Beyond Broken

Relationship

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.

 

Are You A Good Person Who Was In A Bad Situation?

Lifelong feelings of shame and deficiency are typically found to accompany the distress states caused by early trauma.  Children cannot experience themselves as being a good person in a bad situation.  Failure of the holding environment (family) is experienced as failure of the self.  Later thoughts like, ‘there is something wrong with me’, or, ‘I am not worthy or bad’, are built upon early sensations in the body of ‘I feel bad’.  Simply understanding that your shame reflects the environmental failure you experienced rather than who you really are can help shift lifelong patterns of low self esteem, shame and a sense of worthlessness and help you see yourself in a new, more compassionate way.  Paraphrased from Healing Developmental Trauma with Laurence Heller, PHD

 

Have you experienced extreme highs when something good happens to you and extreme lows or deflation when facing something bad or a disappointment?  Do you feel like you are bouncing up and down, dependent on outside forces?  If things are going really well and you are making your goals, do you still have a nagging feeling that you are not enough?  Do you sense an emptiness that does not respond to how much you fill your life or even how happy you seem to be?  Even as your confidence grows, and your accomplishments pile up, do you notice you are afraid that failure could be lurking right around the next corner? Or do you feel that, no matter how successful you are, you are just fooling everyone—playing a charade of a confident, accomplished person; that you’re a fake?

If you can relate to any of these questions, then there may be something helpful for you here.

We are usually not conscious of breathing since it is an involuntary activity of the body. But when we slow down and breathe deliberately there is so much to observe about the breath. Each breath feels differently. One is shallow, one may be deep. There is a world of sensations that accompany each breath.  They usually live in the background of our lives. Our thoughts that speak to us, as words inside, also take on this “involuntary quality”, particularly our less conscious background thoughts. They just become like the air we breathe, and we do not hear them or pay any attention to the power they wield over our lives. Most of the time we are too busy to hear all this back-ground noise.  If we do learn to listen to these thoughts in the background what we will learn is this: there is an inner tyrant inside each of us. It began so early in our lives we may not have even been talking yet.  This is the one who drives us to be perfect and thus avoids the painful recriminations we suffered as children.  It is often not our own voice, but the critical or harsh voice or environment of our family or parents.  This is called introjection: the unconscious adoption of the ideas or attitudes of others.  We all introject the worst admonitions from our families so as to try and protect ourselves from having to endure them again.  “If I say it to myself, then I will never get caught doing [whatever] and have to endure this punishment again.”

The process of unearthing these strong demands and background thoughts does not make them go away, even though we begin to see how irrational, unrealistic and self-defeating they are.  Some part of us knows that you cannot ALWAYS be kind and please everyone, but that rational part does not win out, does not silence the voice of the tyrant.  Beyond the messages that demand perfection are also accompanying beliefs that are mostly unconscious but exert a strong influence on our thinking and actions. But as we follow this process below the surface, we will begin to have more control over this inner struggle and begin to find more inner connections to what is the real good inside of us that is not dictated by outside forces or our inner critic.

The more conscious we become of these buried parts of us, the better we know ourselves.  When the hidden parts become known they have much less power to influence our lives.

The Inner Critic

Since inner critical words are introjected (literally put in us by others), they are actually alien and don’t actually belong to us.  These early messages contradict our present sane beliefs about who we really are.  We can easily see the falseness of them at the intellectual level and replace them with more sane and accurate assessments, but our young belief system keeps us stuck in them. The part of us that knows better, our adult logical self, joined in the developmental process rather late.  The more primitive inner-child part of us already believes firmly in the messages that came from our parents, no matter how offensive or life-effacing they are such as:

    • Don’t show yourself to anyone.
    • Don’t think a man or a women will want you.
    • Don’t let anyone know what you are thinking.
    • Don’t let anyone get too close.
    • Don’t let anyone go too far away.
    • Don’t be enthusiastic about anything.
    • Don’t be quiet.
    • Don’t think you are important.
    • Don’t underestimate yourself.
    • Don’t be arrogant or proud.
    • Don’t be just pretty.
    • Don’t be just smart.
    • Don’t be assertive.
    • You are inadequate, ineffective, weak, failing, doomed – don’t be.

When these “dont’s” are internalized they can become rigid, self-defeating mind sets. These critical voices are so ingrained and insidious because they come from our family.  Our instinct is to trust our families, so it is frightening to contradict or challenge those early injunctive voices of authority.  Our discernment is not yet formed so these messages go unchallenged. (Paraphrased from Shadow Dance—Liberating the Power and Creativity of the Dark Side, by David Richo.)

Observation Skills

Here are some practical ways to get down into the material of our background thoughts.  Those inner voices that control our our inner life.

Observe Yourself.  You will probably be surprised at how many negative judgments you produce during a day.

Study how you react when something unpleasant happens. If you experience a break-up of a relationship, or get fired, or have a nasty falling out with a friend, what thoughts do you have about this?  If you feel bitter and resentful— “I just knew it. This is the way it always turns out. To hell with it!”—you can be sure there is belief at work.  An equally good indication is if you feel self-pity: “This always happens to me. I’m so tired of being disappointed!”  Study this in yourself. Try to get to the root of the negative feeling and define the belief as clearly as possible.

Look at your behavior patterns.  If, for example, you believe that relationships will never work out, you won’t try to give them your best.  You may avoid relationships altogether or be so guarded that they never have a chance to get very deep and eventually die away.  At the other extreme, you may get into a relationship and very soon begin to make yourself disagreeable and pick fights, resulting in the other person leaving you.  What do these behaviors indicate regarding your beliefs about intimate relationships or about yourself?  Are you passive and indifferent?  Impatient and rushed?  Study your day-to-day behavior to see what you can learn about your thoughts and beliefs.

Analyze your fantasies.  Most people cherish one or more fantasies, which they use repetitively to amuse, calm or console themselves.  What are yours?  Do you play scenes in your mind of winning someone’s undying love after undergoing much suffering?  Do you cherish a fantasy of yourself doing something heroic that will gain people’s respect once and for all?  Do you repeatedly play a scene of getting even with someone for hurting or betraying you?  These little stories are based on strong underlying beliefs and assumptions about how the world works. Explore these fantasies and work on putting into words the underlying beliefs that drive them.

Look at your family stories.  Most families have a standard set of seemingly fond stories that they reminisce about and share with new acquaintances: “Yes, Ruth was an ugly little baby, but we were sure glad to get her.”  “Our Jimmy has always been the wild one; he just drove his father and me crazy when he was little.”  “Andy and Liz could never get along—they were like oil and water.”  On one level these may be endearing anecdotes that serve to bond the family.  But they can also be potent indicators of underlying negative currents in the family and in your own personal history that may have been invisible to you when you were a child. What are your family’s favorite stories and statements about itself? How does this relate to you own beliefs about yourself?

Study the times when you feel a deep sense of shame.  It is natural to feel remorseful at times about your flaws and shortcomings.  It’s not unusual to get momentarily annoyed with yourself after doing something that was not conscious or appropriate.  However, if you find yourself going to a place of deep, paralyzing shame about something you’ve said or done, this almost always points toward a belief formed in very young childhood. This feeling of intrinsic badness becomes frozen as a belief that can keep influencing us as adults years later.

After reading carefully some of the examples and concepts above, spend some time listening inside yourself.  See if you catch any words you speak that you have not heard before, because they slip so far into the background of who you are and what it is like to be you.  What are some of the negative, critical, judgmental, and positive, supportive comments that you tell yourself? Spend some time on this and come up with some specific words.

What are images and visuals that accompany the words?  What is the fantasy that frequently plays in your head?

There is no amount of outer accomplishment or outer recognition that touches the critical inner voices.  As we begin to hear these voices out loud and let them be really known to us, we befriend a long, lost part of ourselves.  As we welcome these parts home and hear them clearly, it is like welcoming back an old friend after a long separation.

Shifting Identification and ownership

As we hear more clearly and consciously what we are speaking to ourselves, every minute of every day, we can begin to make choices.  Is this voice really mine or maybe it belongs to one or both of my parents?  We can imagine the tone of this voice and all it’s admonition  as a mass of energy — like the red energetic mass in the photo above.  As we locate and feel this actually energy in our bodies we can gather it up and literally return it where it belongs.  One client did this and both her parents (now deceased) said they were sorry (in her minds eye) something she had never heard  while they were alive.  It was a moment of healing.

We can also find an older and wiser part of ourselves and begin to challenge the validity of these voices.  We can emulate the kind voices of the ones who loved us the best as children.  We can literally say to ourselves, “Oh sweetheart, it is not really true that you are lazy, fat, stupid or [fill in the blank]”.

I sometimes say this out loud for emphasis—if no one is near.

A miracle begins to happen slowly. Our inside voice becomes kind and quiet. We begin to be good friends with ourselves.  We consciously shift our identification from the one who believes these voices and speaks them constantly and unconsciously, to the one who can hold with tenderness and understanding this misguided historic part of ourselves. Then real change begins to happen.

In this shift of identification, we can begin to shift our whole lives. We make the leap from experiencing the effect of our inner lives to being the cause.  Our inner perpetrator finally gets returned to where it belongs and also gets the attention and care it has been screaming for all our lives. Nothing we have done in our outside world has been able to hear this plea.

 

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.”