[StitlyDute]

Gemma, there's also nothing wrong with you because you're having strange, frightening experiences. I'm sure you know that, but I felt like typing it anyway.

Do you have periods, or moments, of true, vivid, positive emotion? If you do (and I know you're not soliciting my advice) I'd suggest focusing on expanding those periods throughout the day. You may meet with resistance.

If you don't, I suggest a lifeline. A lifeline, to me, is anything that uplifts you and inspires you emotionally and spiritually whether it be a poem, a song, or a photograph.

My most-used lifeline is the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley:

Out of the night that covers me.
black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
for my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
my head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
looms but the horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
find me, and shall fine me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul. I know that you're already doing affirmations and that's wonderful. I feel like poems and songs have a special capacity to positively charge us, though, because they speak in images -- and therefore, directly, to the soul. Also, because they rhyme, they're often easier to remember. Also, reciting poems and songs is fun, which engages the spirit too.

Remember that, no matter what you experience, there is inside you an ageless core of love, joy, peace, and unbounded enthusiasm for life. That part of you is inviolate and cannot be influenced or possessed -- it can be forgotten about, you can be distracted from it, but it cannot be harmed. Once I had a dream of being chased through a dark woods by black horses. I spontaneously became lucid and turned on my pursuers and shouted, "You cannot harm the True!" And my pursuers fled. I woke up. I didn't know that such conviction lived inside me, but it came out, and I try to remember it every day.

We all are on and off our spiritual paths, none of us are perfect or untroubled. Some of us are more troubled than others, but you needn't believe what the Neg tells you about yourself anymore than you need to believe what a blocked, spiteful person would project onto you.

I've been reading recently about Harriet Tubman -- her escape from slavery and the immensely daring, charitable work she did in the Underground Railroad in the US during the 1850s. She's an inspiration to me. She lived as a slave until she was almost 30 years old and then fled north with almost nothing but a scrap of paper listing the addresses of two friendly homes. She was said to have had dreams that helped her, and others, escape. What strikes me most about her, in all I've read, is how deeply she trusted herself, her God, the hope of justice and decency. It would be all too easy to deify her and say that she was an "old soul" or what not, but she was a woman. A five foot tall, scarred, skinny, black woman from Virginia of the 1800s who decided she deserved freedom and respect. One of her mottos was: "I can't die but once."