I’m finding it fascinating that there are so many passages in 2005 that resonate for me now: the loss and grief and pain, the depth of the wound that’s been opened, the way the meaning drains out of my life. I can see that I’m so much better now, how quickly I recover, how clear I’m able to be that this pain is not about the person who triggered it, it’s about the wounding that smashed my life at the very beginning.
(Written in November 2005)
A visit with Eleanor, my friend who also lives with PTSD. I told her about my struggles with the issue of being “grateful for the gift of life.” I said it made me angry because the “gift” had come to me smashed and I’d spent my whole life trying to mend it. She said she felt the same way.
Read through this whole notebook yesterday & today. It covers a HUGE passage from pain about David to feeling much better about my life. Talking with Eleanor about not being able to feel “grateful for our lives”, I see that we have taken on a greater task than just incarnating on the planet. We are here to try to turn the suicidal momentum of Industrial Western Civilization, and the only way to do that is to go straight to the root of it which is the abused, traumatized psyche. So we had to be abused, so that we could work on healing the abuse in our own bodies and minds because that’s the only place where we really have the power to heal. Everything else: working to save the ANWR, or clean up a river, or recycle garbage, is just working to support a natural process from the outside. The healing we do within is what really changes the human energy field.
I’m in a place of knowing —knowing that my work at Neskaya is important, knowing that I love Eleanor, knowing that my creativity is what will keep me out of depression — but I don’t feel any of this. It’s like my heart is defended. Defended and held up by walls of what? Knowing, I guess, solid intellectual knowing, so I won’t collapse like I did last Wednesday, but I’m also not in touch with the part of me that’s so lost, so far away. How does that feel in my body? Actually, it’s the container I felt with Brad: my body— arms, legs, torso, is warm and solid and alive — and my heart is tight and cold and numb. And that’s how it is at the moment. I can live with this only because I’m sure it’s not forever.
A sense of deep gratitude to my body for being able to hold me in this way.
Brad was my Somatic Experiencing practitioner for about a year. He was very good, but alas, he moved to California and never came back.