I write to you from the box of the icky place. The walls of the icky place are constructed of out of whack hormones, sadness over my Aunt's death, a healing crisis from a nutritional program (which allows NO chocolate, that alone should give you some idea of my mood), and my overwhelmed feelings when faced with the scope of what I am attempting to create. The dominant characteristic of the icky place is to want out--out of my skin, out of this mood, out of the moment.

"But you can't, dear girl." The voice of my Comfort Queen pipes up from my purple yoga mat, forgotten these last few days in the corner. "You know what they say, you can't go over it, you can't go around it, you can't go under it. You've got to go through it."

I glare at the mat and look for a something to throw at it. But the Comfort Queen is the voice of my own inner nurturer, and so if I threw something at her, it would only hurt me. "CQ, I'm completely and utterly NOT in the mood for one of your lectures. Go away." (We do this to ourselves so often--reject our own attempts at self-kindness.)

"But that is precisely why I'm here, my dear." My yoga mat rises from the floor, sprouts eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a crown as it stands on end, undulating with her words. "Do you recall the story from Sharon's book about her asthma attack?"

I'd been reading Faith by Sharon Salzberg, a remarkable book. Sharon writes about her first asthma attack, sick and alone in a strange place, afraid she might die. "Whatever takes us to our edge, to our outer limits, leads us to the heart of life's mystery, and there we find faith...When my asthma attack began, my first impulse was to fight against it, to get through it with steely resolve...I was swept away up in the relentless momentum of panic...The more I tried to resist the fear the stronger it became until, exhausted, I gave up the struggle.

"Without the support of my tension and resistance, the fear immediately lessened, and I began to remember insights I'd gained through years of practice: 'I don't really know what's happening here.' 'Beware of that determined slide to the worst possible, barely imaginable scenario.' 'You don't have to go there. Let's just see what is happening now.'

"...If I was going to die, I didn't want to end my life scalded by my own acrimony at having failed to wrest control of the situation...Whatever was happening to me, I wanted to be fully there for it. In faith, I surrendered to the moment."