Ancient Triggers

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/ancient/

I know I am not alone. A number of us are being tested at present – in a very specific way: Triggers to past trauma are being activated. The cleansing, and healing, this, no doubt, allows us to experience is invaluable – but, Goddess, it is hard and painful work.

Most people bury things. Some forget to dig them up again, or deliberately lose the map, or move to another continent in order to avoid even the thought of that necessary exhumation.

I, and others like me, are having, in effect, to deal with a vast archaeological dig relating to a life time (in many cases, several life times) of consigning corpses and artefacts to the underground spaces.

In looking for the trowels, the archaeologists, the funding (metaphorically) and all the rest of it, we are triggering our own triggers. We are both setting, and then blowing up, the IEDs of the soul.

Looking at the grave goods standing outside the Burial Chamber of Denial, we do not know for certain what we will find inside. Will there be a sarcophagus containing the linen-wrapped mummified remains of Natron-soaked former selves? Will the bandages be littered with small amulets? Will there be a death mask? What story will the hieroglyphics on the walls tell? Will an evil stench, a long-trapped disease, a ghastly curse sweep out and engulf us when we do, finally, break down the door to the inner sanctum of death and change?

We do not, as I say, know.

We may die. We may scream ourselves into insanity, completely unable to cope with what emerges. We may decide to abandon the dig at the last minute – and go on a safer journey. We may beg, or bribe, someone else to do it for us – so that we get the lessons second-hand and with their soul-blasting potential nullified.

Or, we may stand firm and, like Childe Roland in Browning’s famous poem, raise the slug-horn to our lips, blow a wild note and, dauntless, face whatever the Dark Tower, ancient pyramid, has to throw at us.

Like it or not, the burial chamber, or Tower of Darkness and Fear, will catch up with us eventually. We cannot avoid the triggers which plunge us into our own Stygian gloom forever. We can tiptoe round the mines of the ego as carefully as we like – but one will escape our vigilance in the end and blow our complacency and shallowness and inane posturing to smithereens.

We can run – and I have, just as hard and fast as I could – but we cannot hide because the painful triggers which detonate us into new configurations lie within. We can grow incandescent with rage and try to fight – but we are only fighting against our own recognition and delaying the moment.

Sometimes we all have to trigger explosions of the spirit, or at least accept this fragmenting shock to the system. Sometimes, we have to delve through the wreckage, and gently brush detritus off the shards, before we can find wholeness.

I know I am not alone…