Hole

Sleep is a healer.  Monday arrives mildly when I’ve gone to bed early on Sunday.  It is a lesson learned with great pain over the years – training somewhat like a dog’s shock collar.  The sting of stepping out of necessary sleep forces me at some point to cringe in agony and remember the protective boundaries of restedness.  Lack of sleep is often a factor when I find myself in a mental hole, the dark place where one might retreat when worn, worried, wiped out.  It is not a happy place nor is it compelling for long-term habitation.  A hole opens for many people from things like illness, heartbreak, addiction, abuse, exhaustion, confusion, stress, loneliness, delusion. I see connection between hole and a potential synonym, depression.

 

The noun hole is defined at dictionary.com.
1.  an opening through something; gap
2.  a hollow place in a solid body or mass; a cavity
3.  the excavated habitation of an animal; burrow
4.  a small, dingy or shabby place
5.  a place of solitary confinement; dungeon
6.  an embarrassing position or predicament
7.  a cover or small harbor
8.  a fault or flaw
9.  a deep, still place in a stream

 

An important thing about the hole is to know when I am in it.  That I can get out.  I may need help.  And I most likely have fallen prey to unhelpful habits.  It’s a habit, crawling into the hollow place where we have forgotten our connection to our Source.  The bad habit of believing that we are not enough is fortified as we humans live hearing society’s mistaken stories of how things “should be” and how we have fallen short.

As life’s sticks and stones find their way to our hearts they bring weight, heaviness that drops us to our knees.  Curled up in a small, shabby mental space we might feel safer in darkness even though it hurts there in a constant, predictable way.  Maybe the hole happens because only in total darkness can I see clearly the path toward light?  As such, the hole might be a teacher.

Animals often go into a burrow or seek darkness to have babies.  Only from a grave can someone rise from the dead.  Life comes out of darkness all the time – every birth, every spring, every lighting of a candle.  The deal is not to stay in the dungeon.  We suffer there when we are hiding and it doesn’t end until we reconcile.  A little wallowing might be necessary sometimes just as a seed goes deep in the dirt to find its purpose (which is, of course, to grow toward the light).  Creeping into the hole is not necessarily a bad thing - choosing never to come out is. 

In self-watching, we learn what revitalizes us – sleep, exercise, meditation, support groups, therapy, friends, prayer, yoga.  It generally involves time and practice and patience.     

I can recognize when I find myself in a hole, accept what is, and find the desire to rise.