(Sun in Virgo, Moon in Aquarius, Scorpio Rising)<\/p>\n
In 1964, Jenny got a degree in Astronomy, went to Stonehenge for the first time, and read \u201cThe White Goddess\u201d by Robert Graves (about the Celtic tree alphabet and calendar).\u00a0 In the very last hours of 1964, she was dancing Greek folk dances in Paris with some Greek friends.\u00a0 These four threads: Astronomy, Stonehenge, Sacred Calendar, and Folk Dance continued, sometimes hidden, sometimes obvious, until they all reconnected in Sacred Circle Dance.<\/p>\n
Sacred Calendar<\/a><\/p>\n The Feminine of History is Mystery<\/a><\/p>\n ASTRONOMER DANCER WRITER PRIESTESS VETERAN OF DOMESTIC WARS Children who grow up in alcoholic families have been damaged by early years spent in a chaotic and unpredictable environment.\u00a0 \u201cFor the first time, I saw that the problem was not who I was, but what I had learned.\u201d\u00a0 A very restricted diet (no wheat, no sugar, no yeast or yeast byproducts, etc.) and continued work on COA (Children of Alcoholics) issues both in therapy and at workshops, helped her manage the depression & anxiety without addressing the root cause.\u00a0 By this time, she was married and living in Franconia NH.<\/p>\n JOURNEY INTO COURAGE NORMAL BRAIN CHEMISTRY ARTIST Normal brain chemistry helped a lot.\u00a0 Workshops in creative process such as Contemplative Dance\/Authentic Movement, Shawn McNif\u2019s \u201cArt as Medicine\u201d, and Aviva Gold\u2019s \u201cPainting from the Source\u201d enabled Jenny to learn skills and get more grounded in her own creativity.\u00a0 Neskaya<\/a>, built by Jenny and her ex-husband, was a venue and an inspiration.\u00a0 She created Spirits for the four directions, and an ever-changing display on the East wall.\u00a0 Bursts of creativity alternated with bouts of depression.<\/p>\n HEALING FROM TRAUMA At this point, events conspired to push her back into a depression as bad as any she had ever had.\u00a0 At the same time she was afflicted by severe lethargy.\u00a0 Raising medication did not immediately affect how she felt, but she could tell it was working because she was able to haul wood, shovel snow, walk the dog, and cook food for herself.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the severity of depression and terror forced her to do a piece of work involving a part of herself that might be called the \u201cInner traumatized baby.\u201d She had to recognize that this part of herself needed gentleness, comfort, and patience, not pressure to \u201cshape up\u201d.\u00a0 Taking this issue seriously and committing to changing her attitude toward herself changed everything.\u00a0 At first, she didn\u2019t feel any better, still felt \u201csad & scared\u201d most of the time.\u00a0 But now she came to her fear and sadness with compassion.\u00a0 She was also strengthened by a deep commitment to the practice of lovingkindness.<\/p>\n In February 2006 she went to Dr. Vreeland<\/a>, a chiropractor in Norwich VT who had been able to help people who hadn’t been healed by standard medical practice.\u00a0 She was astonished when he said her thyroid gland had been underfunctioning for years. He started her on supplements to address the problem and after a couple of months she felt better than she had ever felt in her life.<\/p>\n The thyroid boost helped a lot, but I foolishly thought it meant I could get off medication. So I tried once again and once again it was a disaster. I went through some of the worst times in my life in \u201808 and \u201809. Journal entries from those bad times have been posted in this blog along with the Guidance and the Somatic Experiencing work. There\u2019s also a more detailed description of what those years were like in the post for August 8, 2010.<\/p>\n I have arrived at the place where I\u2019m pretty much able to go on with my life, and I\u2019m not either depressed or terrified. Occasionally I\u2019m happy, like yesterday, today (January 6, 2011) I\u2019ve been lonely and sad. I don\u2019t have a lot of control over whether I\u2019m happy or sad, full of energy or so tired I can barely heat up something that\u2019s already been cooked. It\u2019s important not to be alone too much, so I keep working at calling people to see if we can get together. My mantra these days is \u201ccompletely accept,\u201d and I do my best to completely accept what ever I\u2019m feeling, whatever is happening in the moment.<\/p>\n One big change since 2006 was that then, when I was feeling good about myself, it was my functional self, my talented, outrageous, creative, energetic self that I felt good about. I thought that was the \u201creal me\u201d and the depressed one was not the \u201creal me.\u201d I\u2019ve learned to accept ALL of myself, both the energetic and creative part of me, and the terrified baby part of me. I always felt some sort of push to prove that I deserved to live \u2014 that\u2019s part of what pushed me to do too much when I was \u201cfeeling good.\u201d Now, at last, the old push push push is gone. I can feel good doing \u201cnothing\u201d, I can enjoy ordinary life doing ordinary things with ordinary people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Sun in Virgo, Moon in Aquarius, Scorpio Rising) In 1964, Jenny got a degree in Astronomy, went to Stonehenge for the first time, and read \u201cThe White Goddess\u201d by Robert Graves (about the Celtic tree alphabet and calendar).\u00a0 In the … Continue reading
\nJenny received a degree in Astronomy from Wellesley College in 1964.\u00a0 She has lectured and taught classes in Planetaria (the correct Latin plural of Planetarium, that machine that projects the stars on a dome) in Cincinnati, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine.\u00a0 During a trip to the British Isles in 1964, she was lucky enough to visit Stonehenge before it became popular, and this inspired a continuing interest in archeoastronomy.\u00a0 While in England she also read a book by Robert Graves, The White Goddess, which sparked a quest for the astronomical basis of the dates of the \u201cFire Festivals\u201d or Cross-Quarter Days.\u00a0 (Little did she know that the answer was at Stonehenge.)\u00a0 For seven years, at the College for Lifelong Learning in New Hampshire, she taught a course for adults in \u201cObservational Astronomy\u201d which was based on keeping an observing notebook. Her focus was, and continues to be, how much we can learn about the amazing universe in which we live from our own observations with the naked eye.\u00a0 She continues to offer occasional evenings of star-watching through The Rocks and other local organizations in Littleton NH.<\/p>\n
\nJenny has always loved dance, but relegated it to a low priority in a life devoted to teaching and writing about science.\u00a0 When she lived in Brunswick Maine, she began dancing with a local International Folkdance Group. She was aware that the dances were feeding her soul in some way, even though the other people who came seemed to be unaware of this possibility. While dancing a simple Breton dance to the music of bagpipes, her Celtic heritage (one Scots grandmother, one Irish grandmother) emerged and demanded a larger share of her life energy.\u00a0 While at Maine Folk Dance Camp, she heard a woman from India, trained in classical temple dancing, say: \u201cDance is my spiritual practice.\u201d Jenny had been doing Buddhist sitting meditation for many years with more or less success, but these words opened a door: dance could be a spiritual practice, and it was hers.\u00a0 And finally, on the green in Danville, Vermont, as part of the Dowsers Conference, she found people doing \u201cSacred Circle Dance\u201d to celebrate the fall equinox.\u00a0 They were doing dances she already knew around a simple altar\/centerpiece of a scarf, a candle, and tokens of earth and water.\u00a0 \u201cWell, of course, I always knew the dances were sacred.\u201d She had already been teaching Folk Dance to a small group in Franconia NH, where she moved in 1980.\u00a0 Now she went to the first circle dance workshops in New England, given by teachers from the British Isles, who were introducing this new\/old way of understanding traditional dances.\u00a0 She did a teacher training workshop with Peter Vallance from Findhorn in 1987.\u00a0 Continuing to teach Sacred Circle Dance became the most important thing in a life increasingly darkened by clinical depression.<\/p>\n
\nAt the age of 17, inspired by the diary of Anne Frank, Jenny started writing a journal and has been doing so ever since.\u00a0 In Brunswick, she took a dream class from a Jungian teacher, Charles Ponce.\u00a0 This made her aware of the major archetypes of the Sun and the Moon, with the Sun representing all that is linear, logical, rational, masculine, and yang, and the Moon representing all that is patterned, associative, intuitive, feminine and yin.\u00a0 These major archetypes are also represented in the two halves of the body: no matter WHICH hemisphere of the brain is involved, our EXPERIENCE is that the right side of the body is more straightforward and active, the left side is more inclusive and receptive.\u00a0 At the same time, Jenny had become interested in dowsing, ley-lines and other aspects of \u201cearth energies\u201d, the idea that the planet earth has an energy body with meridians and energy flows, similar to the Chinese understanding of the human body.\u00a0 Putting these ideas together resulted in the inspiration for a book to be written with \u201cright-hand\u201d and \u201cleft-hand\u201d pages: the Righthand pages contain a linear narrative, complete with footnotes and bibliography, the Lefthand pages contain dreams, visions, entries from a trip journal, \u201cchanneled\u201d writings (\u201cI made those up\u201d), celebrations, poetry, etc.\u00a0 As part of the research for the book, Jenny made two trips to the British Isles in 1977 and \u201878, to visit the megalithic sites and other holy places.\u00a0 The book, entitled \u201cThe Feminine of History is Mystery\u201d<\/a>, was printed in 1985 by a local press because of the the difficulty of coordinating the righthand and lefthand pages.<\/p>\n
\nWhile living in Brunswick, Maine, Jenny joined a women\u2019s group which ran a small counseling and referral service.\u00a0 As a new member, she did one of her typically innocent things, following the path of the Fool in the Tarot, who steps blithely off the cliff…\u00a0 The meeting was the night of February 2, there was a big gibbous moon in the sky, and she took candle and goblet with her.\u00a0 When the business meeting was over, Jenny said \u201cIt\u2019s Candlemas, and I want to do a ritual.\u201d\u00a0 She lit the candle, filled the goblet with water and passed it around the circle, reciting the words of the Prophet Odo (from Ursula LeGuin\u2019s The Dispossessed): \u201cYou cannot make the Revolution, you cannot buy the Revolution, you can only BE the Revolution.\u201d When it was over, one woman sighed deeply and said \u201cThis is what was missing.\u201d Another said \u201cBlessed Be.\u201d Jenny had never heard those words before, and only much later understood that she had just come out as a witch.\u00a0 Her training followed a similar serendipitous path: the inspiration and writing of a book, which with hindsight turned out to be both justification and process for shifting her life path from that of Western scientist to sacred artist, a class in \u201chow to create your life\u201d which gave practice in the principles of manifestation, a series of \u201cshamanic journeys\u201d from various disciplines (active imagination, imaginative writing, therapy, guided meditations, etc.) Even before she was found by Sacred Circle Dance, she had been leading more or less informal seasonal celebrations, and learning to put together a ritual with whatever comes to hand in the moment.\u00a0 From a journal entry: \u201cThe power is not in the candles, crystals, etc, the power is in me!\u201d She continues to be hesitant to call herself a priestess, or shaman, or witch, because she has not been trained in any recognized lineage, nor does she follow any one teacher or teaching.\u00a0 Whenever she asked Higher Self for a teacher, she was told \u201cYou must be your own teacher.\u201d Probably her most important teacher was clinical depression.\u00a0 She struggled with depression and anxiety most of her life without knowing what was causing it.\u00a0 Again with hindsight it is possible to see that in a culture that does not acknowledge the shamanic world and has no place for shamanic teachers, one of the ways to be initiated into a shamanic path is through an abusive childhood, and some such confrontation with Fear, Death, and Despair as is provided by childhood trauma.\u00a0 Her priestess name, Tarashtri, came to her directly in a workshop given by Jalaja Bonheim.\u00a0 She continues to make pilgrimages to sacred sites, to conduct the seasonal ceremonies, and to function as the Keeper of Neskaya.<\/p>\n
\nJenny was the oldest child in a family where both parents were alcoholics.\u00a0 As a typical \u201chero\u201d, she was an overachiever in school.\u00a0 After graduation from college, she moved to California, was swept up in the whirlpool of the counterculture, protested the War in Vietnam, refused to pay taxes, dropped out of graduate school, but was too suspicious of drugs to complete the transition to a hippie lifestyle.\u00a0 She had a \u201cnervous breakdown\u201d, and was hospitalized for a few weeks.\u00a0 Her on-going struggle with anxiety and depression began at this time, age 28 (the year of the first Saturn return).\u00a0 She spent years in and out of therapy, trying to figure out what was wrong with her so she could fix it, but nothing really worked until 1984, a watershed year when she was submerged by a second major depression, diagnosed with systemic yeast, and found out about Children of Alcoholics.<\/p>\n
\nIn 1990, a friend told her there was a \u201cdrama class for victims of domestic violence\u201d in nearby St. Johnsbury VT.\u00a0 Being interested in theater, and needing to speak out about her childhood, Jenny joined the group which was mostly women who had left battering husbands.\u00a0 Eventually, their work became a theater piece, \u201cJourney into Courage\u201d, written and performed by women survivors of domestic violence.\u00a0 Jenny saw her role as helping to break the cultural denial of the enormous damage caused by alcoholism, and especially to point out that alcoholism of a parent is automatically abuse of the child.\u00a0 Journey into Courage was performed in different venues, mostly in Vermont, and different incarnations: a total of eleven women performed over the years from 91 to 94, in groups as small as 3 and as large as 8.\u00a0 There was a short segment made for Vermont ETV, and a video<\/a> of how Journey was put together and how the women\u2019s lives were changed by it.\u00a0 The video is still used in the state of Vermont for training of police and other service professionals who deal with domestic violence.\u00a0 For Jenny, Journey into Courage represented \u201cthe artist in me coming out of the closet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nAfter the last performance of Journey, Jenny slid down into the worst depression yet.\u00a0 A series of \u201ccoincidences\u201d led to finding the right therapist, and the right medication, and finally in the summer of 1997, a whole new life, or perhaps it would be truer to say \u201cLife at last.\u201d \u201cWhat I had before medication was NOT a life, but I didn\u2019t know the difference because I couldn\u2019t remember being normal.\u00a0 Normal brain chemistry is a gift of God for which I am grateful every day.\u201d\u00a0 When her brain chemistry was balanced, and she was able to actually begin building a real life for herself, her husband of 18 years left her for another woman.\u00a0 Although this has been a source of a lot of pain, she also found the freedom to allow her creative life to grow into its full depth and power, and realized she had been holding back to keep the marriage together.<\/p>\n
\nAs a creative child growing up in an alcoholic family, Jenny was not given guidance or support for developing her talents and giving expression to her creativity.\u00a0 She was either exploited (\u201cWhy don\u2019t you make decorations for Mrs. Jones\u2019 party\u201d) or invalidated (\u201cYou\u2019d better clean up that mess before your father gets home.\u201d) Many dried out sets of oil and acrylic paints and half finished blank books testify both to the power of her creative spirit, and the power of the negative messages in her psyche.<\/p>\n
\nHaving grown up with addicted parents made Jenny very resistant to the idea of being dependent on medication.\u00a0 She tried more than once to get off medication.\u00a0 In August 2000 she reduced her medication to 30 mg of Imipramine, after a maximum of 120 mg which she had taken for nearly two years.\u00a0 The attempt to lower her medication was a disaster.\u00a0 Skills for keeping depression at bay had become denial of depression, and the condition was so familiar it was hard to recognize what was happening.\u00a0 Terror again became a daily companion.\u00a0 On the advice of a friend, who was being helped by his work, she read Peter Levine\u2019s book \u201cWaking the Tiger\u201d.\u00a0 He describes his studies of trauma in animals and his development of \u201cSomatic Experiencing\u201d<\/a>, a method for healing trauma.\u00a0 In the next four years, she worked with 4 different practitioners.\u00a0 Each came to the work with a different slant, all were helpful.\u00a0 In the fall of 2005, she began to feel like a whole person, with a real life, and that she was beginning to see things with a clarity of perception that she had never known.\u00a0 It was clear that some kind of trauma, probably in infancy, had been at the root of her depression and anxiety.<\/p>\n