I wrote this poem many years ago after a friend confided in me that she often felt as if there was as scream living inside her. Something triggered my memory of that conversation and so I resurrected the poem.

THE SCREAM
I don't abide in the usual places
dark abysses and lonely places
are my home

I live in tortured minds and aching souls
their suffering is my abode
I stretch and strain along muscles tight
tense and taut
pulsate my venom into cavities
fraught with fear and pain

Powerfully I spread disease
through sinew and vein
my mission to constrain
manipulate and control
the torment of the anguished soul

In silence I dwell in an iron cage
supressed by anger, entrapped by rage
I have no voice, I make no sound
you cannot see me
I won't be found
I don't think of freedom
to escape is not my dream
BUT if you dare to look
and if you dare to touch
you may just release
The SCREAM!!!!

I wonder what your thoughts are on the SCREAM? Here are some questions to ponder.

Is it something you have experienced?

What do you think the SCREAM is and how do we release it?

Do we need to release it?

If we released it what would be left in its place?

The poem suggest that we daren't look at the SCREAM never mind touch it. Why is this?

Is the SCREAM trying to tell us something? And if so what?

Lets explore the SCREAM together. Please leave any comments in the boxes below.
Thank you.

This is a guest blog on www.yourlifeyourway.net. Click on link to view the article about how the dark times can be a greast catalyst for growth and change.

The main thing we are concerned with on our quest to feel whole and complete again is to entice the unconscious mind back into awareness that it is a part of the Soul and NOT a separate identity as the ego would have it believe.

The soul is the only part of us that holds the full awareness of who we are; it knows we are whole, complete, beautiful, radiant, loving, generous and free beings and so when we set about to put ourselves back together again it makes sense for us  to learn about feeding and strengthening this part of ourselves.

But how do we do this?

Well it seems that we have an inbuilt mechanism that does this for us. Psychologists call this our organismic valuing system; a system that works to help us reach our full potential as human beings. The organismic valuing system works whether we are conscious of it or not BUT we will reach our full potential quicker (though not necessarily more easily) if we co-operate consciously with the process.

Reaching our full potential relies on us being able to rediscover the truth of who we are at soul level. The unconscious mind does not want us to remember this and so to all intent and purpose it is our enemy here. HOWEVER we are not left without an ally for we have at our disposal our conscious mind too.

The conscious mind is our friend. It is freer than the unconscious mind and it has no agenda save the agenda it chooses for itself. It can either choose to feed on food (data/information) that reinforces the thoughts and beliefs of the unconscious mind thus contributing towards feeding the pain body of the fragile ego OR it can choose to feed on food that may offer a different perspective on life, moving us towards integration of mind, body and soul. The choice is ours.

Love is the only ‘food’ that can nourish our entire being. We know this because when we feast on it not only we do feel our souls expand we also feel our minds becoming less agitated and our bodies less tense. This is because love activates our body’s parasympathetic nervous system which is responsible for restoring the body to homeostasis through the relaxation response.

SO choosing to feast on LOVE is good for us but what does this look like in practice?

Well we need some tools to help us. One such tool is MEDITATION.

It would be very strange if in taking the decision to feed our souls we did NOT come across the practice of MEDITATION. As Neale Donald Walsch (author of the Conversations with God books) says ‘A commitment to meditation is a commitment to your soul, to be with your soul, meet your soul, listen to your soul.’

The unseen elements of life vibrate at a different frequency than the visible things of life; to access the realm of the soul we need to move away from noise into silence, away from speed into slowness, away from activity into stillness and away from company into the solitude of our deeper selves. This is what MEDITATION allows us to do. When we meditate we find that our perspective on life widens and becomes more balanced as the souls perspective comes to sit alongside the perspective of the mind. In this way we begin to experience the realm of the soul as a felt reality and not as something that is merely held in the mind as a rather nice but ‘woolly’ concept.

As our perspective on life alters in this way we may find that we decide we want to live differently, in a way that is more supportive of our new found perspective.

For example we may decide to follow the urgings of Ghandi when he implored us to ‘become the change we want to see in the world.’

The story of the two wolves battling inside us is a parable about our human nature, (the ‘bad wolf’) and our soul (the ‘good wolf’).  To understand how this parable works it might help to take a look at the nature of these two beasts.

Let’s begin by looking at the ‘good wolf’; our soul.

Our soul is the part of us that is made of pure energy; the energy of Life itself. Our individual soul is a small part of the Great One Soul (God?) and as such it is endowed with all the Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity and Love that brought life into existence in the first place.

Our soul lives in the realm of Ultimate Reality and Ultimate Truth and its purpose is to bring this Truth to the physical realm where our minds and bodies reside so that we might know ourselves more fully. Our soul’s job is to communicate with our minds and bodies in order to remind them that they are part of the soul. By doing this the soul encourages us to reach for the full expression of whom we  are instead of settling for a version of self that is limited by the physical world only.  

The soul’s language is love and freedom and its agenda is to help the mind and body reconnect with itself. This is in direct opposition to the nature, language and agenda of the unconscious mind, the ‘bad wolf’ in our story of two wolves.

Now let’s take a look at this ‘bad wolf’.

Our human nature is dominated by the ego, the part of our mind that has forgotten (become unconscious of) the truth of its existence as part of the soul and has come instead to believe itself to have a separate, living identity all of its own. This identity however has no real substance of its own; it is very much a shadow identity – that is it is like a shadow in that it only exists relative to a light shining somewhere; in this case the light of the soul.

When we make an identity for ourselves out of anything that is less than the totality of which we are (Mind, Body, Soul) this identity will always be shadow like; flimsy, temporary and insecure.

It is this insecurity and the fear that stems from it which characterises the nature of the ego.  

If the agenda of the soul is for connection then the agenda of the ego is separation. If the nature of the soul is love then the nature of the ego is fear; if the language of the soul is feelings then the language of the ego is thoughts.

So we see from these two illustrations that the two wolves that exist inside us are very different animals and that these differences produce feelings of tension between them. However there is only one wolf that is prone to provoking fights and there are no surprises as to which wolf that is!

The soul has no need to fight. It is complete, whole and secure as it is. Because it lives eternally it has nothing to fear; it has nothing to lose, nothing to gain and nothing to worry about – this is quiet true literally because the soul exists in the realm of no things! Our souls know that in the end all manner of things will be well; that is that all things will come to know themselves as whole again.

Our unconscious mind however does not know this and so lives as though every thought, word and deed was a matter of life or death – which for the ego it is!

It’s important to note here that the ego itself is not necessarily bad. The ego is a wonderful tool that enables us all to experience ourselves as individual expressions of the One Supreme Source of Life (God) and there is great joy and satisfaction in this. Our ego enables us to feel very positively about ourselves. The problem arises from our stubborn belief that this is all we are and our need to defend this at all costs.

Because we believe that we are the ego and we know, albeit it unconsciously that the ego is incomplete the nature of the ego is blighted by:

·  a perpetual need to find what is lost or missing which creates an insatiable appetite for more

·  the constant need to defend and protect itself so that no one will see that it is lacking in some way

·  the need to prove its worth and validate its existence

·  thinking that there is something inherently wrong with its nature

·  tension, stress and strain as it strives to maintain an acceptable identity that will secure the attention, acceptance, approval and affection it desires.

·  a tendency towards feelings of envy and jealousy

·  a filtering of all information through the lens of ‘how does this affect me?’ which results in a distorted view of reality

Because of this the ego invests a lot of time and effort into cultivating, maintaining and grooming a strong sense of self in order to mask its insecurities.

HOWEVER the truth is that no matter how carefully constructed our image of our self is it can be challenged at any moment and the confidence the ego feels in itself can be taken away in a blink of an eye. Success can turn to failure; achievements can fall away; acceptance can turn to rejection; approval to disapproval and wealth to poverty and when this happens the ego’s carefully placed mask drops away exposing large, raw areas of pain that have no where to hide.

This is when the pain body which is normally kept well under control is suddenly exposed.

Then angry and vulnerable the threatened ego releases the ‘bad wolf’ and depending on how severe the threat is perceived to be this wild animal can display behaviour that at best is mildly critical and at worse extremely violent. Rage, criticism, sulkiness; hostility, judgemental and threatening behaviours are all characteristic of the ‘bad wolf’ who, when under threat, will quite easily lash out at any one (including itself) who happens to get in the way. The ‘bad wolf’ will quite happily justify this behaviour and is adept at playing the blame game in order to make others out to be wrong so that he can feel right (self righteousness!)

Afterwards, when the attack subsides the ‘bad wolf’  simply crawls back into its nicely created image of itself and gets on with life as normal as if nothing had happened......that is until the next time the ‘wolf’ is threatened and it rises up on the attack again!

All the time this is going on our faithful soul is still relaying messages to our ego. It is still trying to remind us that none of this matters, that there is no need for us to be so defensive, that we are more than our carefully constructed story of self BUT our bruised ego’s take no heed. They either don’t hear the messages or think them irrelevant to their cause or perhaps fear that they have too much to lose by listening to the soul and so stubbornly they carry on doing things their own way. Then the saying “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got” turns out to be true!

Nothing changes this way.

Eventually though some-thing has to give; the pain carried by the ego becomes too much to bear and will no longer be satiated in the usual ways. The longing to be real; to feel safe; to rest and to experience something lasting spills out in a desperate cry for HELP!

This is a cry that NEVER goes unheard for it lands in the ears of the ever patient soul who moves instantly to make itself known.

This is when the dance of the two wolves’ begins to move into a new level of consciousness.

This is when life begins to get REALLY interesting.

Thank you for reading this post. If you have any thoughts regarding the Beauty and the Beast please feel free to share them by posting them in the comment boxes below.