It’s Painful Looking Back

Posted on May 12, 2010 by jenny

(Written in July 2008)
I’ve been reading from 1986, and it’s so painful.  I am struggling so hard to keep going, and I’m angry at myself for “not doing better”, and deeply disappointed that I’m not being able to carry out the projects I want to do.  And I have no idea what I’m up against.  I’m struggling with diet and the candida program because that helps somewhat — but it doesn’t help enough to make it easy to keep going.  I’m aware of the COA issues, but the only tool I have is intellectual analysis and understanding.  I’ve just read a fine analysis of the inner critical parent (from October 86) and how its criticisms are not helpful — but I can still be triggered by that voice, as R’s invalidations as recently as Dec 06 can collapse me completely.  I’m struggling with the plane phobia — angry at myself for not being able to handle it better, angry and hating toward people who make noise and feeling guilty about that, being invalidated by everyone around me…  medication and Dr. Rankin are 11 years in the future, and the full understanding that I’m dealing with PTSD doesn’t happen until 2001.  And all that time I “soldiered on”.  As I watch Eleanor soldiering on now, unable to address the real issues because she can’t find the right people to help her.  Not for lack of courage or grit or intelligence or willingness to work hard, but for lack of understanding and compassion in the general population.

I felt a bit blue all morning.  The old dull ache of heart no matter what I did.  Reading my journal for 88 may be where the blues came from.  At one point, at Kripalu, Sumitra says “understanding is the booby prize.” Possibly to counteract a belief about how you have to understand something before you can try it?  But it was absolutely wrong for me.  Understanding what I was truly up against was absolutely necessary for me.  As long as I thought I was just up against a “garden variety” neurosis, or disfunctional family dynamics, I could not find compassion for myself, or accept how I was.  I kept judging myself as “selfish” or “too sensitive”, I accepted other people’s invalidation, when I tried to tell the truth about what I was suffering I called it “self-pity”.  Well maybe it was “pity” because my attitude was “I shouldn’t be this way” rather than true compassion because it was being so hard.  Thinking of myself as having a chronic illness — candida— helped somewhat because it allowed me to be a little easier on myself and to justify taking care of myself when I needed rest.  But because it was really only a small part of the picture, the candida program: very strict diet, nystatin, etc. didn’t really work to make me feel much better, to end the mysterious and debilitating symptoms.  Being so ineffective didn’t help depression at all.  I was having such a hard time with the noise of the planes, and I make myself wrong for hating them — the whole thing was such a Byzantine tangle — and I know as I read that it will be nearly 10 years before I’m free of it.  It took anti-depressant medication and a brilliant therapist.  Now, looking back, I can see how understanding what was going on with me was absolutely necessary for my healing.  Understanding — and accepting — that I had been traumatized, and understanding the physiological mechanisms of post traumatic stress.  Finally the thyroid piece — I’m so grateful that Lynelle kept pushing me to see Dr. Vreeland — and the parasite piece — recent experience suggests that my mysterious bouts with illness — headache & nausea — were probably parasite related.

Bessel VanDerKolk called it “a pilgrimage.” Indeed.

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More from Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic

Posted on May 11, 2010 by jenny

From Bruce Levine:
On depression in adolescence: “Why is it that so many young people have unhealed wounds?  Since our consumer culture is increasingly uncomfortable when it comes to dealing with pain, many parents have difficulty dealing with their children’s pain.  Parents with unhealed wounds cannot deal with the wounds of their kids. … [This creates distance] and with this distance, teens feel unknown, … They cannot really experience deep care or love.” pp83-84

“Kafka saw how this increasingly dehumanizing new world order would infect families and destroy human kindness.  He knew that those like himself, who were especially sensitive to this reality, would be the first to feel alienated, anguished, and depressed, but that eventually so would everyone. …
“There’s a long list of artists …  who, in response to tremendous pain, either committed suicide or abused substances resulting in premature death.  And there’s an even longer list of people who are equally overwhelmed by their emotions, sensitivity, and intuition, but who lack the talent, support, or luck necessary to create great works.”     p85

“I believe that in true community and a rehumanized society, we would want intuitive, prophetic, and pessimistic people.  Even when people with such temperaments do not become great visionaries, they are valuable as canaries in the mine. … From my experience, they may be more prone to depression, but they are almost always right when they warn that a family, a community, a society, or a culture is in trouble.”     pp87-88

Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, by Bruce Levine

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Somatic Experiencing

Posted on May 7, 2010 by jenny

(Written in January 2010)
When I got to Caryn’s I went to my corner and collapsed, saying I was exhausted.  Then a cranky person appeared.  I sat up, saying I was angry, pounded on things.  Caryn said “What does your body want to do?” Pound on things.  I ended up throwing a punch with my right arm.  “Slow it down.” When I did I found that my whole body was involved, legs and butt and left arm.  There was a solid sense of satisfaction, of something landing and connecting.  Then we sat on cushions facing each other so I could be properly supported.  Feeling how the bones of the pelvis make a stable base.  She suggested I imagine the stars overhead and that they were pulling me up.  She told me that a woman she was working with spent some time with the altar and really liked my Jizo figure, and suggested I imagine/feel the connection between us.  What I felt/saw was a delicate thread like a spider web that connected me to the Jizo.  I realized I never imagined it going to connect with the woman herself.  Caryn talked about the “matrix,” the structure of space around me, that holds me up, and is filled with connections to other people.  (I think of all the people I do the lovingkindness prayer for.) She talked about “core stability” and we did an exercise where I lay on the floor with my legs on a cube, then push down with one and raise the other and see what that does in my abdomen.  She put her hands below my waist to show me the muscles that tighten around the body, squeezing the spine to strengthen it and make it longer.  She said a strong physical core helps create a strong psychological one.  I can’t always follow what she’s saying, but I trust that my body understands.  Then she suggested that I “roll and pour” and get myself to standing and walk around.  The cranky one said “no” so I rolled off the mat.  The floor was slippery so I stretched out my legs, and then my knees swung around to the other side and I found it easy to sit up.  Big surprise!  How effortless it was.  We talked about it.  I think what’s happening is the “tough little drip” who used to soldier on, has decided to put her stubbornness into refusing to soldier on.

Caryn McHose is a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner in Holderness, NH

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More from Bruce Levine

Posted on May 6, 2010 by jenny

From Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, by Bruce Levine

“Given the human need to be contemplative without regard for productivity and efficiency, and given America’s taboo against nonproductivity and inefficiency, Americans, in a sense, are pushed toward illness.  …
“If you believe, as consumer culture instructs us, that depression is wholly bad, then you try to eradicate it. …
“Consumer culture is more about selling products aimed at diverting people from emotional pain than healing the source of the pain, and it promotes products that must be purchased at a significant cost …  (e.g. synthetic drugs).  The natural crafts of transforming emotional pain to energy and healing emotional wounds are not great consumer products because they are available to us without money.
“…  The faith of consumer culture is that all pain, tensions and discomfort should be eliminated by industrial products and services.

“Traditional Lakota and Blackfoot cultures celebrate joy, attempt to remedy suffering, and have healers; however, these cultures also accept that discomfort is part of life.  Instead of trying to completely eradicate pain and discomfort, many traditional peoples attempt to deal with discomfort, pain, and death in a humane and dignified manner.  Adulthood, in many nonconsumer cultures, is not primarily a chronological milestone; adults are differentiated from children after they have learned not to be controlled by a fear of discomfort, pain, and death.  Traditional Lakota and Blackfoot adults know about healing, dignity, humor, courage, and self-control.  They also understand that pain has meaning.  They understand that one can never truly know how to treat another in pain without ever having been in pain.  Without pain how does one learn compassion, patience, duty, and gentleness.” pp80-81

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Guidance

Posted on May 5, 2010 by jenny

(Written in May 2009)
Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits, I’m in pretty rough shape.  A little scared, a little fragile, a little depressed.  I’m feeling cold and distant, and don’t have much hope for the future.  This struggle out of depression is taking much longer than it has before.  Please help me.
Dear Jenny, hang on.  You are doing very good work, very deep work and it has results in the energy foundation of the earth.  By working with your psyche, working to heal your deep pain, you are also helping to heal the deep wounds of the earth.  We know it’s very hard work, and confusing, and full of pain, times of horror and lostness and bleakness.  This is a necessary part of the healing.  You must feel these stages as you pass through them.  You must take it on trust that you are moving, even when it doesn’t feel like it.  We are doing our best to support and strengthen you to do this work.  We wish you could feel our presence, but know that’s hard for you.  We love you and honor you for the deep work you are doing.

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Hope

Posted on May 4, 2010 by jenny

I have just come back from Rowe for a weekend with Deena Metzger. Deena is a poet, a therapist, a shaman, and an elder.  I have been with her a number of times and I love her fierceness, her warmth, her willingness to face uncomfortable truths and to help us face them.  She spoke immediately about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and that was in the forefront of our writing work.

One of the women in the group sent us a link to an animation of the oil spill.  It was eerie to watch it.  The thing looks like a living creature that is dancing.

One thing that gives me hope in these days of darkness is the work of Elisabet Sahtouris.  I have been rereading EarthDance, subtitled “Living Systems in Evolution”.  She is a systems biologist, who left academia and went to live on a Greek island.  She sees the Earth as a single living creature, she goes farther than the Gaia Hypothesis and says that even the rock is part of the living creature.  She talks about the history of the earth, and of the first organisms that grew in the primal sea, and how they self organized into larger and larger creatures.  I can’t begin to quote her, her language is wonderfully simple and eloquent, but every sentence depends on information given previously.  She tells us that the first great pollution disaster on our planet was the oxygen crisis.  The primal atmosphere did not contain oxygen, but was made up of carbon dioxide and other gases. Among the first one celled animals were some that developed photosynthesis, and could make use of the carbon dioxide as fuel, giving off oxygen as waste.  But oxygen is lethal to many bacteria, that’s why we use it as a bleach.  As the amount of oxygen grew larger, all the living creatures on earth were in danger of being wiped out.  But some one celled animals figured out how to use oxygen in metabolizing food. Earth was saved, and many more new creatures could evolve because oxygen is a more efficient source of energy than carbon dioxide.  I had been taught in geology, that the first geologic age, the Cambrian, was marked by the first fossils, made by these tiny creatures who now had enough energy to create shells. Nobody told me about the oxygen crisis.

Here’s a quote from Elisabet:
She describes something she calls the FIRST World Wide Web, the communication process of these early bacteria.  “Thus the genetic plans for many variations on their organization were kept available, to be borrowed and copied from one another.  ….  The bacterial population as a whole could therefore respond to emergencies such as chemical changes in the environment by drawing on and quickly spreading the genes that best helped them cope with those emergencies.  Nowadays, part of their coping in this manner is their developing resistance to man-made antibiotics, or learning to digest new foods in changing environments.  We also observe, in the frequent failure of our genetic engineering, that organisms recognize and remove—edit out— implanted genes.”       EarthDance, p90

In February 2004, I was feeling hopelessly overwhelmed by the number of causes I was trying to support, and I sent out a plea to the Circle Dancing elist.  The 27 replies that I got in 2 days, heartened me enormously.  I cobbled them together into a document I called “Circle of Hope.”

Here’s the final entry:  I was reminded yesterday of something that gave me great hope at the time, but there was a further lesson to be drawn from it:  there’s a business called Ocean Arks, that designs systems to deal with various kinds of water waste — like the Living Machines in Burlington and at Findhorn that deal with sewage.  John Todd designed a system for a candy company, to handle 10% of their waste…
“One Friday a computer malfunctioned and sent 100 percent of the waste in to the eco-machine, overloading the system.  “A godawful mess — foam, fats, oil, dead fish — everywhere,” says Todd.  Disgusted employees turned off the pumps and went home for the weekend.  But when they returned on Monday, the eco-machine had rebalanced itself.  “They were so startled by this self-healing; that’s what turned the tide and allowed us to continue with other projects,” says Todd, who confesses surprise himself.”  (from story in Hope Magazine, Jan/Feb 2004, written by Sarah Tuff)

This is Gaia, in small, an eco-system that’s capable of handling an overload of toxic stuff.  Humans created the mess, but humans also designed the solution and when they did something magical happened: nature joined the fight. One-celled creatures and plants and fish somehow cooperated to deal with the mess. Guess what, everybody – WE ARE NOT ALONE.  Even the algae are fighting to save planet earth. Nature is on our side and ready to help the moment we open the door — remember the 40 pound cabbages at Findhorn, and the rainforest that’s regenerating under the pines of Gaviotas.  There’s this huge process working toward health, awareness, consciousness, compassion – and it’s bigger than we are, big as the planet, maybe even big as the universe (Today I believe for sure as big as the universe) and our circle dancing community is part of it.  We are part of how the human community re-balances itself — we don’t have to know how, all we have to do is keep on doing what we do.

So KEEP DANCING EVERYBODY.

Vast amounts of love to all of you from Jenny at Neskaya

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Beltane

Posted on May 3, 2010 by jenny

We celebrated Beltane at Neskaya last night, with some dances and the winding of the maypole.  We celebrated on May 2 instead of May 1, because our usual time to dance is on Sunday.  The “correct” date for Beltane is an interesting question. In some traditions, it is the first of May, in others it is the thirteenth.   In Stonehenge Decoded, Gerald Hawkins shows that the diagonal of the rectangle formed by the Station Stones points to the moon’s minor standstill.  The standstills of the moon were in a sense rediscovered by Gerald Hawkins when he did his computer study of Stonehenge.  They are observational phenomena occurring on the horizon, and changing as the moon’s orbit changes.  The Major Standstill is when the moon travels its lowest path through the sky.  For each standstill of the sun (“solstice” means “sun stands still”), there are two standstills of the moon.

The major standstill is in a place the sun never gets to, the minor standstill occurs in two places on the horizon where the sun rises four times a year.  These times are the cross quarter days of the Celtic Sacred Calendar, Beltane at the beginning of May, Lammas in early August, Samhain on November 1, and Imbolc at the beginning of February.  For more complete information see Sacred Year.


this is the season of beltane, the intersection of worlds, when the living green emerges again out of the land of the dead, when we leave behind our homes, the secure constructs in which we lived our winter, and venture out on the great plains, following the herds, following our animal instincts, following the paths of the mother through the grass, following the flow of energy through the earth’s magnetic web.  now we construct the bon fire, the bone fire, the need fire, of nine kinds of wood and the ritual spark struck from no flint, using no metal.  now we burn the remnants of the past, the clinging the hoarding, the resentments, the guilt. now the worlds intersect, what was opaque becomes transparent, what was solid is exposed as transitory.  we sit at the sea’s edge, we sit on solid rock, we watch the patterns form and dissolve in the foam as the swells lift and break — and the shifting and everchanging sea is just as it was a hundred million years ago, and the rock, once crystallizing in the depths of the mountains, is now exposed to the sky and crumbling away to sand.  this morning, at stonehenge, the sun rose in the arch of the moon’s minor standstill, the gates stand open between the worlds, ghosts walk the earth, and mortals awake in the land of the fairies.

From The Feminine of History is Mystery, lefthand page facing righthand page 15

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Somatic Experiencing

Posted on April 30, 2010 by jenny

(Written in February 2010)
The session with Caryn was hard work.  I went to the corner and asked for a blanket and curled up, also holding the cushion in front of me.  I started crying and saying how I was a failure, and not capable of doing life, and how I was ashamed.  I cried and cried.  Finally she asked me to slow the crying down and see what I could notice.  There was my butt, and the window, and the trees beyond the deck.  Maybe I focussed on one tree — a birch — which turned out to be two.  There would be waves of misery, and return to the resource.  Finally I stopped crying and sat up, feeling empty in my torso, like everything had drained out.  Caryn asked me to find a less judgemental word, so I said “diffuse” and then drained and washed out.  She suggested I sit with that feeling of washed out, and see what happened.  I could feel my butt like a strong lid, made of thick leather perhaps, and closing off the bottom of my torso so no more could drain out.  The next thing I noticed was my abdomen seemed to be filling up, feeling more solid.  Then there was a little bit of fear, like a lump, in the area of my stomach.  As I stayed with it, it spread out, perhaps like a dark cap on the energy in the abdomen. We discussed the process: letting me express myself, but not letting it go on too long, asking me to slow it down and find a resource.  She told me that her neighbor, Liz, took the training when she did.  She’s in Cloverly House, and I could see her when Caryn’s away.  I felt a surge of hope.  I told her about that experience with Kevin when I became a planet.  Talked about how the scientist is sometimes a resource — alert for data that can contradict my beliefs & fears.  I told her about a friend saying that I could laugh, even tho depressed — she doesn’t remember me being able to do that, and also that I was better able to receive positive feedback.  That helped a lot.  I may be feeling horrible, but I’m not in the place I was, I have healed.  We also worked on my fear about “empty Saturday” — no one set up to come.  I can write it now and feel OK instead of scared.  (Good for me!)

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Guidance

Posted on April 29, 2010 by jenny

(Written in August 2003)
Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits, I’ve been sad a lot lately.  Probably partly let down after the summer’s activities, and partly another layer of mourning for the end of my marriage.  Please help me.
Dear Jenny, we love you a lot.  The Universe is rooted in love, the creative source is an outpouring of Divine Love that springs like a fountain in the center of every created being.  This love creates, sustains, supports each unique, irreplaceable being — which is why everything is sacred.  Beings feed on other beings, this is a necessary condition for material life, but the sacredness of each being – even as it offers itself as food for another – must be remembered and honored.  In this embodied life pain happens because of limitation and adjustment.  If you refuse to feel the pain, the adjustment does not happen.  Instead, more pain is created.  Pain begets pain until someone is willing to accept and feel the pain, bring it into the present where it can heal.  This is why the major spiritual discipline of human life is learning to be present to pain: not as a victim but as a witness.  Learning to be present to pleasure is not difficult unless you have been practicing denial and dissociation as a way to deal with pain.  The practice of being present to your own pain, to the pain of others, is central to the healing of the world.  Do not deny your sadness but recognize how, even as you are present to the sadness, the Ocean of Compassion holds you up underneath.

The “Ocean of Compassion” refers to an experience I had at Findhorn in 2001.  I was having a very hard time with hypervigilance.  I went to meditate in the Nature Sanctuary, a small round building based on a spiral, with a sod roof.  As I was sitting there, I experienced something like a layer of invisible substance that was holding me up, as though it were water, coming just to the level of the heart.  I experienced it as compassion.  It’s the first time I experienced compassion that was not coming from a person.  Instead, I understood that it was a layer, like an ocean, around the whole planet, coming just to the level of the human heart.  Later I learned that “Ocean of Compassion” is one of the names of the Dalai Lama.  For several years I was able to recall the experience and be helped by it.  Now I don’t re-experience it, I just have a memory of the experience.

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Hopeless Pain

Posted on April 28, 2010 by jenny

(Written in October 2003)
O god I feel so hopeless at this moment.  I think if I could just lay down my head and die I might do it — but no, that’s not what I want.  What I want is a break from the endless hanging out with depression.  Well, I got a break last night — I was too tired to do anything with it after yoga but cobble together a supper and read.  And I’m being able to “be with” depression, grief, and despair in a different way than in the past.  I have a lot more patience.  And I have faith that it’s possible to come through this to some place of transformation.  I just don’t know how long it will take, or whether I will manage it in this lifetime.  I’m also afraid that the best I’ll be able to do is like yesterday: having both the beauty of nature and the most awful pain and feeling very alive.

The pain in my heart is so great — there’s something about this deep level that’s so difficult.  I suppose because I’m so practiced at making myself wrong and turning away from this kind of pain.
Did my best to sit and breathe with it for 20 minutes.  It’s very painful.  I understand better why people will do anything — keep busy, drink, abuse children — to avoid feeling this kind of pain.  I think this is the “soft spot” that Pema Chodron talks about.  It’s like an unhealed wound.  Part of the pain is the vulnerability — too open and sensitive, feeling only cold hostility or indifference — desperately wanting to be safe and warm and comforted and not seeing any possibility of that.

While walking I tried to look at my sense of despair.  It’s not that there isn’t a spiritual dimension to the universe, it’s that there is a spiritual dimension but it’s cold and impersonal, and if I don’t do things right I’ll be doomed to be this miserable for the rest of my life.  I have to figure out the “right thing” because there is no help or guidance or support, and if I don’t have the skills or am too weak to hold up then too bad for me.  Well, I can see this as a description of my family of origin — where there was a lot of invalidation and neglect, no compassion, no warmth and tenderness — this is not how the universe really is, this is the environment I grew up in.

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