Unpacking the Eye

August 9, 2021

I’m typing in bed in my striped pj shorts and white tank. Sipping a steaming spiced assam tea even though it scalds my tongue. I drink my tea too hot. I’ve slept barely four hours last night but there is an urgency that I haven’t felt in a while. I’m tapping, tapping, tapping on the keyboard. Fast and furious.

 

Yesterday a friend in Bombay helped me explore the unnerving phenomena of the left eye’s occasional dysfunctionality. It’s one of the scariest symptoms I’ve had in ages, or in all my life perhaps. A bleeding uterus and vertigo being the others. 

 

Anu is one of my oldest, newer friends. I met her, through a common friend, in 1997 when The Process Work Institute of India had a Worldwork seminar in Lonavla. She was the main organiser. It was the beginning of the most chaotic and painful time in my life and without me really asking or wanting—as I was going through a phase of intense introversion and suspicion because of the complex betrayals in my life around that period—she became one of my most supportive and, yes I’ll use the word, loyal friends. Of course being a process oriented therapist she was non-critical of any emotions and stunts I acted out then. And of course we had our fights, very tangled and hot-blooded, but through it all the care just strengthened. 

 

We hadn’t talked in a long time, but we are together in a WhatsApp group that chats very infrequently, so more or less, though less than more, we know what’s going on in each other’s lives. Somehow the prolonged covid had made us both less able to reach out and connect to people though at the same time we were also aware that what had previously been precious solitude had turned into agonising loneliness over the year. We chatted about our lives a bit and then began to unpack the eye. 

 

I'd been journaling about the eye. Drawing little diagrams, making cartoon characters say things, and generally just feeling the different aspects of the combination of unpleasant sensations around it. There was the poking, the compression, the pulling at the outer edge, the dark heaviness, and of course the blurring and blocked nose that began it all.

 

I picked the pokiness to start on. It’s hard to describe the process of unfolding but I remember starting by using the fingers of my right hand to poke at my left palm. Slowly and more intensely till it hurt. Anu gently suggested using a pillow and finally when the right palm was red I picked up a book, I needed a rigid surface not a pillow, and began poking fast and furious. 

 

It pokes below,

It pokes above,

poke. Poke, poke, poke, poke,

faster and faster and faster

like the relentless woodpecker.

Deeper, go deeper.

Find that heart’s desire, explore persevere,

penetrate the impenetrable barrier. 

Never stop till you open the way.

I am the barrier stretching endlessly into eternity.

I am also the spearhead fast and furious,

Seeking the way.

 

The spearhead, nukite, came from karate. Karate has flowed in this broken year. Karate has energy when everything else is limp. Anu said, use that energy in other things. I’ve heard other’s say it too but there is that yet impenetrable barrier I am just beginning to know. As I worked the pokiness ebbed and the compression increased. I scrunched an A4 page into a ball and squeezed it.

 

Compression. Inward pressure

Squashing the eyeball

Between two strong palms

‘I want to obliterate you.

Crush you in my palm,

Wipe you out.

I won’t stop until I do.’

 

Another powerful symptom maker. This one a giant, a thousand times stronger than me. 

 

Just beginning the exploration. Much yet to unpack with the blurriness and the blocked-ness, being the heart of it all. But I was done for yesterday. 

 

We spoke of the similarity in some of our blocked creative processes and then talked about our children and their lives. Anu about her four adorable grand-children. We laughed about how when my daughter was young I would insist on processing all her body symptoms before seeking medical solutions—like the stomachache from which trampling elephants emerged. Of course that turned her off process work for the longest time. It was time to end the call. We promised to talk more often but didn’t set a date. I will beep her next week. I miss her. I miss the gang of old-new friends that I first met at that seminar.