Beyond Broken

Wendy’s Blog

The Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Yesterday we took a trip to the old Crozet Tunnel.  This tunnel in Afton was built through the Blue Ridge Mountains for trains in the mid 1800’s. It closed in 1944, but it was recently opened to bikers and pedestrians.  In this photo I am standing on the east end of the tunnel pointing to a spec of light which is a mile away at the west end.  Walking through the tunnel is beautiful and eerie.  You need a flashlight because it is completely dark.

The light at the end of a tunnel is such a powerful metaphor as we all wait patiently for the grip of the Pandemic to loosen and end.

In my life I have known two different ways to hold this metaphor.  The first one is waiting for the light at the end of a tunnel to finally appear or arrive—the hope that salvation is out there somewhere in the distance

The other is an on-going sense of hope and purposefulness that we might call faith. We all need a sense that things will get better, that we will arrive somewhere better. It can be a companion to us as we are progressing towards the light.

I have experienced my share of looking for the light at the end of a long tunnel through coping with chronic pain. When it began fifteen years ago, doctors were mystified and there was a lot of treatment that was driven by guesswork.  I was on multiple medications and I had to give up a lot of things I had been enjoying in life.  There were days when I was not sure I could keep on living.  But I kept hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel.

In retrospect, that became the beginning of a significant healing journey for me.  It was the catalyst for the second light at the end of the tunnel metaphor.  I stopped relying on something out there, some tiny flicker of something in a dark tunnel, and started to cultivate that flicker in myself.  Some days I could not and still cannot find it, but mostly it is a real light that guides me.  It whispers, “Turn inward!  Look inside!  The answers are right here!.”  This has led me to many somatic healing practices and has taught me the true meaning of compassion, compassionate even with my limitations. I have learned about the pain/brain connection and how much they rev each other up. And how to unwind their tight duo.

Recently I have been able to hike and bike again after many years of limited physical activity.  I am feeling better than I have in years and most importantly I feel like I have some control over how I feel.  I am not looking “out there” any longer.

In the tunnel yesterday my flashlight broke. It was fun to trust the dark and let me eyes gradually adjust to the tunnel’s environs.  Of course I could see the light ahead, and I knew I could reach it, but what about when we cannot?

The beautiful images of the snow, the ice, the sun after so many days of clouds, dance in my head today.

The Magic Of Second Chances

This time of year we all experience endings and we hope for new beginnings.  We ambitiously make New Years resolutions but do we really believe in second chances?

Perhaps all of us have at least one precious item that we revisit at this time of year.  For me it is a book I was given when I was four years old. Each year I try to gather children around on Christmas Eve and I read it to them.  This year the reading took place with hot apple cider, safely spread around an outdoor fire.

The story is about a little old fashion (even for 62 years ago) doll named Miss Flora McFlimsey who was once loved by a little girl on Christmas morning but has long since been forgotten in the toy cupboard of the attic.  She is very lonely and has only one visitor, Timothy Mouse.

One night Timothy Mouse is very excited because there are so many more crumbs than usual for him to eat and he tells her there is a tree growing right out of the living room floor. “Ah, it must be Christmas Eve” Miss Flora McFlimsey muses.  And her inanimate body begins to creak and move.  She feels like she would give anything to see one more beautiful Christmas tree.

Miraculously (there are lots of miracles) she makes her way down to the living room just as Santa is arriving.  He is muttering under his breath, “Dear, dear, dear, I seem to have lost the doll for Diana in the snow storm on way here.”  And then Flora McFlimsey steps out of the shadows and Santa says, “Well now my dear, it seems that I have seen you before. Oh my gosh you will be just the doll for Diana.”  And he sets Ms Flora McFlimsey under the Christmas tree next to the doll in the stylish red dress and the bride doll and heads back up the chimney.  Immediately the bride doll and doll in the red dress begin to make fun of Flora.  After all she is quite shabby and worn and out of style.  She feels so ashamed she wants to head back up to the attic where she belongs but all her joints have stiffened again and she cannot move.

Little tears come into eyes when Timothy Mouse appears again and says, “help is coming soon.”  What happened next (another miracle) cannot be explained.

The angel comes down from the top of the Christmas tree and her original clothes appear as new. The angel helps her back into her beautiful blue dress with the ermine muff and kisses her on her rosy check and whispered something ever so softly in her ear.

It was something about Christmas and something about love, but only Flora McFlimsey heard her.  And then the angel flew back to the top of the Christmas Tree.  Suddenly footsteps could be heard on the stairs and shouts of “Merry Christmas!”  The children appear and all them head straight for Flora McFlimsey.  No one paid very much attention to the other dolls.

But Flora McFlimsey was so happy for once again on a Christmas morning she was hugged and kissed by a little girl.

After this reading of the annual story I began to think about second chances and how they are always possible, often with the help of what seem to be miracles. Not always the overt miracles found in children’s stories, but miracles nonetheless.  How often do we not even try to start over because we feel too old, too shabby, or too stiff and set in our ways?  In what ways do messengers like Timothy Mouse appear in our lives but alas go unnoticed or unheeded?  I want to celebrate the miracle of second chances as we think of relationships we might want to repair (including with ourselves), changes we want to make in our lives and roads we have been afraid to travel.  Let’s invite the miracle of love and Christmas to show us the way and begin 2021 with these questions:  Where are my angels?  What is possible that I have not considered or even dismissed? What miracles might I invoke and co-create? And what helpful companions might be there, ready to help me on my path to change? What doubts do I need to question and set aside?

Let’s all go for it.  2020 has shown us that we had better not wait.

 

 

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.