(Written in June 2004)
\nIn a session of the \u201cWave Work\u201d at Kripalu: there was a confusing struggle with my body\u2019s tendency to cramp up (esp left hand) and kick, shake, jump.\u00a0 Finally I let it shrivel up into a crippled, spastic child (I could see the starving baby from my collage book) \u2014 and it felt, not exactly good, but valid, solid, like this is who I really am.\u00a0 I stayed with it for a while, feeling huge compassion for that shriveled, spastic, starving baby.
\nLater came a sense of \u201cwrong\u201d \u2014 \u201cWho\u2019s saying it?\u201d They are, mom & dad.\u00a0 Then I got angry and started to growl & she said \u201cLet it get big\u201d \u2014 and it got huge, a shell of fire expanding outward.\u00a0 I felt safe inside it.\u00a0 The wounded child guarded by Tigress Mother Durga.\u00a0 I could feel both at once and like the baby really was safe, and fiercely defended, and OK just as she was.\u00a0 As I stayed with the picture, the limbs of the baby began to plump up \u2014 tho her skin was grey black.\u00a0 At that point Helah said I was integrating and just to stay with the feelings of huge compassion.<\/p>\n
Told Karen about the Wave Work, about being the baby \u2014 then about feelings of resistance and disgust to the idea of taking care of myself.\u00a0 She said it was OK to have those feelings.\u00a0 We explored the reality \u2014 that it\u2019s not an infant that requires 24-hour a day care.\u00a0 When I paid attention to the infant I got that what she needed was just my presence, my attention, my willingness to be with her, and to see her correctly.\u00a0 OF COURSE!\u00a0 She\u2019s not a physical baby but an emotional one, she doesn\u2019t need physical nurturing so much as\u00a0 emotional nourishing \u2014 and I can do that.\u00a0 I told Karen that this time being with the baby was different \u2014 I felt compassion go out to her, but not that I had to fix it or make it better.\u00a0 Karen said she could tell that, that in the past I had seen the baby as a \u2018chore\u2019, a \u2018burden\u2019.\u00a0 (which of course is how mother saw me).<\/p>\n
(Written in December 2004) (Written in December 2005) When I don\u2019t have a Neskaya\/Circle Dance activity, when I\u2019m alone in my house, then I fall into the lost baby \u2014 hopeless and helpless, who will die if no one rescues her.<\/p>\n (Written in January 2006) Somewhere in here, I had an experience of committing myself to the traumatized baby. I didn\u2019t write it down so I don\u2019t know exactly when it happened.\u00a0 I was imagining a war zone, wrecked buildings, burning cars, dead bodies, a few people wandering dazedly around, smoke drifting, colors all grey and black except for the fires.\u00a0 I see a shriveled dark grey baby lying on a garbage can.\u00a0 I think of picking her up, but I realize the orphanage has been bombed.\u00a0 There\u2019s nowhere to take her.\u00a0 If I pick her up I\u2019m stuck with her for the rest of my life.\u00a0 I spend a moment wondering if I really do want to take on this task.\u00a0 Then I pick her up.<\/p>\n Saw Deborah St. Cyr for acupuncture yesterday.\u00a0 Told her about the feeling in my chest, and that if I said to myself \u201cIt\u2019s a traumatized baby\u201d then everything softened and it was easier to be with the fear.\u00a0 When she started putting needles in, she said something about \u201cstrengthening the container.\u201d That reminded me of Beth\u2019s sculpture and the one I had wanted to make and how I had seen that the heart was shielded because it needed to heal, and then the heart needed to connect with the baby, not turn outward again.\u00a0 Then it came to me \u2014 the baby is in the heart!\u00a0 That\u2019s why the heart is all grey like the baby was.\u00a0 That was very exciting \u2014 it\u2019s not the grey of stuckness, degeneration and death, it\u2019s the grey of a frozen traumatized baby.\u00a0 Even writing it down I can feel the shift \u2014 from being angry at myself for waking scared again to compassion for the terrified frozen baby, and willingness to stay with it as long as it takes. (Written in June 2004) In a session of the \u201cWave Work\u201d at Kripalu: there was a confusing struggle with my body\u2019s tendency to cramp up (esp left hand) and kick, shake, jump.\u00a0 Finally I let it shrivel up into a … Continue reading
\nDear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I\u2019m having a hard time.\u00a0 I feel so bleak and despairing and empty.\u00a0 At least I\u2019ve been able to cook & eat breakfast, make phone calls, wash dishes.\u00a0 But I feel so bereft.\u00a0 My life stretches out in front of me like a bleak grey wasteland.\u00a0 Please help me.
\n Dear Jenny, we love you a lot.\u00a0 This is a difficult passage you are going through, but it is a passage.\u00a0 You will get through it.\u00a0 There is life on the other side, never fear.\u00a0 It\u2019s going to be OK, it really is going to be OK.\u00a0 It\u2019s OK for the moment to sit with this level of despair.\u00a0 This is truly the experience of a baby who has been left alone by her mother.\u00a0 She can\u2019t take care of herself, all she can do is wait to be rescued.\u00a0 The longer rescue does not come, the more everything looks utterly hopeless.\u00a0 There, there, dear.\u00a0 Imagine yourself holding the baby who is so frozen and scared \u2014 too frozen to be able to feel your presence.\u00a0 And we are around you, holding you as you hold her.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nThe hopelessness and helplessness feel so HUGE. I say to myself \u201cThese are the feelings of a baby who\u2019s been left alone too long.\u201d\u00a0 At the moment I\u2019m feeling, overwhelmingly, \u201cNothing I do makes any difference.\u201d I can see that\u2019s the baby\u2019s experience, but it doesn\u2019t bring any change.<\/p>\n
\nBleak.\u00a0 Cold stony wasteland bleak. This hard cold stoniness is not who I am.\u00a0 It is the product of trauma and adverse brain chemistry.\u00a0 This is what a baby feels when she has been left too long by her mother.\u00a0 The hard cold stoniness is a defense, and it\u2019s also how the world feels when mother is gone: no hope, no warmth, no love. My job is just to stay with her long enough for her to get it that I really am here for her.\u00a0 Until she gets that, my attempts at self-soothing aren\u2019t going to work.\u00a0 So I need to just sit next to her, with kindness, reassurance and patience, understanding that her anger and rejection and mistrust are because of her pain at being left for so long.\u00a0 I know and understand that pain.<\/p>\n
\nAnd if it takes the rest of my life, I\u2019m willing to do that.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing that I care so much about this baby, who is me, as though the baby were the earth, or all the babies traumatized by war, and not Jenny who I\u2019ve never thought was worth that much focus and effort.\u00a0 But the baby doesn\u2019t seem like \u201cme\u201d, more like the task I\u2019ve been given and I\u2019m willing to take it on.\u00a0 My work to heal this traumatized fragment of the universe is meaningful.\u00a0 And I think one thing that\u2019s helped this shift is Sharon Salzberg quoting the Buddha as saying there\u2019s no one more worthy of your love in the whole universe than yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"