I\u2019m thinking of the many times I\u2019ve come to an exciting new understanding of myself, and then on re-reading my journal I discover that I\u2019ve made the same discovery several years ago, and a few years before that, with apparent amnesia in between.\u00a0 It used to make me very discouraged.\u00a0 Recently I was talking to my sister about spiritual matters, maybe I asked her a question about what she believed and she said \u201cBut Jenny, everything I know about Spirit I learned from you.\u201d\u00a0 That blew me away.\u00a0 When had that happened?\u00a0 The year we lived together in Portland I was badly depressed and had no sense of spirit.\u00a0 Maybe it was earlier, on vacations from college, and I talked about what I had learned in Bible class.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t believe in God at all at that time, so I can\u2019t imagine what I might have said to her that meant so much to her.\u00a0 Baffled by this, I told my therapist Karen, and she said \u201cYou weren\u2019t safe enough to have more than intellectual knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recently I went back to read part of my journal for the late 80\u2019s.\u00a0 I knew it was a period, before medication, during which I was having a very bad time, and was severely depressed.\u00a0 From the present I looked back at my life then and saw it as a grey blur.\u00a0 But when I started reading, I was astonished to see how hard I was working to understand what was going on with me.\u00a0 I was working with a therapist in the Jungian tradition, I was recording my dreams and working with them meticulously.\u00a0 I was working hard, but now I can see that it was all intellectual.<\/p>\n
I think it wasn\u2019t until I started working with Karen in the early 90\u2019s that I began to deal with more emotional parts of the psyche.\u00a0 Finally, when I began Somatic Experiencing around 2001, I began to pay attention to my body.<\/p>\n
I used to be discouraged by how many times I made a discovery, only to have it sink into amnesia, and then it would seem brand new when I discovered it again.\u00a0 Now I see how much work it takes to really \u201cget\u201d something, to ground it solidly and deeply enough that it will hold through a bad time.\u00a0 I have this image of layers and layers of the psyche. \u00a0The top layer is intellectual, the bottom layer is grounded in the body, and the layers in between are the stages from one to the other.\u00a0 As I rediscover the same thing over and over again, I\u2019m also moving it down to deeper layers.\u00a0 Most of that work, I suspect, goes on in my subconscious.<\/p>\n
I also discovered that after the recent time of happiness, thoughts about Lynelle\u2019s difficulty with EMFs didn\u2019t bring me down. \u00a0Usually it doesn’t take much to bring me down. \u00a0And I remind myself that of course I will continue to lose and find these things, and I hope that the faith that they will come back will be strong enough to carry me through the bad times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m thinking of the many times I\u2019ve come to an exciting new understanding of myself, and then on re-reading my journal I discover that I\u2019ve made the same discovery several years ago, and a few years before that, with apparent … Continue reading