Beyond Broken

Relationship

The You AND Me Universe

Join me in an exploration of the Me AND You Universe, a concept introduced to me eight years ago by Diane Poole Heller.  She described an interpersonal Me AND You universe; I have found that idea applies also to our intra-personal and transpersonal experience.

In one of her modules of her DARe Training, Diane teaches about how the Me AND You Universe contrasts with the Me OR You Universe.  She calls each state of mind a universe because they are a lived reality that is exclusive of other realities in a person’s experience.  Most of us live in the You OR Me Universe.  Unfortunately, our early attachment experiences lead us to the conclusion that we can have either ourselves or the other, me or you. In Pathwork terms we might call this a Main Image.  It’s a belief that “if I have you, then I lose myself, and if I have me, I lose you.”  This is a duality of consciousness or psychological splitting which is very painful.  The way this often shows up for me is that I am loving being with you, but also can’t wait for some “quiet time”.  Then when I am alone and have this “quiet time” I am missing being with you.  Either way there is a tinge of dissatisfaction and a lack of wholeness.

For those of us who had a parent who was inconsistent, coming and going from our lives (maybe due to jobs, depression, illness or overwhelm) — one conclusion a child would make is, “If I give up on myself I may have a much better chance of keeping you.” These children often seek perfectionism and performance as a way to sustain their parents attention longer, deferring their own needs.  Others of us who had a parent who was often unavailable with low affect or  self centeredness—a conclusion the child make is, “I will rely on myself and pull my attention inward”. The first child has a “I get you-but-not-me” belief and the second child has a “I get me-but-not-you” belief.  For those of us whose parents hurt us instead of protecting us we will find ourselves bouncing from me to you as above, never truly landing in either place, with life always feeling somewhat lacking, insufficient, and perhaps chaotic.

The good news is that healing is possible!  We know through neuroscience research that the brain has neuroplasticity.  I like to think of this as a brain at the gym working out to strengthen the positive pathways, letting the older, historic habits atrophy.

Recently I had a You AND Me experience. It took me several days to realize why it felt so good and profound because it was so simple.  It was on a beach vacation with my family, two grown children, two grandchildren and my husband Tom.  We had a full morning and early afternoon of fishing, walking, swimming and beautiful weather.  And then…ominous clouds rolled in, unexpected, around 2pm.  And then the rain. At first we huddled under beach umbrellas but then we gave it up and retreated back to the house. Instead of worrying about everyone else, I ran a bath for myself.  It felt so good to immerse myself in the warm water and pretty soon everyone had showered or bathed and ended up in the living room.  Two were playing cards, one was building Lincoln Logs, one was playing the guitar, one was on a computer and I was reading the Sunday New York Times.  I was also cooking a roast for dinner, periodically getting up to fiddle with the oven temperature, add carrots, potatoes and onions.  Cole got tired of the Lincoln Logs and asked me what I was doing.  He wanted to review all the pictures he took at the Aquarium the day before.  On my phone, comfy on the couch, we took another Aquarium tour, seeing it all through his eyes.  He had seen many things I missed, a seahorse exhibit and fishy personalities captured in the light and angles of his photo compositions.  Occasionally I would say, “Go show this one to your Dad”, (who is a serious photographer) and Dad would pause his guitar and make approving murmurs.  This weaving in and out of having my own interests — reading about how the Taliban came into existence — and interacting with the family was so fluid.  And then wonderful smells began to waft from the kitchen, the roast almost done.  It was a simple experience of family, a sweet three hour stretch of time on a rainy summer afternoon, but it was also an experience beyond this, an experience of having myself and everyone else in perfect harmony and balance.

Many of us struggle with the intrapersonal Me and You.  It feels like there is no way to make peace with all the parts of ourselves.  One part seeks perfection while another part rebels and wants to be lazy. In another very simple moment which also felt like an epiphany, I realized I had achieved the Me AND You moment inside myself. I was thinking about shoes. This does not sound like this will lead to some inspirational moment, but stay with me.  I was thinking about these favorite black leather platform shoes that I had many years ago. I loved them because a friend of mine had them and I wanted to be like her.  So I got them too.  I spent much of my life wanting to be like other people, trying to emulate their clothes, style, manner of speech, bodies. This imitation is a natural developmental stage— how we learn when we are young but this stage lasted for me into my 40s and 50s.  As I was thinking about these shoes I realized I no longer want to be like anyone else. I just want to be me whatever that may look like or mean.  Another arriving at a Me AND You moment.

Finally there is the Me AND You that is between me and God or the universe itself.  It is when I and the Universe have each other. I felt this today as I watched the sunrise.  Melting into the always present magic of the moment the sun first appeared on the horizon, the sky ablaze in red through the clouds. This transpersonal experience of having myself and this greater wondrous experience of nature as One.

As humans we naturally drift into duality—good, bad, life, death.  The Me AND You Universe is the ultimate antidote to this duality. It is the true experience of win-win, getting to have it ALL, if only for a summer afternoon.

 

 

A Japanese Lesson In Sorrow and Joy

切ない (Setsunai): When You Need a Word to Hold Both Sorrow and Joy

My last blog post was back in March. Tom and I had begun an intensive teaching assignment with the Pathwork In Japan. On July 2nd we completed our last teaching module.  It was very rewarding and also challenging,  always wondering what might be lost in translation.

I am now back to writing and it seems fitting that I would begin a new blog with a uniquely Japanese concept discussed in the New York Times and passed along to me by a dear friend. It is one of those wonderful words in another language with no counterpart in English. The word is Setsunai.

Setsunai implies something once bright, now faded. It is the painful twinge at the edge of a memory, the joy in the knowledge that everything is temporary. Perhaps, then implicit in setsunai is the way the passage of time eventually draws a thin line of blood, of pain, across even the roundest, fullest happiness.

I have noticed lately that most people I work with hate sadness. They will do anything rather than feel it.  I honor this fear.  Sadness can be a bellwether for depression and depression is scary.  But sadness is not depression. Sadness is a feeling and depression is a numbness.  When I invite myself and others into sadness it always holds a warmth that expands and begins to actually feel quite good!

Many spiritual paths, including Pathwork, teach that you cannot selectively block your feelings. That if you reject sadness you must also reject joy.  You can feel this in the word setsunai.  In this word the sadness is coupled with the memory of such joy. Buddhists elevate the temporary nature of our existence to a spiritual path.  At times in my life I have had trouble following this spiritual direction. As I age and emerge from the pandemic where so much has been lost it is getting easier to hold the joy and sadness and the temporary nature of life.

Tom and I had a stark experience of this over the past few days. Tom built a wooden row boat several years ago. It is old fashioned, beautiful and named after his beloved grandmother and spiritual teacher, Flora. Best of all it floats!  He made this boat to reclaim a memory of his youth when he rowed old wooden boats along the coast of southern Italy, and it evokes the memory of his grandmother Flora, whose grit and love shaped him in the best of ways.

We take the boat to a nearby bay to row on calm, clear days. The fun begins at the boat ramp. There are inevitably comments from people in awe of the romantic beauty of the wooden boat which stands out among all the the motor boats, plastic kayaks and jet skis. This Saturday night there was a younger crowd and no one seemed to pay us much attention.

We love to row to a beach on a secluded edge of a state park and this time we packed a picnic dinner and settled in to watch the sunset. As we watched the sun go down a large group of kayakers made their way across the bay.

We rowed back as darkness loomed and at the dock we encountered the leader of the kayaking expedition.  He was loading all the kayaks into a trailer.  “Hey”, he said, “you two look like you are straight out of the movie The Notebook.”  We had never watched this movie when it came out in 2004.  We went home and watched it that night.  (A movie spoiler is coming next.)

The movie is the story of an improbable but passionate romance, a girl from a wealthy family in love with a boy who works in a sawmill. The story is told by the couple in old age, with him reading the story that she has written in a notebook as she began to loose her memory to dementia. “Read this to me,” she says, “and I’ll remember.” He reads to her as she lies looking blankly from her bed in the nursing home. As he reads to her, little windows of her memory open briefly and then close again and then she does not know him and is very agitated and confused.  He is living for these brief moments of joy and connection amidst so much loss and pain.  In one lucid moment she asks if their love is strong enough, magical enough that death may take them together.  They lay down and die together.

For Tom and me, this was a moment of setsunai.  We have been together for forty-five years, and much of what was once bright is now faded. There is a painful twinge, the joy and sorrow in the knowledge that everything is temporary. The improbable fantasy of the film, the elderly couple leaving life together in each others’ arms, is not likely for most of us. More likely, someone will be alone and grieving. That night, we held each other and wept a big slobbery mess of feelings — setsunai.

 

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.

 

 

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.