I haven’t been able to post anything for a while. I went back to the dashboard and found several drafts, which I can post now.
From my journal for August 2, 1996
In the summer of ’96 I am starting to have a harder and harder time with fear. It lasts much longer.
Dear lord of love, please help me get through this day. Please take away the fear, or give me the strength to bear it. Please heal my wounded heart. Please help me learn how to take in the love that’s available to me in the environment and from my friends.
At Leylia’s after colonic. Fear still holds me in its grip. I feel like my senses are shut down, I’m blind and deaf, can see the world but only take in a very little. Like my wounded heart, tied up in knots, shut against love. I told Leylia the only thing that seemed to affect the Fear was when I was able to cry, be in touch with my grief. She said grief is the heart chakra, it’s the heart opening. Then I found this in The Rosemary Tree: “If you’ve lost the power of love you’ve lost the power of grief. Hold on and the tide will turn.” “Hold on to what?” asked Miss Giles. “To grief,” said John. p299
But I continue to have a lot of difficulty being able to feel my grief. Maybe it’s the problem that if you have something and lost it, you know what you lost. But if you never got something you should have had e.g. physical cuddling as a baby, Then you don’t know what you lost and it’s hard to grieve. There’s so much I didn’t get in my childhood, emotional support, tenderness, forgiveness, I think it’s only when I got support and tenderness from Erica that I started to cry because I realized what I hadn’t gotten.
The Rosemary Tree is another novel by Elizabeth Goudge.
I realize that I’ve been neglecting my inner infant for the sake of trying to be there for Dana. I turn back to her with that grim sense of not wanting to be there for that pain, it reminds me of when I had to turn away from “beautiful, courageous, interesting” Lynelle and pay attention to “garbage” Jenny. I see that I can’t see the baby — so fragile and vulnerable, so wounded, so full of the power of loving, so much closer to god than I am. Instead I see the adult who seems to be making such a mess of things, who can’t keep her promises to the baby, who can’t take care of herself, who can’t be a lover to Dana, who’s closed down by fear. I’m so angry at her for being such a wimp and a failure. Then I think it’s unfair to be angry at her — she’s doing the best she can — but I get stuck there. Maybe I need to forgive her. “There, there, Jenny dear, you are trying so hard, working so hard, struggling so much. You are doing the best you can do. You are doing everything you think might help. Of course I forgive you for mistakes made and effort wasted — for “disappearing” Dana last winter — for being so needy — for spending money we don’t have on acupuncture and colonics that don’t seem to have helped very much. You are forgiven, you are forgiven.”
O gosh I see how hard I am on myself. That’s one thing I’ve mostly been able to let go of. I’m much better at forgiving myself than I used to be.