Relax Into the No-Thingness
All I have felt for days and weeks has been an emptiness, a void, and there were no words for that. I’ve drawn a blank regarding writing. I’ve started no less than a half-dozen stories, but they seem to fall apart before I can bring them to a conclusion. Writers block? Maybe. Until today, this has been a mystery.
My ego voice, always willing to chime in, kept saying, “Maybe you don’t have anything new or useful to share. Maybe you aren’t a writer after all.” Depression set in. I was beginning to think I was an impostor, a fraud. After all, who am I?
My writing coach and dear friend, Aimee, encouraged me to continue. “Relax. Just let it bubble up and come to you and out your fingers!” So I did.
I set about researching topics that interested me and wrote a few pages. Still, there was no passion, no genuine desire to finish. My stories fell flat. And if they were unappealing to me, how would my readers respond?
Illuminating the Path to Wholeness
If you’ve read any of the writings here on my blog or any of my posts on Medium and Substack, you may notice that my intention has always been to provide experiences and teachings about my incredible journey to wholeness. Through sharing my history, I aim to illuminate a path to healing that can often be obscure and confusing.
My writing is authentic, so why do I feel like an impostor? Is it part of the not-good-enough belief?
I dove in to explore where this belief came from and uncovered a childhood memory. Because I was the firstborn on my mother’s side, I was repeatedly told to “watch” the other kids. Starting about age 5, I became the surrogate parent, a task I was unprepared for. No one told me how to do this parenting thing, so I struggled, never getting it right. When one of the kids did something wrong, I was often blamed.
No wonder I feel like a failure.
The Great Void
In truth, as revealing as this was for me, it was only the tip of the iceberg.
There is still a great void. What do I have to offer my readers? In some deeply profound way, until this morning, I truly felt that there was nothing more to say, which was disorienting and a tad frightening.
In the wee hours of the morning, just before dawn, I woke to the tumbling of my mind—so much sadness and fear. I knew I had two choices, I could lay there and toss and turn and feel crappy, or I could start doing some breathwork. I opted for the breathwork and followed through with a short body-awareness scan.
The negativity slowed, allowing my mind to shift into a calm space. As I relaxed into the silence, a word echoed within: Nothing. Hearing this was unexpected and oddly comforting. Silently repeating the word was soothing.
When I arose, I was guided to pull a card. I reached down to the bookshelf to retrieve one of my beautiful decks, and before I could decide which deck to use, my Osho Zen Tarot book fell out and opened to page 12. Before I had a chance to select a card, there it was, my reading: No-Thingness.
Shunyata.
Or Śūnyatā, is a beautiful Buddhist word. According to Wikipedia, It is the “theological concept of voidness in ontology, meditation and phenomenology.” It is a concept shared by many Eastern traditions, meaning emptiness or nothingness.
All you can do now is to relax into the nothingness… Fall into the silence between the words…
~Osho Zen Tarot
The reading spoke about the absolute potential of Shunyata. It was reassuring for me to read that this state can be disorienting and scary. It is the state of pure potential. This is our natural state; it is who we are within the silence, within the gap between breaths, between words. It is a reminder of our sacredness.
There are no coincidences; this reading came at precisely the perfect time. I felt like I had nothing to share with you, dear reader. And as it turns out, I have nothing, and that’s enormous.
Pause, notice your breath, notice how you feel at this moment. Join me in this remarkable sacred space of No-Thingness.