Walking along the foggy Northern California coast one day (I think it was in 1992) I had a moment of extreme disorientation. Because I'd experienced lots of panic attacks in my late 20's, the sensations in my body that day were familiar and my cells screamed with frightening messages from the past; I had to return to my car immediately, stopping short the hike I was barely beginning with my friend John.
My heart beat right out of my chest, heavy with a fear so deep I was trapped in my body's responses to what felt a lot like loneliness. My breathing became shallow and very labored, and I was dizzy with overwhelmingly hot energy surging in my head like a storm wave. Disorientation turned to dissolution. Soon, I couldn't force in any more air and I was loathe to let go of what I'd already accumulated in what I experienced as collapsing, yet was most likely bursting, lungs.
How can this fullness feel so empty?
My arms and legs tingled--first with nervy numbness, then heaviness that turned to a complete loss of sensation, maybe circulation--as though they weren't even there.
Then I wasn't there.
In elevators or in traffic on bridges, panic used to feel like a heart attack; here, in nature, it felt more like I was stroking out...whatever that feels like. Then I became lost inside a place so deep inside myself I couldn't talk and my legs were like jello; even writing about it brings back the tiniest bit of those feelings again. Like a novice shape-shifter, I struggled and fought to sustain my form, to keep from disintegrating.
These symptoms worsened with thoughts of doom and death. Because I'd had these sensations before, I could re-create them easily, pulling on memories that led to obsessive thinking. Long, deep breath to change the context.
What triggered such an event? I think it was the fog.
Walking into the thick mist, the vanishing point ahead, I felt lost in the unknown; like driving in a blizzard, the drops of water were fast moving around us as we walked toward the one point we never reached. Even if we had continued on as planned, for 4 more miles, we would never reach that point; it would remain out in front, some elusive point in the sea of similarity, massive drops of fog that held the Universe inside.
Disorientation, fear, panic, and then non-existence. As soon as doubt rolled into my mind like the fog blankets the coast line, non-existence never really had a chance in this body as I clung to my many forms, anything that would keep me separated from the discomfort of not being me. My mind was tortured with pictures of vast expanses of ocean, lost at sea, with a thousand thoughts of loosing myself, of never being "this" again.
My ego desperately needed acknowledgment; even more, it needed to know and see familiar things. It needed to see the sky, the hills around us, my skin and even the ground, would have been a welcome sight to my ego that needed to be defined in that very demanding moment.
So I ran. I ran until I could see the light coming back through the flat monotones of grayish mist; I ran until I could see the trail markings, the signs and even the muddled lines that delineated it from the wild grasses, rocks and unmarked territory on either side. I knew the difference, however hazy the delineation, and I welcomed its strength in me.
I found, or maybe I should say repeated, this same scenario over and over in my life the next several years. Flying to Denver from Albuquerque or St. Louis, in the middle of hundreds of people chatting away, I was lonely and filled with panic. While sailing peacefully over the gentle seas of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California (and it was calm on many of those occasions), I was lost and alone out there with no land in sight, even on a clear, fog-less day.
While working at a hiking retreat in the Redwoods just south of San Francisco, I was introduced to these God-like centuries that stand looking down at the shores of Half Moon Bay below. Their old souls are discrete and simultaneously hide something dear in the dank darkness up there on the ridge. I love those Redwoods and long for them now, almost daily. They are the keepers and incredible protectors of a mostly unknown ecosystem deep underneath the canopy of their forestation. They are certainly unmet by those who drive past at 50 miles an hour on the way to some populated and comfortable place; they are mostly unseen to those who sail by sea looking up at their fortress, and even unknown to those who walk among them, between their spaces on the soft paths that wind through their middle world. Even to those who live nearby breathing the same air inspired by this mystical prana, their inner world is mostly undiscovered.
Over the years I've been lost in there as they too provoke my ego's comfort zone. Even on paths I've walked hundred's of times before, I am lost, because there is another level of awareness that pervades and destroys the known senses. In there, I am senseless.
Because I visit this inner terrain often--whether on land, in the forest or coastal hill fog; out in the middle of the sea or up in a plane--I can re-create the panic of being lonely inside the expanse, within the oneness, in the midst of so much freedom. It's really quite frightening.
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