This video came around on Facebook. I cried all the way through it. Such incredible pictures, and the tides breathe, the falls sing, and people’s greed ruins so much beauty. Be careful, this could change your life.
Something worth giving my life for? You bet.
(Written in September 1993)
I talked about the feeling I got from Verna, I once described it in a journal entry calling her a cannibal, that there was something I had that she wanted, that she would just suck it out of me if she could, that I could feel pressure from her to teach her how to write like me. Something about Verna reminded me of Granny, how she would tell me how “wonderful” I was, and how confusing it was for me because I felt that she wanted me to do something for her, but I didn’t know what it was, and also that she didn’t see me clearly, so her “wonderful” couldn’t apply to me. (I see now that I experienced “you’re wonderful” as a manipulative expectation, but I didn’t have that concept to understand it and ended up feeling inadequate.)
Exploring this stuff with my therapist, I saw the enormous baffled pain of being a child that is wiser than the adults around her, you see better ways to do things, or at least that theirs is disfunctional, so you can’t rest on their authority, but when you try to help, they invalidate your viewpoint so you learn not to trust your own perceptions either. And that deep wish to help (the natural response of an adult to a child she sees is floundering) is turned into a feeling of failure and hopelessness, because although you have the greater wisdom, you are only a small child and haven’t skills or concepts to articulate what you see, and they have big bodies and big voices and all the authority of being “grownup” and they are threatened by what little you do manage to say and of course have to make you wrong.
[I see now, it’s not so much that the child is “wise”, that I was “wise”, it was just that I saw the truths which my parents were spending their lives denying. Oct93]
I saw that part of what kept sucking me in to “try to fix it” for Verna was my inability to validate my own perception that she is deep in denial. She is so charming, so plausible, she has even said she admires my writing and would like to write like that. So I get sucked into trying to teach her how, I start doing my “song-and-dance” about honesty at which point, of course, I cease to be honest. (Later it became clear that what I had to do was embody honesty and keep my mouth shut.) Verna will never be able to write like me until she shifts her life orientation from “putting a good face on it” to a willingness to see the truth. There’s nothing I can do about that. [And of course, what I would really want for her is not that she would “write like me” but that she would write like herself.]
Verna was the mother of a friend. She came to my writing group.
What’s interesting about this journal entry is my effort to “figure it out” and also the comments I make from the future. Part of my process with my journal was to reread it occasionally and make comments from my present viewpoint. I always wrote on the righthand pages, leaving the lefthand ones as space for comments. This developed into a dialogue between older and younger selves. In this passage, the comments added when I was typing up a month later are in square brackets and italicized.
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’ve been feeling a little down and lost, not quite sure what I want to do next. Can you help me?
Dear Jenny, “down and lost” is a very natural reaction to being so busy for a number of days. Also, we think that finding Charlotte’s letter has really thrown you, because you are really beginning to be able to take in the truth about yourself that she describes so well. Remember that beginning to believe positive things about yourself, beginning to fully understand who you really are, is very threatening to some inner parts of you. There are very young ones who are afraid of being made wrong and abandoned. There are also internalized voices left from your mom and dad. They have pretty much been disempowered, but there’s still a residue of discomfort in your body which can be triggered.
(Written in February 1993)
I have more thoughts about what I was writing about yesterday. I was reading in ’86 about the visit from Beverly’s friend Victoria, how she thought she “always wanted to be right” and was putting herself down for such a petty motive. When we examined it, it turned out that what she really wanted was to be accepted just as she was. She experienced enormous relief with this discovery. I’ve also seen, reading through all those old journals, that what I was really looking for from other people was not “support and approval”, not compliments or agreement, what I was searching for was honest response, honest feedback.
How amazing! Immediately after that entry I got a long letter (5 pages) from Charlotte in response to the Journal excerpts I sent them for Christmas. It was a real response, direct comments on parts of the journal, stories of herself and Howard, general thoughts about spirituality and the economy stimulated by my words. She also included a long description of me which warmed my heart. I’ll probably scan it to put it in here, but there’s one sentence I want to copy: “There is the child-like trust and openness and readiness for response to the world.” and “Whatever happened to you as a child, it did not break your spirit.” What a gift for my moon-day — perceptive intelligent feedback from someone whose judgement I trust.
She emphasizes response and exchange and giving-receiving as being the important thing about life, and I realize that at least part of my wish to publish is wanting to put my work out there so that I can get a response. I notice that Charlotte describes me as one who wishes to respond to the world, not a person looking for attention or approval, not a person looking to impose her ideas, but one who wants to answer, to receive the impact of the world and respond from the heart. This is the motive that lies behind my desire to be an artist, not “showing off” or “bragging”. I find myself furious on behalf of little Jenny, whose attempts to respond were misinterpreted and deflected by her mother’s narcissism, and so she shut down. But that sensitive, generous, responsive being is really there, and was not killed, and my job is to protect and nourish her and create space for her to live in the world.
I just read over a journal entry (’87) where I’m struggling to accept that “Jenny” is herself my task, but what I’m seeing is a hypersensitive chronically ill “fussy” self-involved drip, instead of the being described by Charlotte. Sitting here at my desk I can see them both, I can see that the irritable self-involved one is what you get when you place a sensitive, intelligent, eager to respond child in an alcoholic environment, and I can love them both. Last night I cried a lot for how I too had judged and stunted and starved that lovely being and I apologized to her.
My “moon day” is the day that the sun is conjunct my Moon. Since my Moon is in Aquarius, my moon day is generally February 14.
After reading what Charlotte said in her letter, I found myself being able to see good motives behind actions that I had thought were selfishly motivated. Here’s an entry from February 93:
Yesterday I discovered that good and positive and generous motivations lie hidden under all the garbage and habitual self-judgement. I was reading a passage from Dec ’86 in which I quote “the desire to be helpful is really a wish to control”. I don’t buy that completely for myself, but I do end up judging my desire to help as disfunctional. Now I see that it is not my desire to help that is disfunctional, but my distorted ideas of what constitutes “help” and my compulsive desire to help even at the expense of taking care of myself. My desire to help is that generous child’s impulse and should be honored. Then as I struggle with the issue of trying to help Beverly, distrusting myself and my motives all over the place, blaming and judging myself for being self-serving, what shines through strong and clear is my willingness to work on my own stuff in order to be truly helpful to my friend, and the fact that she did find it helpful.
It interests me how quick I am to assume that my motives were selfish. My mother was very good at hiding her selfish motives behind pretensions of virtue, and I could see that wasn’t true. I was so afraid of doing the same thing, that I tended to think the worst of myself. It’s also true that mother treated me as though I was selfish, as though my actions were done deliberately to hurt her, etc.
In doing my project of converting old journals into a newer word processor, I have discovered many things. One is a letter from Charlotte (the mother of my ex-husband) in response to the collection of excerpts from my journal that I sent to people as Christmas presents. The letter says wonderful things about me, that are still hard for me to accept, though I’m beginning to become aware of the person she’s describing. In 1993, I was completely unable to take in what she said, and it fell into oblivion almost immediately.
From Charlotte’s letter:
So many of the entries had to do with your self-questioning. To me it was immediately obvious that you were intelligent, educated and talented – and extraordinarily so. Besides this, however, there was something special about you – something Dana mentioned in the letter in which he first told us about you. There is the child-like trust and openness and readiness for response to the world. For all your sophistication, there is nothing worldly-wise or cynical about you. And you don’t put other people down to build yourself up. You feel the need for approval, but you have to be honest. All this is very unusual. I never cease to be amazed at how many intelligent, educated and talented people there are in this world. Yet to judge by what happens in public, their gifts are squandered in a quest for success that makes them jump into the latest bandwagon and get caught up in institutionalized mis-information, exploitation and pandering.
As for being attractive, to me there’s something charismatic about you. Even in jeans one can tell you’re a dancer – in your posture, your bearing, your movements and gestures. When you get excited, your eyes shine like stars.
Whatever happened to you as a child, it did not break your spirit. What Karen said is exactly right. Accept yourself – it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand yourself. At bottom, all things are founded in mystery – through the courage to be. So forgive and forget. It’s obvious you do. There’s nothing vengeful about you and you are turning your recollections into creativity.
The real problem is not you but the world. The more extraordinary one is, the harder it is to find response from others. People one meets may feel threatened and turn away. But you have made and do have friends – such as have helped to release your creativity.
Disclaimer: I’m almost feeling scared to publish this, how conceited will people think I am, isn’t this the ancient sin of “bragging”? But it’s somebody else’s writing. Isn’t that OK? Please, Dear Reader, if you know me, let me know if the person Charlotte’s describing sounds like the person you know.
From her PS:
Also, I’ve been thinking about what Jenny said in considering the possibility of publishing her journal. My suspicion is that publishers only grab journals of celebrities (or with plenty of the scandalous). Still, there could be a set of selections that would tell a story meaningful to others. In any case, the journal is full of beautiful writing – simple, clear, expressive – revealing a journey toward authentic self-hood. The little comments on the morning sky or winter night are brilliant gems. You certainly have a right to think of yourself as an artist in the field of literature.
I was reading two books by Matthew Fox in June. Creativity and Original Blessing. I wrote down some quotes that were meaningful to me, and I’m pretty sure they are from Creativity, but I’ve already taken the book back to the Library (interlibrary loan) so I can’t go back and check.
“Creativity takes courage — courage to explore one’s deepest self and to let in the depths of the world’s struggles and joys, torments and agonies. Rilke put it this way: ‘Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes. … This sort of derangement, which is peculiar to us, must go into our work.’” p71-2
Fox talks about imagination enlarging the soul and the heart, about the wildness that we must allow to move through us. He talks about how antithetical wildness is to the need to control, which Fox says is “Fascist.” “All fascism wants to kill imagination and make control into God. … We have to learn to trust the universe and its creative process.” p 65
“There is a river of creativity running through all things, all relationships, all beings, all corners and centers of this universe. We are here to join it, to get wet, to jump in, to ride these rapids, wild and sacred as they be.” p66 “One reason creativity takes courage is that the Holy Spirit is no small force to let into our lives.” p74
“Anaïs Nin once said: ‘We write to taste life twice.’ I agree. I think we write to taste life twice, and we paint and dance and sing and compose and do all art to ‘taste life twice.’ This opportunity to taste life twice is an invitation to go deeper, to miss nothing, to tell others, to experience the joy a second time in the telling and in handing on the depths and mystery of life. When we behold, we become so struck by what is that we want to share. We call that sharing ‘art.’ … We tap into the work of the Creator whose power is ‘unceasingly glowing and burning with all the Divine wealth, all the Divine sweetness, all the Divine bliss.’” (He’s quoting Eckhart) p77
I’m really enjoying Matthew Fox. I feel enlarged and what? loosened? It’s that sense of chaos, that anything could happen and that I can trust the process. Even the political idiocy becomes flotsam on the water. And I see how my “Sacred Sites” program is an opening for the Holy Spirit to come through. That makes me excited again to think about doing it.
“ … becoming fruitful as a result of the gift is the only gratitude for the gift.” (Eckhart, quoted by Fox) p78
Another quote from Matthew Fox. It was on a loose piece of paper.
“There are practical ramifications when we experience the Divine Nothingness. We become more ample channels for grace to pour through, less self-conscious and more trusting and certainly less in control.” p 169
Learning to trust the process has been a long journey for me. Having grown up in an alcoholic family, and feeling terror on a regular basis, had the consequence that I was very afraid of loss of control. I think Kripalu was the first place where I was taught to “trust the process.” From Painting from the Source and authentic movement I began to learn more and more how to let go and begin to trust the process. Finally, doing Somatic Experiencing gave me a lot of experience of letting go, and learning that the process CAN be trusted.
My paintings from Painting from the Source
“Sacred Sites in Ancient Keltia” is an audio-visual program using slides that I took on three trips to the British Isles, and a musical background composed by my friend Beverly Woods.
From my journal for May 1992
I start to feel scared and totally blasted — it’s the old familiar panic — can’t breathe, can’t make my mind focus, can’t make decisions. Feel totally overwhelmed. Also feeling that unpleasant combination of lethargy and restlessness. I suppose it’s not so much lack of energy as fear that anything I do will be wrong. So I’m immobilized, but unable to rest.
I feel totally overwhelmed. I feel like a two-year-old, left by her mother in Grand Central Station, watching the adults rush by, no one paying attention to me, nowhere I can go to feel safe, I don’t know what to do, or whether my mother’s ever coming back, or how to look for help. And I feel like I’m outside and can’t get back in, like I’d gone out on the roof of a very tall building and the door had slammed shut and locked. I feel high up and exposed to merciless light. I feel like I’m spread thin on the outside of some cylindrical shape — perhaps my body — and there’s nothing inside, or I have no connection to what’s inside. I have a sense of my body as a hollow shell filled with thousands of beating wings, perhaps many birds, but they are not trying to get out because from their perspective there isn’t any out. So what I’m experiencing is that the inside and the outside are completely disconnected. I don’t like the sense of isolation, the sense of my life being flat and dead.
I’ve just been typing up a passage from last year where I describe a similar state: both immobilized and restless, unable to sense any clear purpose or desire. A frantic feeling of must do something, and absolutely no sense of what would be OK or correct to do.
Gosh I keep writing this same one over and over again. So tiresome. When will I get it.
Actually, what I’m describing, the combination of immobilization and urgency, is a very exact description of PTSD from the inside. The intellectual description of the state is not going to heal it, it may even be re-traumatizing. But intellectual description was the only skill I had.
This was written in April of 1992. “Ondine” was the name of a journal volume that I kept from January to May 1970. In those days I named each of my notebooks in imitation of Anaïs Nin. On the first page it quotes her: “The legend of Ondine tells of how she acquired a human soul the day she wept over a human love.” “The Year of the Ship” was the name of the previous journal. Ondine contains the account of a very intense period in my life. I had a breakdown and was hospitalized, and filled full of Mellaril, a serious tranquillizer. I was at the University of California at Davis, and went to the health center when I fell apart. In April of 1992 I was scanning a typed version of this notebook. And now I’m converting April of 1992 into a newer word-processing program. Each time I get a chance to look at the material again, and it’s different every time because I’ve learned more about myself.
I’ve just finished scanning and correcting the typed version of the journal volume of Ondine. (Don’t know exactly why I skipped the year of the ship, but that’s what I did) I guess I’m not quite ready to try to write about it yet, still too incoherent. I was amazed, very angry, and yet very validated, to read how I saw my parents’ criticism and neglect as damaging, I even mention my father putting his hands on my breasts, I express very articulately and accurately just what they did to me. Yet that intellectual understanding failed to heal me at that time. WHY? WHY? WHY? Well for one thing I saw my outpouring as overdramatizing, as coming out of my sickness, as “making a big fuss” about nothing, I didn’t really believe the depth and power of what I was saying, I saw it as the ravings of a crazy person. Secondly, I failed to understand at all the extreme power imbalance existing between parent and child, I think I really saw myself as an adult, not a child, I saw what they did to me as though it had been done to an adult to whom it would be painful but not profoundly damaging, I saw myself as some kind of wimp that I couldn’t handle it better. I also still believed that their lack of love meant that I was unlovable, their neglect meant I was unworthy of attention, their criticism meant I was a failure, I had not yet got it that their behaviour was controlled by their alcoholism not by my deficiencies.
Goodness! Also, I’m beginning to see how confusing it was for me that mother was so threatened by me and at the same time so dependent on my behavior, specifically my admiration. I could see pretty clearly pretty early on that I was more intelligent than she was, and also wiser than she was, and that she was threatened by this. So of course I shut myself down, held myself in, in order not to threaten or “hurt” her. But I also saw that I could not depend on her, or look to her for guidance. How could I possibly hurt or call to account someone so obviously weaker and more defective than I, someone so obviously in need of more help, guidance, love and support than I could possibly give — though I tried hard and was defeated again and again with consequent damage to my self-esteem and self-respect. God! I should never have had to take on that amount of responsibility!!
Highly Sensitive People are a special category of human. About 20% of all people are “Highly Sensitive” and that turns out to be true for 20% of dogs and horses. Possibly all mammals exhibit this category. The brains of HSPs are organized a little differently. Where 80% of the population would see two shades of red, a Highly Sensitive Person might see as many as eight. This means that they can see nuances and distinctions where others can’t, but they can also be more easily overwhelmed. Since overwhelm is the essence of trauma, I suspect that HSP’s are more likely to be traumatized.
When I finally read the book by Elaine Aron, I was so relieved. My mother was always telling me “don’t be so sensitive” as though I had a choice. Once at a wonderful retreat for women (Woman’s Way) we had done “dreambody paintings.” Each of us had lain down on a large piece of paper while someone traced the outline. There were certain things assigned — injuries and surgery, number of pregnancies and births — and we could also add symbols from our dreams. When they were finished we hung them on the wall and walked around looking at them. Zanda (one of the leaders, Alexandra Merrill) came up to me and said something like “You are trying to take in too much. Use your venetian blinds.” That was hugely, unbelievably helpful. She was the first person to suggest that yes, I was sensitive, and I had to learn how to manage it. I told my trauma therapist about the “venetian blinds” and she thought it was a very useful image. About a decade later the book was published, and I was able to understand in greater depth what I was dealing with.
