My meditation journal

[Thittato]

45 min meditation today as well. Very deep and nice concentration.

[Thittato]

Second session of therapy

Yesterday: The 45 min of meditation already mentioned, and then second session of therapy. I'm very impressed with this therapist, and I'm very satisfied with this therapeutic work we have already done in only two sessions. Engagement in my job has increased quite a lot. Not only the results from therapy so far, but the sense of safety in knowing I'm in good hands related to my various challenges in life. Since I'm a social worker in a psychiatric hospital I'm working within the therapeutic field myself, and I'm experiencing a lot of the classical dynamics in such a field, even though it is not psychotherapy I'm doing, but still there are a lot of the things like transferrence and counter-transferrence and stuff like that I'm experiencing, so that going to a psychotherapist to clear out a lot of the experiences that can tend to get clogged up inside myself related to this social field I'm operating in - that only makes a lot of sense.

Today: 45 min meditation. Very nice and powerful experience.

 

[Thittato]

Yesterday: 45 min of meditation
Today: 45 min of meditation.

Very nice and deep concentration both days.

[Thittato]

Yesterday: 45 min meditation

Today: 1 hour

[Thittato]

Third session of therapy

Tuesday: 45 min meditation and third session of therapy. We did a guided regression journey deep into my first memories of abandonment and being alone in this world. Memories of me being left alone as a baby crying for hours without anybody coming to comfort me came up. I'm not sure if I was being "manipulated" into these memories, or if they are actually true, but at least they became powerful images of early abandonment and some truths about life I could have possibly internalized at these moments. So the point of this regression journey was to catch the moments when these "truths" about life where being made, and to gain full access to these feelings and to understand that now I'm a grown up who has the skills to re-parent myself and offer myself regulation and comfort. So naturally this created quite some waves after this of these feelings hitting me pretty hard, but surprisingly I've been able to surf these waves pretty well. I think I have most likely been able to process out a lot of the charge around this already, but it remains to be seen.

Wednesday: 45 min sitting in the feelings from yesterday therapy-session. I had quite some panic about being back into therapy again and thinking that there is going to be a really hard job ahead of me now, but surprisingly these feelings where alleviated quite a lot as the day went by and I was really in a nice state of flow throughout the evening, but feeling more vulnerable and probably emotionally accessible instead of in my normal stubborn defensive persona bubble.

Thursday: 45 min meditation. Really deep and flowing concentration. Felt magical and down-to-earth at the same time.

[Thittato]

No meditation friday, saturday, sunday and monday. Today (tuesday): 45 min meditation.

[Thittato]

4th session of therapy

Wednesday. No meditation

Thursday: 4th session of therapy. Inner child healing. Projecting a 6-7 year old version of myself into a chair with a pillow in it a few meters in front of me. The therapist has revealed a charge around my inner child that was already active at this point. I describe how I see myself as this 6-7 year old. Sad, insecure, looking down into the floor. Then I pick him up as the pillow and put him on my lap and hug him and tell him that everything is going to be all right. I get tears in my eyes and feel incredibly sad. So I just sit there and hug him. It seems like the sorrow is endless. But at some point he actually starts to feel comforted so he is happy again, I put him back into his chair, he looks happy and he want to run off and play with his friends. Amazing session. Very interesting to work with projections like this, and to see that the images I get up are coloured by deep emotional unfinished states stored in me.

Friday (today): 45 min meditation. Deep and mellow concentration.

[Thittato]

Saturday: 3 sets of kettlebell snatches.
Sunday: 20 min vinyasa flow yoga
Monday: Light parkour style stuff in a park with a friend
Tuesday(today): 20 min vinyasa flow yoga

We have a big and dangerous guy again as a patient in the psychiatric hospital I'm working in, which reminded and inspired me about the necessity of staying fit, so my practice is turning to physical practices again for a while.

It feels very right regarding where the combination of meditation and therapy has brought me for this period. I'm continuing therapy, btw, but there will be a little gap between last session and the next one.

[Thittato]

Also 3 sets of kettlebell snatches, including warm-up, today, now in the evening. Vinyasa flow yoga and kettlebell snatches have turned into my foundational fitness routine that I return to again and again. It feels like a really nice combination.

[Thittato]

5th session of therapy

So fifth session of therapy was last week on Thursday the 9th. And tomorrow if my 6th session.

So I started in therapy again because my job sucked so badly after we got transferred to a new department 3 years ago. I worked for 5 years in a psychiatric emergency hospital before all of us got transferred into this new hospital, and things haven't quite been the same for most of us. I lost all spark, and got pretty depressed, but since I've been pursuing my spiritual path and creativity outside of work, I have sort of managed to cope, but this winter this really bad work-situation was really catching up with me. I tried to get help from both my doctor and HR-department, but they didn't really have much to offer. So I turned to what I knew from before works - gestalt therapy. And it has seemingly been really efficient this time. Last time I did gestalt therapy I was in a pretty unstable situation in life changing between different jobs and studies and no clear path ahead of me, but as I'm starting up again now I've been in the same job continuously for 8 years, and it is quite a different situation to apply therapy on.

I'm starting to realize that one of the main reasons I took this transfer so badly is because I had made my old job into my old happy childhood home before my parents divorced, and when we where transferred into this new department this old patterns of my childhood home getting torn to pieces and me getting thrown into a new and chaotic situations - those emotional patterns have been re-activated again.

To make a long story short we had a really strong community in my old job that we don't have anymore, and we where all giving each other a lot of acknowledgement and belonging, which there is not room for in the same way anymore. Having found my role and solid sense of both belonging and mastery in my old job, I had everything I needed.

And even though it is sad we don't have this strong human connection between each other any longer, I see now that I have still been carrying around an unhealthy need for affirmation and belonging, coming from these childhood needs that were not met.

Well - to round it off quickly. What we are doing in therapy now seems to really efficiently heal those needs, and I can see that I already care a lot less about how strong the sense of belonging and community is in my job, and that my capacity for focusing on helping the patients have been increasing. So, seemingly I'm growing up, and I can put my own needs aside and focus on my role as a caregiver. Which I also could before - but somehow something that was not completed in me was triggered by this transfer. And it is good to get these unfinished processes mirrored so that I can deal with them. So all in all I'm pretty happy with how this has turned out. So much so that I'm considering finishing the gestalt therapy education I was starting on last time I did gestalt therapy. I finished the 2 first years that time, and I have 2 more years left if I choose to go back to it.