January 25, 2003 | 10:12 PM

Here are two of the skills I�ve learned over the past two weeks.

1) Patience

2) Detachment

My heart used to be a bowl, trapping and containing each feeling, resulting in an overflow of psychological and emotional chaos. Now my heart is a sieve, a method of transference where everything flows naturally. There is so much power in that. I feel whole. Years of therapy and psychotropic medication did not accomplish what I accomplished on my own in the space of one week.

It�s very hard sometimes, when you�re an intelligent and highly intuitive but damaged person, to make sense of all the vibes and signals that come at you. Lots of things get confused. It�s hard to know the difference between what you want/fear and what actually is happening when you�ve built a defense mechanism as mighty and complicated as the one I�d created. I feel so blessed to have learned the difference between projection and reality. My psychic ability�not in so far as predicting the future, but with naked and unbiased eyes seeing and accepting everything as it is in the moment, has become highly refined and potent. It always was before when applied to situations having nothing to do with me, but now that my own ego has been more or less shattered, I have gained so much insight into who I am and the world around me. I have such trust in my perception, and despite the occasional occurrence of questionable/uncharitable feelings regarding other people (the aftershocks of the natural disaster that has occurred in my psyche) I feel so free and clear and so compassionate. As Jonee said, I have a sense of the Bigger Picture.

In order to gain the full wisdom of the lessons that come into our lives and bless us, we need to go through certain things blind, not knowing what the outcome will be. The utter disbelief and pain over having been made a fool has subsided. We are all fools, as in tarot mythology, that�s the beginning of the journey�the road from ignorance to enlightenment�not just �knowledge� but true wisdom.

I�ve been reading up a lot on Buddhism and tarot and archetypes. I�ve been reading a lot of poetry�Frost and ee cummings and Yeats and Auden. I�ve been listening to Bach and Aimee Mann and staring at Goya and Chagal . I feel safe within myself for the first time in my entire life because I have been forced to deal with my greatest fears�abandonment, betrayal, and loss. Instead of running from them in all the ways I have in the past, I�ve stared them dead in the face. And they are shadows. Being afraid of them is like a child being afraid of the dark.

I think that I attract experiences which force me to wake up and smell the coffee. I�m human and have made many mistakes, but I think there has always been a part of me that has wanted to be enlightened and thus the experiences I attract force me out of my self protective shell. I will never have a safe complacent life filled with easy delusions. When I attempt to create that sort of reality, I am always eventually forced out of my docile stupor and into a much more heightened understanding of the world. This is at times painful but I am so thankful for it. I will not be sixty years old, collecting a gold watch, sitting in my armchair and knowing that my life was a series of distractions and that I didn't serve my gifts and learn my lessons. That I avoided and dodged destiny and indulged myself in make believe.

So much of how I viewed the world prior to last week just no longer applies. It�s all so new and intense and when people use terms like �right� and �wrong� and �good� and �bad�, I no longer identify with their definitions. My need to defend my own position or to attack the position of others has subsided almost entirely. I have the emotional equivalent of a loaded gun and I am choosing not to point it at anyone. Instead of being overwhelmed and controlled by my passions, I have mastered them without denying their existence. I feel calm and centered and accepting. Yes, I have my moments. The impulse to say many useless and unproductive things aloud, or to judge other people or to dehumanize them through psychoanalysis. But I take a step back, acknowledge what I�m feeling, forgive myself for feeling that way, and strip away the fa�ade of each impulse to see what is actually lurking behind it. This has given me an enormous insight into my own boundaries and values. As I said, this is all so new to me. And it�s a learning process. I haven�t gotten all the way there yet and I would be foolish to assume that there won�t be any more of these moments�they will occur and they will pass, as each moment does.

But I feel like I�ve truly shifted my own karma�by which I mean the self destructive patterns I�ve participated in over and over again because I was blind to their formations, I can see quite clearly now and have chosen to side step. I can be any kind of person I want to be. I can choose to be the best and highest that is in myself. So much of my depression, substance abuse, and power struggles manifested because of a profound sense of helplessness on my own part. I felt chained to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and to the choices of other people. And now, as in the Devil tarot card, I can see how loose those chains are around my neck. That I can slip them off at any time. That enslavement to a belief system is a matter of active participation and personal choice.

And through this I have learned to appreciate what real love and friendship are. What a profound gift that is. The crucifixion of outmoded forms of relating and the sacrifice of ego drives has lead to a supreme redemption. I am so grateful. So grateful for this evolution. So grateful for insight and empathy and the love that envelopes me like a long velvet robe.

Sometimes the very best gifts come in the nastiest of packages.