“Thy will be done”

Posted on September 2, 2022 by jenny

Sunday, August 28     While walking Mocha I realized that I am really helpless to change the low thyroid.  So I was able to say “Thy will be done,” and really let go.  “I can’t do this so if you want it to happen, you have to help me.”

Wednesday, August 31     Had dinner with a friend who’s been spending a lot of time dealing with a scam. Talking with her did not cheer me up for once.  I realize I’m holding on to three things: The relief of “Thy will be done” and a sense of a being I hand things over to, the solid foundation that’s there deep down below everything, and the story of the man who saw something wonderful as he was dying.

The “solid foundation” was something that I discovered in Faithfulness Group on August 14.  I said I was feeling like there was only the “capricious malicious, willful” god based on my alcoholic parents.  Katie asked if I could feel the presence of Spirits and I said Yes, completely surprised by my answer.  I experienced spirit as a “foundation,” as a solid, flat floor underneath me.  The way I know that is the same way I recognized the “Goodness beyond Goodness.”  It’s a deeper knowing, not intellectual, but doesn’t have any felt sense.  I wonder if I can trust it and realize that yes, I can.  That sense of Spirit as a foundation reminded me of the “floor” that caught my pieces when I fell apart after I had started Somatic Experiencing.

The man who was dying was Dedan Gills.  His story is in Oneing/Unveiled.  His wife, Belvie Rooks, says “As you took your last breath, you looked past us with an ecstatic smile and a look of awe and wonder. Our eyes followed your gaze and we half expected to see someone or something since your smile had been so joyful! When we turned back, you were gone.”

It’s funny.  When I imagine O Holy Night in French, I hear it in my mother’s voice, her “soap opera” voice, and it used to annoy me.  Now I think “Poor old Mom.”  I guess I’ve finally forgiven her, and my ex-husband as well.  Maybe it’s the big letting go of handing it all over to God/Higher Self/Universe.

Thursday, September 1     I started reading Atul Gawande, Being Mortal.  It’s painful, but I really do want to look at the truth.  Which is that I am going to keep losing ground until some major system fails.  I’m never going to “have a life.”  At least I can understand that Journey Into Courage and Neskaya were two worthy gifts I gave the world.  (I see God in a sheet saying “whatever you have done or not done, Welcome!”  God doesn’t need me to prove I deserve to live.)

Saying “Thy will be done” reminds me of doing a prostration in Buddhism.  How I didn’t like it at first, not feeling that there was anything to worship, and then realizing the relief of letting go — of what? of the burden of the ego?  Walking Mocha this morning I realized that the Goodness beyond Goodness and the Foundation under everything are the same thing.

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The Shamanic Realm

Posted on August 28, 2022 by jenny

From my journal for September 1994:

My life.  This is a time in my life when…  well, I’m in the transition zone again, with that sense of floundering, old ideals losing their value, old structures disintegrating, and the new ones haven’t crystallized out of chaos yet.  It seems like I spend a lot of time in this place, rarely have a safe structure or ground under my feet, usually feel that I’m struggling to hold on to my values as to a flag in a storm.  What values?  Silence, inner voices, the value of spiritual practice when there are no emotional consolations, the value of a life like mine, invisibly damaged, unheroic, of no use to anyone.

[Margin: O yes, thinking of someone saying an artists life is changing all the time, there never is any place to stand.  Artists Way p 182 “Just when we get there, there disappears.”  “The ruthless truth is that if we don’t keep moving, we sink to the bottom and die.”]

I’m also discouraged because reading over last fall I saw a lot of “insights” that I’m still struggling with, still rediscovering and trying to make real in my life.  At least I “no longer” —— ha! there was one “no longer” in there that I had to sadly acknowledge was not true — probably about the airplane phobia.  What’s different now?  Just that I take the appearance of the same insights as evidence for how long the process takes instead of evidence that I haven’t moved at all.  I have moved, but not very far.

I’m also feeling a little overwhelmed by my life, there’s so much happening that I have no control over.  I have a sense of floating, half submerged, in a river in flood, being swept along with other bits of flotsam, all jostling together, and I could be smashed on a rock at any moment.  The wind shakes the trees, water and leaves fall from the branches.  I see a bright edge of cloud where the sun has almost reached a patch of blue.

What are we doing here anyway?  I wish I could write a poem to express my sense of precariousness and transparency, of the landscape like a fragile surface, hiding layers of meaning and history, crushed and torn apart by relentless titanic forces.  I think when people lived closer to Nature, the restless titanic forces were visible in the stuff of every day, now they are hidden by layers of padding that we create in our efforts to find security, to pretend that life is safe and not a perilous adventure.  And the restless titanic forces also act in the invisible layer of the psyche.

From a National Geographic story on the Indian Powwow (June 1994, p109): “When I talked to a noted Lakota dancer about the unusual design of his regalia, I expected a description of history and research.  He said: “It came in a vision.”

“I had a sudden image of a way of life whose surface is less solid than my own, a life in which you can see through the skin of the earth and time, as if it were only painted gauze, to the texture of the past and the visions beyond it.  Indians scatter litter on the surface as if they don’t care, but they attend carefully to the layers they see on the other side.  No wonder music and dance, those tools we use to reach beyond words, are so important.”

Reading this I am struck by my ability to sense so much life and color even though it is precarious, not at all safe or in control.  It’s been a long time since I have had that strong a sense of the shamanic realm.

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Anger is Unmetabolized Grief

Posted on August 27, 2022 by jenny

Just watched the Francis Weller video on grief.  He says that anger is unmetabolized grief.  I thought about the other day, when I realized that I was angry with my ex-husband for the coldness with which he treated me after the divorce.  I had told him to go see the woman he met, to find out how important that relationship was to him.  He said “I’m afraid it will ruin the whole thing.”  I said “If it does then it’s not worth having.”  When he decided he wanted to divorce me and marry her, I did not fight it, I supported him.  I gave him a very generous marriage settlement.  I thought we were best friends and wanted him to be happy.  Instead, he cut me off completely and very coldly.  Somehow that destroyed our whole marriage.  I had thought he loved me, but his coldness just made it unreal.  I remember at one point thinking he was immature and being able to forgive him.  But that didn’t last.  Then I read in Elizabeth Goudge “We hate those we have injured because they make us feel despicable” and that made a lot of sense to me.  But I still wasn’t able to forgive him.  It’s a place I periodically revisit without success in having it be different.  Just yesterday, I realized for the first time that I was angry at him.  Then this revelation from Francis Weller.  I realize that after Dana’s rejection I got badly depressed.  But I know that depression is also grief that has not found expression.  I was unable to express my grief that the marriage was over because our marriage had ceased to be something that was good.  Instead of being something good that I had had and lost, it had been an illusion.  I am angry because it was not the ending of something good, but the complete destruction of something that was never real.

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“Souls are Like Athletes”

Posted on August 19, 2022 by jenny

I’ve been struggling with the low thyroid for a long time.  It’s been slowly getting worse.  I had a fall, and my bowels stopped for quite a long time.  I thought it had to do with the fall, but now I think it was more the low thyroid, which can cause constipation.  I felt, not so much tired all the time as having difficulty waking up.  I had very little energy for doing anything.  I also realized that my brain was not working properly.  After more than two weeks without a bowel movement, the medical people here sent me to Dartmouth-Hitchcock via ambulance.  After two days, they got my bowels working again.  It’s so funny, I always thought “bowel movement” referred to the stuff that came out, but now I realize that it refers to the peristalsis of the intestines that moves the digested food along.

I started reading Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain, because I’ve enjoyed it in the past, but this time through I’ve been finding it difficult.  Some of his misery feels like what I’ve been going through for the last couple of months.  I tried to find the words to describe it without success.  But what he says here about his father resonated with my struggle with the thyroid thing.  I found myself wondering if what I am struggling with is somehow strengthening me, even if I lose the battle.  That makes me think of the quote from Rilke: Being defeated, decisively, by greater and greater beings.

From my journal for August 18:

Merton writes about his father’s struggle with a brain tumor that eventually killed him.  “Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. … [His] was a great soul, large, full of natural charity.  He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding.  And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the Tomb, was not destroying him after all.

“Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers …  And my father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle.  We thought he was done for, but it was making him great. … his struggle was authentic, and not wasted or lost or thrown away.”    p83

What’s worst about this low thyroid thing is not so much the physical disability as the mental one.  It feels like my brain is caught in my earliest paradigm, where God is “capricious, malicious, and willful” and I am being punished for “always doing everything wrong.”  I don’t actually buy this, I’ve been working on changing it for a long time, but my emotions now come out of this worldview so it feels true.

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Work with Angry Part and Protective Part

Posted on July 25, 2022 by jenny

I found this absolutely fascinating.  I was trying to work with parts, but I didn’t have the help of a therapist who knew about that work, and I didn’t know anything about the Internal Family Systems model yet.

From my journal for September 6, 1994

From No Enemies Within, the story of Norma, whose wounded self made signs while her verbal self rattled on about past abandonments and failed to see present support.  “I care about you.  I’m curious about you.  We’re not done yet.  We’ll never be done.  Don’t give up.  I’m still here.  You don’t have to work so hard.”  From the wounded vulnerable self to the wounded try-to-fix-it self, these words weave reconciliation.

I’m trying to find a way to reconcile the screaming baby and the screaming mother within me.  I realize that I’m so angry at that screaming mother that I could kill her.  I imagine a scenario: Mother, somewhat drunk, changing diapers angrily, sticks baby with pin.  Baby starts to scream and mother yells at it, slaps it, perhaps even picks it up and shakes it.  Baby screams even harder.  Mother leaves it to scream.  I know this scenario in my cells and bones, I know that if I express my pain I will be hurt more and then abandoned.  I see why I experienced leaving yesterday as such a failure: I can’t make the noise stop, so I’ll leave the scene.   (god! I don’t believe it.  There goes the glider plane, out into the cold grey day.  I hope it rains soon.)

Get the walkman.  Sit at my desk and cry.  I feel so defeated.  (“We’re not done yet.”)  What’s the point.  (“Don’t give up.”)  I feel completely weakened in my body.  (“You don’t have to work so hard.”)

So can I find some compassion for that Mother?  She was raised in the school of the stiff-upper-lip.  Her mother was probably psychotic.  She gave birth to her first child while her husband was away fighting a war.  She didn’t have any support for dealing with her feelings of fear and grief, she didn’t have any one to help teach her how to care for a new baby.  She had no disciplines to help her when things got difficult, no way to put her feelings aside in order to take care of her child.  She saw the child as a source of her own comfort and got angry when it didn’t provide comfort and instead asked her to be the comforting one — she didn’t know how to do that.  And I’m still angry at her narcissistic attitude, though I see it as a case of arrested development: she never got beyond Kegan’s stage 2) the “Imperial” self, she never got to the place where she could see that other people had different insides, their own needs and wants.  Now can I have compassion for such a one?  She was failed by her culture, which supported her narcissism, but not the parts of herself that might have been able to learn compassion and tenderness.  I can sympathize with the new mother (unsupported & unmothered herself) who gets upset when she can’t stop her baby from screaming.  And I do have great compassion for the enormous unacknowledged guilt she must have been feeling: knowing she was hurting her baby and not knowing how to stop it, and then all that buried because she could not admit that she might be wrong, she could not admit that she didn’t know what to do.  I can certainly sympathize with the frustration of not being able to help, with not knowing what to do and not feeling able to ask.  I imagine that Mother’s frustration with not being able to help had more to do with her image as a “good mother” and with the inconvenience to herself of the baby’s crying, I don’t think she cared about what the baby was feeling.  And that’s what I find so hard to forgive.  I don’t think she was saddled, as I was, with fears of inadequacy, I think her fears were all centered around how she looked to the outside.

I’m astonished at this description of my mother.  From everything I’ve learned since, I believe it’s a very accurate portrayal.

OK.  That’s mother.  And I’m still angry at her and find it hard to forgive her for having a baby and then making her own welfare more important than that of the baby.  It’s interesting to notice, as I write, that though she can be “nice” she’s really not capable of compassion or tenderness.  So then I turn and look at myself.  I see that following her example, I have also screamed at myself for being hurt, I have hit myself for crying, and then I’ve been very angry at myself for not behaving better.  It has taken me a long time to learn compassion and tenderness, and even longer to learn to extend compassion and tenderness to my own wounded self.  I’m still struggling to do that: because it’s not “convenient” for me to be subjected to this pain, because the pain prevents me from producing something that would justify myself in the eyes of others.

At this point I know that I can feel compassion and tenderness for other people and creatures. I’m still almost completely unable to extend them to myself. In describing the “one who has mothered me” I am talking about a part of myself.

What is the unmet need of the one who has mothered me so badly, bullied and pushed me, ignored my cries of pain?  She saw that the world was a tough place to get along if you were too sensitive, that you were attacked if you were too vulnerable, so she did her best to get me to hide, or rise above, my sensitivities and my wounds.  And then she tried to push me to produce stuff that would be acceptable in the world because she thought that that was the way to find people who would support me.  And then she was continuously sabotaged by a very powerful part of me that insisted on being true to myself, that felt that denial and hiding of pain was hogwash.  What a battle!  This is the real battle, not between me & my mom, or me and the planes, but between the part of me that’s screaming her pain, and the part that’s trying to protect her: “If you do that, you will be first attacked and then abandoned.”

And inside me now is an adult artist, a strong woman, who can turn to each of these agonized fighting children and say to the Screamer: “Yes, it is right for you to speak your pain.  Spill it out, and then I will edit and shape it into a form that can be put out into the world, because it’s important for other people to know about.  It’s important for all of us to begin to share our painful stories.”  Then she turns to the Protector and says: “Thank you for all the years that you have worked so hard to keep me hidden.  I appreciate your efforts, even as I see that they were misguided.  I need your energy now to help me hide when it’s appropriate, not to deny the vulnerable parts of me, but to protect all of me from outside hostilities.  This means maintaining strong boundaries within which I can be whole, instead of impenetrable barriers between parts of me.  And I also need help with the discipline of writing practice, painting practice, not to “produce” for the world, but to keep my creativity flowing for my own health and satisfaction.”

That was a big piece of work, and one I keep doing over and over.  I wish I felt better.  I guess I need to find a way to get it down to the non-verbal levels.  Well.  Take it to Karen.

[Typing it up now, a little over a month later (October 12) none of this seems real to me.  It seems very distant, something written by someone else.]

I’m still typing up current journal a month later.  It often gives me a new perspective on what was happening.

In fact, I think it was an astounding piece of work, except that it was mostly on the intellectual level. I certainly couldn’t separate the parts from myself as observer which is what allows me to feel tenderness and compassion for them..

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Trying to Work with my “Enemy”

Posted on July 24, 2022 by jenny

It interests me to go back and read my old journals.  They remind me that I’ve been through an enormous amount of pain, and even managed to heal some of it.  I suffered from the noise phobia for 14 years, and it took an astute therapist and medication to help me change it.  At that time I didn’t even know that sensitivity to noise is a symptom of PTSD.

When I got here to Kendal, I discovered that I was still sensitive to noise, and that it helped a lot once I knew what caused the noise.  My reaction was nowhere near as bad as the one to the planes.

From my journal for September 3, 1994

Sun on the front of my desk, a thin streak on my page.  Mountain pale in gold-colored mist.  A beautiful morning.  We’ve been concerned because the bear ate most of the apples on the Duchess tree, and broke two branches and left claw marks in the trunk while doing so.  I’m torn, I love having the bear around, but I don’t want the tree damaged and I don’t like the danger to Shenanigan.  It’s chilly out there.

Shenanigan was our dog, an Irish Terrier.

I got up early because of Dana’s snoring.  I woke at 6:30, was tired enough to sleep some more, but couldn’t because of the snoring.  So I tried to listen to it, be curious about it.  But all I wanted to do was scream and run away.  I tried to create spaciousness, to soften around it, I tried to figure out what I needed to be able to relax and listen to it, but nothing helped.  After 15 minutes it was as irritating as ever so I got up.  It’s very frustrating.  I haven’t a clue as to why I find it so awful.  I wonder if my frustration itself is a clue, the frustration of “not knowing” what I have to know to be able to control it, make it go away.  Then there’s the frustration of being tired and unable to sleep, and the frustration that I love Dana and yet can’t stand the noise.  I tried to eliminate some of the frustration by deciding that I was going to get up anyway, so I might as well see what I could learn.  I tried to “be curious” but I simply couldn’t relax and open enough to do that.  And I see that I was trying to make myself be something that I’m not, trying to make myself “relax and be open” when I wanted to scream and run away.  This smacks of anger and invalidation: “Whaddayou mean you can’t stand your husband’s snoring?  What’s the matter with you?  You’re too sensitive.  Shape up.”  Then there’s the conflict between wanting to poke him to make him stop and not wanting to wake him up.  Well, that’s a lot of conflicts, a lot of double-binds.  I guess there’s “good reason” for my discomfort.  I sure don’t know what to do about it, except to try not to be angry at myself for being so sensitive.  Can I love myself for being so sensitive, for agonizing so much about a harmless and not very loud noise made by a person that I love?  And I feel a gush of warmth for that poor woman, with her hypersensitive nervous system, and her habit of anger at herself.

Second cup of tea.  Dana just left for Montpelier.  I’m tired and not looking forward to this day.  There will of course be airplanes: it’s Labor Day Weekend.  After my lack of success with Dana’s snoring, I’m a little afraid of not being able to handle it.  I will try to not be angry at myself for being so sensitive, to treat myself like a hurt and frightened infant.  I will try to explore the sadness, despair and fear that overwhelm me when I hear that sound.

I had a good talk with Eleanor yesterday.  I had been sitting upstairs with Dawna’s book and spent about 20 minutes trying to hang out with the feelings the planes make me feel.  (Yes, I know it’s technically incorrect to blame the planes for triggering the feelings that are already in me, but it mostly feels like they do it to me.)  I had no more success than trying to hang out with Dana’s snoring this morning.  I did find an image of my body stretched taut like a string and then plucked and vibrating.  Then Eleanor came up for some tests and we talked about “Why go on.”  She had to take her rent check to the people in Dr. W’s office, and they wouldn’t look at her.  She thinks they’re angry that she’s on welfare when they have to work.  She said she felt like there wasn’t any point in going on when she had nothing to contribute.  “I’m not getting anywhere, I’m just sitting here by the side of the road with all this pain and sadness and despair and terror inside.”  I said life wasn’t about “making a contribution” on the economic level, or even making people happy.  I said her life was the most difficult life I know, that it was worse than that of a Vietnam Vet in a wheelchair, isolated in a village of people who hate him because they don’t want to face his pain.  I asked her how it would feel to him if someone were to come and sit with him in his pain, not try to fix it, but just be with him, wouldn’t that make it easier to bear?  Then I said her pain inside was her job, her piece of human suffering that she needed to be with, and that that was her “contribution”, not making it better for other people.  I think it helped her a little, but it actually helped me a lot, I was listening to myself as I talked and acknowledging that the sadness, despair and fear inside me were my job, and the twanging and jangling calmed down.

Eleanor is my friend who lives with PTSD, having been horribly abused by her parents.

I’ve been reading Dawna Markova’s book No Enemies Within, and trying to identify my “enemy”, which is being hard.  I’m also starting to feel strung out & vibrating like I did yesterday.  What needs are hidden behind that unpleasant feeling?  Needs for safety and validation.

My enemy (the different levels of):
1) Noise
2) Sensitivity to Noise
3) Anger at myself for being sensitive
4) Invalidating the pain.

I see that (3) and (4) are easily projected onto (1) in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.  I thought at first that (3) and (4) were in conflict but in fact they work together.  I invalidate the pain by saying 1) Nobody else is bothered by it, 2) your childhood wasn’t bad enough to justify continued pain now.  Then I get angry at myself that I can’t make the pain stop.

Well, what if I am “gifted” with an extremely sensitive nervous system and the pain really is that bad.  Nobody would pretend that it wasn’t a lot of pain to sit in a dentist’s chair all day and be subjected to 3 minute rounds of drilling occurring without warning and without novocain, roughly every 15 minutes.  [To be a direct parallel to the planes, the drilling would go on longer, but the actual pain to the nerve would be about 2 minutes.]  I think most people would not want to be subjected to that, would not choose it unless there were very great benefits to be derived from it, and it would be understandable if they began to find it intolerable toward the end of the day.  And what if they had to face it again tomorrow, and the next day, off and on for six months, with no obvious benefit to be derived from the process that was causing so much pain?  I think most people would be excused for deciding this was intolerable torture and wanting to kill the dentist.

I need to validate that the pain I experience as the noise pierces me is real, is intolerable, and that I don’t know what to do to make myself stronger so I can tolerate it better, on what to do to be able to live with it.  I am in intolerable pain and I don’t know what to do.

Reading this journal entry, I see how much I invalidate my own experience, and how much trouble it causes for me.  My parents invalidated me on a regular basis, in fact I don’t remember them ever validating what was going on for me.  Not knowing what causes the phobia is a big part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is that I am a “Highly Sensitive Person.”  It makes it harder to deal with overwhelm.  It didn’t help that Mother kept saying “Don’t be so sensitive” as if I had a choice.

 

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My Prayer/Vision

Posted on July 17, 2022 by jenny

In February 2013, I was reintroduced to the importance of making a choice. I wrote:

Feeling lonely and bereft of spirit. Recently I was introduced to the idea that faith is not good feelings, faith is a stand you can take, a choice you can make.
I choose to believe that the universe is benevolent.  I choose to believe that “All things work together for good.”  I choose to believe that the creative spirit that is continually birthing the universe is hugely loving and deeply merciful, and shares in our triumphs and joys, our defeats and sorrows.

But I didn’t keep repeating it. The next step, in February 2021, was reading an article by Francis Weller in Kosmos Journal. It was on the difference between Trauma and Initiation. Both start by stripping away your identity, and disconnecting you from the world you live in. Trauma leaves you disconnected, but initiation brings you to a “wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos.”  Those words were incredibly meaningful for me.

In a post in March 2022, I describe the meaning for me of each word. I also describe the first version of my prayer:

The prayer I’ve been saying for quite a while now, when I felt discouraged, was “I choose to trust that the wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos is real, and holds the world I love in compassion.”  I say “I choose…” because I am unable to trust, I don’t really believe, but I want to set my compass needle in that direction even when I can’t move in that direction.

In that same post, I went on to describe an unexpected direction that just appeared:

One day I was saying this prayer and instead of saying “the sacred cosmos is real” I said “the sacred cosmos is alive.”

So my prayer has become:  I choose to trust that the wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos is alive and intelligent and works through me to create a better world for all. Just saying it fills me with positive energy.

Then in May 2022, I read Choosing Earth, where he says we have three possible paths:

1: Crash, chaos, and collapse
2: Authoritarian control with artificial intelligence
3: Great transition and transformation

Naturally I want to see us make the transformation to a sustainable system. The subtitle of the book is “Humanity’s Great Transition to a Mature Planetary Civilization.” I know that this is possible, no matter how unlikely it looks. I also know that holding a vision of what I want can help make it a reality.  So “I choose to trust that humanity will make the great transition to a mature, sustainable, planetary civilization.”  I hang on to that.

But the book really brought me down.  I wasn’t even able to finish it. And the news was worse. The Supreme Court, oil companies raising their prices, Global warming, the political idiocy, the war in Ukraine…  Then my physical energy is deteriorating and my mind hasn’t been working very well. That was a bit scary until I found out from Dr. Court Vreeland that my thyroid is functioning at a very low level. At least I’m not lazy or senile! But it’s a tremendous effort just to keep going.

Finally I came across something in Matthew Fox’s book on Julian of Norwich just a few days ago. He quotes from a book by Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker called Radical Regeneration: Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction. I’ve ordered the book, but I don’t have it yet. But just the little Matthew Fox says is enough to lift my spirits. finally, something I can do, despite my own lack of energy and struggling mind. I can hold the vision they describe. I’m still working with the wording of the vision, and it may keep changing, but at least I’m able to stay focussed on it.

A course by Robert Fritz, years ago, taught me how to make something I wanted happen: create a vision, and a completely honest description of current reality. Just hold the two together and structural tension will pull current reality to the vision.

Current version of the Prayer/Vision:

“I choose to trust that the wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos is alive and intelligent, and works with us, teaching us to value diversity and helping us to self-organize into a higher order being.”

I worked a long time on this.  Kept getting confused by the material.  I hope it makes sense. My brain is not working very well.

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A Day in the Life…

Posted on July 16, 2022 by jenny

from my journal for Saturday, July 16

I wake up early.  I feel miserable.  I lie there only wanting to go back to sleep, but I can’t.  I take the Thyroxin, bring a glass of water, make a cup of tea.

The misery is both emotional and physical.  Thyroxin is a drug to stimulate the thyroid. I’ve just started taking it.

3rd cup. coffee.     Walking Mocha I worked on reciting my prayer, and trying to see/feel the components — participatory: Mocha, me, grass, trees — in the world around us.  I see this as the expression of my love for creation, even though I don’t have any good feelings.  “Not some nice thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do.”  It is hard work, and I do it because I love creation. Walking home I hear a cardinal, positive message from the Universe.

The latest version of my prayer/vision:  “I choose to trust that the wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos is alive and intelligent, and works with us, teaching us to value diversity and helping us self-organize into a higher order being.”  I’ve noticed that it keeps changing, I’m not getting stuck.

Finishing my coffee, I found All Shall Be Well on YouTube, starting a set of pieces “mixed for you.”  Then I went and did puzzles while the music was playing.  They went on to do the lost words blessing, then Windward Away and a lot more Julie Fowlis.  They did Kate Wolf singing the Times we’re Living in.  The last one I listened to was the Ballad of Anne Frank.  I had lots of feelings, mostly sad, some sentimental.  It was good to feel feelings, I guess I haven’t done that for a while.  There hasn’t been much but discomfort, dryness, and despair.  “On their sleeves was a broken cross, on my heart was the star of David.”

These songs are all ones I have played a number of times.  

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Crisis Becomes Initiation

Posted on July 13, 2022 by jenny

In his book about Julian, Matthew Fox quotes from a book by Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker.  The book is called Radical Regeneration: Birthing the New Human in the Age of Extinction.  The quotes are from Matthew Fox, Julian of Norwich, pp95-6

The ancient Hindu sages, we are told, “predicted the age in which we are now living.  For them Kali Yuga represents the collapse of every kind of inner and outer coherence and personal and institutional forms of compassion, concern, and justice.” The current collapse of industrial civilizations all around us seems to mirror this reality. We are rapidly moving toward a “lethal stage” when “Kali’s dance will destroy ghastly amounts of human and animal life and a vast portion of the planet.”

Yet they believe that the “global dark night crisis is not the end of humanity but the birth of the new human.” The dark night, including a “savage grace of annihilation” can lead us to a new stage in our evolutionary journey.

This has given me something to do in this time of no energy and barely functional intellect. I can hold a vision of humans working to celebrate diversity, to gather groups of diverse humans and self-organize into a emergent phenomenon which will be a sustainable and healthy planetary — planetary what?  “civilization” is related to the Latin for “city” depends on hierarchical structures, etc.  I think we’re talking about something completely different here. I’d use the word community but that has connotations of being relatively small. I think what’s being talked about here is a planetary intelligence, at a higher level than the one that keeps Gaia’s life-support systems working.

My latest version of my prayer/vision:  “I choose to trust that the wider, more inclusive, participatory, sacred cosmos is alive and intelligent, and works with us, teaching us to value diversity and self-organize into a higher level being.”

For “self-organize into a higher order being” see “We’re at Home in the Universe,” paragraph two.

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Struggle to Deal with Tiredness

Posted on July 10, 2022 by jenny

from my journal for Tuesday, July 5

I’ve been struggling with the idea that this odd tiredness is a gift of life and I’m supposed to accept it, not fight it, and learn from it.  Oddly, if I think of it as fatal, I feel relief.

During breakfast I read more of Matthew Fox on Julian of Norwich.  He says she says no matter how bad things are, it is our duty to find joy in existence itself.  OMG!  How do I do that feeling so tired, feeling this person that I am to be unfamiliar and defective, feeling like I’m losing ground.  So while walking Mocha I did the best I could to notice beauty.  Not sure I “enjoyed” it exactly, but I certainly tried.

I do realize, and am very grateful for, my love of Sacred Circle Dance and astronomy and truth.  They enabled me to share these things I love with others who also want them, and that I have greatly enjoyed doing.  Grateful for the money that allowed me to build Neskaya and to see good therapists and to not have to work a 40 hour week.  In exchange I have done my best to heal the early trauma and hope that has results in the human energy field, helping others to recover from trauma.

Matt Fox says to seek to deeply know one’s own soul is the same as seeking god.  So all my work with therapists has been on this quest.  Maybe this lethargy, this being unable to wake up, is to let me know I’ve done enough, I don’t need to do any more.  Am I still trying to “prove I deserve to live”?

Matthew Fox says Julian says “We can never know God until we first know clearly our own soul.”  He goes on to say: to get to know our own soul we have to “survey our own shadow rather than run from it, or project it onto others.  [To learn] how to explore who we are and what our motivations are, how to explore the wounds that we inherit from family or society so that they do not dictate who we are.”  p84     The work he describes is the work I have been doing in therapy for many years.  Fox and Julian validate that my work on myself is not pure self-referential or self-indulgent.  It is the same that people do in monasteries in prayer and meditation.  It is my way to reframe the “capricious, malicious and willful” image of God that is based on my alcoholic parents.

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