Remember how that feels?
And yet, none of those middle of the night thoughts was at all important. My life is going along well enough; there isn’t all that much to be upset or stressed about that truly matters. I am getting older, my body is what it is, and none of that matters, especially at 3:45 AM. Recognizing that in the moment, I attempted to interject gratitude phrases, but this thought-cacophony was having none of my gratitude. I gave up, got out of bed, made a cup of decaf, and watched an episode of Finding Your Roots, which for me is soothing. I don’t need to know why it’s soothing, just that it is.
After an hour or so, I was able to go back to bed. The words tried to resurface, but I envisioned myself melting into the feelings of discomfort and soon feel asleep. I awoke this morning surprised to be in a very different feeling space…a more floaty, less verbal space. I still have access to words, because I am typing this, but I am not imprisoned by my verbal mind trying to explain away feelings. The feelings are and the words just are. Neither is causing the other.
Being an analytic person and being a storyteller, I am on generally good terms with the words that flow through my mind. I value communication and the intentional use of language. I like to think about things. But, I also feel deeply and use my felt-sense in connection with my intuition to navigate the world. Often my feelings are the first nudge of my intuition that steers me through the map-less mystery that is this life. This is usually followed by images, then words. I think that’s how my mind usually works when I’m awake. At night, things can go hay-wire. That’s when the words can take over, trying to explain whatever feels wrong.
But, sometimes, feelings are just feelings. They may not even be mine, but rather be something I’ve picked up or something that has glommed onto me as it’s moving through our collective experience. It’s almost like feelings and thought forms can be separate entities that pass through one’s space asking for energetic food, like the silly ghosts from the Harry Potter series that bother people for fun.
As I was recounting my overnight experience to my husband, mentioning the thing about the experience coming from a thing outside of myself, and he started calling it “Glen”. (Sorry to anyone named Glen). That made it seem kind of funny and allows for detached consideration of the experience, protecting the thoughts with some intention onto something imaginary in order to see them. So, Glen fools my thought and feeling generators into believing they know “the cause” of an uncomfortable feeling, resulting in a word barrage of “explanation”, an attempt to create a story for the worsening emotional experience. All of this feeds Glen and makes him seem bigger. And, of course, the stories generated target my areas of greatest weakness and vulnerability, especially in the middle of the night, stirring up more discomfort and…feeding Glen.
What was unique about the experience this particular night, what made it possible for me to recognize what was happening, was that the thoughts didn’t come with any action items. Usually when I have unsettling feelings that I don’t understand, they come up because something is emerging in me. I need to make some sort of change, decision, or choice. I need to write my to do list down, so it stops bugging me. I need to remember something from my experience and process it with a new perspective I have gained. I tend give these experiences space and importance. They prompt me into growth and new inquiry. The thoughts that offer explanations help me make the changes needed. When they wake me up in the night, I often gain some new awareness or need to make a to-do list.
Glen’s chatter overnight was just repeating pointless things about how uncomfortable and bad my body was. In the past, I have fallen for this, so the thoughts last night weren’t that unusual. But this time I had just enough space to recognize that the words and the feeling were lying to me. There was nothing for me to do but look away from the words and let the feeling be, to observe and feel it.
I awoke feeling surprisingly more spacious. I still feel the emotional discomfort, but the disparaging words have stopped, likely because I don’t believe them.
I was lucky this time because the words were so silly that I could see through the process. Whatever was happening wasn’t going to be solved through that well-worn loop of words. Relief came from disrupting the loop, from doing something different. Next time I’ll be more aware and ready.
My takeaway is that I have lots of feeling experiences and typically my verbal mind goes to work explaining them. Sometimes the explanation is valid, but only sometimes. Diving into the words strengthens the story line, amplifies the feeling, but can perpetuate a loop of misery if the story is wrong.
Sometimes unpleasant feelings are just unpleasant feelings. Sometimes they’re not even personal.
Sometimes the feelings and thoughts are clearly just dumb, something like mind and body junk that doesn’t know where to go. And sometimes it’s just Glen, the energy eater, wandering through looking for a meal.
He moves on if I stop feeding him.
For those of you who’ve noticed I haven’t written for a while, I thought I’d let you know that I had the opportunity to do some lovely traveling over the holidays. I’ve now come home to the final completion weeks on the home we’ve been building since ours was demolished four years ago. We hope to be moving house in the next two weeks so that will take a lot of my time and energy.
I enjoy sharing my writing with you, and I want to insure that writing remains joyful for myself and meaningful for you. I’m giving myself some grace to write on a less rigid time table as I go through this move. I still intend to post every one to two weeks, but I’m allowing some evolution in my process. Thank you all for reading!
Kudo's to your brilliant partner for introducing you to the idea of "Glen". And i quote: "...sometimes it’s just Glen, the energy eater, wandering through, looking for a meal.." For me that is the summation of a brilliant strategy as to how to deal with this night time mental cycling experience, (as it happens to all of us.) To personify it makes it more ludicrous and pokes fun at its unreality while at the same time bringing attention to how it leaks and leeches your precious energy to mentally cycle like this. Amazing! In my experience as an Initiator (truth teller), this would be called a "pattern interrupter".. Changing any pattern requires bringing more awareness to it, to interrupt the habituated neural "movie re-runs". Then the work of re-patterning begins, in this case, with observing that the thoughts and the emotions that they spawn, are both not only not useful but actually untrue and thus.not real. In the process of observing the pattern, you saw the pattern of using your thoughts to be mean to yourself.. to say things that were hurtful to your feelings and sense of peace. Once you caught that culprit red-handed, you were then set to make a NEW choice.. being kinder to yourself in your thoughts.. to not give them so much power..whatever frame works for you to interrupt and then discontinue the 'inner mean girl " pattern. I celebrate your awareness and am grateful that due to that awareness, you are being kinder and more gentle to your self to not push and demand that it behave in a certain way to be loved and cared for. Great awareness sleuthing, Cynthia!
Loved this share, Cynthia! It helped clarify my own "Glenn" and know we're not "alone" when this happens. Gratefully, Vyana