Welcome To Anna’s Office

As day turns to night…

Welcome to Anna’s ‘Office’: two white lounge chairs at the edge of a small empty pool.

I’d walked by a few evenings in a row, watching women sit beside her there while looking up into the sky.

One night, I followed the impulse to go there and rest. I don’t remember who was there first. I went to the spot. And then, there I was with Anna. I didn’t plan to lay there with her that evening, but I was somehow “up.”

At the point I found myself in the white chair, I’d been in a week-long house-wide experiment that was birthed out of necessity to de-privatize my relating space with another woman. Each of the Bridge-House women were a yes to holding space for me to come to the Reality of this relating space being over, and for me to uncover and dismantle my Fantasy Worlds. I was given Possibilities to map out and share all the stories of how I might fix things enough, or change enough, or be clear enough, or committed enough, or calm enough, or even angry enough to make the relationship “work.” I met with my team daily to say how it was going inside me, and they invited me to write and share all of my Underworld purposes for choosing this person, as well as noticing every time anything going on inside me that had to do with putting my focus and attention on her.

Side note: at the Bridge-House one of the invitations—and I’d go as far as to call it an agreement—is to not have a hidden life. What this means is that we ask and invite and encourage one another to share the totality of our inner landscape, be it an Emotion or a Reactivity or an Ego-State or a Feeling. We ask and invite and encourage one another to say what’s really going on, so that we are not living in stories or fantasies within ourselves. This takes practice, and I have gotten a lot of it here.

The white chairs are for that, and, for something different than that.

Another part of my experiment was to start tracking where my attention and my energetic body was going, and over and over again notice and bring myself back to the present. I had the bodily sensation of panic, fear mixed with anger and sadness too, about not speaking to or being “there” for this person. I faced the insidious layers of Rescuing, and how woven into my identity of a Rescuer had become. To always be available or solve issues or be a calming force in “chaos.” What I got to see was that the calming force was different from the feeling force. The calming force was the numb version of me that would do anything to try and keep my inner landscape similar to how it was when I was a kid: not stepping on toes, taking care of other’s emotions, and ultimately—and I feel scared to write this—making every thing about me.

One day I went through a Process alongside two other woman, held by Vera, to pull this person out of the fantasy space I’d created for them. It was a long and heart breaking process, of allowing all the fantasies to be spoken out, all the dreams and future plans and even memories, while still deciding to clear and close the fantasy space just below my heart. Not to close my heart, but rather, to decide to be in Reality. The next day, I retrieved and re-integrated a part of my being that was spliced. And on the next day, I found myself on the white chair.

There I sat with Anna, listening to insects in the trees and frogs in the pool.

There I sat with Anna, in what felt like the spaciousness of white light.

There I sat with Anna, being next to her at the magical hour called Dusk.

There I sat with Anna, as the words of my Feelings started to pour out of me as if I was made of Everything.

I said so many things I never said before, about what hurt and what was incredible and what I loved and what I lost. About how it is to sense what I sense and see what I see and know what I know and not know what I do not know.

In that spot I felt and shared and felt and shared, and suddenly, I was tapped into a river of Conscious Feelings: sadness of being there next to her in a human body, fear for the aliveness of the jungle moving through and around us, clarity of being on a new path, and joy for the Love that I got to share with her, this person, my dear friend Anna, full of grace, who laughed and cried with me, and who laid with me on the white chairs as day turned to night.