I am so glad I went out to the party. Everyone there remembered me and hugged me, even those I hadn't seen in years, and everyone was so warm and wonderful and genuine. I felt loved and supported. I also felt very confident in my skin tonight and danced a lot because the band was perfection and I was with my people. Very therapeutic. I was already invited to another thing this weekend! I have friends again, yay.
A friend there said she cried for the past four months in a row because of a hard breakup, and I comforted her, and told her my recent tragedy too, and it felt mutually supportive and healing to talk about our experiences, in between goofy dancing, which really helps to stay in my body, in the present, and not be scared of the pain, because I felt safe surrounded by community, dancing and experiencing together. The other friend has stage 4 cancer so between us all there was much pain but also a need to celebrate life. There was a lovely moment when the birthday boy had a solo and everyone in the venue clapped, as if communally holding him, in the form of yelps and yips and claps, with so much love it was palpable. The room was full of all the empathy and compassion and community spirit and camaraderie that I had been craving and missing so terribly. It smoothed over all the hard parts of this entire year, and melted the bitterness away.
Whew. I really needed that.
Tonight was about holding space for both grief and joy, together.
Before the party I was dorking out hard on evolutionary biology and the intersection of what neuroscience knows about the pineal gland and very early Hindu beliefs about the third eye. (Did you know that Tuatara lizards have a third eye?!! Lots of species apparently do.) Science says the pineal gland probably has something to do with circadian rhythms, seasonal rhythms, dmt, melatonin, hallucinations, etc, and that if you "activate the pineal gland" you'll probably just fall asleep. Sleep produces dreams! Dreams are where we can receive insights, intuitive predictions, and a state of consciousness in which the dead and living could plausibly interact. Meditation produces natural DMT in the brain -- in the pineal gland. Science and ancient metaphysics kind of align here and that excites me. Maybe it explains those dreams that seem to know things about friends before they tell me, like they're dying, or were raped during the 2 months we didn't talk, or were robbed at the same time I dreamed it, or I sense they're crying somehow even though I am in a different country and haven't talked to them in awhile. These startlingly intuitive dreams were extremely frequent in 2020 when I meditated a lot and did yoga daily and maintained a very healthy consistent routine, ate well, slept well, no alcohol or weed. At one point, I had three dreams come true in a 10-day span. More than ever before. My brain and body were healthy, so I theorize my pineal gland was in top shape, (or third eye, or subconscious mind, whatever you like to call it.) The ancients claimed yoga and meditation strengthen the third eye.
Anyway, that's fun. And good motivation to be healthy. Because I want to dream of R, obviously. And I also might like to endure more intuitive dreams, to understand if there's a way to induce them on command with practice. They seem to mostly be about loved ones in some sort of danger. Maybe they give off an invisible emotional sonar and my brain subconsciously makes a note of it and then when I dream my brain proposes the most likely scenario that caused my friend's distress alert. It would be a good evolutionary survival mechanism for us herd animals to keep our tribe alive. Or maybe our subconscious minds can communicate with each other! (Could the "soul" be the unconscious mind? Maybe the dead are tuned to a subconscious channel of existence, and that's why they meet us in the realm of dreams, on a plane we have only limited perception of.)
Another lesson/reminder today was a thing a neuroscientist said which is obvious yet profound:
"Everything evolves."
I am now seeing grief as a spiritual experience. Like dead roots that miraculously produce living mushrooms. From death and endings, new life and new beginnings emerge (after marinating in a dark place awhile.) We evolved from mushrooms... Today I learned that the mushroom genome is more closely related to animals than plants! I live for weird discoveries like this.
9:33 p.m. - 2022-11-13