Solar Plexus - part 1

He awoke in the usual time, somewhere in the dark and quiet hours between 3 and 5 in the morning. It took him a few moments to climb out of the dreaming and realize that the pain was gone; that familiar pain in his belly, approximate to the region known as the solar plexus.

In recent years he had come to know this pain, to acknowledge it. He had learned that it was always there, dull and persistent. For many years he had blocked it from consciousness. But then for some reason he could no longer recall he began to think it important to attend to it -- to, so to say, treat it. Sometimes he sat quietly and breathed into it as he had been taught once by a yoga instructor. He had sought the aid of a hands-on healer who uncovered emotions locked deep in his belly. These were powerful emotions, but they did not surprise him.

And sometimes he imagined a very small rodent gnawing at him, consuming him from within, but with such small and slowly working teeth that he might well not take notice until it was too late, until, well, this wound would grow wide enough to kill him.

As I said he had got to know this pain, to know it as part of his life for some years now. He knew it orgins -- in rage and fear, in sadness and loathing.

These feelings which attended to so many of his waking hours did not derive from some complex of neurotic attachment to old desires and losses. Rather there was immediate cause and accumulating effect.

That cause was the verbal and physical abuse that filled so many of his waking hours. He hated the perpetrators, but judged himself powerless to change the circumstances. Of course, he realized that his position favored the turning of his rage back on himself, hence the self-loathing held in place by fear and sadness that ate away from the inside.

When he awoke in the dark morning hours and realized the pain was gone he also realized that he had made a decision and that his life would change.