The Core of Trauma

Posted on July 4, 2013 by jenny

(Written in August 2011)

I told Eleanor about how I’m feeling, waves of discouragement, everything I think of doing feels like an impossible chore, I just want to lie down and quit.  She said “This is the core of trauma.”  She said she’d just read it in Peter Levine.  She brought me the book.

In an Unspoken Voice, p 49

“In freezing, your muscles stiffen against a mortal blow, and you feel ‘scared stiff.’  On the other hand, when you experience death as being unequivocally imminent  …  your muscles collapse as though they have lost all their energy.  In this ‘default’ reaction (when it has become chronic, as it does in trauma) you feel that you are in a state of helpless resignation and lack the energy to fuel your life and move forward.  This collapse, defeat and loss of the will to live are at the very core of deep trauma.”

This is exactly how I was feeling yesterday, July 3, 2013.  I had completely lost the will to live.  Fortunately, I had a Somatic Experiencing session and it helped a lot.

The full post of “The Collapse Phase” has more material.

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Hard Time

Posted on June 30, 2013 by jenny

I’ve been having a very hard time since Bella was diagnosed with bone cancer and not expected to live much longer.  A psychic told me the lump was not cancer and I should have it removed.  But after a first moment of reprieve and hope, I realized that Bella’s too old (she’s 14) to go through major surgery, and I’m too old and too vulnerable to depression to help her through a difficult convalescence.  I would also have had to find another veterinary surgeon and that’s really daunting.

So I’m doing my best to stay present with myself and my feelings and appreciate Bella as much as I can.  I’ve been cycling through the stages of grief: denial, painful grief, depression, and times of being OK and able to appreciate her presence.  As I do now, with her curled up next to me on the couch.  She’s handling this much better than I am.  Her spirits are good, and she moves along gallantly on three legs.

I’m feeling horrible lonely and badly out of touch with Spirit.  I’m really needing contact with people who care about me, and I’m finding it very hard to get in touch with them.

Because I’m in a lot of pain, I’ve been reading through my “Resource” notebook which contains good things that have happened to me, good things I’ve done, good things people have said about me.  Came across this passage from August 2009:

One of the downsides of having a really good week is that the slight amount of discomfort I’m feeling now — a little sad & scared — feels like a failure.  What’s wrong with me that I couldn’t sustain it when I got there?  No, it’s not that I “did something wrong,” it’s that life has ups & downs.  And my practice is: to bring compassion to this woman who is angry at herself for being scared & sad.  There there dear, it’s natural to feel scared & sad.  So much of your life was spent in futile struggle against the symptoms of PTSD because you were traumatized in infancy and didn’t know what happened.  You learned to make yourself wrong for being terrified and depressed so much of the time.  Dear, you are truly a bodhisattva who chose this lifetime for the purpose of healing.  That means all of your work on yourself is worthwhile, even the techniques that failed to help because they were designed for more ordinary lives, not for PTSD.  You have learned to be more and more compassionate, toward yourself and toward others.  None of your work has been wasted.

This is helpful because it puts my grief for Bella in perspective with the losses and pains of my whole life.

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Rock Recycling Itself

Posted on June 14, 2013 by jenny

(I wrote this at a workshop with Deena Metzger at Rowe in April 2010.  I was outside sitting near an altar of stone set up in front of a big quartz rock.)

Quartz.  Crystallized slowly from a melt where all the darker minerals have already crystallized out.  I go to temper my soul on hard rock.  Yosemite Valley, climbing the granite slab.  Rock melts and folds and hardens again.  Rock breaks and dissolves, and in the warm solution Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen gather and become alive.  Rock learns to breathe, crawls ashore, roots itself.  There are delicate mosses, bright green leaves pushing through.  There is a stump and it’s bleeding.  Rock grew a backbone, four legs, began to walk.  Reptiles grew feathers and one sits in the tree saying “tsip, tsip”.  Flowers too and sky.  Rock transforming itself.  Dead bodies fall, and decay, are eroded, carried by rivers, sink and settle and harden and become rock again.  The rock sparkles in the sun, it has layers, banded colors, hard and soft.  Rock sparkles in the sun — it is an altar — smaller rocks gather, bring twigs and dead needles, a nest for rock babies.  There’s a shell here too, rock became creature, grew shells, left shells behind, shells gather, pressed tightly as more come from above, the long rain of shells that becomes limestone or marble if cooked hot enough.  Rock stands on its hind legs, grows a brain and opposible thumbs.  This could be dangerous.  What has rock got itself into now?

What story is written in the rock, what can it tell us for these hard times?  Rock says pressure and heat form marble from limestone, transform coal to diamond.  Rock says go deep, melt, stay long in the depths, find metamorphic, metaphoric, what transformation happens in the deep.

Love will keep us alive
help will finally arrive,
there are so many ways to survive.

(The idea of “Rock recycling itself” came from Elisabet Sahtouris’ book “EarthDance.”  She says there is a Russian scientist who describes the activity of life on our planet as rock changing form.  I wasn’t able to find the quote.  The last lines are from a song about the Holocaust.  I don’t remember where I heard it, or the woman’s name who wrote and sang it.  Just the chorus stays in my heart.)

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“We’re at Home in the Universe”

Posted on May 28, 2013 by jenny

This description of how “life is the natural expression of complex matter” meant a lot to me.  In fact the whole idea of chaos as something that can be expressed mathematically greatly expanded my appreciation and understanding of the universe.  When I was studying astronomy and physics, I felt frustrated by the fact that we could describe so little of the universe in mathematics.  Back in the 60’s, if you wanted to model living systems mathematically, you had to make so many simplifying assumptions that the equation you might come up with is trivial.  The image of chaos, of patterns repeating themselves but never exactly, feels so right.  Just watch the river flow: there’s a standing wave upstream of a boulder, and it keeps changing, never the same, but it also never gets very far away from a basic wave form.  In chaos mathematics, there’s a thing called a “strange attractor.”  This is the boundary that the continuously evolving pattern never gets away from entirely.

There are also what are called “emergent phenomena.”  This is when a collection of diverse simple items self-organize into a higher level object.  For example: water, air, and heat can interact in such a way that they produce a huge storm called a “hurricane.”

From these ideas, and from the amazing stars I see in the night sky, and what I know about the creation of stars and galaxies, gives me a very strong sense of the Spirit that created/became the universe.  See my earlier post for more about this.

I love this quote from Stuart Kauffman

“I have partial answers to what it all means,” says Stuart Kauffman …  “For example, suppose that these models about the origin of life are correct.  Then life doesn’t hang in the balance.  It doesn’t depend on whether some warm little pond just happens to produce template-replicating molecules like DNA or RNA.  Life is the natural expression of complex matter.  It’s a very deep property of chemistry and catalysis and being far from equilibrium.  And that means that we’re at home in the universe.  We’re to be expected. How welcoming that is!  How far that is from the image of organisms as tinkered-together contraptions where everything is bits of widgetry piled on top of bits of ad hocery, and it’s all blind chance.  In that world there are no deep principles in biology, other than random variation and natural selection; we’re not at home in the universe in the same way.

“Next,” says Kauffman, “suppose that you come back many years later, after the autocatalytic sets have been coevolving with one another and squirting strings at one another.  The things that would still be around would be those things that have come to evolve competitive interactions, food webs, mutualism, symbiosis.  The things that you would see would be those that made the world they now mutually live in.  And that reminds us that we make the world we live in with one another.  We’re participants in the story as it unfolds.  We aren’t victims and we aren’t outsiders.  We are part of the universe, you and me, and the goldfish.  We make our world with one another.”     p321

This quote is from the book Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Stuart Kauffman has more books!    At Home in the Universe
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

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The Science of Love

Posted on May 27, 2013 by jenny

I’ve been subscribing to the “Daily Good” for a while.  Their stories often give me a needed lift, but this one just blew me away.

The Science of Love

Even though you experience positive emotions as exquisitely subtle and brief, such moments can ignite powerful forces of growth in your life. They do this first by opening you up: your outlook quite literally expands as you come under the influence of any of several positive emotions. With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mindset, you become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time, you also become more resourceful. In fact, my research and that of others shows that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself.

This is from “The Science of Love” by Barbara Fredrickson

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Body of Wisdom

Posted on May 26, 2013 by jenny

This came to me on facebook.  I ordered the book and it is well worth having!!

There are women who understand how ceremony works. They come with an intention. …The intention is set out at a cellular level of the body. The body knows. The heart knows at a cellular level. It’s an energetic expression that comes from every ounce of who we are. It comes from knowing, feeling, sensing – the inherent intelligence in the body all working and synthesizing at the same time. And the transformer that provides direction is the heart.

This is far more profound than most people realize. The women who know don’t just carry knowledge. They know that the most important aspect of the work is invisible. Knowing comes from a place of great mystery, that is vibrationally expressed through our bodies. 

Larry Merculieff, from Body of Wisdom by Hilary Hart

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Perspective

Posted on May 25, 2013 by jenny

A long spell of feeling happy and successful, a person with a meaningful life and worthwhile work to do, has make me aware of how much pain I’ve had in my life.  It was a constant struggle to get through the day, to not fall apart, to not kill myself.  To keep on going even when in the depths of despair, or badly disabled by terror.  The therapist and nurse practitioner who helped me get on medication that worked both told me that most people who were as badly depressed as I was occasionally stayed in bed all day.  For a lot of my life I felt like a person walking in a blizzard.  I’d rather lie down, I don’t understand the reason for keeping going, but a voice inside me keeps saying “Now put your right foot forward.  Now put your left foot forward.”  I remember walking around the backyard at 3AM, chanting the Prajna Paramita, because I was too scared and upset to sleep (I didn’t even know what it was about).  I remember walking the basement corridors at Kripalu on another night when I couldn’t sleep.  Even in 2005, only 8 years ago, I was still struggling with despair and terror, still being very hard on myself.

If I had been living in conditions of drought or war, I would have known that things were hard and all the people around me would have been struggling too.  But because my wounds were invisible, no one could validate how hard it was.

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In Pieces

Posted on May 8, 2013 by jenny

Broken in a pile on your bedroom floor is a state I know well.  I recently read a story by Julie Peters in the Elephant Journal.  It’s a great piece about a little known Hindu Goddess whose name is Akhilandeshvari.  I used to fall apart in pieces all the time and found it scary and tried desperately to put myself back together again.  One day it occurred to me that falling into pieces creates an opportunity to put myself back together differently.  I liked the idea and it made me feel better about falling apart.  “My pieces swung in wide orbits without a center” is how I described it in my journal.  It wasn’t until I was working with Somatic Experiencing that I had a revelation.  When I went to pieces, they fell on a floor.  Until that moment, I hadn’t been aware of a “floor.”  The “floor” was a container I had built doing Somatic Experiencing work. I realized that now there was a floor, I didn’t have to worry about any pieces falling into outer darkness.

Once, working with an art therapist, I made a number of pieces that I was intending to use in a collage.  At one point I said “I’m not a collage, I’m a constellation.”  My therapist laughed and suggested I use the pieces as a mobile instead.  What a great idea!  I used wire and thread to combine the pieces.  When I hung it in my stairwell, the pieces swung entertainingly.  Much better image/metaphor for a life.

I find it very interesting that Akhilandeshvari gets herself up off the floor with the help of a crocodile.  The crocodile is a reptile and the reptilian brainstem holds the instincts of flee-fight-freeze.  The reptilian brainstem must be activated in order for the nervous system and the body to “digest” the pieces of an indigestible trauma.  Those of us who have been trained in the belief that  our cognitive brains are running the show and that we must never be out of control find it very hard to allow the body/brainstem to do what it needs to heal from trauma.

Julie Peters translates Akhilanda as “Never Not Broken,” and describes her ride up from the floor:  “in pieces, warrior-style, on the back of a crocodile.  Yee ha.”  I echo “Yee Ha!” and know that riding down the river, in pieces, carried by the reptilian brainstem, is how I heal from trauma.

Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Bedroom Floor is a Good Idea. ~ Julie (JC) Peters

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Guidance

Posted on April 26, 2013 by jenny

Dear Guides & Guardian Spirits,  I’m feeling so sad.  Maybe even depressed.  I think if I could cry I’d feel better.  I’m not even sure what it’s about.

Dear Jenny, we love you very much, and we know you are doing the best you can with a difficult situation.  First of all, all your painful abandonments got triggered.  That’s a huge amount of pain.  Secondly, when you were feeling so happy and healthy you could see how much pain you’ve been in your whole life.  The tender red flowers just starting to unfold on the maple trees are a reminder of a part of you that got cut down before it had a chance to bloom.  There’s a lot of mourning for your wounded and stunted life.  You’re worried about Bella.  Your friend Eleanor’s life keeps getting harder and harder.  You haven’t been able to make contact with people who might want your presentation.  You haven’t found a way to contact the director about things you’d like to offer at Burch House.  So you’re feeling blocked in directions where you hoped to expand.  There’s also the difficulty with the computer.  Beverly said to call FairPoint but at the moment that’s too hard for you.  And you’re angry at yourself for that.  Dear Jenny, you were badly wounded, so badly that just getting through the day can be hard.  Give yourself a break.  Yes, it’s true some things won’t get done.  None of those things is as important as compassion for yourself.

 

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Guidance

Posted on April 24, 2013 by jenny

(Written in December 2005)

Ann Staffeld called to tell me a story: she was at Church and a man asked if she had been in a movie.  Turned out he’s a batterer, doing a program, and the video of Journey was part of it.  He said it had really turned him around.  So something I was part of 10 years ago is still doing good in the world.

I’ve been trying to imagine what would make me feel better about having no energy, and having to spend so much effort just in taking care of myself.  I imagined the Bodhisattva, Kuan Yin herself, walking in the door and sitting on the couch next to me, and speaking the words I need to hear:

“My dear child, you have been working so hard.  You are exhausted and drained from your effort not to be dragged down by the huge weight of depression.  You have done well — magnificently! — and your efforts have been of help to all who struggle in darkness.  The only part of the work that you have not been able to do is to take better care of this cherished child, who has worked so hard for the benefit of all.  It is time now to relax your efforts on behalf of others.  You have set things in motion, like Neskaya and Journey into Courage, that continue to do good in the world without your making further effort.  Now you must take care of Jenny as best you can.  Know that we love you and support you in doing this.  Know that your effort to be kind and compassionate to Jenny, to nurture her and allow her to rest, is not different from your work on behalf of all sentient beings.  Let your tired, wounded heart rest in the Ocean of Compassion.”

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