Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Blog

I WONDER WHY

As a teacher trained in Special Education I was taught to use every question children ask as a learning opportunity.  “What is that,” the child asks pointing to a stop light.  I would answer, “it is a stop light and watch it change colors, red, yellow and green.  Red means stop, yellow means slow down and green means go.” In recent years, I have seen teachers in the Waldorf School respond differently. When a child asks a question (and inevitably children ask a ton of questions) the parents and teachers are likely to answer, “I wonder.”

Sensing the wisdom of this, I was challenged to change my approach and answer, “I wonder.” And it took me a while to understand the depth of this philosophy of letting children stay in the wonder and mystery of world, and find the answer for themselves when they are ready.

This week in sessions, my own and someone else’s,  I notice a pervasive human tendency to try and answer difficult questions.  How do we answer the “unanswerable questions?” Like, why do bad things happen to good people? Why do innocent children starve to death or are tortured in war?  And especially, why is this terrible thing happening to me?

One person I work with is wrestling with a terrible thing that is happening with her son.  She has a whole list (I captured 6 items) of how she has failed him as a mother and caused all his troubles.  Some of them have a grain of truth (after all, there are no perfect mothers), but most of them feel very harsh and exaggerated to me.  I am curious about her list.  I know when we blame ourselves or others (and she can bounce back and forth between herself and blaming her son) that there is a difficult feeling being guarded, a difficult feeling that the blame game is protecting us from feeling.  I ask her if she can put her list in a little thought bubble outside of herself and look at.  I am trying to help her get some distance from it.  “Oh no she says, I need it right here close (and she motions to holding it on her lap).  I ask if she might consider making it a balloon and holding it by the string.  “No I need it right here” (same motion), she says.  And we get curious together about why she needs to literally persecute herself for this fate that has befallen her son.  We ponder this for a few moments and finally she says, “Well, I need a REASON for what has happened”.  And we both feel how powerful the need for a reason is—an answer in the moments when life unexpectedly serves up painful circumstances.

If we do not have a reasonable explanation for inexplicable and painful things, what are we left with?  She did not want me to take her reason away—even a little away. What do you do without a reason? Without one,  we live in a very dangerous, chaotic and random universe.

Without a reason we are left to find support from some other means. And a lot of the “reasons” that we imagine are ways to turn against ourselves and create shame and blame. Without these reasons, we are back to “I wonder”, and we are left with the MYSTERY. As I feel into this “I wonder”, what I find is the miracle of spirituality.

My client needed support as she struggled to separate her grief from her grievances. A “council of women” appeared in her imagination, all women who had struggled literally and figuratively through the labor of having children and then losing them. This group of women surrounded her and wailed with her in grief. They were a collective but they also had individual stories. One was the mother of the son who was one of the Columbine killers. Another a mother of a lonely son, who became radicalized on the web and put on a vest and blew up himself and others. Were these mothers “bad mothers”? No! There was not a clear cut answer to what happened, why this happened to them and their sons. They were fallible mothers but… it was a mystery how this happened. As she felt surrounded by these women, feeling their support, she began to relax into and feel her true grief. And then came a more universal grief, a non-personal grief that is clear and clean and true.

Later in the week I am in my own session, unpacking some of my own trauma. In my 15th year I am sitting in the front pew of our Synagogue right next to the altar (which feels very close to God). It is the funeral for my mother who has just died. I feel the support of those around me and the support of God. There is a comforting fabric of all that surrounds me, affirming that this is a very sad and terrible thing to have happened. Grief comes quite easily. A year later, I am sixteen, sitting in the same pew at the same altar, but this time my father is getting married to a woman I hardly know. It is supposed to be a happy occasion but it is too much for me, and much too fast. I fear I am now losing my father. I will be an orphan. And I look up at the altar and decide that God is now punishing me. I have done something terribly wrong to deserve this. Something is so wrong with me that everyone is happy around me but I am not. Since that moment fifty years ago, I have lived with a subtle feeling that I am being punished. Pain in my body follows me around most days and it is confirmation of the punishment by God. I have my REASON.

Then I too move into the MYSTERY and I am surrounded by a group of women. They have all lost their mothers and it did not go well afterwards. This “it did not go well afterwards” is the new puzzle piece of my work. The women form a collective but each has her own story as well. One women loses her father to grief and has to raise her younger siblings; another is shipped off to other family members and boarding schools. For me it did not go well with my stepmother and I did in fact lose my father. As I am surrounded by this support I feel a fullness creeps into my chest and a fullness surrounding me. I look up at the sky at twilight and the sky is luminous. A confirmation of a God that is so grand and true and loving.

That night I have a dream.  I am at a shopping mall—dropped off there by my husband—and as I go from store to store, no one is wearing their masks. I am the only one.  I feel like I have been dropped off into a world that is so different from me, that does not understand the threat and danger.  I am so upset, I wake myself up and have to walk around the house for a while before I can go back to bed.  These are  the feelings I had with my father and new mother.  I am able to feel them now through this dream.  No one understands me and no one understands the danger and threat.  Having been dropped off there I am trapped just like I was at 16 in my family.  Everyone seems to think everything is normal.   The feelings are difficult but I remember the luminosity of God that I felt and go back to sleep.

What Is Being Revealed to Heal?

Week nine of our respective isolations and aloneness is bringing with it a phenomenon I am observing in many of us.

This iceberg is a classic metaphor. The part seen above the water line is what we are conscious of knowing, experiencing and remembering, and the mass below water represents material that lives in our unconscious.  What is beginning to happen is that as the waters of life have been quieted by our slowing down and staying still, we can see what is below more clearly and more unconscious material is making itself known.  It is fascinating to watch this in myself and in those with whom I work. Here is how things were revealed in some dreams.

I dream I am in the hospital with the virus and I feel its desperate grip on me.  I can feel the moment of choice — will I fight to live or will I succumb?   It is a desperate moment and I am all alone.  I choose life and wake up realizing that I have often made a different choice — one of living with depression and contemplating suicide.  I are now affirming life!

In another dream I am in a terrible car accident, a 600-car pile up.  The devastation is unimaginable, yet I am taken by ambulance to the hospital and told by the medical staff that it is a miracle that I survived.  On waking I realize that I have survived the tremendous car wreck which was my family breaking apart when I was young.  I am walking away,  into my life — a true miracle.

In a third dream I am able to bring someone back to life who is a mother figure to me.  She has stopped breathing and no medical intervention helps. I lay my head on her chest and a magical healing power of love starts her breathing.  In real life I was not able to bring my mother back — it is the most impotent, grief-filled experience of my life.  In my dream I get to complete this story with a new ending where I have the power to heal and life is restored.

Through these dreams, much is being worked out in the hearts of the dreamers.  I sit in awe of how hard our unconscious material is working to surface and heal, uniquely during this time.

Trauma that has not been given enough attention is also surfacing. Painful past experiences with friends and loved ones are coming back to life to be fully experienced and healed.  The protective strategies we used instead are being questioned and loosening.  In one example, a woman lost her best friend to suicide.  She was young and helpless as she saw her friend degenerate into depression and madness.  Soon afterward she got her first professional job.  She has since had terrible work anxiety.  At work she is always afraid that something horrible is going to happen, she will make some unforgivable mistake and get fired.   As we slowly, with lots of time and love, revisit the moments leading up to her friends’ death and the shock of her death itself and fully experience all the feelings, we can finally feel that it is over.  The trauma can now retreat into the past and not be just about to happen, re-lived in her feelings about her workplace.  We hope this will lessen her work anxiety.

Finally another person I work with has found a dissociated part of herself who emerged out of extreme trauma with the belief “I can withstand anything and look fine and heal the rest of the world.”  This part of her has been very successful but has been completely cut off from her real needs.  She is beginning to come into her needs, preferences — truly herself.  It is astounding how she has found this while having the time to be at home, to really come to grips with what happened to her and step into the real person — the beautiful person she fully is.

For myself I notice for the first time an anxiety before bedtime.  I often find a small symptom that seems to flair up at night, a foot throb, an ear ache, or some other unexplained symptom.  In the past week a voice has surfaced to accompany the symptom.  In a desperate tone it says. “this will hurt and you will be alone and not be able to sleep all night.”  I am curious about this and wonder if it’s origins come from a time when I was six.  I am driving home in a car with my parents and feel like I have to throw up.  I ask my parents to pull over and I try retching at the side of the road but nothing comes up.  This may happen a few more times before we reach home until my parents are exasperated.  They put me to bed (alone) with a pot and tell to be sure to use it if I need to throw up.  The next morning I am still in distress and am taken to the doctor who admits me to the hospital.  I have acute appendicitis.  As I am meditating this morning and listening to the voice in it’s full desperation say, “I will be alone all night.”  I whisper back, “not now, I am with you , I am right here and will stay right here.” 

It is obvious to me that this time has been given to us to investigate more closely our relationship with ourselves.  Ann Lamott once said (and I paraphrase), “my mind is like a bad neighborhood I would not like to go into after dark.”  When we are isolated we have ourselves.  It may turn out, if we listen carefully and uncover that which has been unconscious and hidden, that there is constantly new territory for us to discover.  We may find out we are one of the most interesting people we know.

Little Drops of Rain – The Grace of Grief

Walking on the beach yesterday — a beach that is officially closed except for exercise — I started to let in the fact that our summer is essentially cancelled.  Each event was cancelled one at a time and there was a feeling of loss, or sometimes relief. But now there is the empty beach and the empty summer stretched out in front of me for miles.  My mind went to all kinds of conclusions.  First, that I should not feel sad because I have so much to be grateful for, second that we could stay a shorter time here and then go home and third that I was just feeling blah and would get over it.

I came back home and listened to a Tara Brach podcast I have been following Called Sheltering in Love.  She has been a teacher of the practice of RAIN meditation, a profound process of Recognizing a feeling, Allowing it, Intimately feeling it in the body, and then Nurturing it.  As I fought my feelings that arose when I felt the loss of our summer I had hoped for, we usually resist our feelings.  We do this by minimizing them to try and make them small or exaggerating them so they feel too big to handle or by trying to fix them. So naming them and allowing them is so different.  And then giving them space in our bodies and our own comfort — it is revolutionary.

Today, Tara varied a bit from RAIN.  She says she uses this mantra: “Come right up to the edge and then soften.”  She is referring to coming right up to the edge of a difficult feeling and then softening instead of stiffening and deflecting as we usually do.  She leads us in a ten minute guided meditation and I use the difficult feeling of grief.  As I move to the very edge or edginess of grief, I feel much more grounded in my body.  I remembered this: grief is grounding.  I had discovered this before. The heaviness of grief lends us weight and gives us the feeling of substance.

Towards the end of the meditation we are invited to bring in a nurturing presence of our own or a nurturing person or spiritual entity.  I remember grace, and a special moment from the past.  Over ten years ago a close friend was visiting me from Israel.  She speaks Hebrew as her native language and is very proficient in English but she is pausing to translate each thought from one language to the other.  I am no help to the communication. I speak no Hebrew.  We are outdoors in the woods one day and she tells me she thinks I am very graceful…

At that moment I am sure that something has been lost in translation.  I have never thought of myself as graceful. I was never good at any sport, always too tall, too fat, too uncoordinated.  Being too tall, I took to stooping over and have poor posture.  I cannot think of a graceful thing about myself.  So I ask my friend to explain.  And she says, ” the way you hold your grief is so graceful.”  I am a person who experienced a good amount of loss and grief, all before I was 16 years old.  For years I tried to get rid of it or heal it.  Once, on a mountaintop, I created a ritual with a small fire and burned all my losses written on little pieces of paper and watched them curl in the fire and go up in smoke.  There, I thought now this is all behind me.  But it wasn’t, and the loss and grief would come over me in unexpected moments.  When I watched a young girl shopping with her mother, or when I cooked and entertained, something my mother loved doing.  It was hard losing her when I had just turned 15.

I became impatient with myself.  I would rail against my mother (imagining she could still hear me) with an unquenchable question : “How could you leave me?”  I would summon her to give me a sign, any sign.  One day she did answer me.  She said that her death had nothing to do with me.  It was her own life’s trajectory.  It settled the question but did not bring me much comfort.  Her words were matter of fact, like a reading of spiritual law — not warm or particularly loving.

I finally realized that transforming the grief, getting over it, or whatever, was not my actual task.  My task was to learn a way to live, and love, with the grief, and let it inform me, ground me, even console me. I learned this gradually, and it seems that my friend noticed.

Today I find the pairing of grief and grace again.  As I allow in the nurturing presence of grace my whole body feels animated, as if grief now has a substance and an aliveness.  It is a profound experience— allowing our feelings.  Lingering with the experience I realize that going through the grief did not produce joy as I may know it but something new all together.  Perhaps this feeling is true joy.  I invite the people I work with to feel their feelings all the time.  I am glad I did it for myself.

 

What Is Calling YOU?

It now seems a bit ironic that my last post, at the end of January, was about finding our true pace in what can be such a frantic world.  What I suggested as a task worthy of some thought and consideration has now been imposed on us as we are forced to slow down.  Moving fast through the world with a doingness consciousness can become an addiction.  Most of us have addictive behaviors, but are not addicts.  In fact our addictive behaviors have often served us well to help us cope with and avoid very difficult feeling states or painful situations.  As the world has come to an unprecedented screeching halt, this can be the deepest and most meaningful of times — if we chose to take on the challenge.

We can inherit our addictions, and the one I inherited from my mother looks a lot like OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder).  My mother, whose name was Bernice, was nicknamed Baboo Bee (after the kitchen cleanser popular in the 50’s).  She scrubbed and cleaned everything continuously, including me.  This was particularly frustrating for her and wounding for me because I never stayed clean!  I was a constant project for her and I felt like I was a constant disappointment.  I had a cousin who always seemed to stay ‘put together’.  But not me.  One minute after brushing my hair it would recoil and fly out in a million directions.  ‘Stay on all day’ lipstick stayed on me for about two minutes, and still does.

In the past week I have been holding space for a lot of people who feel fearful and ungrounded.  In between my sessions I have been going out to the garden and somewhat maniacally digging up weeds.  My OCD has resurfaced with a surprising momentum and force.  Not consciously, but somewhere below the surface I am sure I believe that if the garden is weed free, then I am safe.  That I have done my bit to help the situation our world is in.  That each weed represents a deadly germ and as I dig this one weed, getting the full root ball underneath it, I am making the world a better place.

It has helped me feel more grounded, being outdoors, my hands in the soil.  But of course I know this strategy is just my way, just as it was my mother’s way, of dealing with stress and disorder inside and around me.  It is an illusion of control, and although it is fruitless, it also helps in a small way.  So here is one meaningful thing we can notice as we slow down.  Watch for little addictions that are getting stirred up.  Poke a little deeper for the real roots or deeper feelings underneath. This can help us get closer to ourselves — our true nature.   Now I can look at my behavior with some humor and lots of awareness and compassion. I can begin to turn my attention to ordering my real inner garden, my inner home.

And as I contemplate this I turn to Tara Brach and her new book, Radical Compassion.  On page 130 I find the heading; YOUR STAR IS CALLING YOU.  And although her book was published in December, before the world as we have known it ended, she seems to be talking to each one of us now.

She says, “Awakening from the trance of wanting is a spiritual path.”  And clearly many of our wants are stymied right now.  For some of us, what we truly need, like money, employment, food and shelter, is being challenged.  As one-by-one more and more things are getting cancelled, I notice an interesting phenomenon — some things that cancel are really disappointing and other things that cancel give me a sense of relief.  This makes me wonder how much of my life I actually want to be living?   In the trance of ‘wanting’, have I lost my way?

Next in her book is a beautiful meditation what contains the question; “What is my deepest longing?” This quiet time in our lives allows us to step back from everything and ask these kinds of basic questions.  And some of us may be in too much fear to settle into them.  At the beginning of my sessions I have been inviting us to remember the most beautiful, serene and safe place we have ever been.  As we go back to this place in our minds eye, I illicit all the senses, how the air felt, the view or sights, the smells.  As we linger there a little longer (30 seconds) we both immediately calm down and our fear or threat feelings reduce.

So, what is my deepest longing? What captivates me?  As I make my way into and through the meditation she gives us prompts. Is it the longing to love fully or be loved, to know the truth, to be peaceful, helpful, to free of fear and suffering?

  • The longing to be helpful fits. I feel this deep in the center of my being.
  • I  also have an especially strong longing and need to know the truth.

Those answers came to me. What is calling you?

Tara Brach promises that when you know your deepest longing it gives you a felt sense of innocence, energy and flow.  I experienced this in my body.  She also promises a potential inner shift that can give us fresh resolution, openness and ease.  For me it makes my life take on new meaning.  It gives me a new sense of my true priorities.

When and if life gets back to some new ‘normal’ I will be making different choices about how I spend my time.  They will need to be in alignment with my deepest desires.

I hope that I will not need things to be cancelled to know they were not right for me in the first place.

Traveling at the speed of… me?

Dear Lord Prayer

Actually my boat is relatively small, even though I was told as a child that I should not be afraid of anything because my mother was afraid of everything.  I felt like an adult from the day I was born.  I honestly believed that some of us are born full grown.  We are the special ones, we know to keep our napkins in our laps, to use big words and how to shadow all the grown ups in our lives to be really helpful.  ‘Mother’s little helper’ was the grandest of praise!  Me along side my mother baking eight kinds of Christmas cookies—all to perfection—until my mother’s ‘back’ gave out and sent her to bed, never to recover. Instead, she would  die eighteen months later.  I never made the connection between her death and her perfectionism until  now.  How driven she was to always ‘look’ so good to the outside world, many times at my expense.  My father and I got used to staying clear of her right before a dinner party when she was entertaining.  A tantrum would ensue with slamming doors and fits of hysteria at one or the other of us. Her little helper was watching, and learning.

Stretching to be as perfect as possible glorified the OCD in our household and I adopted the idea that love equals perfection.  This left me too exhausted to actually be very present to my life or the people around me.

When a feeling of emptiness ensued, I was sure the cure was more perfection and more activity.  When I went to college I chose a major that would please my new step mother.  When my husband and I started a business together, I became the salesperson, never really asking myself, “Do I want to be a salesperson?”  Instead, I flew into the job head first and was renowned for being able to squeeze in the most customer presentations in one day or week.  When or if I had time to even eat on these days was uncertain, but I would make ‘my numbers’ and I thought this would bring me more love from my husband, and approval from the world.

Each of us, especially  those who experience trauma at a young age, find developmental coping strategies.  I have noticed these three tendencies.  These are uncomfortable yet familiar and all push us out of our window of tolerance.

Dan Siegel coined this term “Window of Tolerance”.  The concept suggests that we have an optimal arousal level when we are within the window of tolerance that allows for the ups and downs of emotions experienced by human beings. We may experience hurt, anxiety, pain, and anger that brings us close to the edges of the window of tolerance but generally we are able to utilize strategies to keep us within this window. Similarly we may feel exhausted, sad, or shut down, but we generally are able to shift out of this.

Below is a diagram demonstrating the ebb and flow of an optimally regulated nervous system.

“When we experience adversity through trauma and unmet attachment needs this can drastically disrupt our nervous system. Our senses are heightened and our experiences and reactions are typically intensified and strategies are less readily accessible to us.  Adverse experiences also shrink our window of tolerance meaning we have less capacity to ebb and flow and a greater tendency to become overwhelmed more quickly. Learning how to track and shift our affect can be a powerful tool for promoting regulation and integration throughout the brains, body, and mind”. (From Dan Siegel)

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There is the hyper, over-the-top strategy of dis-regulation which creates over-achievers like me.  These people push themselves beyond their limits so habitually that it feels normal.  There is a constant mantra like a drum beat that says, “you are not enough, you are not ok”.  These people feel that they must do more and more to somehow compensate for this terrible flaw in themselves.  All of these strategies carry deeply held, often unconscious beliefs like, ‘I will miss out on something so important if I don’t go into overdrive’, and, the worst, ‘you will leave me’.  As children we may have felt  we were not really wanted or our parents expected too much of us.  This became my ‘normal’, to always be ahead of  where I actually am.

The second tendency is a habitual hypo, under-energized response.  These people can struggle with depression and lack of interest or follow through in their lives.  They may have a similar mantra going on in their heads of not enough-ness but they have developed a different strategy.  They wanted to stay out of trouble, perhaps from a very critical parent by trying to stay below the radar, to literally disappear.  This would require shutting down their natural energy, holding their breath and making as little movement as possible.  They have decided, “if I stay really still and small, I will be safe.”

The third tendency swings from high to low.  These people burn the candle, so to speak, on both ends.  They go into a frenzy of activity one moment and then a full collapse in another moment.   They vacillate between full on and full off.

Each of these three different strategies needs different things to begin to reclaim their true windows of tolerance.  It is possible and it takes conscious work to override a lifetime of an energetic pattern.  For the hyper person who is always above and beyond their window of tolerance, they need to begin to feel their enough-ness in a regulated state.  They need to slow down, risk the terror that something bad will happen and notice all is well when they are comfortable and operating inside their window of tolerance, their true limitations and energy.  For the hypo person they need to move more and risk getting bigger in their lives.  And also notice that it is safe to do this.  Obviously the third type person needs to do both.

What does it mean to be ‘in’ your window of tolerance?  What does it feel like?  We have all had days where life felt relatively effortless and everything just seemed to flow.  This is what being in your own window of tolerance feels like.  It feels so good and natural.  Like the picture below, you are light on your feet and surrounded by all the colors and joy of life.  Or it can also feel like you are fully feeling your pain and loss and it is moving through you as if by magic as you allow it and stay close to yourself and your own needs.  When you stay connected to your actual energy system and honor it, your window of tolerance naturally expands.  So we cannot push or pull it open or closed but by staying within our own comfort zones we naturally grow and expand.  How perfect is that!

This requires us to face squarely our own limitations and the obstacles that life presents to us.  It no longer is dangerous to be big or small.  We can come into reality and it is safe.

Jon Kabat-Zinn gives us a glimpse of this feeling and encourages us to live more from a place of wholeness at the end of his body scan meditation: “…Feeling complete and whole as we are in touch with our essential completeness a realm in which our limitations are not confining a realm of oneness ,silence, stillness and peace.  Open to things just as they are in each moment and seeing that this attitude and stillness itself is healing and allowing the world to be as it is beyond our personal fears and concern beyond the tendencies of the mind to want things to be a certain way and seeing ourselves complete right now as we are.  Experiencing the fullness of our ability to love and care and experiencing being totally awake right now…”

Truly we all are rather small when it comes to meeting the suffering and adversity that life presents to us.  We can reach out to God for help and/or be Godlike and compassionate to our selves.