September 1998: The Story You “Haven’t Told Yet”, the WHOLE story

Posted on September 25, 2012 by jenny

Another gem from converting old journals.  This must have been written after the retreat with Deena Metzger.  A lot of the writing was done in the retreat, but some of it was done elsewhere.  It’s a different way of looking at my life, and I like its oddball quality.

To tell the story, you have to tell the WHOLE story.  Doesn’t mean you let yourself off the hook — just look at all the factors that influence you.  Tell the story, not to understand it, but to illumine all the details.

I go to “National Depression Screening Day.” I fill out their questionnaire and am told that I’m in a “severe depression.” I laugh: if this is “severe depression,” I’ve been severely depressed most of my life, ha ha.  (This turns out to be true.  I couldn’t know it until my brain chemistry was normal.)

“Write a story you haven’t told yet, or haven’t told all of it…  Imagine that what you’re beginning to write is an offering — as best you can — something you do out of love.  Try not to limit who you are.”

What did I notice today?  The tiny oak trees in the lawn, cut again and again but refusing to give up, now dense with leaves, bonsai oak trees.  Cut down again and again, but still flourishing.

What my mother taught me about mortality is that you must never acknowledge it.  You must never show weakness, or neediness, or difficulty.  You must carry on, with head held high.  If you never let anyone see your pain, then it doesn’t exist.  To help her keep to this code of honor, she drank until her body was saturated with the smell of bourbon.

It was too long to make it into a post, so I did it as a page.  About Jenny – alternative version.

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May 1993: Real Life is Bigger than Happiness

Posted on September 20, 2012 by jenny

(Written in May 1993)
May 13    Real life is bigger than happiness
I was visited by an odd image which seemed to express my current state of soul:  The body of a woman lying in the grass near blossoming apple trees, a rough stone wall, another field, and blue mountains in the background.  I think she’s been dead for a while, she looks like a bundle of oddments, perhaps ragged clothes.  The grass has grown up around her and the tree put out its blossoms.  She was killed weeks, perhaps months ago, on a dark rainy day, when the war swept over this outlying farm.  She may have been pregnant, she may have run from the soldiers and died giving birth in the orchard, she may have been raped and killed.  Wild creatures, and perhaps winter as well, have reduced her corpse to a ragged lumpy shape.  The other people who lived here must have been killed or run away.  There is no one here now to take care of the house and the garden.  I am aware of a group of nature spirits drifting through.  They see the woman, the grass, the flowers, the mountains.  I feel the contrasts in my body.  I wait, hoping for more information, hoping something will happen, someone will come.  But nothing changes.
The war happened long ago.  But the corpse has only recently been uncovered and thawed out.  There hasn’t been time yet for it to rot and become part of the grass and trees.  It’s in the spring that I become aware of the corpse.  Who is the dead woman?  Is she my capacity to conceive, to give birth, to mother?

The change began with a detachment from daily life, a sense of walking away from everything familiar and known, of walking with measured steps out into a vast darkness.
Goldfinch battles near the thistle seed feeder — life goes on in the place I have left — but I have no sense of what life there might be out in the vast darkness.  Will there be birds, trees, people, conversation, colors?  Or is the darkness a place of transformation, and one emerges on the other side into a new world, a new life?
Do I want to leave this world — the world of goldfinches and apple blossoms — has it become “unspeakably dear”?  Or is it still a place of horror — a rotting corpse under the apple tree, and death-dealing planes sending daggers of pain through my heart — a world I would be glad to leave?  The truth is that it is both at the same time, and I am torn apart by the contrasts.
I offer myself to this process.  By an act of will I set myself to believe that there is meaning here, that the forces that tear me apart are divine, that the purpose is transformation.  Only by being eaten and digested does the mouse become eagle.

I feel a pain in my heart, enormous pain — I am afraid to give myself over to it for fear I would be ripped apart and die, and at the same time a part of me invalidates the pain: “Who are you to be unhappy?  A lot of people would like to have your life.”  “Why don’t you choose to be happy?”  “You’re just wallowing in your pain.”
And I say no, this is real life.  Real life is bigger than happiness.  Real life is to be torn apart by the contrasts.  There are corpses under all the apple trees, if you choose not to see them, then what do you have?  Mourning and rejoicing are both appropriate, death and life are inextricably mingled in the tapestry, you have to accept it all, or you get nothing.  “This beauty comes out of a great heart.”  Yes.  And that heart is open to include everything.

Later: I lost that glorious & painful sense of wholeness, that sense of holding together the two halves of the world: the corpse and the blossoming tree.  It occurred to me driving to St. Johnsbury that all the soil is made up of corpses, the decayed dead bodies of bugs, animals, plants, that all the grasses and blossoming trees are rooted in corpses.  And it occurred to me that the enormous sweet pain I feel tearing my heart open is love, love for the tree and for the corpse, love for life which is inseparable from death.

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Vision for the Planet

Posted on September 19, 2012 by jenny

I created this vision back in March, when I was very discouraged about the state of the world.  My understanding of how to manifest a vision came from Robert Fritz.  If you hold the vision, and hold a clear picture of the present, without getting caught up in strategies to reach the goal, the vision will move into reality.

1) The earth is healthy, with clean water, clean air, and resources being used responsibly and sustainably.
2) People revere the earth and care for it appropriately.
3) People in public office are intelligent & compassionate and have high moral standards and are willing to work for peace and justice for everybody.
4) People who are disabled, sick, poor, having a hard time, can find appropriate, knowledgeable and compassionate help.
5) People know how to work together co-operatively, and everyone gets to do work that they really care about.
6) Schools are fun, learning is self directed, children spend a lot of time in nature.  Making sure that kids grow up healthy and happy is the highest priority for everyone.

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July 1995: “The Whole Thing”

Posted on September 18, 2012 by jenny

(Here’s another gem, found while converting old journal documents to a newer program.  Written in July 1995)
SUNDAY, JULY 30.    Candle, dandelion tea, aap sahaee hoaa on the tape deck.  Glorious day, snarling planes, enormous sadness.  I’m seeing that in the struggle with the noise there are many “parts of myself”:
I am the one that screams intolerably loud, trying to get someone to pay attention to my pain.
I am the one that tries to avoid hearing the noise, that makes the noisemaker wrong.
I am the one that cries out and causes other people to feel the pain of their unhealed wounds.
I am the one who, attempting to enjoy my life, thoughtlessly causes pain to others.
I am the one who is damaged, before birth and all my life, by the toxic wastes of our unhealthy culture, and I am the one who perpetuates that pollution by the choices I make in how I live.
The hardest one to own is “thoughtlessly causes pain” since I have spent so much of my life’s energy holding myself back, holding back my power, my creativity, my intelligence, my joy, in the effort not to “hurt” people.  But much of that fear was an illusion.  And the truth is that I have, more than once, thoughtlessly caused pain by an unconsidered remark.

Walking back to the house to get a mug, I could see the beauty of the glorious day – sparkling blue and green, fresh breeze, white clouds — and the pain of my grief like a dagger in the heart and one did not shut out the other, they were both there, both parts of me, both pain and glory and they were somehow one, somehow some new thing that contains both pain and joy, that’s much bigger than either, that reaches out into enormous spaces.    This is the whole thing.    This is like the moment of the corpse and the blossoming apple tree, but more complete.  Words are poor substitutes for experience — that’s the best I can do.  I wish I could express it as poetry, there’s some sort of intensification that happens when the pain is there with the beauty, but doesn’t cut me off from the beauty.  This is like the way the beauty of the world was intensified in the aftermath of Fiona’s death, but then the pain was greater than the beauty, and now the beauty is greater than the pain, includes the pain, is completed by the pain.  I repeat to myself with wonder and tears: “This is the whole thing.  I have it all.”

“This beauty opens a great heart, wide, wide a world’s refuge.”

The white clouds fly.  The little green leaves quiver in the sunlight.  A purple finch sits at the feeder.  The sunlight falls on the pottery shells.  Signs from Journey into Courage stand against the wall.  Maria & Susie are elegant, the dollhouse is unfinished, the crone fabric hangs in the background.  The white clouds fly behind the ugly transformer with its ugly wires that brings the electricity into the house to run the tape deck so I can be listening to aap sahaee hoaa, and the sound of a plane contributes a base note.  A butterfly and a bee come to the window.  “I am the sacrifice unto the One, day or night, with every breath, remember Him.”    Not perfection, but completeness.  Yes, Lord, I happily and with gratitude, give up “perfection” and accept completeness.    “The Lord Himself has become my refuge.”    What an astonishing, rich, complex, enormous place to live.  And I have no name for it, can only feebly call it “the Whole Thing.”    Perhaps this is god?  Certainly there is a sense of a Divine Being who contains all these contradictory things, and has room for more, space in which utterly new things can appear.  And I say Yes! I want it all, the pain as well as the joy, the endless risk of being “open to the new.”

9/16/12  As I am reading this, a rabbit comes up the steps and looks through the door glass right at me.  He stays there, then ducks down and pops up several times before leaving.  Is this a message?

Fiona was our first dog, killed on the road.

Aap sahaee hoaa is a Sanscrit chant.  We played it a lot after Fiona’s death.

The line about “opens a great heart” is from Thomas Merton’s translation of Chuangtse’s poem “How deep is Tao”.

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May 1995: Airplane Pollution

Posted on September 15, 2012 by jenny

(Written May 2, 1995)

There’s been a damn airplane snarling out there while I’m writing.  I hate to have a lovely fresh morning, 8AM, sunshine, greening grass, spoiled by that continuous grind at the edge of hearing.  Sigh.  I am not looking forward to airplane season.

I went to take out the birdfeeders and there was the plane, gnarling away in the distance.  I don’t understand how it is that it can completely spoil the freshness of the day, it’s like the days when the mountains are bleared by sulfur dioxide, a continuous low-grade pollution that prevents a return to freshness, newness, innocence.  It’s like the way childhood abuse prevents me from being reborn with the spring, there is no rebirth possible if every experience of freshness that could provide a metaphor for healing is tainted.  I feel like Frodo, so wounded by his quest to destroy the Ring that he could not enjoy life in the Shire when he returned.  Yes, that’s how I feel, that I am so wounded that certain things just aren’t possible: a return to innocence, to freshness and newness, to zest in life?  will I never be able to really enjoy living again, enjoy it 100% in some total kind of way, will there always be that pollution, that shadow, darkening the edges?  I think I’ve been hoping all along that it was possible to heal, to “get back to” some kind of primary positive experience.  I think of Nessa saying after Julian’s death: “I may smile again, but I’ll never be happy” or something like that.  I think of the woman in The Unicorn, who had always wanted time to herself, time just “to be,” and then when she got it, found that it was spoiled somehow, as though already used by someone else.  That’s how I feel, that I’m not able to come into the freshness of the moment because before the moment gets to me, it has already been spoiled.
Wow!  I can see that that doesn’t make sense logically — surely each moment is truly new — but that’s how it feels.  Time itself, the day itself, surely even the noise of the planes, is always new, so if I experience it as “already spoiled” it must be something I do myself, some mechanism in my psyche.  What comes is my inability to forgive myself — for being unable to enjoy, for being wounded, for having been abused, for being unable to heal from that abuse.  Sigh.  Maybe I should try forgiving myself seventy times seven.

Comment from the Present:  Here I am blaming myself for symptoms that are caused by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: the hypersensitivity to noise, and being triggered by it into a position of being totally hopeless and helpless.  Medication is still two years in the future, and I don’t really get it that I was traumatized until 2002.

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Tracy Nelson

Posted on September 14, 2012 by jenny

This is via a group called Christians Tired of Being Misrepresented.  I really like what Tracy has to say.  She’s talking about the Jesus I believe in, even though I’m a Buddhist and a Pagan.  I firmly believe that Jesus was an incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and that means that the Dalai Lama is Jesus come back to show us the way he wanted us to be.  Oh yes, I dislike the word “God”.  Most of the time this name conjures up for me an irritable, judgemental, punitive, white male, who sits on a throne up in the sky.

“My name is Tracy Nelson, I’m a TV actress and a writer, from a famous family (“The Nelsons”) who have become synonymous with ‘Good Ole American Values.’ This means that fans of my dad’s and grandparents ‘friend’ me on Facebook, and then are shocked and offended when I turn out to be a liberal Christian, and a (gasp) Democrat to boot. I’m a political activist and patient advocate; ‘Obamacare’ is personal to me; I had cancer 3x and was ‘uninsurable’, and lost everything to pay for the care that saved my life…….I wrote a short essay that I wanted to share with you, in hopes that you may consider it or some portion of it for publication on your page. It’s regarding the issue of the apparent disappearance of God from the liberal agenda, and why it might have happened, something I feel very passionately about.  Thank you for the work you do, God Bless, Tracy Nelson.”

Many, especially conservatives, are asking: WHY OH WHY is there Democratic resistance to “God”?  Beyond the obvious, the separation of church and state, (even Jesus recommended it: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s”, MT 22:21,) there is something else.

I can tell you why liberal Christians like myself are not surprised or offended by our party’s shying away: The right has hijacked God the same way they did the American Flag after 9-11…when you had to wear a flag pin like some kind of fascist salute or you “weren’t a patriot”…a flag pin!

For those of us who try every day to walk the talk, it’s downright embarrassing to call yourself a Christian. The assumption is immediately made that we are narrow minded bigots determined to inject Jesus, whether you like it or not. “God” has become a dirty word, thanks to the Right, who use Him for political instead of spiritual purposes, to justify things like homophobia, misogyny and racism…to justify a particular oppression of the soul. If the Right is upset that there’s no God in the Democratic Platform, it’s nobody’s fault but their own.

Jesus was a radical, folks, teaching the revolutionary concept of turning the other cheek at a time when only power and force were respected. He (and Paul) spoke tirelessly of helping the poor, the sick, the elderly, even at the expense of one’s own solvency, even if it meant leveling the playing field by having the rich pay more. Jesus was the one to exhort the rich man to give away all of his things, Jesus is the one who talked about how hard it was for the rich man to get into heaven. This concept of giving away your money to help those less fortunate was radical then, and it is radical now.

Make tons of money, we all want to, that’s American, but don’t call yourself a Christian or say we are a “Christian Nation” if you cannot abide by this basic tenet: YOU ARE CALLED TO HELP THE SICK AND THE POOR AND THE ELDERLY. To argue or justify how you can be a Christian and not do so is being what Jesus hated most of all: “a hypocrite.”

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Guidance

Posted on September 11, 2012 by jenny

Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m feeling sad and don’t know why.  Maybe it’s just being too tired to do fun things like they did Thursday night — flash mob, dinner at Cold Mtn.  Please help me.
    Dear Jenny, you are greatly loved.  It’s true that you are slowing down, and don’t have as much energy as you used to.  And lots of things aren’t interesting to you at this point because you no longer care what the “truth” is — the question of extra-terrestrials visiting our planet is one — it doesn’t really make a difference to you whether they did or didn’t.  You have accepted the mystery of life.  Yes, it’s right to be sad that you haven’t got enough energy to carry out all the art projects you’d like to do.  Even so, we think that you should do as much as you can, because it’s fun.  Practice enjoying your daily life as much as you can.  We love you.

Tuesday, September 11
I typed up a guidance from a month ago and it’s very interesting.  My Spirits remind me that many issues I used to wonder about — such as whether or not we have been visited by extraterrestrials or even descended from extraterrestrials — I used to want to know what the truth was.  At that time I was mostly living in my head, and trying to “figure it out” and find evidence for what was “right” were important to me.  I really struggled with issues like what happens after we die, and whether the founding energy of the universe was power, or love, or just blind growth.  I don’t exactly know when that changed.  I think Somatic Experiencing had a lot to do with it, because I’ve been learning from experience about the wisdom of my body, the wisdom of the unconscious, the wisdom of the Creation — meaning all the galaxies and stars, and planets and plants and animals — the wisdom of the “process” for lack of a better word. The mantra “I offer myself to this process” was given to me at Kripalu, and it felt right to me.  “Thy will be done” was much too difficult since my first image of God was of the Big Old Man up there on his throne, judgemental and punitive.  The Process, the amazing process that carries me along, that brings what I need for my healing when I am ready, that surprises me with radical serendipitous and synchronicitous (are they the same? probably) happenings.  I find that I can listen to stories of what happens after death — we go on in the same personality and meet our dead friends, or we go through a time of testing and learning before we get into “heaven,” or maybe I lose everything of the personality I think of as “me”, and the energy I have embodied, and hopefully changed for the better during my lifetime, goes on to reclothe itself in another body and continue the Work.  Once I tried to imagine a “heaven” where I could be happy, and I couldn’t imagine anywhere I’d want to be other than Planet Earth at a time when we humans understand that there are no enemies, that our differences can be celebrated, that our planet is a gloriously beautiful life support system, and our purpose is to support, enhance, and celebrate it and the creatures — whales, bears, dogs, spiders, grass, trees, flowers — we live beside.  This is the only image I have that satisfies me.  All the other stories are just stories, and I’ve begun to know, at some deep level, that the reality we are trying to explain is more beautiful, more amazing, more compassionate, more meaningful, more integrated, than anything we could ever imagine.
I think of Ram Dass saying, whether it’s the New Age or the Apocalypse, “I will quiet my mind, open my heart, and bring compassion to the beings that I see before me.  So it doesn’t matter what happens.”  No matter what comes next, I will do my best to show up and be present, pay attention, tell the truth, and let go of the outcome.  (Four rules for living by Angeles Arrien.)

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Arundhati Roy

Posted on September 5, 2012 by jenny

This quote came through on Facebook, from the Anonymous ART of Revolution.  It’s by Arundhati Roy, who wrote the beautiful and painful book “The God of Small Things.”  It makes my soul feel stronger, which I desperately need, in this crazy world where it looks like the Empire is about to win.

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Arundhati Roy, War Talk

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April 1994: Interview for Journey into Courage Video

Posted on September 4, 2012 by jenny

Found while converting April 1994

Mary and Bess came to film (or videotape) an interview with me for the Journey into Courage video.  It was quite an experience.
Some of the interview questions were expected “How did you hear about Journey?”  Some were not — and got me thinking about things in new ways.  Bess asked something about my anger, which surprised me, I don’t think of myself as an angry person.  But I guess one of the gifts of Journey is the ability to use my anger, consciously and effectively, in the service of what I value.  She also asked about my spirituality, and I think I did manage to say something about the sacredness of every day things.  She asked me about the advantages and disadvantages of growing up wealthy, I said something about not experiencing myself as “wealthy”, but that I was glad for a good education, that the money gave me time, time to write in my journal and to explore my psyche, and made it possible to see good therapists.

Bess and Mary commented on how well I was able to articulate the answers to some of the questions.  Bess said “You’re so succinct that sometimes you answer five of my questions at once.”  I was thinking about how that is part of my cosmic job, to speak for the voiceless, to articulate what other people feel, but can’t express in words.  I have been angry that a person of intelligence wealth and creativity had her life so damaged by childhood abuse that she has never been able to live up to her promise.  But something that is desperately needed in our culture right now is for someone to speak out about the plight of abused children: and who can do that better than a person who is articulate and intelligent, who was herself abused, who has money and time to do the therapy, to work to understand what happened to her, and to write about it.  If I chose this life, if I chose to be born to abusive parents, it was for the same reason that a reporter risks his/her life to go into a war zone, to be a witness, to send back reports of what is happening on the battlefield.

One thing I didn’t get to say, was how I did Journey not for other women, but for myself, to tell my story and be heard.

When it was time to go to bed, I discovered that I felt so good in my body that it was hard to go to sleep. It felt like a lot of little doors in me, that are normally shut down, were now wide open.  It felt like I had really been appreciated for the very first time.  It felt wonderful.  And I notice today that my body feels better, not so stiff and sore.

For another take on what this interview meant for me, see Keeper of the Calendar

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July 1994: No Enemies Within

Posted on September 3, 2012 by jenny

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.
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.
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.]

Today (September 3, 2012) I’m very impressed with my analysis of the situation, and the hard work I was doing in trying to see my mother clearly, and to see the internalized mother accurately.  I’m amazed by this sentence: “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.”  This intention became Journey Into Courage, and then this blog.  What is saddest to me, is that for all my excellent cognitive work, no healing was happening.  That’s why it sounds so distant only a month later.  The part of me that needs to be healed is frozen in my brain and nervous system, encoded in my cells. Eighteen years ago, Peter Levine’s first book Waking the Tiger was not even published yet.

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