Beyond Broken

Attachment

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)

page25image7173312

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.

Real But Not True

 

According to Tsoknyi Rinpoche,  a most beloved contemporary Tibetan Buddhist meditation masters, to have an open heart and open mind we must develop a deeper understanding of the patterns that drive our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Then we will not so easily surrender to the impulse to blindly follow them.

I happened to be reading his book, Open Heart, Open Mind: Awakening the Power of the Essence Love, as I was crossing the International Dateline around the Bering Straits on my way to Tokyo to teach a class on Images. (The Pathwork terms for false beliefs and conclusions formed in early childhood.)

Tsoknyi Rinpoche continues to say that patterns are hard to change, especially the ones that are embedded in our unconscious or even our pre-verbal nervous systems.   This reminds me of Pathwork Lecture #201, which I am preparing to teach. It talks about the negative force field that images create as they go unexamined. The lectures defines images as a “force field of distorted ideas”.  “… it is like a deeply imprinted motor mechanism set in motion with great energy.  Thus a stronger energy is required to deactivate this motor force and change the negative force field into a positive one.”

After going through the hard work of uncovering your patterns or images, Rinpoche suggests a mantra, which is a time honored method of talking to your thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes called prayer, it is a means of opening up a conversation between the heart and the mind.   His mantra is a simple four word phrase: Real, But Not True.

What I love about this prayer is that it acknowledges the young one in us who came up with this group of distorted ideas and conclusions.  To this young one our conclusion about ourselves, about life, about God are absolutely real.  But as we shine a light on them with our adult consciousness they are also absolutely not true.

To find images we have to look back on our lives, the ways we define ourselves, the pressures that were applied by the people around us and the culture in which we were raised.

In the process of teaching Images in Japan my husband and I find our intertwined images, which are always at work in relationships.  My image:  “If I am sick and suffering then I will get the attention I need.”  This comes from my young one who watched my mother, sick and suffering and sucking all the attention and energy out of our household, leaving none left for me.  It seems so clear to my little one if I can be sick like my mother then all that attention will be mine.  Of course the attention I want the most is from my husband.  His image: “My attention does not matter or will be used by others to manipulate me”  I try desperately to get his attention and he tries desperately to avoid being manipulated by me by withholding it.  And round and round the negative force field we go.

This is a spectacular example of the truism: we teach what we most need to learn!

Sometimes images or patterns help us avoid feelings like being alone and neglected in my case or being invaded and used in my husband’s.  But I also learned while teaching that sometimes images are put in place as a sacrifice to try and save our families.  One student took the blame for everything that ever happened in his family.  He sacrificed his need for fairness and justice.  This was a huge sacrifice. When he realized what he had done he wailed with grief.  We all know how important fairness is to children.

Tara Brach has more to say about Real, but not true. “What this means is that, while thoughts are really happening and there is a real biochemistry that accompanies them, they are only representations in our mind. They are not the experience of this living moment. We can begin to identify and challenge limiting beliefs by starting with the simple question: What am I believing right now? And then: Is this true? Is it possible that this is real but not true? Our beliefs fuel our sense of separateness. Uninvestigated, they are a veil between us and reality; they actually prevent us from seeing truth.”

 

 

 

 

AWAKE

 

“I just realized something important”

My husband and I recently taught a workshop in Vermont about the Spirituality of Relationships—the title of a Pathwork Lecture—but the workshop was really about love.

I was walking in the woods a few days later with nothing particular on my mind and started to think about a woman I know who wanted to become a mother about 10 years ago. She told me she was going to manifest this.  She was older at the time and I was cynical.  By that point I had had many failed attempts at having a child.

I will tell anyone who will listen that not having a child is my biggest disappointment or regret in my life.  As I walked through the woods I began to think about disappointment and regret and my story about it began to turn upside down. A new truth emerged.  My friend had  approached being a mother with a full open heart. My approach was different.  I had conditions.  I had wanted a baby of my own with my husband, Tom. I could feel the constraints I put on my heart.  And therefore I could  feel that I had created different results than my friend whose son is now nine years old.  There was no judgement about the different results I had created and I do not wish for my friend’s life, but my sad story seemed to vanish in the light of the truth of my own creation.

I felt incredibly empowered and knew that something really important had happened that was going to change the dynamics in my family.  I began to feel into the subtle tension I bring to our family gatherings—a vigilant, focused attention on “who is getting how much of what”.  I feel that I must get my share (especially of the grandchildren) given that I did not have children of my own.  The tension contained a demand.  By Friday of the same week our family was assembled for our last birthday party of the summer.

The change was amazing.  I was able able to relax and just be with everyone.  I noticed how much attention I did get, how much joy and love was present in our family without needing anything extra.

This made me think about what the Pathwork teaches us, that cause and effect only seem spread out over time because of our time/space relationship on this plane of existence, and that it is actually immediate in the reality of greater unitive conscious.  Cause and effect collapse into all cause.

In another example this week,  the woman of a couple I work with wanted to unpack what happened to her on a family trip.  One day she was letting in the love of her family, especially the love of her niece, and the next day it felt like she lost it.  Her niece let her in and then shut her out.  She went from blaming and shaming herself to blaming her niece (which is what we do—we go to the hard pain) when we do not want to feel the softer pain.  I asked her to track what she was feeling back to the softer feelings and she was feeling a broken heart.  This creates an apparent dilemma for her as she has a real need to love and it comes for her naturally.  In that moment the time/space continuum collapses again and I realize that needing to love and having our hearts broken are not separate.  They go together.  Her partner says, “we think we will love at one time and then sometime in the future we might get our hearts broken but actually it is all going on at the same time.” “Exactly,” I say, “it is all cause—the future effect is an illusion. She realizes how love and heart break are inseparable.  In this place there is no duality, there is no victim or perpetrator.  The world is truly benign, as the Pathwork Guide promises us, and we are truly mini gods creating all our experiences in every moment.

Stand Your Ground

This summer our 5 year old is venturing out into the ocean but he needs to hold hands for support when the big waves hit.  When the big wave approaches I say to him, “stand your ground, buddy” over and over again. My wish is that he remember this as metaphor for the rest of his life.  As I say it to him over and over again, I am learning to stand my ground.

Boundaries are something that did not exist in many chaotic households, or they were held inconsistently.  And I am finding that many of the people I work with have never experienced healthy, safe, flexible boundaries.  As one person put it recently, “I either shut down completely behind my wall or I am wide open with my heart fully exposed”.  The first approach is not a boundary but a defense and the second approach is a merging which is unhealthy and leads to co-dependency and loss of self.

Brene Brown has done the most beautiful work around boundaries that I have discovered.  It came out of extensive research that she did.  She wanted to know what qualities contributed to the most compassionate people.  She began by interview clergy and other known types of compassionate people.  Her hypothesis was that compassionate people were also spiritual people and that spirituality contributed to compassion.  What she found out was very shocking to her and it might be to you too.  She found that the most compassionate people are the people who have the best boundaries.

She uses the acronym BIG for her boundary discussion.  BIG becomes an amazing question.  Here is how it goes:

What Boundaries do I need so that I can be in my Integrity and be most Generous towards you?

As one friend pointed out, we often try and do GIB, and that doesn’t work.  We often think we should be generous.  Aren’t good people generous?  And then we find we have gotten out of alignment with our integrity and wonder what boundaries we might need or should have put in place and didn’t.

As I have worked with this notion of boundaries and generosity with myself and others I find this miraculous thing happens.  Let’s say there is a conflict with another person.  We are considering having it out with them.  Hashing out what is wrong, all our hurt feelings, etc.  And then we consider maybe a boundary would help.  When we energetically feel a boundary — like a transparent cloth over our hearts or a piece of lucite (letting light in and out but a boundary none the less) — everything changes.  We feel the boundary.  We are inside and the other is outside.  We have a parameter around us, there is a border between us and the other.  In this act of protection  and self designation, we instantly can feel more generous towards the other person.  The grievances or issues seem to vanish as we feel secure and unharmed inside ourselves.

I spoke to a friend about BIG yesterday and as she carefully took in what I was saying she said she felt I was talking about creating order.  Boundaries do create order where otherwise there is the potential for chaos.

Try standing your ground first with a simple boundary based on your own integrity and watch your generosity and true compassion grow.  It is straightforward and easy and works instantly.