So we snuck off in the early morning, beneath a grove of oaks and bonded ourselves to one another. It was the most beautiful moment of my entire life.

When we were complete we made our way back to the real world to prepare for the celebration with our families and friends. We stopped at a local Starbucks and I felt like I was in a dream. As soon as we got out of the car, I knew something was very different in my perception. I could hear people.

I don’t mean I could hear their voices, that was a given. I mean it was like I could hear their innermost worries, the way they felt, and (I swear) I could even hear what they were thinking.

It was the most open hearted I can ever remember being with other people. I’ve never felt so connected.

The Cycle of Life

I believe we exist on a continuum; a never ending cycle, and the point is not so much to ‘get’ anywhere on the circular path as much as it is to ‘be’ completely on it.

Within the cycle there are various levels of our being at varying points in the cycle (we are not linear-black-and-white creatures!). What I’ve noticed is there are three main particles of ones self to monitor on the cycle: power, pleasure and pain.

I like to pay particular attention to the initiations that happen to propel the three particles into more mature development.

Over this past weekend I found myself weeping hysterically over the death of a friend. I was surprised to weep so heavily for her, actually, it is has been a year since she passed. I don’t know what happens at the year mark, but it is significant and feels complete somehow, like a real ‘good bye’.

I read in this book that in some traditions, the tears from grief are considered the source water for the soul of the world. By releasing and expressing our grief, the spirit of the one who has passed may be carried on our tears into the next realm. Our cries of pain announce to the ancestors that one is coming to join them. They must wake from their slumber and receive our beloved into the folds. The grief calls them to our world to carry over what has gone.

When I wept it felt as if I were filling the river of grief, I imagined pouring myself into it completely and calling to the other realm that my friend was coming, love her and keep her for she was precious to me.

The whole process feltlike a maturation of the open hearted realm I experienced on my wedding day. It sounds strange, but the pleasure, power and pain were all present at this threshold, and thus it has a sense of completion to it.

In initiation practices round the world, there is a very real pain and separation that must be experienced for the initiate to walk the line between worlds. He or she must meet death (in its many forms) and return to the land of the living, wisdom in hand.

There is the pain of separation, the power of facing death and the pleasure of coming back to life (imagine waking up at dawn on a fresh spring day just after rain… that kind of pleasure).

Completing the Initiation

I find my brain getting hung up on what exactly happened?! What kind of initiation was that? What exactly did I leave behind and what do I need to move forward into now?

In matters of the body and the remembrance of ritual thousands of years older than we – it doesn’t really matter.

The first time I experienced this level of grief (from the loss of feeling open hearted as it were) I was too young to know what to do with it, and so I left my body behind. I never completed the initiation.

I traveled into the realms of psychic, hallucinations and god. I met death in its many forms, but I never came all the way back to my body from each disassociation and so I didn’t come all the way back to life.

Since it is an endless cycle, there will be many initiations in our lives, many cycles to complete. It is in understanding the rhythm of the cycle and allowing our selves to flow in it that will bring us freedom.

For now, the world is coming alive with the spring, and on this turn of the cycle I am coming alive along with it.

The Practice

The body knows what’s here now. The body knows what is needed in this moment. The body remembers connection to all things.

Follow the first desire without judgment; the original wanting that emerges from your body. Put your hand on your chest, feel your heart beat beneath the palm, and ask, “What is here now?”

This is the practice of opening the heart and welcoming your self home.

photo credit: M.Angel Herrero via photopin cc

I also have a hard time with Mother’s Day, in general. I realized this year that I have resentment and bitterness stored up against my mother from the past and it comes out full force.

Did you know the etymology of forgiveness, is to ‘give up the power or desire to punish’? I don’t know why, but this doesn’t sit well with me. I think it’s because I’m not ready to forgive yet. Because I still want vengeance and retribution, I still desire to punish.

I see clearly the way things were. I know what happened to me. I know it was bad and I know I wouldn’t be who I am today without it.

I feel the sorrow and grief, I feel the tremors of remorse, and I feel hatred.

But I can’t seem to find forgiveness.

I Believe. I Hate.

I believe our emotions tell us messages about the deeper truth we are aiming to find. I think what ever we are feeling: shame, anger, hatred or fear is effective if we can feel our way through the emotion and to it’s underlying truth.

Beneath my loathing of Mother’s Day I found a whole storeroom of bottled up hate. Hatred that I hadn’t ever allowed myself to feel for my mum, because it’s my mom and its mothers day, it just exacerbates the shame I feel about feeling it in the first place!

But the emotion carries a message, and I know that I don’t really hate her. The message behind the emotion of hatred is shadow – or recognizing a part of ourselves we have disowned, disliked or discouraged.

It’s funny, but hatred of another is really all about us.

The part that I needed to bring back into myself was being self-absorbed. I have an ability and tendency to be self-absorbed and there are times that is a good thing (when I need to go to the foot doctor and get help with my groceries) and times when it is not (when I compare and compete with others over stupid shit like ‘who had it worse’). The point of the shadow uncover-y was accepting that I had this tendency in me and that it was okay.

I thought I was done at the shadow. I breathed a sigh of relief but something kept nagging me. I wasn’t complete.

It showed up as restlessness. I painted a birdhouse, cried, watched Harry Potter, wrote, cried some more and all the while wondered what was I so angry at?

I realized the real question I had was: why did my mother go back to him?

Over and over again she returned, after shattered glass and blood, after threats and attacks, hell, he even tried to kill me … and still she went back to him.

The whole time recalling our returns spun me further into anger and resentment, until I remembered the definition of forgiveness. And I realized I was trying to punish her.

I wanted to punish her.

That stopped me short. Did I really want that? Is that what I really desired to be and emit into the world?

Then I Realized

It was then I realized I had been thinking about our returns to chaos all wrong. I’d been looking at it like she chose him over me – like we were two cupcakes in a parlor and if I was just showy enough, or good enough, or brave enough, she’d choose me in the end.

I’ve been wrong to think she made a conscious choice in the matter, because she didn’t. Going back was never about either him, or me. Going back wasn’t actually about choosing at all. It was about what was going on inside of her.

Even though it didn’t work for me, it worked for her.

You know what occurs to me now: if she had left him then – he would have done something really dangerous, my brothers would be lost to me, and there would have been even more irreparable damage done on all fronts. It sounds crazy, but I think going back saved our lives.

I think that because this one time I had to run away from a particularly violent evening carrying my infant brother in my arms. When I ran past him, it was like I didn’t exist, he would stop at nothing to get to his son (whom he referred to always in the possessive “my boy” or “my son”). If there hadn’t been someone there to block him, if he would have caught me that night, I would have been seriously injured. He was in a state beyond irate, he was murderous.

When you take things from him, he snaps. He can’t NOT win. He has to, it’s a compulsion. Maybe my mother’s body knew that somewhere even if her mind did not. Maybe she knew somewhere in her that if she ran away with his children he would crush her, and if she fought him… well, no one fights him. I don’t know anyone who has fought him face to face that didn’t come out the other end with significant harm.

Maybe she went back because there was nothing else she could do.

Jesus, I’ve been spending all this time being angry over this when the truth is she didn’t have a choice.

You might be thinking, “there’s always a choice!” And that’s true, I don’t mean she was blameless – god knows we all perpetuated the cycle of destruction and abuse in our own ways. I’m just saying she had her own compulsion to keep the secret that outweighed other things, and that of the options she felt she had available: going back is what worked best for her.

I guess I’m feeling, on this mother’s day, compassion for her and how hopeless she might have felt. How hard it must be to know that I was disappointed and didn’t understand.

I know this isn’t the end. I do not fully feel the release of ‘the desire or power to punish’.

But I also know this is the beginning of forgiveness.

And I hope one day I will feel mercy swell in me like high tide, that I will release these powers and desires in me to punish… for they are true tormentors.

photo credit: Massimo Valiani via photopin cc

But what if pain was our friend?

I read an excellent book when one of my dearest friends was dying of cancer called Making Friends with Death. Its basic premise is that death happens to everyone, it is natural and by not observing and honoring it as a rightful passage, we increase our suffering.

There is a Buddhist saying that says, “suffering ceases to be suffering when we form a clear and accurate picture of it.” Meaning, when we see death for what it really is, it not longer causes us suffering. When we see pain for what it really is, it no longer causes us suffering.

What is Pain?: It is a Companion.

One of the most striking stories in this book was a man who was very sick and experiencing a tremendous amount of physical pain and he says that his closest and most consistent companions are pain, sickness and death.

He wasn’t being a victim; he was altering his viewpoint about a fact of his life. He was in pain, it was a constant, and the more he tried to fight it the less he could be where he was. The less he could be where he was (no clear and accurate picture) the more he experienced suffering.

I’ve never been that sick, I’ve never had cancer or had to fight a terminal illness, but I do know pain. We all do, we’ve all heartache, broken bones or loss.

Pain is an integral and essential part of life, not an unwelcome house guest.

Pain is a friend, a companion, and a teacher with something vital to tell each of us about who we are and what we are meant to do.

Pain teaches us gratitude, presence (when we embrace it), and rest. It requires and sometimes demands that we slow down and heal our bodies, our boundaries, our past, what ever it is that needs mending.

Healing is Not a Destination

Healing is not a destination, it is a continuous attention on Self and the needs of the body, mind and soul. Healing is a pathway to wholeness, and pain is the door.

Where I have seen myself run into trouble is I alleviate the pain (the bruise, the nightmare or the broken toe) and I think, “Alright! I’m all better now! Healed!” (cue: Halleluiah choir!)

But, how do you know when you are really healed? How do you know when you reach wholeness?

The thought occurred to me this morning that equating healed with perfect is not accurate. Healed does not mean ‘good as new’ or ‘just like before’. Healed means something much more profound.

Healed means initiated.

Battle scars heal and proclaim a boy initiated as a warrior. Traumas heal and one is initiated into that sacred sect of ones who have seen the destructive qualities of humanity.

Healed means that we have embraced what is new, surrendered the old, and we are now someone other than who we were before the pain.

Pain is a friend because it refines us, like metal in fire, it shapes and molds and burns off the dross of our being. We are ‘healed’ when we see our new form for what it is and accept it.

A Brief Note on Initiation

Michael Meade (a Mythologist who studied tribal initiations) explains that there are three stages to initiation:

1. Separation from the known world

2. A brush with death

3. Being welcomed as an initiated person

Stage one is painful, in it’s essence it IS pain. When we are in pain we are no longer a part of our known world, our world is changing.

In our pain we experience a brush with death. This doesn’t have to be the end of our lives kind of death, there is the death of a way of being, death of the ego, death of a habit, or death of a relationship, death takes many forms

Then we return to the normal world. Michael Meade says that if we do not honor ourselves, or are not welcomed by others, as having gone through this ordeal we will simply repeat it until the third stage can be accomplished.

This has been a troubling thought: How does we welcome ourselves as initiated?

I believe the answer lies in what meaning we assign to our suffering. The only person on the planet who can validate your suffering is you. The only person who can truly understand is you. And the only person that can give you a meaningful and significant ‘why’ – is you.

Of course, there are many a glorious helper along the way! But the completion of initiation belongs to you alone. You get to choose.

Four Lessons from My Friend, Pain

I was fortunate enough to be witnessed and guided through the story of my life this past weekend. Through it four gifts became clear.

1. There is pleasure in every moment.

2. I am worthy.

3. I believe in myself and am capable (I also believe in the Great Spirit and know It is capable).

4. Bringing my attention back to my body moves me through acknowledgement, feeling, insight and action. Presence brings relief.

Pain is a teacher and a friend. It whispers that we can build beauty, power, passion and peace if we let it. We can become more than what we were before the fires. We can create wholeness from ash,

The truth is: there is no way but your own.

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Here goes…..

What would I write about if I didn’t care?

Sometimes life feels like a thousand pieces to a puzzle and I don’t know what the picture on the box is that I’m supposed to put the damn thing together by.

I feel like I should have something happy to say, something brilliant. My past few blogs have all been about memories and darkness. Honestly, I’m tired of myself.

I feel like I should be at that place where I pop out again, fresh on the other side and say, ‘oh thank god that’s over’.

But I’m not.

There will be a time that I will look back at these blogs and wonder to myself how I could have ever felt this way? There will be a time in the not so distant future where I will laugh easier and sleep deeper. There will be a time when the cycle shifts up and out for some relief.

For now, I’m having nightmares. Those come in cycles too – the night terrors. I can’t say that they are directly correlated to anything except the fact that I am writing and digging through my past, so it makes sense that my subconscious elbows its way into that party.

In the night I wake up in tremors, like my shoulder muscles are involuntarily twitching me awake. I open my eyes and am frozen, the lingering image of his face and the faint ringing of whimpering in my ears.

In my dream I am pinned down, yet I see so clearly the confusion in his eyes. I see him not wanting to hurt me and yet wanting to at the same time. “Please don’t do this,” I whisper. What is odd to me is the emotion with which I give this plea: it is loving and terrified mixed together.

(How could it be loving?! I wonder. How fucking confusing is that!?)

I’ll tell you a secret: I have all these blank spots in my memory, places where my body completely froze and I blacked out. Sometimes I wonder if these dreams are helping me put some of the pieces together, how I felt in those blank spots without giving me the whole memory to deal with.

But that’s the truth of it… it only took ten days and a bottle of wine to get here (so forgive me if this isn’t well thought out).

I loved him. I loved him like a father.

Jesus Christ, I loved the man who beat me, and stole from me, and took away my childhood. I loved the man who threatened my life and the lives of those I love. My brothers, whom I said I would die for, I watched them again and again show up with bruises and I still loved that man. What kind of person does that make me? What kind of woman does that make me now? (Don’t answer that.. Seriously, don’t.)

We had some good memories, you know. He showed me how to change my own oil, how to gut a fish and how to organize a tool set. He gave me my first job and instilled in me a sense of discipline.

I know I don’t owe him anything but I’m feeling nostalgic at the moment – maybe it’s the wine or the hummingbirds or the miracle of spring but I don’t feel nostalgic for him, like, ever – so I’m going to go with it.

You know what’s weird? I think I miss the father-figure he could have been (I certainly do not miss the father-figure he was). He could have been something, or someone, he could have done so many things (I know this would enrage him to no end… to know I was pitying him like this, but I can’t help it). He was a good man once.

I wonder if this is how forgiveness happens? I always thought forgiveness was a load of shit (to be totally honest, and we’re being honest here, right?). Forgiveness seemed like something people put on, like a mask, when you know, deep down, they haven’t forgiven at all. Forgiveness sounds good, that’s why people actively “do” it.

But I think forgiveness is something that happens naturally when you see the situation clearly with compassion. It’s like it bubbles up out of nowhere and all of a sudden you feel clear with the person… they can’t hurt you anymore.

I thought I had forgiven him (at least my brain thought that sounded like a good idea!) but this feels different, the feeling of that dream. Such compassion my heart felt, I could see him.

And that dream memory of “please don’t do this”, that mixture of love and terror keeps at the forefront of my mind these days, while I put this puzzle together, this endless fucking puzzle….

I don’t have a conclusion. I feel like I should wrap this up nicely, but it just isn’t here today.

It’s strange, I woke up the other morning after a fitful night and a poem drenched my mind like the sunlight, it whispered to me like it did as a child. It was so beautiful.

I wish I could remember it.

— This is what’s called a ‘check in’ —

That means I tell you what’s up for me at the moment and how I feel about it.

What’s up for you and how do you feel about it? What’s your check in?

photo credit: Adnan Yahya via photopin cc

The good news about my busted foot is that I’ve had nothing to distract me – I have to lie on the couch and feel whatever I’m feeling. The bad news is – I have nothing to distract me and have to feel whatever I am feeling.

It’s okay when the feelings are easy, straightforward. It gets a little more complicated when they are confusing, non-linear and erratic.

Since I’ve been holed up in my house, I’ve taken the opportunity to spend some time writing my book.

I find it particularly interesting that I get stuck at certain places, specifically the stories that I don’t have a lot of conscious emotion about or any physical sensation associated with. These places in the story are incredibly confusing.

The Place I got Stuck

The place I got stuck this week was regarding a memory: when I was seven (maybe eight) he dragged me down the stairs. I don’t remember why, or what happened to provoke it, I only remember that I was screaming, he was laughing and didn’t stop until my high-pitched shrieks forced him to.

My mother dressed the wounds, but said nothing.

My writing stopped for days because I got stuck here, wrapped in a fog of confusion. In my memory, I seemed to be afraid, though I can’t remember fear in the adults around me. Even now, when I ask my mother if she remembers this incident, sometimes she says no, other times she simply says yes. There is no real explanation, I think her memory may be just as frozen as mine is around our tumultuous past.

So, I thought I was crazy. I thought I made it up. I thought I was blowing it out of proportion. I mean, he did tell me we were playing and sometimes children get hurt while playing. That seemed true enough, and no one else made a big deal of it.

The problem was that I didn’t think we were playing. The problem was, I felt terrified.

The Perils of Getting Unstuck

I got up to write this morning, I made my mountain of pillows on the couch, did my meditation and was all set to go. Except when I sat down to write all I could think about what how much I didn’t want to write. I wanted to watch forty episodes of Mad Men, or read fiction novels, or go for a run (which I can’t do), anything except write this story about the stairs.

Instead of checking out, I decided to stay with it. I decided to go deeper into the resistance to find the truth of the discomfort.

I’ve been keeping a notebook with me lately. When I feel my critical voice, or anxious voice or fearful voice surface, I let it speak in the notebook (I find it is more efficient to let them rant on paper and we can usually get to the bottom of the resistance in a page or two – otherwise we have a constant merry go round in my head of ‘I don’t wanna’s’ and ‘you’re stupid’s’ that lasts for an ungodly amount of time).

The key to utilizing this kind of notebook strategy is to ask myself genuine and grounded questions. (For examples and definitions of grounded questions, check out Mark Strom’s TedX talk on the subject)

Questions like: What needs protecting? What needs restored? What are your instincts? What action needs taken? What are you feeling?

I find that if I ask ‘why’ questions, my brain is engaged rather than my body or my spirit. Grounded questions spark the response of the body and as my gifted aunt Karen says, “The body doesn’t know how to lie.”

When you ask your body and listen with your soul, the truth will always emerge.

“What is the truth here?” I asked this resistance voice in my notebook.

“You’re not going to like it,” it said (that much was obvious!).

Then, the tears came. A Stage Three memory surfaced, like being swallowed by a tide of emotion there is nothing to do except feel it, witness its rise and fall, and be with it as it discovers itself.

“It’s my fault,” the watery emotive memory said, “if I had just been better, if I had been less stubborn, if I had been good, none of this would have happened. He would have never come after me if I just did what I was told.” and then the tears really started to flow, “I deserved it.”

The Truth Will Set You Free

I know, logically, that a seven-year-old child never deserves to be dragged down a flight of stairs. The point is, somewhere deep in my body, I believe that I deserved be hurt.

It’s a reasonable conclusion that my younger self would have come to: If there was no external validation for my fear and pain, then I must have done or been something wrong to provoke it.

My adult Self knows differently, but the body remembers what it was like to be a child and to be afraid. My body remembers what it was like to feel undeserving.

I find that my brain wants to know how to ‘fix’ it: how to not feel undeserving. But the real question is, and continues to be, can I see this part of me that feels undeserving and love it anyway. Can I love this part of me as it is without having to fix, or change, or better it? Can I accept this part as a piece of me that is incredibly uncomfortable to feel?

Discomfort is a ridiculously nice way to describe the feeling of being unworthy, but that is where the suffering (the anxiety, the doubting myself, etc) in these past few days has come from. The discomfort of feeling like I ‘deserved it’ multiplied by my resistance to feeling that feeling.

Now that I have let myself feel and cry about it… it passes, like a storm. You see discomfort, especially emotional discomfort, is not a destination but more like an eddy in the river of life. A place we stop over and explore until the current takes us once more.

Our paths continue to unfold before us, timeless and never ending. There will always be pit stops of discomfort and/or emotion. The velocity of our travel, or how fast we get through it all, or how far we get along the way doesn’t earn us any points.

The entire endless, timeless current is along this moment, and this moment and this moment. The entire infinite cosmos is here, on this couch, staring at the mountains while the clouds envelop them like a tidal wave, listening to the classical melodies of Beethoven while I write and feel. Everything is here now.

When we are flowing with the current that is here now it alleviates our suffering. There is discomfort, that is an absolute certainty of being alive, but if we are not in resistance to the discomfort – then we are not suffering.

When we feel our discomfort accurately by letting our bodies tell us the truth and with keen awareness by letting our souls listen, the discomfort either alleviates or it compels us to make a choice or take action that moves us in the direction of relief.

What ever you are feeling, feel it fully with all of you, and it shall pass like this winter’s storm. Then, the snows will melt away and in the bright clarity that comes afterwards, there the truth will be.

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I believe the body has messages for us, it let’s us know when we’re pushing too hard or when we need a break. The body steps in and says something like, “Oh, wonderful, you worked 18 days in a row again. Well, I’m going to make you sick so you can calm the hell down.”

Messages the body gives the mind does not always receive, and so the body ramps up the intensity and duration of the messages until we hear it, understand it and integrate it.

Two weeks ago, I got runners knee. The message was clear: slow down. Then I took a little detour into the hole in my heart and again, the message was: slow down. I was finally on the up and up, prepared to go out guns-a-blazin’ when I busted up my foot (real good like!) making me hobble to and fro (I am currently residing in the approximate velocity of molasses), going even slower than the knee and the depressive bout combined.

Slow. The fuck. Down. My body is saying. My body keeps saying.

But I can’t slow down on my own because when I slow down I feel myself. I feel. So, my body slows down for me.

{{“Take a breather, sister.” It says and hands me a cup of cocoa, and I reply with a tight-lipped, “screw you” and plan my escape.}}

In this particular slowness, I feel pain (physical foot pain) and sadness (emotional), I also feel anxious (in my body) and un-tethered (in my vision/soul). All enormous red flashing light indicators that I need to let go.

The Four Stages of Presence

In my experience, there are four different kinds of memories and it has occurred to me recently (with the remarkable assistance of one super-awesome-therapist) that these four types of memories may, in fact, be four stages of presence.

Using them in memory can help us identify how embodied, how present and how much we could feel at the time of the event. Using them as stages of presence can help us identify how to move into deeper awareness and understanding of ourselves now.

• Stage One: This kind of memory or state of being feels the most “real” to me, because there is the most information within it. More data is transferred on the passageways of the senses than in our logical mind, and our body mind remembers the subtleties. In this stage, exact feelings, fragrances, sounds, pressure, and other details are striking and apparent. In this stage one views the experience from their own perspective, from within their body and looking out into the world. If it is a state of being it is heightened awareness, if it is in memory, it is almost like being there again.

• Stage Two: This kind of memory or state of being is one where I recall the events and the details, such as colors, objects in the room, light and shadow, my own appearance and the appearance of others. But the scene is witnessed from outside my own perspective, as in I can see myself clearly, and I recognize myself as an active participant in the experience but I cannot recollect what the impact was inside of me. There are no associated sensations. I can conjecture how I think I felt, but I don’t remember the feeling of feeling it. It’s like watching a football game recap or a home video.

• Stage Three: This kind of memory or state of being surfaces as pure emotion. It isn’t really tied to anything in particular (though I suspect it is connected to a sense, smell, emotion, etc. and the memory is too buried to recall in detail.) These emotional memories surface, I know they belong to me, but I cannot connect them to a specific event or chronologically categorize them. They are just pure emotion. It’s like being moved by a song or a poem that someone else wrote – the topic or the melody is foreign, but the feeling in my body is resonant.

• Stage Four: This final type of memory or being state is the most difficult for me personally to deal with. It is the kind of memory that flashes quickly through my mind or my response. I can witness the scene from outside myself, meaning I am watching myself as a character of the experience, but the details are out of focus, there is no emotion involved and I do not even recognize myself within it. It’s like watching a foreign film: I’m not sure who the actors are, what they are saying, or what the context is. Even though the scene sort of makes sense it isn’t as familiar as the other stages.

It’s a brilliant mechanism, the mind, and it makes sense that our bodies and brains protect us by disassociating from feelings and sensations that caused us pain.

What troubles me about my own memories and stages is the startling lack of emotion, the quantity of Stage 2, 3 and 4 memories until I remembered: it wasn’t safe to feel. Emotion, especially, was dishonored and devalued in my family, as I am sure it was in many homes.

I have Stage Two style memories of being cornered and screamed at. He was telling me to cry, hitting the wall or throwing things at me to win some kind of response. Responses I never gave and which only angered him further. But I couldn’t, crying or being scared – he’d call me names and terrorize me, he’d use it against me later. No, crying and reacting then was not an option.

So I went totally and completely numb. I disassociated from my body until my whole life began to resemble Stage Four. {{This, by the way, is why I’m so kick ass at helping men wake up to Stage One. That trail is worn like an old pair of runnin’ shoes.}}

Moving Through the Stages

This week’s video is going to take you through a short exercise that will help you determine what stage you are in and how to move into the next one.

It’s Safe to Feel Now

I’ve spent so much of my life in Stage Four that the memories I have are thin with whole chunks missing. It’s only been in the last year or two that I’ve more fully returned to my body and present time. I have more memories of this past year than of the past decade, because there is more of me here to feel it.

What I notice is that the more I return to present, the slower I have to go. I see this as a downer when my foot is elevated and I can’t walk faster than a mud pie in June, but really, it’s a gift.

I have to slow down to include all of me. To honor all the responses from Stage 4, the emotions of Stage 3, the details of Stage 2 and the present awareness of Stage 1 is to be with all of me in wholeness and acceptance of what is.

I gave a prayer this morning, of letting go. I released the life I thought I was going to have in order to make room for the life that’s here now: A life where I am in active healing, where I am making my best effort to go within and welcome myself home as an initiated wise one, a life where I go slow… very slow, and a life where I feel.

Because I feel, I know I am alive. It doesn’t matter what that feeling is, pain, ecstasy, embarrassment, the feelings let me know that I am here. I am now and I will probably always have something more to feel and discover.

I am like a rocket ship re-entering the atmosphere, burning away as I cross the sky. How long have I been burning? The stages welcome me back, closer to what can only be fulfillment (and isn’t fulfillment just being present with what is?).

“Come back,” my body says, “come all the way back to stage 1. Feel.”

It’s safe.

Good News!

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I find myself more aware this week, more aware and less incapacitated. I’m starting to think of this whole thing as seasons, as cycles.

What I have come to know about crawling out of the hole, is that there is something beautiful in that darkness; buried within our deepest pain is our greatest gift.

The Tale of the Garbage Disposal

I have an aversion to the sound of a garbage disposal.

Aversion isn’t quite the right word. When I hear the deep whir of it coming to life, the muscles alongside my spine tense, bringing my shoulders up and back. The rest of my body braces itself and I involuntarily lean my head and chest as far away from the noise as possible.

It’s subtle, the muscle spasms, I think only I would be able to notice. They tighten like tectonic plates grinding against each other until the tension is released in an almost imperceptible shudder.

Honestly, I never thought much of it. I think everyone has a distaste for various sounds and activities, I assumed that shoving things down a pipe with metal teeth was mine.

I learned a neat trick from an energy worker and friend, it’s the ability to bypass one’s cognitive brain and speak directly to the reptilian or limbic brain. When you can access the deeper brain, you can overlay new neurological pathways that then lead to different behaviors.

For example, one might have consistent issues with asking for a raise at work. Conceivably, one could implant the idea that they had value, deserved to be compensated and was a good worker – eradicating the old belief of not being deserving or not being enough.

I used this technique for various belief “implants” which were sometimes successful, and sometimes not. At one point, I wondered if the pathway might work both ways. If one could plant a memory using this method, one may be able to extract a memory using the same methodology.

I gave it a try with simple things like lost car keys, misplaced bus passes or a ball of twine I really liked (I realize that sounds like a crazy person, but I like twine, whatever). Each time, the memory extraction worked – the memory would surface and the item would be wherever the deep part of the brain remembered it being.

Then, one night I was making dinner, when I ran the disposal. I clutched my bones tighter when I mused where this response came from. It wasn’t perfectly logical; I had no cognitive memory of why I would feel this way.

Without thinking much of it, I decided to ask my deeper brain, to perform a memory extraction assuming the effect was due to some horror film I saw as a child.

But this is not what surfaced to my awareness…

The Memory That Came a Knockin’

What came up was only a flash, a snippet before I shook it off – unsure I wanted to see more.

I had my hands on either side of the sink, holding tightly to black marble. My step-father was standing to my right, gripping his hand on the back of my neck. Forcing my face deeper and deeper into the metal sink and the black hole at the center where the disposal was running.

I don’t think he was really forcing my skin to collide with the blades, he was much stronger and if he wanted to it would have been simple enough. I don’t think the act was intended to hurt me, I think it was intended to threaten and frighten me.

What’s funny is this scene is almost completely silent in my mind. There are no words though I can see his lips shouting something; I can see my stoic and unresponsive face, but all I hear is the disposal chugging away.

When I extracted this memory, I shook it off. Dismissed it almost immediately as something I must have made up in my subconscious mind so that I would feel validated. So I could draw a straight line between my responses and violations, like it would all add up as nicely as an algebra problem.

The thing is, I think with the mind and the body and the mysterious relationship between them, it’s more like a differential equations problem. Only 10% of the time is there a real solution.

It nagged at me though. This memory came into my consciousness with no more emotion attached to than when I retrieved the location of my keys, or which box the twine came in. It just bubbled into being where it wasn’t before.

What I Know

Now, I can’t say for sure whether this memory is real or not, whether I made it up or not, it has the flavor of a memory that’s like watching a movie, there’s no real emotional attachment to the characters, just a witnessing, and I don’t have any experience of it except when the disposal runs.

When the disposal runs, I have a response.

What I do know is that I have a very loud self-critic, and when I say very loud I mean immobilizing. When she’s really acting up I can’t even make a decision about which tea I should order. I freeze.

She’s a bully and she’s cruel.

In the modality of psychotherapy that has worked miracles for me (the Internal Family Systems model) this critic is what’s called a Firefighter. A part of my psyche specifically designed to protect a more vulnerable part of myself from pain and suffering.

It’s similar to a first heartbreak. Maybe for a while there was a part of you that was angry or sad and so you hardened. The hard ‘part’ is the firefighter, protecting your lover or vulnerable heart from being fucked over again.

So this bully, this loud fucking critic – she’s protecting something very vulnerable, perhaps the most vulnerable part of me. I discovered as I inched my way out of the darkness this week that she’s protecting the part of my psyche that holds the lost memories.

Lost memories like the tale of the garbage disposal.

This part of my body and mind has locked down like a virtual Pandora’s Box, holding all the terror and horrific nightmares that I can’t remember, that I don’t want to remember and the critic is in place to protect her.

When I imagine her she’s slow, she can barely even speak, and she’s subtle. What I found most intriguing about her imagery (in IFS you work with the image of your parts) was that she was responsive.

She knows. This lost, broken part of me knows what happened and she’s keeping it safe. She’s the one who shudders, she’s the one who tightens and who makes my palms sweat.

These memories that my conscious mind cannot recollect, my deeper brain can. My body brain knows, it remembers, and what has been the gift of this round in the hole is that I know to trust those responses. Trust them because they are real and they are here and they are now.

They are not some puzzle to put back together, or to fix, or to find out about myself. I don’t have to make up what they mean, but I do have to listen and act according to the responses.

They are my gift, my subtlety; they are my responses to being alive and intimacy.

This part, this girl who shudders and weeps, laughs and shrieks, she who holds the memories, she is my subtlety. She is my joy at the wind in trees and freshly baked bread. She is my greatest gift.

Like the song, let it be.

There is a hole in my heart that I’m crawling out of today. It’s sort of fitting that I am writing this on Easter, the day of new beginnings, the day of resurrection. And on this day of lilies and flowers bursting through the soil, I am coming back to life… again.

I feel silly that just a few weeks ago, I proclaimed that I hardly ever have bad days. And is if to prove me wrong, something lurched up from the deep, grabbed me by the ankle and dragged me down the pit and into the void.

I had another episode, or episodes more accurately, this past week. When the episodes last for days, I call them ‘bad patches’. My husband calls them seasons. Periods of time where an emotional storm hits, sometimes for no reason at all, and it takes everything I have to move and go to work and eat.

One action at a time is all I can do in this place: get up off the floor, Christin. Now wash your face off. Take a deep breath. Turn off the stove.

It’s like this, one task at a time until some part of my brain kicks in and decides that it wants to plan a few actions ahead. Then the ball starts rolling and I can maybe, maybe plan a few hours in advance.

This is what it’s like in the hole. Desperate, hopeless and unforgiving. Flashes of memories surface in this place, they don’t really tie together, they mostly blink and then they’re gone, but my body is left racking itself through the feeling of it.

I believe the psychological term for these surfacing sensations is ‘flashback’ and I’ve pretty much given up on trying to make any sense of them because making sense of them doesn’t make them go away. There’s nothing to do when they come up except feel them and feel them completely. The only way out is through.

I read a statistic this week that only 3-5% of children have been strangled, kicked, punched, or threatened with a knife or gun. I fall into this percentage with the suffocation bit and this simultaneously upsets me and gives me comfort. As in, maybe it’s quite normal for someone in this abnormal 3-5% to freak out over a burnt quesadilla.

I’ve come to the conclusion this week that there is no ultimate healing for this hole in my heart. Just like if someone lost his or her foot, there would be no bringing that foot back. There are prosthetics and physical therapy, and there is the adjustment made in life to accommodate and still perform activities that person loves. But there is no bringing the foot back.

This hole feels much the same only we can’t see it. I can adjust my life and make accommodations for myself, I can do therapy and filling with helpful tools, but nothing will bring that piece of myself back.

I don’t believe there is a ‘done’. There is no ‘completely healed’ or ‘arrived’. This is my wounding and my life’s project and it is unrealistic to expect myself to ‘get over it’, just like I wouldn’t expect a rainstorm to suddenly stop, or a person without a limb to climb Everest without their prosthetic.

I think we have this false belief in America that we can ‘fix’ it. And, while this is helpful for some things, it is not true of all things. Some broken bits, we have to learn to live and be with in ourselves.

This pain… it’s a part of me. It isn’t who I am in totality, but it is a part of me. And so are the tears and the bouts of despair.

I am trying to wrap my head around the idea that I will always be … exactly what I am. There is no changing it, only becoming more aware of all my facets.

I will always need to sit in the chair that faces the door just in case I need to run, I will always need to depart social situations at 9 o’clock because it triggers a somatic memory I can’t even recall, but scares me too much to think about. I will always have to focus my breath to move through someone expressing anger, or the sound of beer bottles clinking in the trash, or loud noises, or the garbage disposal. I will always have nightmares that wake me and frighten me beyond sleep, and I will always have days where I forget to eat because I can’t move.

I don’t mean my entire life will be compromised of these things, I have been blessed with so much beauty and love, I merely mean that they will exist for me. Where I’ve run myself into trouble is when I deny them as my reality. I hold onto a hope that one day I won’t have these responses and it’s like denying the rain in the middle of a deluge.

It’s a joke my husband and I have during these times. When I was in Thailand I went on a jungle tour with elephants and caves, it was beautiful and I was enjoying myself immensely when the rain started coming down. I whined, “Ug! I wish it wasn’t raining!” When the tour guide turned to me and said, “but it is raining.”

When these storms hit my emotional landscape, my husband says to me, “but it is raining.” It’s our way of saying; do not fight what is, accept what is here now so you can weather this storm and take care of yourself the best way possible.

I’m lucky to have the friends, mentors and the husband that I have.

After I had finished being huddled in a ball, reliving various memories of fear and faces and feelings of terror in my body, and I had finished crying, the last of the sobs escaping like wringing out a wet rag, I was walking up my stairs thinking how embarrassing that was. How ashamed I was that I couldn’t even cook dinner without having a complete melt down when it hit me: my closest friends, my husband especially, they see this, they know this about me and they love me anyway.

They see and hear my weaknesses, my hopelessness and despair, they listen to me when I question myself and wonder if I’m insane. They hug me when I just need to stop for a moment. They tell me it’s going to end, this isn’t permanent, and this is a storm. They cook me spinach and polenta when I can’t cook for myself. They know about my brokenness and they love me anyway.

It’s bringing up a new question for me, one I’d like to investigate further because I notice that I don’t have an immediate answer for it.

The question is: Can I see my own weaknesses and brokenness, can I fully accept that my heart has a hole that will never be filled, and can I love myself through it? Can I love myself anyway?

When I completed my 90 day masculine break, one of the things I learned was that if I was going to have time off, I had to schedule it for myself otherwise it wouldn’t happen.

I notice a pattern that around solstices, equinoxes and full moons I get especially tired (and so does everyone else by the way). So I scheduled a break over this equinox as a preventative measure and was very proud of myself for learning my lesson (insert smug smiley face).

The only problem is: I haven’t been taking a break.

I’ve somehow tricked my mind into thinking that just because I have written it down in bright red stripes on my google calendar it totally means I’m not really working. It means that even though it’s business as usual, I have my regularly scheduled clients, blogs and workshops – they somehow don’t count as ‘work’ because I’m on ‘break’. My calendar says so.

The result of ‘pushing through it’? An ever increasing feeling of anxiousness, boredom and lack of giving a shit about … pretty much anything. So, that’s not very responsible in the end, but I realize that these feelings are directly linked to my need for a break into the void.

Here’s Where it Gets Fun

Not being able to actually clear my schedule, I needed to find another route. One that would give me the rest I need without having to cancel on everyone.

Somewhere around three days ago, I decided to reinstate a long lost motto that served me well in my times of over anxiety, fear about what other’s thought, and other nonsensical expectations.

Here’s how the motto goes: Fuck it.

Simple and to the point, it’s my favorite saying. Now, I don’t mean give up on everything and become a hobo living out of a shopping cart. I mean, fuck it, as in who cares?

Who cares if you’re being an asshole, and you don’t get your work done this one week out of your entire life, and who cares if you need a break from people because you think they’re crazy right now, and who cares if you suckle down two strawberry margaritas, two coronas and two hard apple ciders on a Thursday afternoon? Alright, so the last one might have been me, but you get the point.

The point is, life is so short and I’ve noticed lately how much time I waste thinking about other people and the stupid expectations that came from somewhere mysterious to me but I have somehow managed to grip onto like they were the goddamn holy bible of thought.

What really matters is this one wild and precious life and who we are in it. What matters is that we’re building something we love and enjoy ourselves in the process. What matters is you and me and the connection between us.

I also believe strawberry margaritas matter, but I am willing to have a serious debate about this.

Why ‘Fuck It’ Should Matter to You

So part of my ‘fuck it’ week was re-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yes I am a science fiction nerd. Whatevs.

Why your new motto matters is just like that movie. Bear with my geeky referencing here, but these tiny hobbits go on this epic adventure and cast this crazy ass ring into a mountain of doom. And when they finally make it home then they’re all like, “oh, I’m going to ask Sally Mae Hobbit to be my wife,” and “I’m never leaving the Shire again,” or whatever they say.

My point is why wait for that? Why wait for some adventure and near death experience with the greatest evil in Middle Earth to go after what you want?

Fuck it.

You like that pretty woman? Ask her out. You want a raise? Ask for it. You want to go on an adventure? Tell people you’re going.

You don’t owe anyone an explanation. You don’t owe anyone anything. You are enough, just as you are.

What’s This Got to do With Taking a Break, Again?

So, here’s what this has got to do with equinox and taking a break and all that (comin’ back round to a full circle, my precious).

My home-skillit Christine Arylo says, “It’s okay. Only go as fast as the slowest parts of you can go.”

There’s all these things your ‘supposed to’ do and be as men. You’re ‘supposed to’ get up early, work long hours, be emotional power houses, know what a woman’s thinking every second of her life, be a man, man up, show some self-respect, have zero body hair, seventeen abdominal muscles and all kinds of other non-sensensical super-human expectations that came from god knows where.

And yet, there are parts of you that need to go slower, that need something other than constant crazy pushing. There are parts of you that the real masculine craves – a wildness, a passion, a sovereignty, a depth, a mission, I could on and on about the mysterious wonders of you.

In order to touch those depths you have to follow your wants of the moment and of your slower bits. You have to honor ALL parts of yourself.

If you need a break – you need a break. If you like that woman – you like that woman. If you need more money – that’s what you need. The slowest part of you, or the saddest part of you, or the most romantic part of you – they don’t get to run the show – but they matter. Their voices count because YOU count.

We all have these slower, ‘less desirable’ parts of ourselves that we hide away and pretend don’t exist because we believe they make us inferior. We have fear we will be judged for them.

No one is judging you except for you. And you have the power to release yourself from those chains, my friend.

Fuck it.

Iron John is a mythical character who represents our inner wildness and the moral of the story is that our inner wildness cannot be tamed and holds the keys to our true and authentic Self.

While I enjoy the premise very much I find myself troubled by the fable, particularly in discovering what parts of my own wildness, and therefore which parts of my authentic Self, I have not released into full freedom.

What bothers me about it is that I can feel the wildness in me changing, growing and deepening. It is aligning with something in my soul that I do not have a name for – I do not even have a memory for.

The Wildness of Youth

There is a wildness we all experience in our childhood and adolescence; the wildness of youth, of freedom to do and explore and adventure. The wildness of emotional expression.

This is a particularly interesting phase and I enjoyed my own wildness and adventuring very much, however, I am finding that the wildness of my youth does not feed the wildness of my woman (or man, in your case).

The hunger for freedom and passion has deepened and the old ways of satiating do not satisfy.

The Wildness of Adulthood

We maintain our wildness as we age, in fact, it is imperative to strengthen our own Iron John’s as we become older because it is what makes us free and authentic.

Without our wildness we are merely machines.

In adulthood (and mind you, I am still discovering this topic myself), the wildness takes on a new flavor.

For men, it is the need to be freer in your expression, in your love making, in your passion and opinion. There is a depth to this wildness, however, that differentiates it from the nomadic and idealistic plights of your younger years.

Wildness now is wisdom and truth, it is authenticity and choice. It is the ultimate freedom of spirit and mind.

We think wildness is spontaneity and being unexpected, and while this was true of our younger years it does not satisfy the deeper yearnings of a man’s heart.

The Deeper Yearnings of a Man’s Heart

The deepest longing of the masculine is freedom. To be free.

I find myself in this conundrum currently. There is a part of me that I long to be free of, that I long to release and surrender.

And yet, it terrifies me because I cannot say what will happen when the Iron John of my soul is released from his cage. I cannot say who I will be then.

I’ve seen this show up in so many ways with so many men – they say, I cannot do or be X because of Y. I am not free to do whatever job I wish because of my bills. I cannot be with that woman because I am broken. Some variation of this formula plays out in our minds.

I have my own version, and you have your own version, but the point is that there is a version of excuses or fears that are holding us back.

Break Free From the Chains

The wild man in you wants to be free, to do as he will, to speak his heart and his truth. The Iron John in us all desires to be free of our golden cages, the chains that bind us.

I’ll tell you a little secret: the only thing standing in your way to ultimate freedom – is you.

You may have to walk through fire, and hell, you may have to feel pain and anguish, you may have to let go of people and things, but ultimately the choice is yours and yours alone.

No one can make it for any of us.

It sounds super difficult! It is, AND there are simple tools that will help you get started down your path to wildness.

This week’s video illustrates a one that will help you get started.