Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

Scar Tissue

 

Oops! I had a pretty bad accident in June. I fell onto broken glass.

I have not written a blog post in a while (since March) and part of the reason is that, for a while, I could not type.  A trip to the emergency room, six hours and fourteen stitches later, I was back home with bandages, pain meds and a long healing road ahead.  Fortunately our local teaching hospital has top hand specialists, and all summer I have been working with a Physical Therapist Angel named Hannah. Lately I have backslid a bit working to get feeling and movement back in my thumb and index finger.  “It is because of scar tissue,” Hannah says.

A Google search turns up all the information I need.  The ability of the body to heal and close a wound may seem simple, but it is not. Normal soft tissue or skin on the body has fibers that run in a nice pattern. Scar tissue has fibers that are best described as a haystack, with fibers developing and running in a different pattern than normal tissue. The formation of scar tissue by the body is undeniably amazing.  It is doing its best to heal but in a very chaotic pattern.  We end up with something like this.

But of  course, I am struck by what a metaphor this physical process is for our emotional healing from wounding.  The scar tissue is so well-meaning, but it lays down its fibers in a random pattern, attaching to whatever skin it can and creating lumpy tissue deep below the surface.  That is my trouble right now.  I have a special little suction cup to grab the tissue and pull it up to the surface so it can be massaged and re-organized into smoother tissue — not pressing on nerves while also trying to regenerate and heal.

Oh my! Our emotional defenses work just the same way! I spend all day with clients helping them bring to the surface the tangled chaotic patterns that were meant to protect and heal them but that have created more problems than they solve.  We use a little suction cup of empathy, curiosity and wonder to draw these wounds and scars to the surface so we can we reorganize them energetically and emotionally and so that we can see them and gently massage and manage them to work with us rather than against us.

I love the haystack analogy because our survival strategies, our attachment adaptations, and our false beliefs about ourselves and the world do seem to stack in layers, one upon another.  When one does not work, we lay another down. The early layers become obscured from our view, from our conscious mind. Given our early environments and traumatic events, we frantically take our tender healing fibers and grab hold of anything we can to knit a layer of protection and safety.

We all put ourselves back together but, oh my goodness, we live with messy haystacks that press on nerves and tendons, disrupting the fullness of what our lives might become.

 

Spring Gardening

In my garden this year the weeds are plentiful.  Especially one kind of weed that is very satisfying to find and pull out.  It is wide and can spread out its lush and large tendrils for several feet in all directions but at its base is a small ball and if you are lucky and pull it out just right you get the very deep central small single minuscule little root.  I am always amazed that such a small yet tenacious root can give rise to such a prolific plant.  Buckets of this weed come out of my garden and into the compost.  A Taproot, as it is called, turns out is the first root to appear from the seed and remains the central root of the plant.

I love this as a metaphor.

While we may, in our lives, spread out in many directions with flashy, fleshy greenery we have one central root to our lives and it has always been true.  In the Pathwork this is called our Soul Task.  The promise is that finding this task and staying true to it is the secret to a satisfying life.  Recently, my husband Tom found a letter that I wrote him in 1988.  We had been married for 7 years and I was about to turn 35.  In the letter I say that I  feel like I have checked important boxes in my life: kids, self employment and married for life.  While all this is great I go on in the letter to answer a question Tom has asked me the week before.  He asked, “Do you think we will ever make the Big Time.”  He is  referring our fledgling technology business at the time. Reading it all these years later, I am pretty astonished at my answer .  I write, “I think we will — but on a different track than what we are on now.  I think the contribution we can really make is to share with others who we are and how we are and that is our most marketable product!”  I go on to say that I am clear I can only keep going in this business for two more years….

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Allowing – Coming Into Congruence With Our True Nature

By now it is obvious to me that most therapeutic tools and also spiritual practices have one main unifying focus.  That focus is to help us develop the willingness to pay attention, while letting feelings be as they are.  Mark Epstein writes in The Zen of Therapy that “non-interfering attentiveness… is by its very nature transformative.  The point isn’t to stop feeling or thinking them (our feelings) but to change our relationship with them.”

Fear is one of our strongest and most prevalent feelings.  Recently I have noticed that it is my go-to feeling.  It overrides many more authentic feelings underneath.  Here are a few of my examples: A house keeper does not show up.  I feel very anxious and panicky instead of disappointed and actually a little angry at her.  Another example cutting back on medication I have a back spasm.  I feel anxious and afraid instead of sad and in pain.  James Hollis, PhD. writes in Living an Examined Life, “If we are going to have a meaningful life we have to feel our feelings.  Much of our behaviors are fear based. Fear protects us but also constricts us.”  In 1912 Jung said, “The spirit of evil is negation of the life force by fear.  Only boldness can deliver us from fear and if the risk is not taken the meaning of life is violated.”  Hollis goes on to say, “Realize ninety percent of energy that blocks you has its origin in your childhood where everything was overwhelming.  When we are stuck, we have activated this archaic fear.”  Sooner or later, to have a meaningful life, we have to  begin with allowing our feelings with open, curious attention.

James Hollis goes on to asks us “what does our soul ask for us?”  To get to this question there are layers of blocked feelings that block our intuitions and knowing.  Jung said “We don’t solve these problems … we can’t cut our history out of us like a tumor… our task is to outgrow their influences.  You cannot rule out what is wired in neurologically or in your psyche but you can watch it with curiosity, compassion and spaciousness.  In this attentiveness it loses its power….

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Coming out of the Fog of Negativity – A Gift for the New Year

Recently a friend sent me an article from the New York Times entitled, When Do You Know Your Work Is Done Here On Earth?  The title is provocative because it reminds me of a recurring dream I’ve been having and had just had, once again, the night before.  In this dream I am either at school or at a job and I have not done the work required.  If I am at school the whole year has gone by and I have not done any of the assignments.  If I am at a job I am showing up but not actually doing my work .  I wrote back to my friend to tell her how the article overlayed with this dream I keep having and she wished me well in finding the meaning.  I turned this wish into a prayer.  As the holiday unwound and I had some free days I actively asked to be shown the meaning of this dream.  In addition, I have spent many hours reading a new Pathwork book just published by Liam Quirk.  The Book, Being and Becoming, Five Essential Pathwork Lessons, (Pathwork Press) is the book that has been so needed to distill the Pathwork into meaningful, relatable liturgy.  I say liturgy because I am carrying the book around with me everywhere like a bible.  Liam was a student of mine and as I read the book I vacillate between feeling the pride of a parent and the awe of  his mastery.

Liam weaves so artfully the essential message of the Pathwork Guide that we are already perfect as we are AND we must attend to our distortions and negativities to get back to that state of perfection.  Early on in Lesson One he asks us two questions: what is the truth and what can I learn?   I ask these questions again of my dreams and I have another dream on New Years Eve.  In this dream I am with friends who in real life have recently disappointed me.  We are eating dinner and I am feeling unseen and uncared for and a lack of attunement.  I wake up at 5:45.  I lay in bed and recount all the actual disappointment that the dream left me feeling.  My mind spins from one disappointing relationship to another.  I cuddle with my husband who is sound asleep and rather than feel the pleasure of our comfy warm bed and his embrace I am off in a negative, even rageful rant that I seem to have no control over.  Finally I get up just before 7:00, get dressed and go out to the beach to watch the sun rise.  It is a completely foggy day with no sun but somehow this is a great comfort to me.  I walk in the fog realizing it is so dense I may not find my way home.  The low moan of the fog horn and this dense mist matches my internal state.  And it is a relief to lose myself in the ocean, in nature, in something bigger than myself….

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Expecting Disappointment

The holidays seem an apt time to write about disappointment.  How many of us struggle during December and January to create meaningful experiences that end up falling short in comparison to some magic we remember as children?  There is a “big D” of Disappointment.  COVID is still here and we cannot see family and friends without feeling anxious and in danger and there is the “little d” of disappointment; the gift that was not quite right, the lack of attunement of a friend or family member.  All disappointing.  There is the FOMO and being excluded during holiday events and there is the overwhelm of too many activities and burn out.  More disappointment.

However we have an odd coping mechanism to avoid disappointment. WE EXPECT IT!

What sense does that possibly make?  Because expecting something is a setup for having it actually happen!  Ways that we try to avoid disappointment include perfectionism, pessimism, vigilance and a kind of living on the edge of life….

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