Tech problems updating my web site throw me into the painful "white water" turbulence of helpless, powerless, thwarted, betrayed, abandoned, rageful and despairing feelings from my wounded past.

Such challenging times I’ve had weaving through this past month! October seems to have been a most intense month for many people I know. Even more accelerated big challenges and big changes, some hard and some wondrous!

For me it all began as Barbara  (my close friend/computer mentor/creative collaborator) and I set about our shared monthly ritual of updating the web site. For some time now it’s been clear to both of us that I would have no trouble uploading the site on my own. Still, we’ve chosen to continue the very magical ceremony of coming together each month to create shared sacred space—with smudging, prayers and oracles: Runes, Angel Cards, Sacred Path Cards. It’s in this sacred space that we ceremoniously put the new writings onto the site.

Over the almost four years during which we’ve worked together on creating and maintaining the site, we’ve learned to limit the amount of time we struggle with glitches at any one sitting.  We “take” glitches to mean that Spirit is slowing us down for some as yet unknown reason/lesson. 

In these bumpy moments, usually one or the other of us will remember this knowing and remind us that it’s time to move away from the computer(s). Once we remember to stop, we either explore going deeper into our dialog with each other or we take a real play break, going off for a walk along the beach.  Most often, we return from these breaks to find we are suddenly and magically awake to what we need to do to make our way past the obstacle/bump.

Every once in a while, that isn’t quite how it goes. In these more challenging moments, we’ve learned that we just have to let go completely–to “give it up” (whatever “it” might be at the time). Over the course of our collaboration and in our own separate journeys, we’ve each deepened our trust in the ways that Spirit has a hand in our lives and doings. We’ve learned to trust that there is a “rightness” in what might be happening—even when it feels upsetting or aggravating in the moment. This usually helps us to let go.

Yet, sometimes we forget what we know. Then, despite what we’ve learned, we get caught in fruitlessly persisting, in exhausting ourselves in “just one more try,” in  “banging our heads against the wall” way longer than some parts of us know makes sense! 

In September, when we had a couple of glitches while trying to put up a new home page photo of me, we got caught up in just that way. After a while, we finally did reach a moment when we both could agree it was time to let go.

I went back up the hill to Ojai. I read, napped and rested, and went for a long post-midnight ramble. When I came back in the wee hours, I sat down once more and in just a few minutes had the “struck-by-lightning” experience of seeing where we had both missed an obvious and essential step!  Voila! The photo got uploaded.

Coming together a month later to put the October pieces up on the site, we had this very fresh experiential reminder about obstacles and letting go. Regrettably, it made little difference in how we (or mostly, I) dealt with the overwhelming obstacle that reared itself!

The obstacle: the software we’d been using for over two and a half years to upload the site suddenly proved unable to produce an effective connection.  Without the connection, we couldn’t put the new pieces up! We tried several times. Tried various alternative routes. Nothing worked. We took breaks, offered prayers, asked for help from Spirit. We came back to it later, thinking the problem might have been heavy traffic on our Internet service provider. Still no workable connection.

Barbara was ready to let it go for the day. She encouraged me to do the same. I, sadly, seemed desperately caught: like a little mechanical wind up toy repeating and repeating and repeating the same processes that were clearly not working! Finally, I did stop and went back up the hill to Ojai feeling tearful, thwarted, betrayed, frustrated, helpless, confused, abandoned and despairing.  

Later that night and for the next few days I spent endless distressing hours alternately trying the same old way again and again, troubleshooting with tech support people at AOL and Interland (my web host, unable to offer much to Mac platform users) and trying unsuccessfully to reach the software people in England. (Barbara did other, less driven, investigations.) I kept trying different software doorways, different “fixes”—none of them worked, for no reason that I could uncover.

I was possessed! So distraught. So emotionally upset and overwhelmed. I felt so agitated, so angry with the computer and its unpredictable technology. I felt so furious that I had become lulled into trusting it so much. Some parts of me wanted so much just to take a hammer to it! I kept having despairing, tearful, pained and rageful meltdowns.

In some moments, I could stop agitating, could sit talking lovingly and gently to myself. The Mommy-in-me was holding and comforting me, offering me sympathy, giving me all the room I needed for all of my upset. She also was reminding me that I could surely expect that an answer to the “problem” would come in its own time. Reminding me, too, that surrendering into that unknowable timing might well release me from my considerable distress. For brief periods I could actually do this. But then, like a squirrel in a cage, I’d fall back into the frenetic attempts to “push the river,” to force the timing, to “make things work.”

Everything was saying No! Stop! No forward motion now! This is not a “real” problem, only a matter of timing. Yet, I continued in my suffering. Unable either to give up struggling against, or to let go and surrender into this enforced delay.

Awash in my distress, feeling held by a loving, caring, sympathetic inner Mommy, I could also be aware of watching myself in the middle of this whole process. It was clear, even in the worst moments, that my upheaval was more than simply the reaction to this particular “bump” in my current road. The clue for me, as always, was the intense disproportion between the “problem” and my level of upset.

Fleetingly, from time to time, I could grab on to a branch, hauling myself briefly out of the “white water” of the emotional turbulence. In those moments, I could feel–in my body–the remembering of all of the moments in my early history when I’d felt betrayed–invited to trust, then abandoned. I could feel the despair, the helplessness, the powerlessness, the terror, the pain, the overwhelm, the frustrated rage that had been locked in my body since those early times. In this present swirling vortex of emotion and suffering, my body was releasing the stored, blocked energies of a lifetime of woundings in this particular domain. I could feel that my body was freeing itself from the hold of this old pain, pain that my psyche/my emotional self had already released some time ago. 

Having this sense of it all allowed me to keep making the space to feel all of it for as long and as often as it rose up. As the week continued, the spaces when I could let go, could just surrender into the enforced delay gradually got longer and more frequent. The spaces in which I flailed–suffering in sobbing, angry devastation–got shorter and less frequent. By the end of the week, the siege was over. I felt an enormous sense of having been released. There was a new sense of spaciousness in my body. A sense of more room to grow into than I’d had before. A sense that I was no longer being hemmed in by a body that still lived as if it were endangered in places in which my psyche and being had already learned to feel safe.

By the end of the week (of course!), Barbara had found a new (to us) Mac-compatible software that worked on our AOL service, though only on her computer. Mine still seems problematic. Clearly, Spirit has cast an emphatic vote that we continue sharing sacred space as we upload the site! And, for the time being, this particular releasing process seems to have run its course.

It’s been a “tickle” to notice that after all this I felt a suddenly compelling need to prune back the two orange trees that have long been encroaching on the growing space around my container garden. Many of my rose bushes have had to grow in the oddest contortions in order to get to the sun and air space they needed. Yet, only now did I see what needed doing! I love walking out (frequently) to delight in how much space/spaciousness there now is for new growth in my garden!  I feel the same delight in the new felt space/spaciousness in my body-being!

Originally published November 2002