Blank, Empty, Dead

Written in writing group on Monday, March 11:

I’m scared.  Why should I be scared to write?  Nothing to say.  Talk about fear.  Well, it comes and goes.  I don’t find much else to think about.  Even had trouble writing my journal this morning.  I did do a blog post.  I’ve been working on the letting go as I do meditation.  Just breathing out and holding my hands on my knees palm up and imagining everything flowing out of me with the breath.  Sometimes  I imagine a prostration.  Sometimes I say “Thy will be done” or “into Thy hands” or “I offer myself.”  

I see little tiny bits of ice moving in the air flow in front of the window where I’m sitting.

I’ve been reading Stephen Levine’s book called Who Dies?, but finding it very difficult to understand.  He talks about who you think you are and who you really are, and I’m not at all sure about myself.  I know that who I’ve been thinking I am lately is a real failure, although sometimes that feels like a relief.  Not having a clue who I am feels very freeing somehow.

I have a story about how, at the time of my death, someone else wakes up, as though from a dream, and says something like “Oh!  I was Jenny!  What an intense life!”

How do I feel as I go through my day?  Sometimes blank and bored, same old stuff, everything is meaningless.  Sometimes I’m able to do the thing of being in the moment: walking, walking, grass, snow — just focussing on what’s there in the present.

A cold wave of fear.  My shoulders are shaking.  Trauma release.  I don’t know how much my early trauma affects my ability to be in the present.  Very confusing.  I remind myself to soften, soften around, bring compassion to the fear, to the cancer, to myself, to the young parts.  My heart feels cold.  I notice I stop breathing while I write.  I make myself take a deep breath.  Cold, cold, cold.  Outside is cold, bare trees, snow, buildings, clouds.  The ink is running out, the time is running out, everything is running out…    I feel so blank, so empty, so dead.

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Wanting to be Connected to Spirit

From my journal for Saturday, March 9

I realized, walking Mocha, that it’s not dying I’m afraid of but living.  After two months with a sore knee, having to use a walker and a cane, and now facing an operation, it’s just getting harder and harder to keep going.  Too much work to just keep functioning and nothing meaningful enough — or things that are meaningful are too rare.  Sitting with friends at dinner, writing group, Meeting in person, meditation group — that’s it.  Not enough.    O yes, talking with Elizabeth, and talking with Erica, also worth doing.

Then something comes up like having to stop contributions to causes I support because I can’t afford it.  And Mocha, who is also deteriorating, and someday I will have to make the painful decision to help her die.

I am so tired.  Not as tired as yesterday, but still makes it hard to get up and do things.

While I was showering and washing my hair I realized that if I knew God existed and that He/She had given me a job to do — Journey, Neskaya, blog, and a further job to sit with the dying — then I would go on with good spirits.

So the problem is not feeling connected with Spirit.  I look up and see the trees, and feel the energy of their spirits reaching out.

I realize that being traumatized very young, by being left alone, was a confrontation with death. Trauma happens when the reptilian brainstem gets the message that death is near. So this confrontation with death triggers that old stuff. Having trouble believing in “God” is connected with not being able to trust my alcoholic parents. I suppose in some ways it’s amazing that I have ANY sense of Spirit. I realize that going into the woods saved me as a child. Nature has always meant more to me than anything else. If I’m looking to be connected with Spirit, maybe I should be looking to Nature, as I do at the end of this piece of writing.

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“What have I done with my life?”

Last week, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I talked to the surgeon and liked her very much. I also trusted her. The surgery will happen at the end of this month. It sounds like it will be just a lumpectomy. But the confrontation with cancer forced me to look at death.

Feeling a need for some kind of spiritual support, and I think, having a sense of wanting to know whether what I’ve done with my life is worthwhile, I got out Stephen Cope’s book The Great Work of Your Life. One very important piece of advice about the “Great Work” is to work hard at your vocation, but let go of the outcome, of any need to “succeed” or be praised. I’ve actually managed to do that. I’m also amused that, having wanted to die so many times, even recently, suddenly I’m afraid of it. Cope tells the stories of famous people and ordinary people.

From my journal for Tuesday, March 5

I realize that being diagnosed with cancer, even tho it’s not a fatal kind, has left me feeling terrified of death.  While I walked Mocha, I talked to Death as he walked beside me, and he was friendly and kind.  “It’s just a transition” he said.  Maybe the fear is mostly coming from younger parts.

I also looked up the blog post where I talk about Erica telling me that I gave my life energy to sacred meaning, and my response was to feel that I could die because I had done what I wanted to.  That was back in October.  I do sometimes want to know that a lot of people are reading my blog, and then I let go of it.  The most satisfying thing is just putting the post out there.  And as for the other things that happen because I’m open to channelling Divine energy, I don’t need to know about them, and I don’t need people to know that I did it.  Of course I would like to know that I make good things happen in the world I love, but I don’t need to know.

Cope, talking about Keats:  This reframing of death is his final embrace of “the world as the vale of Soul-making.”  “Do you not see,” he wrote to George, “how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence, and make it a soul?  This school is a place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.”   pp152-3

What? Pain and trouble make a soul? I’ve certainly had plenty of pain and trouble in my life, and have I learned anything at all? Plus, so much of the pain was invisible: trauma before the age of three and severe depression for most of my life. I thought I was defective, I didn’t understand that I had been wounded. So I tried to fix myself, which doesn’t work. But I did start seeing a therapist in my 20’s, and I have been lucky and mostly had very good therapists. Though it took someone who knew how to work with both trauma and attachment to really get down to the bottom of what I was struggling with.

My alcoholic parents had wealth and status, and it hadn’t done them any good that I could see, so I was never interested in wealth and status. Possibly I was never interested in wealth and status because of who I was. But their drinking gave me no one older and wiser that I could trust, and unfortunately my image of God was that he was not any better, so I lost belief in Spirit very early. I did however still need meaning, so I looked for it in science, in dreams, and in my search for truth.

Since death has arrived in my life, I got out Elisabeth Kubler-Ross‘ book “The Tunnel and the Light.” I’ve read it more than once, but it was good to revisit it. A reminder that Death is just a transition, that the Universe is much bigger and more complex than our simplistic materialist worldview. I’m comforted by reading that as people approach death, they relax and seem to be looking forward to something. But these are stories told by others and not my own experience. I’ve never been with anyone as they died, and I’m hoping to sit with people here who are dying and have no families. There was supposed to be a training and it got cancelled because the person who would teach it left. I trust that it will happen again.

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Turning Toward What’s Difficult

I listened to a podcast of Tami Simon interviewing Tsultrim Allione, who started a Buddhist retreat center in Colorado, and did a lot of work to bring the feminine into Buddhism.  She talked about facing and incorporating the bad, a practice described as letting the demon eat you.  She described what she did when her husband died, which was to think of all the people who had lost someone they loved.  I realize that’s something I already do when I am feeling pain.  Thinking that I’m not the only one, that there are other people who feel as bad as I do or worse, really helps me not feel so alone with it.  I don’t think this is exactly what is meant by “letting the demon eat you.” I think that’s a more complete surrender to the pain, which I think I have been able to do with emotional pain, but not with physical pain.

I am beginning to feel really comforted by people like her and Thomas Hübl.  They describe a world that is much bigger than the one that most people live in, a world I certainly am not really in touch with.  But I find their knowledge of it convincing, so I trust that it is real, and just that is comforting.

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An “Emanation” of a Great Being

The Sounds True podcast of Tami Simon interviewing Lama Tsultrim Allione was quite amazing, in fact I’ve read the transcript more than once. Tsultrim Allione talks about being told she was an “emanation” of an 11th century Tibetan yogini named Machig Lahdrön. What does it mean to be an “emanation” of a great being?  She thinks of it as a job description.  She is “working for her,” not actually being her. She had been already doing it all of her life.  So now she could completely trust herself to know what she knows.

This reminds me of my experience with the Red Woman —

Written October 31, 1989 at Kripalu for Women & Yoga Workshop

During body work with Debra, I was telling her about Samhain, and she said people here would be interested in the sacred calendar.  She suggested that I come and do a workshop for the sisters, and I was so grateful at the thought that they might want me, that something/someone woke up in me.  Feeling the new energy in the room, Debra said “Who’s that?” but I didn’t know, I only had a sense of huge red wings.

Thinking about having this person wake up in me.  She is both me and not me, she is huge, she is a flame, a fountain, she has wings, and my life is dedicated to her service.  Is she my soul? God?  She seems much bigger than I ever imagined my soul to be, and at the same time she is much more personal and unique to me than I could ever imagine God.

The work that we do together is the geomantic healing of the planet earth.  I know the timing of the festivals and the steps of the dances, and the placement of the stones.

That’s part of what I wrote about when I had that experience of the Red Woman. It sounds a lot like being an “emanation” of a great being from the past. So when I built Neskaya, and taught dance and created ceremonies, I was doing her work.  But what happened when I came here?  Am I still doing her work in the world?  Possibly, even though I don’t feel like I did when I taught dance.  But what about when I say “may my presence be a blessing” and feel the energy flowing through?  I’m not “doing” it, but I am a channel for the divine energy.  I’m beginning to trust that it’s still flowing through me even when I can’t feel it.

Interestingly, I painted a red woman nine years later, at Painting from the Source with Aviva Gold, and it took me quite a while to make the connection.

I don’t imagine that the Red Woman is any kind of equal to a Tibetan yogini, or my work in the world anything as important as Tsultrim Allione’s creation of Tara Mandala Retreat Center.

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1996: Voices from the Dead

From workshop with Deena Metzger at Rowe, February 1996

“When we think of the voices within us we must include the dead.”
What dead are alive in you now?
What are stories about your relationship with the dead?   … your relationship to the ancestors?
Who is the person who is informed by the dead?

The names that come to mind are Chief Joseph, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum.  Anaïs Nin, May Sarton.  My father, my friend Ron.

The Diary of Anne Frank was what started me writing a journal. I was also influenced by the journals of Anaïs Nin and May Sarton. My friend Ron was a gay man who lived with me in my house in Brunswick for a while. My parents failed to teach me prejudice against homosexuals, so I was easily able to accept them. Ron moved to San Francisco and died of AIDS. One person I failed to mention was my great-grandmother, Jenny Murdoch, who came over from Scotland on a boat. The boat was caught in a terrible storm, and she fought her way up on deck crying out “If I mus’ dee, let me not dee in darkness.”

Why Chief Joseph?  The refusal to fight, the heartbreaking journey and attempt to save the people of the tribe.  I too retreated from oppression in a heart-breaking journey.  I too refused to fight, tried to rescue the wounded, watched them die in the snow.

Anne Frank.  She wrote to try to find her way through a horrific situation.  In adolescence, when life should be expanding, hers was contracted.  She wrote to tell us on the outside how it was.  I too write to try to tell those on the outside how it was, and hope that if the fascists wipe me out, something will still be published.  “Those of us who grew up in alcoholic and abusive families have lived with a level of stress that is equivalent to that of prisoner of war…”

Etty Hillesum.  She who could enjoy the fresh roses in her vase while simultaneously knowing that the people who passed her desk were on their way to the death camps.  Her valuing of Rilke’s poetry as a help in desperate times.  Her claiming of the whole thing, the good and the bad.  I know and admire her as one on a far peak that I want to reach but doubt that I will ever get to.

My father.  Reduced to essence?  I see a pedantic nerd who desperately wanted to be liked — the petty tyrant of my childhood — but there’s something there, some sense of honor narrowly defined, but still a guide.  He might have made more of it if he had stopped fighting the effects of drinking and fought the drink itself.  But I have some sense of honor that looks behind the surface to the cause, that insists on getting to the roots of things.

Ron — what stays with me from my friend?  — I think the moment when he told he that I was the most important person in his life.

Who is the person who is informed by the dead?  Mostly the journal writer, who writes to let the ones on the outside know what it’s like in here, who writes to make her own experience real (Anaïs Nin), who writes to process her inner life.  I don’t have much sense of ancestors, of a heritage from the past, of a connection with blood relationship.  I suppose if I did have ancestors they would be writers, especially those who write about inner experience.

It’s odd that I’ve arrived at the age of fifty with so few losses by death of people who were really important to me, living presences in my life.  Certainly May Sarton’s death means more than my father’s.  He was dead before he died.

Forgot the awakening of my Celtic roots through the dance.

“That these honored dead shall not have died in vain…”  The soldiers who died in Vietnam are my dead, the ones I feel most connected with.  Claire asks why.  I say because they were sent to fight a dirty war, without support or guidance, the leaders who should have been making wise decisions abandoned them to the swamps and the jungle.  Sometimes they couldn’t tell who the enemy was.  This resonates with my childhood in an alcoholic family.

Claire was someone I met at Woman’s Way. I talk about the soldiers in Vietnam in my script for Journey Into Courage.

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1996: Two Versions of Father’s Death

This is an exercise from the Workshop with Deena at Rowe in February 1996.  After identifying different selves Deena asks us to identify one story that two of your selves share:  I choose my father’s death, shared by the one who didn’t come to this workshop and the one who asks “How can I express all that is in me?” The story about my father’s death is actually the story of the last weekend I spent with him. That story is part of this blog, it’s a page called July 4th monologue.

One who didn’t come:

My father is dying of cancer.  My mother is too drunk to take care of him any longer.  I go home to help so he can have a last weekend at home before he goes back to the hospital for radiation.  I have trouble getting home, I can’t find enough to eat on the plane, I get shaky running from one plane to the other in Pittsburgh.  I have brought my medicine and vitamin B6 and acidophilus with me.  Mother is not very sympathetic.  I know I can’t take care of Dad, he has a colostomy bag and a complex series of medications.  I call for help and get nurses to come round-the-clock.  Mother is angry about it.  I try not to let it bother me but focus on seeing that Daddy is comfortable.  I can’t sleep at night.  I hear the chiming clock ring the hours until 2AM and then am shocked awake at 6AM.  I take a message from the doctor and then forget to deliver it.  I have to cook meals for myself because I can’t eat processed food.  I wash the frying pan and put it on the burner and turn on the burner to dry it.  Minutes or hours later I walk into the kitchen and find the burner bright red.  I am confused, who turned it on?  It had to be me, there’s no one else, but I can’t remember.  I’m terrified by the failure of my short-term memory, what important thing have I forgotten.  I feel like I’m going through this in a fog.  I call my aunt for help, when I hear the voice of a sympathetic responsible adult I burst into tears.  She is very supportive.  I talk to my brother, tell him I’m really having trouble with my health — he says “get outta there, sis.”  As my father is taken to the hospital, he looks straight in my eyes and says “Thank you.”

One who wants to express:

My father is dying of cancer.  My mother is too drunk to take care of him any longer.  I go home to help so he can have a last weekend before he goes back to the hospital for radiation.  I don’t believe the way they are behaving.  My father drinks the whole time, he’s continually sipping a little glass of vodka, though he can’t get food past the obstruction in his throat.  I refuse to deal with the colostomy bag, so I get free lance nurses to help out.  Mother keeps complaining about the nurses, no matter what I suggest she makes me wrong, she makes constant cruel remarks.  I write it all down, it’s the only way I can stay sane.  I feel like I’m in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf rolled into one.  I’m writing as fast as I can, as though taking dictation from a master dramatist.  In my wildest dreams I couldn’t come up with dialogue like this.  Mom & Dad fight about the nurses, about paying the bills, about what to watch on TV.  My last evening with Dad, he spends most of it worrying about what happened to one of the plastic flasks that he wants to fill with vodka and take to the hospital with him.  When he’s out of earshot, Mother says “I don’t understand why he has to go for more radiation.”  The nurse says “It might ease the pain.”  Mother says “But why do that?”  I want to smack her.  She says “If he just stopped being fed…”  I almost ask if she’s going to take responsibility for stopping his food but stop myself.  But I feel like an avenging fury.  I want to grab her and shake her till her teeth rattle and yell that she’s talking about murder.  Feeling the need for help, I call Aunt Betty.  I’m sick of carefully editing my conversation.  I tell her they’re behaving like infants.  I say I had to get the nurses in the house because neither Dad nor Mom would take responsibility.  She is shocked.  She tells me to go home and let them fight it out.  As my father is being taken away to the hospital, he looks directly in my eyes and says “Thank you.”

Is there some understanding I missed from the first character?  Only what a daze she was in, how hard it was to take care of herself in this chaotic environment, how shut down she had to be.  Desperately trying to do the dutiful daughter.     ??    But does she see this?  I don’t think so.

And from the second person?  O I am so angry at those two jerks.  Their precious precious lives, wasted in an alcoholic stupor.  Their marriage degenerated into a battle for control.  This is no way to finish a life, to finish a marriage.       Deena says “That’s because you know a better way to do it.”

Well, there’s my anger.  I really am angry at my mother and I didn’t know it til I wrote this piece.

I am interested now, reading this, to see that I wrote it, just like the original, in the first person, in the present tense, do not use the word “and.”  I notice that I occasionally call my father “Daddy,” but I never call my mother “Mommy.” One thing I don’t say, in either version, was that when Daddy said “Thank you,” his last words to me, he had an expression in his eyes I’d never seen before. The only words I could find were “His whole soul came into his eyes.”

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1996: How Can I Express the Totality of What’s in Me?

This was written in a workshop with Deena Metzger in February 1996.  One of the exercises was to find the right form of the question “I am the woman who asks…”  Quite a bit of work to find the right one, but so powerful when we did find it.

Going around the room, everybody saying “I am the one who asks…”   What wonderful diversity.  Some were still working to clarify.  Wonderful shifts as they got it right —— From “I design my life” to “I remember who I really am.”  Deena says imagine if everyone in the country were able to make that shift.

I am the woman who asks how can I express the totality of what is in me?

I cut myself and wrote with the blood.  Before that I tried to find safety in relationships with men.  Before that I read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and took Deborah as my role model.  Before that, I felt enormous passion for truth, for beauty, but could find no outlet.  Before that I studied science into a dead end, I broke out into cutting little bits of colored paper and [writing/crossed out] pasting them down.  I danced, but I did not dance my full joy or my full pain.  I lit the stage for others but did not appear myself.  I started a journal but wrote in the style of a pedantic schoolgirl.  Before that my aunt gave me a book which at first I filled out dutifully, but then found too limiting and filled with teenage scorn.  Yes, there were massive outpourings of misery, and cold grey adolescent poems.  But everything was molded in reaction or rebellion, nothing came that felt like the sweet outpouring of a spring, or the quiet opening of a flower.

When I began to write with blood, the artist in me was so stifled and starved she did not know that she existed.  Every effort I made, to write, to paint  —— o but there was the painting of Thanatos, the dark angel, still with me, still powerful —  but so much else felt hopelessly inadequate, felt like it did not begin to give release to all that was stirring in my heart.  And at the same time, or perhaps for that reason, my efforts at writing and painting were restricted by the fear of others judgements or by the desperate effort to find some way to express myself that someone would finally listen to and understand.

Was the writing in blood my first authentic expression?  (There’s blood in Thanatos.)  Perhaps it was.  I no longer cared about reading anyone else, I was just desperate to get what was inside me out, and this was the most direct route.

Writing continued, writing grew stronger and deeper, writing became a spiritual practice, a river in flood.  Writing saved me.  No longer a few words in blood — quoted from someone else — WHO IF I CRIED OUT WOULD HEAR ME — but different pens, endless notebooks, dialogues with Tarot cards, writing my dreams.

Science, the right-hand way, which I had studied and then found too limiting, became the means by which I could create a format where there was room for all the many voices to speak.  Not only a book but a slide show, a multi-media presentation.

Dance had its own thread, equally convoluted, winding through folk dance and yoga to authentic movement and the discovery that poetry is dance.  Then I added painting, and dialogue with images, the discovery that drumming is dance, the performance in which I sewed carefully, meditatively, like one of the fates.

How can I express all that is in me?  The planetarium was part of it, theater pieces choreographed for sun moon and planets, explanations as carefully written as poems so that they would be both technically correct and intelligible to school children.

Now I work with voice, to speak my story in the present tense, to wail and lament the pain of my lost childhood.  I sing in the car, old songs, celtic laments, singing out the pain in my heart, singing my love of trees and rocks to the landscape.

And I’m back to writing, with ballpoint pen, in yet another notebook, so like the spiral notebook I started writing in so many years ago.

So amazing to find this piece of writing.  The only thing that’s missing is Neskaya.  I also fail to mention the importance of science in my search for truth.

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The Traumatized Baby

This is a repost of something first posted in July 2010.  So amazing.  Here I am working with parts before I had any idea about the Internal Family Systems work. It’s also how I’ve been feeling this week: “I feel so bleak and despairing and empty. …  I feel so bereft.  My life stretches out in front of me like a bleak grey wasteland.” I have to tell myself again and again “This is not current reality. This is the past. You are not stuck here. Your job is to reach out to the frozen traumatized one with compassion.”

(Written in June 2004)

In a session of the “Wave Work” at Kripalu: there was a confusing struggle with my body’s tendency to cramp up (esp left hand) and kick, shake, jump.  Finally I let it shrivel up into a crippled, spastic child (I could see the starving baby from my collage book) — and it felt, not exactly good, but valid, solid, like this is who I really am.  I stayed with it for a while, feeling huge compassion for that shriveled, spastic, starving baby.

Later came a sense of “wrong” — “Who’s saying it?” They are, mom & dad.  Then I got angry and started to growl & she said “Let it get big” — and it got huge, a shell of fire expanding outward.  I felt safe inside it.  The wounded child guarded by Tigress Mother Durga.  I could feel both at once and like the baby really was safe, and fiercely defended, and OK just as she was.  As I stayed with the picture, the limbs of the baby began to plump up — tho her skin was grey black.  At that point Helah said I was integrating and just to stay with the feelings of huge compassion.

Told Karen about the Wave Work, about being the baby — then about feelings of resistance and disgust to the idea of taking care of myself.  She said it was OK to have those feelings.  We explored the reality — that it’s not an infant that requires 24-hour a day care.  When I paid attention to the infant I got that what she needed was just my presence, my attention, my willingness to be with her, and to see her correctly.  OF COURSE!  She’s not a physical baby but an emotional one, she doesn’t need physical nurturing so much as  emotional nourishing — and I can do that.  I told Karen that this time being with the baby was different — I felt compassion go out to her, but not that I had to fix it or make it better.  Karen said she could tell that, that in the past I had seen the baby as a ‘chore’, a ‘burden’.  (which of course is how mother saw me).

(Written in December 2004)

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m having a hard time.  I feel so bleak and despairing and empty.  At least I’ve been able to cook & eat breakfast, make phone calls, wash dishes.  But I feel so bereft.  My life stretches out in front of me like a bleak grey wasteland.  Please help me.
Dear Jenny, we love you a lot.  This is a difficult passage you are going through, but it is a passage.  You will get through it.  There is life on the other side, never fear.  It’s going to be OK, it really is going to be OK.  It’s OK for the moment to sit with this level of despair.  This is truly the experience of a baby who has been left alone by her mother.  She can’t take care of herself, all she can do is wait to be rescued.  The longer rescue does not come, the more everything looks utterly hopeless.  There, there, dear.  Imagine yourself holding the baby who is so frozen and scared — too frozen to be able to feel your presence.  And we are around you, holding you as you hold her.

(Written in December 2005)

The hopelessness and helplessness feel so HUGE. I say to myself “These are the feelings of a baby who’s been left alone too long.”  At the moment I’m feeling, overwhelmingly, “Nothing I do makes any difference.” I can see that’s the baby’s experience, but it doesn’t bring any change.

When I don’t have a Neskaya/Circle Dance activity, when I’m alone in my house, then I fall into the lost baby — hopeless and helpless, who will die if no one rescues her.

(Written in January 2006)

Bleak.  Cold stony wasteland bleak. This hard cold stoniness is not who I am.  It is the product of trauma and adverse brain chemistry.  This is what a baby feels when she has been left too long by her mother.  The hard cold stoniness is a defense, and it’s also how the world feels when mother is gone: no hope, no warmth, no love. My job is just to stay with her long enough for her to get it that I really am here for her.  Until she gets that, my attempts at self-soothing aren’t going to work.  So I need to just sit next to her, with kindness, reassurance and patience, understanding that her anger and rejection and mistrust are because of her pain at being left for so long.  I know and understand that pain.

Somewhere in here, I had an experience of committing myself to the traumatized baby. I didn’t write it down so I don’t know exactly when it happened.  I was imagining a war zone, wrecked buildings, burning cars, dead bodies, a few people wandering dazedly around, smoke drifting, colors all grey and black except for the fires.  I see a shriveled dark grey baby lying on a garbage can.  I think of picking her up, but I realize the orphanage has been bombed.  There’s nowhere to take her.  If I pick her up I’m stuck with her for the rest of my life.  I spend a moment wondering if I really do want to take on this task.  Then I pick her up.

Saw Deborah St. Cyr for acupuncture yesterday.  Told her about the feeling in my chest, and that if I said to myself “It’s a traumatized baby” then everything softened and it was easier to be with the fear.  When she started putting needles in, she said something about “strengthening the container.” That reminded me of Beth’s sculpture and the one I had wanted to make and how I had seen that the heart was shielded because it needed to heal, and then the heart needed to connect with the baby, not turn outward again.  Then it came to me — the baby is in the heart!  That’s why the heart is all grey like the baby was.  That was very exciting — it’s not the grey of stuckness, degeneration and death, it’s the grey of a frozen traumatized baby.  Even writing it down I can feel the shift — from being angry at myself for waking scared again to compassion for the terrified frozen baby, and willingness to stay with it as long as it takes.
And if it takes the rest of my life, I’m willing to do that.  It’s amazing that I care so much about this baby, who is me, as though the baby were the earth, or all the babies traumatized by war, and not Jenny who I’ve never thought was worth that much focus and effort.  But the baby doesn’t seem like “me”, more like the task I’ve been given and I’m willing to take it on.  My work to heal this traumatized fragment of the universe is meaningful.  And I think one thing that’s helped this shift is Sharon Salzberg quoting the Buddha as saying there’s no one more worthy of your love in the whole universe than yourself.

Note: Karen Collins is a therapist I worked with for many years and still talk to occasionally. Also, some of this post was published just 5 months ago. It seems more relevant than ever now as I struggle with being almost overwhelmed with very young, despairing, non-verbal parts.

Posted in Guidance, Healing, Trauma, Work with parts | Comments Off on The Traumatized Baby

Talk with Youngest Part

At least I think/feel it’s the youngest. She can’t talk so I have to sense her feelings. I was reading James Hollis’s book What Matters Most, and got to the part where he talks about doing what your soul wants to do, not what your family/culture have taught you to do. So I asked: What does my soul want to do at Kendal?  At the moment the work with parts looks like the only thing.  I’ve lost dance, I can’t see myself doing astronomy, that leaves therapy and the blog. I decided to work with the one I feel is the youngest. So young, she’s non-verbal, so I have to sense her replies.

From my journal for Saturday, February 17

Thinking about working with younger parts. I feel an ache in my heart.   No, I want to learn and grow, explore something bigger.   You’ve tried that and they were too big, concepts beyond your experience or ability to understand. What’s wrong with working with parts? It’s been interesting, and brought the good feeling of connecting.

Then I think of the baby, the really young one. I think I need to try to be with that one.

I have the rock that signifies the youngest one. I’m holding it to my heart. I feel that she’s scared.“Yes, but I am here and I’ve got you. It’s OK to be scared, but what happened happened long ago, and someone came and fed you and you didn’t die. I’m here now, and what I want to do is help you to feel safe enough that you can stop being afraid and pay attention to where you are now. We are in a retirement community where we are well taken care of on the physical level.”

Jenny: I want to tell you about my life. It’s been hard. I lived with severe depression for most of it. I did manage to accomplish some worthwhile things, but it has been hard to see their worth. I still have to remind myself, and mostly I don’t feel it, though I can see it intellectually. Yes, I still have a long way to go.
How are you doing?

Baby: starting to feel warm.

Me: good.  My dog left, scared of ice falling off the roof, so I feel a little bereft, but I’m glad you’re here.
Can I tell you a story?

Baby: assents

Me: I went to a women’s retreat, and at some point I shared with some enthusiasm about writing a journal and how much I learned. Toward the end of the retreat, I started feeling uncomfortable and raised my hand to indicate I wanted to work with the facilitator. She had me lie down and relax. Asked what I wanted to work on. I said “Maybe it’s not that important…” She said “I don’t want to listen to your head.” So I relaxed again and the word “woman” came swimming up. “Maybe it’s about being a woman since that’s why I’m here.” I was quiet for a bit and started feeling uncomfortable. So I said “I’m uncomfortable.” More quiet. Then I realized it was because the day before I had talked about my journal. “Maybe that wasn’t OK.” The facilitator said “Why don’t you ask them?” So I sat up and looked at the other women and asked  “Was it OK that I talked about my journal?” They said “Yes!”  “It was very interesting.” “It was inspiring.” I started to cry. I asked “You mean it wasn’t bragging?” They said no. When I wrote about this incident in my journal I called my reaction “childish,” I think still trying to apologize for myself. It was only much later, after a lot of work in therapy, I realized that Mother had told me over and over “Don’t think you’re so great.” It was her worst criticism for someone. I was afraid I was conceited.

But years later, I was talking to a therapist, with some enthusiasm, about astronomy and the universe. I saw an imaginary plane fly by on my right side, pulling a banner with the words “…THINK YOU’RE SO GREAT.” I said to Mother “I don’t think I’m great, I think the Universe is great.” The therapist said she’d never heard me speak from such a strongly embodied place. I realized that Mother had always felt threatened and jealous and that’s why she said that. It helped a lot to see that. If Mother was threatened and jealous, then maybe what I was saying had some value after all.

That’s a story about how I realized that Mother was wrong. And she was wrong when she left you alone. She didn’t know that it would hurt you, she just felt the burden of being a mom was too much. It wasn’t about you at all.

I feel the baby’s surprise.

Me: “No, it really wasn’t about you, didn’t mean you were bad.” I feel the baby relax.

I was surprised to find myself saying “It wasn’t about you at all” and that it was a relief to the baby. Painful to see how early that belief about not pleasing Mom set in. On the other hand, after I finished this talk with the part, I felt really good, grounded, connected in some important way.

Posted in Healing, Journal, Present Day, Work with parts | Comments Off on Talk with Youngest Part