Guidance

Posted on July 24, 2010 by jenny

(Written in April 2005)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, my heart aches and I keep talking to David in my mind.  Please help me.
Dear Jenny, you are doing just fine.  This is another layer of deep old grief.  You are mourning for what you did not get as a child, the firm foundation that would have made it easy to lead a life of creativity and love and actions that show in the world.  The fact that you’ve spent your life’s energy in work that is for the most part invisible, does not mean that what you have done is not worthwhile or lasting.  Your life has been lived with an enormous amount of creativity and love, action and service, all directed toward healing the roots of your own life, and that means healing the roots of suffering for all.  None of your effort has been wasted, even tho you can see now how much was misguided.  All your hard work is bearing fruit now, when you have finally come to medication and Somatic Experiencing — as your life opens up and expands you are able to use all that you have learned and developed in yourself during the hard times.  You have not yet found a relationship that will satisfy your passionate nature.  You do not know what will happen — we do not know what will happen.  Anything could happen.  The fantasy conversations take you away from the present moment, and your life only happens in the present.  When you catch yourself fantasizing 1) pay attention to your heart.  If it hurts, be with it. 2) talk to us instead.  Look at what you are needing to share with another (human) being, look at what parts of you you are needing to have seen and accepted.  Remember that we love you.

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Global High Activation

Posted on July 23, 2010 by jenny

(Written in February 2005)
Weekend with my siblings.  I was not well, dehydrated, constipated, headache, slept badly.  I think I got radically overstimulated — too much talk, ideas, opinions, I thought at the time that I wasn’t overwhelmed because I was able to function.  Although I didn’t take care of myself very well.  I felt odd right from the start.  A sort of spaciness which I didn’t understand at all.  It may just be my response to over stimulation when I’m not depressed or terrified.  I did take art materials but never got them out.  I didn’t read any of the stuff they had lying around — that’s really different.
Gosh it’s so strange — I wish I had written about it while I was in it, but even paying attention in the Somatic Experiencing way wasn’t really possible.  I’m wondering if I was out of my body all weekend.  Certainly coming back to Neskaya, and dancing with the circle brought me back.

Still haven’t been able really to digest and integrate the weekend.  I told Eleanor I thought I had been out of my body, and she said yes, that’s why you got sick.  I wasn’t really able to describe what it felt like in my body.  Just now I thought of trying to describe the quality of the energy — vibrating, buzzing, colorless, its location all around the upper part of my body, a sphere or cube 3 feet across.  Something like that.  There was a dryness about it too, although there was also real dryness.  I drank lots of water while I was there.  The meaning of my life (Neskaya, dances, diversity, bringing compassion to pain) didn’t disappear completely, but it was like it was in another room.

In the Somatic Experiencing training they told us about “Global High Activation” which is what happens to an infant who is traumatized before the flight or fight instinct is fully operational.  After all, what would be the point of needing to flee when you can’t even crawl.

Work with Barbara, another trainee, in small group — couldn’t think what to work on and then suddenly thought of last weekend with my siblings.  Just the thought sent me into global high activation, and even my attempts to ground could only reduce it, not make it go away.  What’s really amazing is that’s what I felt that weekend with my siblings, that I couldn’t identify because I’ve never had it before without either depression or terror.  I could feel my attempts to ground and also the upward pull — the most useful thing was Barbara’s suggestion to let them both be.  Then the dynamic went to a finer level — 1000 tiny helium balloons each pulling up on tiny heavy pieces of me.  Sitting with that sensation, I became a mountain — the mountain from The Mountain That Loved a Bird — I was aware of all the small earthquakes and crumblings and also the life: trees growing, streams flowing, animals prowling, really a lovely image to sit with and experience.  It became even finer, an image of the Mandelbrot Set, chaos and complexity, very small adjustments, but the whole picture organizing itself at finer and finer levels.

The Mountain that Loved a Bird by Alice McLerran, illustrated by Eric Carle

There’s a lovely short on YouTube of the story with different illustrations.

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Child in Despair

Posted on July 22, 2010 by jenny

(Written in January 2007)

Please help me.  I recite it over and over but don’t feel any answer.  I have been able to imagine a safe place: it’s a little room in a nunnery and a very kind old woman is sitting with me so I won’t be alone.  This is the level of despair of a child who’s tried everything she can, everything she knows how to do, and still there is no warmth, no comfort, no support, so she has retreated into a cold dark place and she doesn’t want to have anything to do with people because people have always meant pain.  And there’s no adult here to rescue her.  My adult has collapsed completely.  I can barely think.  I freak out at the possibility of the simplest of tasks.

I turn to Nancy Napier for help:
“It’s as though part of us can’t bear to experience what it was like to be let down so horribly when we couldn’t do things for ourselves, when we had to depend on others.  To have needs that must be filled by others, and to have those needs ignored, humiliated, or abused, brings about almost intolerable feelings of vulnerability.  It’s even worse because, as children, we can’t not have needs.  We can’t turn them off completely.  We are built to seek out cuddling, soothing, positive regard, not to mention food, shelter and comfort.
“No child should have to live in a hurtful environment.  No child should have to experience neglect, beatings, humiliation, or any of the myriad ways we may be hurt in an uncaring situation.”     Napier, pp138-9

“It’s helpful to remember that a child in despair has tried every possible way to make things better.  Finally she has given up and withdrawn into this dark, lonely place.  It’s just too painful to make contact with others.  In this child’s experience, any contact simply means a renewal of the pain of abandonment, the expectation that what is offered will be taken away.”    p144

Nancy Napier, Getting Through the Day: strategies for adults hurt as children.  She also has some helpful tapes.

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Ashram Day

Posted on July 21, 2010 by jenny

(Written in February 2007)
My heart feels exploded with terror.  My brain’s not working very well.  I can’t tell if that’s because I’m scared, or if that’s what’s making me scared.  Can I bring kindness to my fear?  Can I soften around it?
It eases and comes back.  I feel very blank and blunt and disconnected.  I try to figure out what I am afraid of without success.  What is the worst that can happen?  That I will sit here watching the birds, unable to enjoy them, unable to connect with them, and that I’m stuck here, nothing I do makes any difference.  This is trauma — the stuckness, the disconnect, the terror.  I’m right in the center of it.  This is the worst that can happen — and I’m still here, being present to it as best I can.
I’ve come out of this before, and I will come out of it again.  There’s nothing I have to do today.  I can keep to an ashram schedule.  (did 20 minute sessions because I’m so scared: typing, reading, meditation, painting, snowshoeing, etc.)

I used to do this when I was doing very badly, unable to make decisions, know what I wanted to do or when I was ready to stop something. I’d set the timer for 30 minutes and do one of the following: yoga, meditate, houseclean, read, write, type journals, etc.  When the timer rang, I’d do something else, alternating active & quiet activities.  One day I told someone at Kripalu I’d done “nothing” for several days, and described my schedule.  She said “That’s not nothing, that’s an ashram day.”  I felt much better about doing “nothing” and started calling them “ashram days” myself.  If I was really doing badly, I’d set the timer for 20 minutes.

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Wild Turkeys

Posted on July 20, 2010 by jenny

It was 1996, the summer from Hell.  In February I had tried Paxil for 5 days while my terror shot through the roof & got worse & worse until the 5th night when I didn’t sleep at all.  So I stopped taking it.  I was fine for a while, didn’t feel depressed at all, but gradually I began to have trouble eating and sleeping.  In the hot weather I began waking up in terror, soaking wet, after only 90 minutes of sleep.  I would be able to sleep again, but for no more than 90 minutes when I would wake terrified again.  My weight went down to 105 lbs.  I was in a pretty constant state of terror.  I tried acupuncture and the first time it gave me a few hours of relaxation.  The second time I was back to terror almost as soon as I got in my car to drive home.  I was on I 93, driving south.  As I came over the big hill that leads down into Franconia, I was feeling pretty desperate.  I thought “I don’t know how I can live my life.” A huge flock of wild turkeys came flooding across the northbound lane and the median strip.  I slammed on the brakes with visions of blood & feathers everywhere, but the blessed car stopped in time.  I sat there and watched while about 30 young turkeys were herded across the road by 5 adults.  After they all got safely by, I drove into the breakdown lane and cried for a little.  Then I went home and got out a little book called “Animal Energies” by Gary Buffalo Horn Man & Sherry Firedancer, and looked up turkey.  Turkeys are “abundance”, turkeys are “coming back from extinction.” I said OK, god, I’ll hang on.  A year later I was on medication that worked and I found out what normal brain chemistry was like, and that I had probably been depressed my whole life.  I still think of turkeys as good omens and am glad when I see one.

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Guidance

Posted on July 19, 2010 by jenny

(Written in August 2008)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m tired and bummed out.  All the talk around me has been of people struggling with unfair governmental, bureaucratic, societal practices, and people who are too numb to care or fight about it.  Please help me.
Dear Jenny, we love you.  The real world is much bigger than the human world of misery and grief.  There are stars and planets, mountains and oceans, trees growing and rain falling.  Millions of organisms going about their business.  And many humans of courage and compassion doing their best: The Dalai Lama, Joanna Macy, Al Gore, and many many others “under the radar.” There are also ranks upon ranks of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, Angels and Devas and Nature spirits, all watching over your planet with love, encouraging growth and health and compassion.  You are not alone, dear, you are profoundly accompanied and watched over by many spirits.  Relax.  All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

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Dialogue with Little Jenny

Posted on July 18, 2010 by jenny

(Written in January 2003)
In a panic.  Sitting here with a cup of tea to be with it.  The usual breathless dissolving feeling in my upper body.  It began when I couldn’t find the list.  I kept telling myself there was nothing important on it — found it, and there isn’t.  So then I guess I said “Now aren’t you stupid to get into a panic over that” which of course made the panic worse.  It’s easing as I write about it.



ME: Dear Little Jenny, you were scared, weren’t you?
Little Jenny: Yes.  I was afraid I’d forgotten something important.
ME: You didn’t trust yourself to remember?
L. J. NO. They were always angry at me, for something they expected that I didn’t know about.
ME and now here am I, getting angry at you for being scared.  I’m so sorry.  Your Mom did that to you a lot.  First she had unreasonable expectations and that made you scared.  You had a right to be scared: it’s very scary to be expected to do something & not know what it is & then when you didn’t do it she got angry.  So then the next time it happened you were scared and she made you wrong for being scared. That was very unfair of her.
L. J.  It was?
ME: YES.  It was not at all fair to expect adult behavior from a little girl, to expect you to know things she hadn’t told you, and then get angry when you couldn’t perform.
L. J. (Big sigh)
ME: I tell you what, Little Jenny, I’ll be in charge of remembering what to do.  It’s not your job at all.  Let me take care of it.  Sometimes things don’t get done because they weren’t on the list.  That’s not your fault.  And I may feel sad or annoyed that they didn’t get done — and that’s not your fault either.  In any case, if something doesn’t get done it’s not the end of the world.  I can handle it.  And I’ll try to remember that you get scared in such situations and I’ll reassure you that it’s not your fault.
Little Jenny comes to hug me and cries.  I hug her and say “There, there” and “I love you.”

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Guidance

Posted on July 17, 2010 by jenny

(Written in January 2003)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, please help me.
Dear Jenny, you are doing just fine.  You are getting better and better at being with the fear.  We rejoice that you are doing so much better.  Do keep reminding yourself of the availability of unceasing love and unending forgiveness.  This is the most important thing in the universe, the energy that created the universe.  Do allow yourself to be in touch with it as much as you can, do allow yourself to take in all the love and forgiveness that’s available to you.  Remember that when you take it for yourself, you are not taking it away from anyone else, and actually making it available to people who can receive it from you.  Well done, dear Jenny, well done.

Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits, I’ve had some good days of ordinary happiness, and I’m grateful.  What do you have to say to me today?
Dear Jenny, we rejoice.  We are so glad that you are learning to be with yourself in the difficult emotions.  It’s also true that you are beginning to live more and more in the spiritual realm and detaching from the physical one — mistakes and accidents and failures in the physical realm do not touch or affect the spiritual realm, unless you let them by losing faith or making yourself wrong.  As you see that the true “successes” have to do with being with yourself with compassion in the difficult emotions, and letting go of the things you are worried about, the physical realm begins to look more and more like a game that you are playing.  It gives you many chances to exercise “spiritual muscles” but nothing you do there (“spent too much on the house”) is really meaningful or lasting.  It’s OK to keep letting go of all that into the hands of Spirit.
Thank you so much.  I’m so glad that I have you to speak to me from a place of wisdom.

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The Traumatized Baby

Posted on July 11, 2010 by jenny

(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.

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From Empire to Earth Community

Posted on July 10, 2010 by jenny

In June of 2006 I read David Korten’s book The Great Turning, from Empire to Earth Community.  I got it as a gift for being a supporter of the Positive Futures Network.

Human development does not proceed in a linear, hierarchical fashion, but through multiple self-organizing centers that connect.  The same image governs the metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly.  David Korten and Elisabet Sahtouris offer this as an image of how we humans are performing the Great Turning, which is a term coined by Joanna Macy: “The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life sustaining civilization.”

Circle Dancing last night was really good.  People kept coming until we had a huge group.  Maybe 17?  I wanted to do some dances for air/Gemini, also Sunrise and Danza Solar to encourage the sun to come out, we did Maize and These Are the Days to encourage summer.  I told them something about “The Great Turning” and Empire vs. Earth Community.  We did Dandelion and We Shall Overcome to express the crumbling of Empire, and Community Dance to celebrate Earth Community and then we went on to do “O Brother” — a dance with attitude!  It felt wonderful, it felt like we had done a good piece of work in service to the growth of Earth Community.

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