I wake up in mid-gasp, heart pounding, eyes snapping to attention, adrenaline rushing, thinking about Madame Du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, who was dragged out of retirement during the French Revolution and executed by guillotine, shrieking and pleading for mercy from the executioner and the throng of increasingly uncomfortable onlookers until the blade whistled down and cut off her head.
Here in bed, in an endless instant, I feel all of her pain, all of her sorrow and confusion, all of her terror in those first few seconds I am awake.
Madame Du Barry means exactly dick to me. I’m not much of a French history buff, I’m not psychic or a card-carrying empath. And it’s not a dream. It’s a thought. It’s taken me a few months to understand that.
The surge of cortisol and adrenaline comes first, while I’m still asleep, and jolts me into the right-here-right-now of my dark bedroom, with palpable horror tearing at my throat.
And then my mind, in reaction to my body, sends a mental crochet hook up into the stratosphere of my brain, and pulls down some thread of a fear,  real or imagined, fresh or stale.
This happens in a nanosecond, a thought that my inner committee rubber-stamps without my knowledge or acceptance, something to validate the hot kidney juice squirting through my system and setting me on fire.
But I can talk to my brain. I can talk to my body. My higher self can soothe those parts of me that are out of control. A trick I learned from one of my spiritual mentors, Betty Hill Crowson—I can talk to myself like I’m a little girl.
“What do you want, honey? Would you like a nice cup of tea? Let’s get a nice cup of tea…Awww, is the shower scaring you? Is it too loud and needle-y? How about a nice warm bath?”
The first time I did this, I felt like an absolute idiot. Dammit, I’ve actually become the kind of woman I used to make fun of…scurrying off to yoga retreats, meditating, actually taking care of myself. That’s not who I was raised to be! I’m a natural go-getter.
But I’ve learned that I need to take things slow. I need to keep my central nervous system calm. I need to be gentle with myself. And it works.
Time for another cup of tea, as it helps me keep my head, and I will lift my mug in honor of Madame Du Barry, who lost hers.