Waiting

Healing begins at the exact moment one stops waiting for someone to take care of oneself. This sentence seems harsh. In reality it is the gentlest there is, because it gives back to the person what they had placed in other hands: their own life.

To understand why, we must look at where the waiting comes from.

A child waits, and rightly so. It waits for the mother to say yes, to feed, to comfort, to welcome. It waits for the father to say no, to protect, to set the limit, to stand firm. These two forces, the yes and the no, build the adult (fig. 1). When one was missing, the other was missing too, and the child remains waiting for what it did not receive: “I love you”, “I am proud of you”, “forgive me”. This waiting knows no age. It is found intact at forty, at sixty, turned towards a partner, a friend, a practitioner, a stranger, sometimes towards the invisible itself. The person does not know it. They only know that they are not at peace, and that they hope someone, one day, will come.

In a perceptible person, waiting takes a particular form, and this is where the subject becomes complex.

A perceptible person picks up. They receive what comes from others, from places, from situations, far beyond what their five senses show them. This perception is what Centre EPÉU calls PPA, heightened perception. It is neither an illness nor a privilege. It is a capacity, and like every capacity it asks to be understood, analysed and directed. As long as it is not, it comes in without control. Everything arrives at once: one person’s fatigue, another’s anger, the weight of a room, the unease of a conversation. The person does not sort. They do not know what is theirs and what is not. They take everything on themselves, and they come home empty.

This is what everyday language calls hypersensitivity. The word is wrong, and it makes people ill. It describes the person as a victim of their own nature, when they are facing an uncontrolled perception. The gap between the two is all the hope there is: one does not heal from a nature, but one learns to direct a perception.¹

Here now is the point where waiting and perception meet, and where the fall occurs.

The perceptible person who has not directed their perception lives in a state of exhaustion and confusion. They do not understand what is happening to them. They look for a cause outside: an attack, a malevolent person, a charged place, an energy. And, because the child within them is still waiting, they also look for someone to save them: someone who will protect them, who will take away what they carry, who will finally tell them that all will be well. They go from one explanation to another, from one hand to another. Each time they hope, each time they leave with the same weight (fig. 2). That is the fall into hypersensitivity: not a stronger perception, but a perception without direction, placed in the service of a waiting that never ends.

Let us examine the opposite hypothesis, for it is legitimate. Can one not be carried by another, at least for a time? Yes. The presence of a just person, their word, can open a door. But no one opens or closes someone else’s perception. No one directs another’s mind in their place.² The other can show; they cannot do. Whoever waits for someone to do it for them stays seated, and the door that was shown to them closes again.³

Healing therefore begins at the moment the person withdraws their request. Not by hardening, not by cutting themselves off from others, but by taking back their place: that of an adult who no longer needs someone to come in order to exist. What they were waiting for from a mother, they give to themselves: welcome, gentleness, the yes. What they were waiting for from a father, they give to themselves as well: the limit, the no, protection. And it is precisely this no that was missing before their perception. A person who knows how to say no to what comes in is no longer invaded. They still pick up, they even pick up more, but they sort (fig. 3). They know what is theirs. They turn their back on what attacks them, as they would in ordinary life, and they place their attention elsewhere, with force.

This work begins with words. Whoever says “something is blocking me” speaks of a thing they cannot see, and what one cannot see cannot be changed. Whoever says “I am hypersensitive” has already declared themselves a victim. Whoever says “my perception came in without my directing it” has already begun to direct it. The change of perception begins at the moment one observes the words one uses (fig. 4).

Then comes the rule that the Centre places before any beginning, and which it calls the soul of the work: whatever happens, nothing matters; it is your mood that decides tomorrow. The perceptible person who has understood it no longer asks what touched them during the day. They ask in what state they choose to go to bed. They relive their day, turn into positive what was negative, and prepare the next day.⁴ Nothing, in this movement, waits for anyone.

But how can one see what one does not see? This is where human memory fails. It forgets, it arranges, it excuses. The Δ Delta-Score, for its part, forgets nothing. That is why it exists. Three times a day, morning, noon and evening, you note what you are, without thinking: your clarity, your emotion, your coherence, your sleep, your resilience. The activity journal keeps what you did; the private journal keeps what you thought; the acts of the day keep what you gave in to, avoided, decided or postponed. After a few weeks, your daily behaviour is before you, as it is, and not as you tell it (fig. 5). Noûma reads this material and sends it back to you: it describes what is happening in you, it does not advise, it asks questions.

You can walk this path alone. You can also walk it with a practitioner, through the Cabinet: she is then present on your phone, she reads the same measures as you, and she explains and guides this observation of yourself. In both cases, the principle is the same. No one tells you who you are. Your own days show you, and it is before them that you decide.

Then perception changes its nature. It ceases to be a burden and becomes an instrument. The person no longer picks up in order to suffer; they pick up in order to see. And what they see, they keep for themselves, without asking another what it means, because everything that comes from beyond the human dimension is for them alone.⁵

Healing is not the day someone comes. It is the day one discovers that no one had to come, and that one had been standing from the start.

M. Mischa Harmeijer, Centre EPÉU

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