I have had very strong emotions all my life. It wasn’t possible for me to rise above them, so I learned to separate myself from my feelings. Learned to no longer notice them, by focusing on the outside. I distracted myself with everything that came along, the main thing was not to dive into these inner whirlpools.
Of course, that didn’t work at all. The more of myself I repressed in one place, the more came up in other places, rather explosively.
Then I discovered the modern form of a Tibetan practice called Chöd (“Tschöd”). The idea of facing my demons and looking them in the face made me shudder, but it also held an incredible fascination for me.
The day I put a pillow for myself and one for my shadow on the floor for the first time, jumped over my doubts and committed myself to the practice of reflection, Peacock Woman began to awaken in me.
The peacock has the ability to swallow poison and transform it into the bright colors of the peacock wheel.
In Tibetan Buddhism, this image is often used to describe the spiritual process of transforming emotional energy into wisdom energy.
My mind thought all these years that feeling never ends. That a feeling I give myself to remains. In psychiatry this is called trauma suction, and it is very real.
However, if we have developed the inner resources to counter the pull of trauma without allowing ourselves to be sucked in, feeling is not fixed. It’s changing.
The more I allowed myself to feel, the more insight into myself and my truth I gained..
and so I became a peacock and a woman at the same time.
Through feeling, which often feels like swallowing poison, I create creative worlds that give people color.
As a woman, which means nothing other than mistress, I develop resources for myself and others to deal with life.
“Being a woman (aka mistress) or master of something has nothing to do with control, for example of feelings or the population, but with dealing with these on the inner level.” –
If I wanted to sum up Tibetan Buddhism in one sentence, it would be this.
It’s important to completely surrender to what you definitely don’t want. To be with it, to accept it as it is. Because what I embrace lets me go.
Even today, my mind still sometimes struggles with letting me feel my feelings, because such deeply programmed behavior doesn’t change overnight. It shouldn’t, anyway, because our nervous system can’t process a quick change like that. Hence, everything is absolutely right, every part of the path is important and instructive and nourishing, even if we often only understand this in retrospect.
Like my mind saying “No no no, we certainly don’t have time to feel THAT now!”, while my wise physical body is already crying and sobbing on the floor, transforming more poison into a magical blaze of color.