(Written in September 2008)
A little better this morning. My heart still hurts but I’m not experiencing the same depth of despair. Yesterday I was reading Nancy Napier’s chapter on despair where she talks about sending a line of light from your heart toward the lost infant. When I did that I saw that the infant was enclosed in a shell — like a walnut shell, round and wrinkled — a thick hard shell, and the shell with the infant inside it is in my heart. The shell can’t be cracked open, it’s hard and thick, it will have to be dissolved. So I set myself to the task of holding it patiently, gently, softening around it, surrounding it with gentle light, and just waiting. This is something I can do. Some time in the last week I had an image of my heart — it looked battered and bruised — it looked very like the wrinkled dark shell around the baby except that it was soft.
Right. I have two vocations. One is Neskaya and circle dance and the other is learning to love and patiently be present to the traumatized infant.
Napier: “Deep in your psyche, outside conscious awareness, is the urge to heal, to reclaim your whole self — to be free of the confines of a troubled and unprocessed past.” p24
Just opened to that passage. It’s really helpful — something eases inside. She also talks about that on the tape — the strength, the wholeness, the possibilities that are still there. Yesterday, listening to a tape on creating safety, she talks about a safe place inside with a room where all the parts can gather together. She talks about the “Future Self” which I think is also the Higher Self and for me that’s also the person who came so alive last summer. I see a room, almost a cave, with different levels and platforms and nooks. The Future/Higher Self is sitting on a chair across from me, beaming love my way. Napier talks about “Helper” parts and “Caretaker” parts who help take care of the younger parts. I see two, dressed in green, helping care for the babies. They are like Peter Pan or Puck. There was also a Tinkerbell figure. I’ll put on the Napier tape. “There’s always room for every feeling … Whenever a healing process is activated you are likely to feel a mix of feelings: relief and pain, anticipation and dread.”
Nancy Napier’s book Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children has been an enormous help to me. Her tapes as well.