Getting my legs back.

January 13, 07—In some ways my health continues to improve, as I live without fighting off the invasive and hateful psychotropic drugs that have completely ruined my health and caused a 35 pound weight gain that I finally am chipping away ounce by ounce.  I realized today, at the end of yoga class, during final meditation, that I finally can do contemplative prayer on a deep level again.  Because of my work schedule, I can only do yoga three times a week, and then meditation is 5-10 minutes, so I need to take the initiative to do contemplative prayer on my own and try to get back in touch with my spiritual life, which was lost first through the constant, banal noise of jail and then the through the soul destroying drugs.  But I have to be very careful about verbalizing my spiritual life—there are misunderstanding and manipulative predators ready to pounce on anything I say as an indication of a mental condition that needs coercive and pharmaceutical intervention, just like in Stalin’s Russia.  Still, I do want to make some changes, to try to get back to the real me, of whom I’m proud to be, and who I really like, and even love.  To that end, I’ve given up my TV, and the next step I think will be to force myself to wake up to an alarm after 9 hours of sleep.  I’m sleeping too much right now, which feels good but accomplishes nothing.  I dreamed the other day of a yoga teacher who couldn’t teach the class because she was handicapped in her legs. That teacher is me---archetypally, my vocation is that of teacher, and as yoga is a spiritual discipline, I am a spiritual teacher, except that right now, I can’t teach.  I’m too crippled in my legs.  So I need to work at getting my legs back.  "To dream that you legs are wounded or crippled, signifies a lack of balance, autonomy, or independence in your life. You may be unable or unwilling to stand up for yourself. Perhaps you are lacking courage and refuse to make a stand"  There are many ways to teach.  It is time to start pursuing my true vocation again.  I can't get my independence and autonomy back directly, so I will have to do it indirectly.  But I have to do it.