{"id":7810,"date":"2023-07-03T07:18:58","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T11:18:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7810"},"modified":"2023-07-05T09:34:06","modified_gmt":"2023-07-05T13:34:06","slug":"a-new-look-at-the-voice-from-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=7810","title":{"rendered":"A New Look at the “Voice from the Past”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Found a passage written in June of \u201896, when I was in the pit of despair & trying to find things to help me hold on. \u00a0I posted it in May 2010. \u00a0I’ve since posted pieces of it with commentary from the present. Thought it was time to post the whole thing again with new understandings.<\/p>\n

June 3, 1996
\nI tried praying again last night, even though I have no sense of any beings out there to pray to.\u00a0 I keep calling, but no one appears.\u00a0 Mostly attempts at prayer feel like desperate pleas for help to an unhearing Void.\u00a0 I keep praying because I don\u2019t know what else to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Compare these lines from a poem I wrote at the time of Journey Into Courage<\/a>. \u00a0It’s called Blood and Stone<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I am open and vulnerable in my need for love, in my childish
\nattempts to make it better, take your pain away, do
\nsomething, anything that might win\u00a0from you a smile.
\nI offer you my heart\u2019s blood and you remain a stone.
\nBlind, you crush my eager efforts to show you who I am.
\nSlowly, gradually, I learn to close and harden.
\nIt was someone else you wanted.<\/p>\n

Mommy and Daddy, if I cut myself and wrote you in blood
\nwould you listen?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m recognizing once again that my basic fear is that nothing will change if I don\u2019t make conscious efforts to make it change, and I don\u2019t know what to do.\u00a0 Actually, that\u2019s not entirely true.\u00a0 I am making conscious efforts: to exercise, to do continuum and yoga, but I don\u2019t know if they will actually \u201cwork\u201d, that is if they will ever result in feeling better.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been trying to not focus on feeling better, but on asking myself what is worth doing even if I don\u2019t feel better.\u00a0 I think Neskaya is worth doing, even if I am building for a future that may never happen, it\u2019s still worth doing.\u00a0 And certainly it\u2019s an action toward creating the sort of world I want to live in.\u00a0 As for myself, if the soul is immortal, then I hope I\u2019m building in some character traits that will be useful to the next person who emerges out of this particular soul.\u00a0 Otherwise, all this suffering will be really meaningless.<\/p>\n

Then I get angry at myself for referring to this life as \u201call this suffering\u201d.\u00a0 Other people envy me, would like to have my life.\u00a0 Yes, but they see only the externals, they certainly wouldn\u2019t want to have my insides.\u00a0 What good is it to have a loving husband and a lot of money and a beautiful house if I can\u2019t enjoy them?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know how to answer that question.<\/p>\n

I remind myself of what Eleanor said the other day.\u00a0 She was terrified about her therapist and I was having my usual hard time.\u00a0 I took her back to her apartment, and when it was time to go I could hardly bear to leave her.\u00a0 I hugged her again, with tears in my eyes, saying \u201cI don\u2019t understand why we keep on going, when it\u2019s so hard and painful \u2014 what\u2019s the point?\u201d\u00a0 She said \u201cI keep going by thinking that God needs our help.\u00a0 When we don\u2019t give up, and don\u2019t kill ourselves, then that\u2019s refusing to allow the darkness to take over.\u201d I haven\u2019t got her words quite right, but it was something like that.\u00a0 I got the sense that even when we fail to win any kind of victory, just refusing to be defeated is some help in the battle \u2014 assuming that there really is a battle of the forces of light against the forces of darkness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Eleanor’s words: “I keep going by thinking that God needs our help.” \u00a0She was hideously abused in her childhood, but she sounds like Etty. See previous post for Etty’s ideas about helping god.<\/p>\n

I had an insight, a while back, that consciousness, consciously holding a vision, was a kind of strange attractor<\/a> that could \u2014 not control the chaotic forces of life \u2014 but direct them in some way, or at least move them closer to the desired outcome.\u00a0 So therefore, holding on to a vision is important, even if there aren\u2019t any \u201cgood feelings\u201d or any hope that the desired outcome could manifest.\u00a0 I\u2019d feel better if I were more in touch with my own vision. What do I want?\u00a0 I want to feel connected to my life, engaged in it, involved with it.\u00a0 I want to have some sense that my daily activities are meaningful even if I don\u2019t know what that meaning is.\u00a0 I want to feel my rootedness in the divine, so I can move from a place of peace and wisdom instead of fear.\u00a0 I want to feel connected to my friends, and to be able to support them to the best of my ability.\u00a0 What about my creativity, the books I was going to write?\u00a0 I guess what I want is to offer my creative gifts to the Great Powers of the Universe to be used as and when they see fit.\u00a0 And I would also like to have some sense that those Great Powers are \u2014 what? I hate to say \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbeneficent\u201d, that seems too limiting, as though the Great Powers were concerned with my material security and happiness, as though the Great Powers were constrained by human ideas of \u201cgood\u201d \u2014 when I know they can be wild and unpredictable and demanding of larger visions, bigger efforts than would be consistent with \u201csecurity\u201d or \u201chappiness\u201d.\u00a0 I think I want to be reassured that the Great Powers are not blind, unintelligent, malicious, mean, but that they are tending toward some vision of greatness, wholeness, divinity, some dazzling truth or beauty or compassion that would call forth my reverence and willingness to sacrifice my health or happiness or life for such a cause.\u00a0 When have I ever had that sense, of a Universe big enough, spiritual enough, to enlarge my soul and lift me out of my petty concerns?\u00a0 I can\u2019t think of anything recent, but I know there are times written in my journal.\u00a0 I think of thunder and wind and fire, and the hands of God, at the time of Fiona\u2019s death.\u00a0 I think of the \u201cblazing and storm-shattered<\/a>\u201d maples at Kripalu and my sense of wanting it all, wanting a whole life, both the glory and the pain<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Consciously holding a vision” comes from the ideas of Robert Fritz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Wanting both the glory and the pain reminds me of Etty saying “Things are very bad and very good at the same time<\/a>.” I am amazed when I read what I wrote. \u00a0I would have said I never had any experience of glory and pain as a whole, but here it is. \u00a0Somehow it never got integrated into my memory. \u00a0Probably too contradictory with the rest of my experience.<\/p>\n

But mostly my experience of the universe is that it\u2019s at best unhelpful, at worst malicious, that it\u2019s set me some hard and difficult assignment, refused to give me help with it or even make it clear what the assignment is, it has some expectation of me that I keep failing to fulfill, it\u2019s just waiting to punish me badly for every mistake and sneer at my attempts to do something \u201cgood\u201d, to make something \u201cbeautiful\u201d.\u00a0 Well, I see that I\u2019m not describing the Universe at all, but my childhood experience of Mom & Dad<\/a>, where I kept failing to satisfy their expectation, and got no help or guidance at all, just sneers and invalidation when I ran into trouble.\u00a0 I can\u2019t believe that the Universe is like this.\u00a0 Surely the One who made daffodils<\/a> is capable of more compassion and support than that.\u00a0 It seems like I\u2019ve got so entirely caught in the world conditioned by my parents that I\u2019ve completely lost my sense of some bigger wider universe, where compassion and support and abundance are available, and especially support for being one\u2019s \u201cbig self\u201d, living one\u2019s big life, really using and living out of one\u2019s creative power and strength.\u00a0 I see how afraid I am of being punished and abandoned if I dare to live out of my real power.\u00a0 Gosh that makes me mad! \u00a0Something showed up in my dream \u2014 I am being restricted by my parents\u2019 \u201cpost-hypnotic\u201d suggestion to live the kind of life that would have made them comfortable, not the kind of life my soul is capable of.<\/p>\n

It makes me mad that I have to keep coming to this insight over and over.\u00a0 I stopped thinking of the fear states as being related to infancy with my mother because a) if that was really it, they should have stopped with the realization, b) I\u2019m wrong to blame my spiritual failures on Mom, c) I\u2019m tired and bored with the whole thing, d) Valerie Hunt says the fear comes from soul problems stemming from past lifetimes not from childhood trauma in this one.\u00a0 But the truth is, going over the whole thing in detail again again, writing down exactly what the fear feels like and then seeing how it matches my childhood, results in me feeling much less fearful, much more stable, seeing beyond the shoulders of my parents\u2019 shadows to the possibility of a real Universe, big enough, wild enough, creative enough, compassionate enough, to meet my Soul\u2019s need.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 2019, I looked at this piece and saw how wrong my ideas wore and did a post in which I say:
\nThis is a story<\/a> that keeps me stuck. \u00a0\u201cI stopped thinking of the fear states as being related to infancy with my mother because\u2026 a) \u201cif that was really it, they should have stopped with the realization.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Intellectual understanding doesn\u2019t end a belief unless it\u2019s very recent.
\n<\/span>b) \u201cI\u2019m wrong to blame my spiritual failures on Mom.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>I never blamed Mom for my difficulties, I always saw that it was my job to heal the damage.
\nc) \u201cI\u2019m tired and bored with the whole thing.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Because I can\u2019t see how to go on.
\nd) \u201cValerie Hunt says the fear comes from soul problems stemming from past lifetimes not from childhood trauma in this one.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>What made her the expert?\u00a0 <\/span>I think my acceptance of her statement is me being willing to trivialize my experience.\u00a0 <\/span>It will be about 5 years before I understand that I was traumatized. \u00a0The story that I was traumatized in infancy makes sense of my life and gives me a way to work on healing.<\/p>\n

I suppose it\u2019s possible that the fear and the disorientation right now are so great because I\u2019m refusing to do anything at all any more to placate those angry childhood gods.\u00a0 I think the full collapse came when I stopped typing up my journals, when I gave up the hope that I would one day publish a book that would \u201cjustify my life.\u201d\u00a0 If I ever had published \u201cWritten in Blood<\/a>\u201d it would have made my parents very unhappy, so I was unable to see that it still represented an achievement that is acceptable in their world.\u00a0 For some reason I don\u2019t see building Neskaya<\/a> as an \u201cachievement\u201d or a \u201cjustification for my life\u201d, though I am sure, to many people looking from the outside, it would be just as much that as publishing a book.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not, I think because the motivation had nothing to do with \u201cjustifying my life\u201d, but rather with needing the right sort of place to do these activities that are of spiritual importance to me, so much importance that I am willing to sacrifice some amount of comfort in living and my future security in order to build it.\u00a0 (Added later) YES, DAMMIT, and isn\u2019t that courage?\u00a0 Instead I put myself down (my father\u2019s internalized voice) for being foolish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“I often say of Neskaya that it\u2019s the most selfish thing I\u2019ve ever done, that it\u2019s what my heart most wanted to do.” From a post on Cynthia Bourgeault called “A Midwife for the Divine<\/a>.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Found a passage written in June of \u201896, when I was in the pit of despair & trying to find things to help me hold on. \u00a0I posted it in May 2010. \u00a0I’ve since posted pieces of it with commentary … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","category-spirit","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}