Intention

Posted on September 25, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2006)
I’m feeling a bit scattered.  I’m thinking one thing I could do is make a drawing of my life — the pieces that are scattered — and then what is the center around which they could re-align?  I’ve been reading Pat Allen, Art is a Spiritual Practice, and finding it inspiring.  The last time I tried to read it, it scared me, felt like something I really couldn’t do.  She talks about intention — and how important it is to set an intention — so I’ve been thinking about that this morning.  What is my intention for my life?  I want to live with awareness and compassion, to do God’s will, or to move in alignment with the Great Powers, or to help all beings grow in awareness and compassion, or to be part — to do my part — in all things working together for good.  Secondary to that is my healing work on myself, and whatever I can do to support the healing process of others, and to live as lightly on the earth as I can — or to use the gifts of Earth/Nature with reverence and appreciation.  Where does art come in?  Part of my healing process, part of how I support others — “art” meaning more specifically work in the studio with colors and textures — and the other “art” is what I do at Neskaya and that’s a way that I can support healing our connections with each other and with the earth.

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Being with the Baby

Posted on September 24, 2011 by jenny

(Written in June 2004)
Told Karen 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).

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Don’t Want to Live

Posted on September 23, 2011 by jenny

(Written in June 2004)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m having a pretty bad time.  I wanted to die this morning — I’m just sick & tired of being Jenny — she’s too much burden and not enough reward.  Please help me.
    Dear Jenny, relax.  Breathe.  Feel the couch and the floor holding you up.  You are held up — by the Ocean of Compassion which is there for you.  We are all around you, too.  Supporting you.  It’s OK to let yourself rest on this support.  It’s OK to stop trying to hold yourself up.  It’s OK to let yourself down into that place of not wanting to live.  This is the real courage, to face this darkness, not trying to make it go away.  We know, and you know, that you are not going to kill yourself.  So it’s OK to be here.  It’s OK to rest here.  You will die some day, and lay down the burden of being Jenny.  You can lay down the burden now.  Let us carry it for a while.  Dear dear Jenny, you are needed here on the planet at this time.  Even with all your wounds.  Your wounds are not yours but the earth’s.  You do not need to do anything more than bring compassion to your wounded self.  And when you can’t do that, when you are angry and hating yourself for “not doing better” we are still here, you are still held in compassion.  It’s OK to be angry at yourself for “not doing better” — see! The moment you become conscious of it, it changes.  Of course you have compassion for this woman who is hating herself for being deeply wounded.  How could you not?  Your heart went out to your mother when she said “I’m not liking myself very much right now.” You are the hardest person for you to open your heart to: your own worst enemy, your heaviest burden, the “least of these”.  But you are doing it.  You are doing the work.  You never quit.  Being courageous enough to sit with yourself in the “don’t want to live” place IS the work.  Well done, dear.

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Tough Day

Posted on September 22, 2011 by jenny

(Written in June 2004)
Rough day yesterday.  A lot of fear & sense of alienation from my life.  A beautiful day but I wasn’t really present to it, etc.  A lot of pain about the ecological crisis, letter from Barbara Kingsolver about the animal species headed for extinction, the potential disaster of global warming — and feeling bad again about my house, so unsustainably built — It occurred to me this morning that my house is like me — a mixed bag of creativity and health and disfunction.  I can love it, even tho it’s not “perfect” — I can even love its “imperfection” as I love the battered and starved baby just as she is.  Can I love myself too, love my mistakes and unconsciousness?  I feel a softening, tears coming.  Dear Jenny, I do love you, I love your brilliances and your mistakes, your creativity and your inhibitions, your passion and your blindness — you are doing the best you can with a truly difficult set of factors.

“Shamans know that those wounds are not their own but the world’s.” (Matthew Fox)

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Wanting to Live my “Big Life”

Posted on September 16, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
I’m scared again, scared that I will never come out of this.  Yesterday I could see that I’m being able to talk about what’s going on for me and to ask for help — I think this is new and also that the cracking of my protective armor might well leave me feeling vulnerable and scared.  How will I take care of myself if I don’t come out of this?   Well. I’ve taken care of myself so far — everything that had to be done has gotten done, either I did it, or I asked for help.
ONE DAY AT A TIME.
Lately I’ve been feeling like I could say angry things to Mom — angry and true things.  I also felt, yesterday, how angry I am at myself for not being able to pull out of this.  I try to feel compassion for myself and I can’t do that either.

So what am I seeing?  This woman who felt over-confident last summer — “I can do it now” — who was wanting to expand her life and learn new things, who really thought she was healed of the hurts of the past and wanted to make up for lost time — wanted to live some of the bigger life that she might have had if she hadn’t been so damaged by trauma and depression.  She really wanted to live that bigger life, and she also didn’t like being on medication — it feels dishonest to her.  So she tried to “do it all”.  Now her actions look incredibly stupid and misguided, especially the house which she should never have started — she should have chosen a simple house plan that could be completed quickly and easily.  She should have thought about the environmental stuff.  She’s bad, selfish, greedy.     “Your creative actions come from the heart.” No, she is not bad, selfish and greedy.  That is Mother’s judgement.  She is a creative person whose creativity has been held in check most of her life by depression and the traumas of childhood.  When her mother died and she inherited a lot of money, her creativity expanded too fast for her skills in staying grounded and asking for help.  The house project was set in motion during this time.  Now she has crashed badly, for a variety of reasons.  She tried to get off the medication. She celebrated herself with a party and she made some big changes in her investments — this is majorly moving against old family injunctions.  As is letting her creativity get big.  What she’s going through now may be backlash from having allowed herself to “live her big life.”
The same thing happened with the building of Neskaya — while it was being built she was so disabled by fear and depression that she had to leave the whole project in the hands of others.  All she could do was keep affirming, in the teeth of her fear, that yes, she wanted it to be built.  Once it actually existed, it turned out to be the perfect setting for the flowering of her creativity.  So, dear, trust that the same thing will happen with the house — that it will turn out to be “exactly right” for what needs to happen next.

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Compassion

Posted on September 15, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
Dream: we’re all in a car coming up Park Road, Daddy driving.  He goes past the driveway & we tell him & he complains that we should have made sounds when he got to the mailbox so he’d know where the driveway was.  As he starts up the driveway I realize that he’s blind, and we’re all letting him drive.
Woke about 5:30.  Fear & heat.  A lot of heat in my heart.  Asked for mercy.  Put on relaxation tape.  Still awake at the end so I started the Pema Chodron tape on “joyful exertion” but found it too difficult.  & finally turned it off.  She talked about 3 kinds of laziness: 1) comfort-seeking 2) losing heart 3) not caring at all.  It’s clear that I’m dealing with 2)   O but it’s not about pushing through.  It’s about getting to know your resistance — not acting it out, not repressing it.  So to look at my loss of heart as a witness.  Mercy, mercy.  Not trying to make it be different.  There’s a softening in my heart.  Holy Mother Mary, have mercy on me.  Have mercy on me.  I will be gentle with myself.  There, there, dear.
I keep seeing a young mother with her new baby — she’s angry and unhappy, she wasn’t prepared for this neediness, she’s all alone, and she doesn’t want to face her anger and unhappiness, so she treats the baby roughly, yells at her for crying, maybe even slaps her. Then she feels terrible, cries and sobs while holding the baby, then goes off to comfort herself with alcohol. And fails to return to the baby for hours.  I can feel compassion for both of them.  I can see that the stoniness of heart that I’m struggling to be with is the stoniness of a mother in denial (she may even be dealing with post-partum depression — her husband is away at a war for god’s sake, and she’s all alone in that big house — and she’d never be able to admit her depression) and the stoniness of the poor baby’s despairing helplessness.
I’m feeling so much compassion for Mom.  Totally unexpected.  This is a true place.

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Too Hard

Posted on September 14, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
I can’t do this.  It’s just too hard.  I did the bank deposit & went downtown, shopped, got mail — all with my heart like a stone, body frozen in fear.  Put on Oratorium, collapsed on the floor.  Got in touch with the pain, moved a little in the music for Shoror, then just collapsed again.  It’s too hard being alone with this.  I’m willing to do the process but when I try it on my own I just bog down in depression.
I need to find some support right around here.  What would help?  Someone who’s willing to be with me while I’m in the pain and not try to fix it.  Someone who could listen and empathize if I need to talk.  Someone who supports me in staying in touch with my feelings and being able to speak them in the moment.

I’m feeling totally bummed out.  I’ve lost my courage.  I find myself wondering what one does with a beloved dog if/when one commits suicide.
Well, I can feel a toughness stiffening me, thank god.  Yes, this is a war zone, and I fear that the things I love are going under: beauty and peace, co-operation and consideration and compassion, tenderness and mercy — and our beautiful planet with its richness of biodiversity, and our beautiful human family with its richness of music and dance and costume and food, its many names for God and different ways to contact Spirit.  And I know that the physical vehicles of all this richness and beauty are doomed to death and disintegration.  So then the only things that last are the creative joy that brings them to birth, and the compassion that witnesses all suffering.  Therefore I hold on to my faith in the realm of Spirit, despite the fact that I can’t feel it, I hold on to my need for authenticity and compassion, despite the fact that I can’t feel the compassion.  And I try to live with some dignity in this horrific world, sometimes collapsing in abject fear, sometimes continuing to make cups of tea though the bombs are falling.
I think what I’m most afraid of is the long slow disintegration, the erosion of my courage in niggling struggles like the one at the supermarket, with no clear crisis that calls out my courage and helps bring people together, but instead just this horror of things getting more and more difficult and we all keep struggling in isolation, getting overwhelmed one by one and going under…    That’s the fear.

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Guidance for Scared & Sad

Posted on September 13, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
Dear Spirits, please help me.  I’m so scared and sad.
Dear Jenny, the sadness is grief for losses of the past, and you are afraid it will never change.  Dear one, it changes all the time.  Relax.  We love you and we are gathered around you right now.  It’s good to move with your fear and sadness, and it’s also OK to do nothing.  This is a long journey, a process, and what’s most important is the compassion you are able to bring to yourself.  Try to observe yourself without judgement.  We see a woman who is sad and scared, and who is making herself wrong for being this way.  But this is just how it is right now.  Of course you don’t want to feel like this, it is painful, and the stuck quality triggers panic and helplessness.  Remember that you can “do” stuck — but we see that this idea is not helpful right now.  “Stuck” is being very scary for you.  You are like that baby who is down in the well — a process is in motion to bring you out of it, and it’s OK to wait with patience.  There, there, dear, we are so sorry you are having such a hard time.

Everything feels impossible right now.  I don’t know what to do.  It’s OK to not know what to do. It’s OK to wait in the place of not knowing.
There is a process in motion.
My intent is to heal by facing into my fear, grief, and despair,
and to be open to what they have to teach me.

Feeling how torn apart, or double-bound, I am by the two voices/energies.  1) I want to face into my feelings and really feel them, I am willing to do this, willing to feel the pain, I offer myself to this process.   2) I wouldn’t be depressed if I had something to do so I should just keep busy, there’s plenty of housework, etc.
Well there’s certainly more energy for choice 1.  When I think about making myself do laundry I just feel sick and weak and weighted with lethargy.  But when I try to face into the pain I just feel helpless — the helplessness is so painful.  I think of being a baby whose mother doesn’t come.
But how to be with the feelings?  There must be women in Iraq feeling as hopeless and helpless as I do right now: facing another day of the struggle to find food for the children, to keep them warm, to keep them from running out into danger, trying not to think of the bomb that might fall or the machine gun that might rip through the village, grieving the deaths of loved ones, caught in the pain of not knowing what’s happened to others, worrying about what kind of future there will be for my children…   Writing that seems to ease it — maybe I don’t feel so alone with it.  I suppose it’s a little like tonglen — breathing in the world’s sorrows.  There must be women in New Hampshire — in Gorham where the mill closed, wives whose husbands have lost their jobs. Struggling to feed their family (on what? Welfare?) to keep the house clean, trying to stay cheerful, worrying about the refrigerator that’s on its last legs — we can’t buy a new one now — and how will we pay our fuel bills…   And the children feeling hopeless and frightened, facing another day of humiliation at school, another night of sexual abuse, coming home to find Mom unconscious on the couch, afraid that Dad will get violent again…   So much pain.  And then all the people with chronic or fatal illnesses — the woman last night with chronic fatigue, Judy with her throat tumor, Lynelle struggling with her joint pains and her painful hands…   Then I think of Mom & Dad and their lonely deaths, Mom especially trapped in her pitiful isolation, and me and Dana, supposedly loving each other but feeling more and more distant as our lives diverged — and I want to scoop up all these people and cuddle them like frightened children and say “Everything’s going to be all right” — but do I believe that?  Where is the Ocean of Compassion?  Are we all resting in the hands of god?  I know this at some level even when I’m feeling most despairing.  I know that our pain-filled world is held within compassion.

So then what is my despair about?  It’s about not knowing what to do.  So if I sit here, with this pain in my heart, and I know compassion holds all of us so I don’t have to do something about the pain right now — then what do I do next?
The next thing is to make rice cream for breakfast.

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Deep in the Pit

Posted on September 12, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
I feel dazed and trapped in a small space, unable to move.  It feels like there is shaking or quivering in my upper body that’s just on the edge of happening.  Tried dancing but it didn’t help, my energy is still caught in my upper body.  Tried reading, tried lying down.  Reading is meaningless and painful, lying down is not restful.  Finally drove up to Gov Gallen & walked to the picnic table with Bella.  Tried to be in the present, pay attention to my feet but not very successful.

Feel like everything I’ve done in my life is wrong, Neskaya is a big mistake, a waste of time and money, and so is the house.  What does that feel like in my body?  My upper body is full of trapped electrical zingy prickly energy.  It’s agitated with nowhere to go.  Trapped in by something like armor.  My legs don’t feel like muscle & bone they feel like dead fiber, dry dull bland tasteless.  No energy, no fluidity.  What does the electrical prickly energy want?  To be held and comforted, to be reassured that everything’s all right, that it doesn’t have to do anything and can relax.  There is no need for action right now, it is truly profoundly OK to rest, all is being taken care of by a larger, wiser, older being.  But nothing changes.  This is what is so discouraging.  I try so hard to “be with” it, to accept it and comfort it, and nothing does any good.  Patience — a badly frightened child may take time to calm down, and if it’s been left for too long it will be untrustful and rejecting of the parent when it does show up.  There there dear, you are doing the best you can with an extremely uncomfortable and painful situation.

It’s beautiful outdoors, sunlight behind red leaves, piercing and painful.  I can’t/won’t make myself go out.  I refuse to make myself go out.  I’ve put on the Oratorium in Memory of the Victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 — thinking it might ease the pain in my heart.

Danced the Ode Verse and Shoror — it’s helped.  The sun has gone in — that helps too.
That music helps restore some sense of context.  I’m not the only person who suffers, who feels lost and alone in a vast cold landscape, trudging onward carrying the fragments of what was once/would have been a rich and vital culture.  I’m not the only person who sinks down by the roadside unable to keep going because of the weight in the heart, and the fear that there is no oasis out there, no camp full of friends, no refuge, but only a barren waste where one will die sooner or later.
And yet I have been able to create Neskaya, this refuge, this “healing sanctuary” where people are able to come and be their real selves, knowing that they are welcomed.  I have created for others what my parents denied me, and I seem to be unable to participate in the healing myself — is that true? or is this place healing me little by little?

Shoror is the name of an Armenian Dance step, it’s a rocking step, like rocking a baby.  Laura Shannon choreographed a dance to music from the Oratorium called Berceuse.

This entry, from 2003, shows that I am using the techniques of Somatic Experiencing as best I can, but I’m really deep in a very horrible place.

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Guidance

Posted on September 11, 2011 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
O spirits, I’m in a profoundly bleak and despairing place.  I’ve been trying to work with my pain as Greenspan suggests, I’ve been dancing, writing, and painting my pain as well as breathing through the heart.  When I was feeling really alive tho in pain it seemed like it was the right thing to do, now that I’ve been in bleak stony misery all day it looks like I had beginners’ luck and now the technique won’t work for me again.  I’m maybe subtly trying to be with the pain to make it change instead of just being with it with compassion and patience.  Please help me!
    Dear Jenny, you are being too hard on yourself.  You set your intention to offer yourself to the process of grief, despair and fear.  You were prepared for the work to go on indefinitely, but feeling better last night fooled you into imagining that you now “knew how to do it.”  Dear Jenny, you do this over and over again.  It’s not wrong or bad, it’s just how it is.  This is a long process, the work you do every day counts, but it doesn’t always make you feel better.  Be gentle with yourself, stop pushing yourself to “get through this”.  You were feeling compassion earlier for those who numb themselves to this pain with alcohol — can you bring compassion to yourself that you are finding this work so hard and difficult?  Give yourself some credit for being willing to tackle this.  Relax.  It is OK to not struggle any more today.

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