Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

Healing The Shame Of Sexuality

(Photo taken at Ephesus, a Greek and then Roman city that flourished around the time of Christ)

 

I have been exploring Dan Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness in which he describes the hub of awareness as the center of ourselves and the spokes and rim as the things we take in from the  outside world: our senses, our mind thoughts, our relationships, our body sensations.

Practicing this for several days I became interested in my hub, the essence of me that is me — the center.

This is a new variation on many practices of I have tried over the years.  I have always found some resistance to going into the center of myself.  In the past I have  thought I was afraid of how little would be there, that I would find that I am really just made up of everything going on outside of me.  I am very ‘other’ focused.

This time I began to notice something new stir in the center of my being.  The word feminina came into my consciousness.   It is a word my husband uses to refer to me often.  The word means feminine in Portuguese.  I have noticed that I have a slight aversion to him calling me this name.

This aversion, as I really explore it, contains a lot of strong emotions and is a microcosm of myself as a sexual woman — fear, shame and lust.  In the center of my being I find my sexuality as an integral part of the essential me!

When I was becoming a woman at age 14, my mother was becoming a man.  She had a radical mastectomy and then took hormone treatment which made her voice lower, and hair grow on her face.  This was horrifying to me and I understood — this happens when you are a woman.  I also knew that  for women there was another type of danger, whispers of pregnancies, getting in trouble, being a bad girl.

My own budding sexuality, although active, went into hiding, laced with shame and isolation.

This may be a common experience for women even though my coming of age experience with my mother was unusual.  The photo above depicts  Medusa looking very ambivalent herself, some 2000+ years ago. It adorned a wall of a home in ancient Ephesus.

If I am Feminina, what does that mean?  Pressure to be something, the receptacle of endless need?  I have not had many positive associations.  AND that is changing!

My husband and I have been working with sexual fantasies and preferences in a new way in our teaching . Of course it has been so healing for us as well.

Sexual fantasies  and sexual preferences are a great way to find a view into the center of yourself.  Our sexual fantasies are working underground on very above-ground issues.  The main issue for each of us is how to resolve the inherent conflict between two of our most basic needs; arousal and safety.

Through fantasy we can have our arousal in a safe and private place.  Our fantasies are also busy resolving other issues.  Inside our fantasies we find our deepest wounds.   Some of our fantasies are direct.  I was used as a child so my fantasies are about being used.  Others compensate and are indirect.  These fantasies provide us access to what was denied us as a child, power, importance, admiration etc…

Finding your sexual preferences by exploring pornography can also be so helpful.  I was always put off by pornography – above it all.  But now I see images of women like me.  Doing things I like to do.  I always thought there was something wrong with me.   I am normal after all!  I feel my shame lift and freedom take its place.

I love this quote from  The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel  by Jamaica Kincaid.  She is describing a young women who turns 14.  “And so, too, the smell of my underarms and between my legs changed, and this change pleased me. In those places the smell became pungent, sharp, as if something was in the process of fermenting, slowly; in private, then as now, my hands almost never left those places, and when I was in public, these same hands were always not far from my nose, I so enjoyed the way I smelled, then and now.”

What if each of us could embrace our sexuality with all it’s bodily manifestations in this way?  What freedom awaits each of us as we can feel normal and accept the fullness of our feminina.  For men I am sure there is an equivalent experience of isolation and shame around sexuality.  Let’s all come into the light that is our own unique yet normal sexuality and see what a beautiful vehicle it is to work our our deepest issues and come into contact with the deepest center of ourselves.

 

 

 

The Dry Desert of Self Contempt

Each of us has words we say to ourselves silently that we would never speak out loud to anyone else.  These words become so familiar they barely reach conscious thought but they carry very negative energy.  With my clients we have excavated phrases like “you are such an idiot”, “you are a fat big”, “you do not even deserve to live”, or “you are worthless” and more.  You might be interested in listening for what you say to yourself.  This self-contempt is so painful, but is actually meant to protect us.  If we say these things to ourselves we will fend off the criticism of others.  We will whip ourselves into better shape (smarter, thinner, deserving, etc).  Sometimes these words were said to us and we have internalized them.  Sometimes we just lived in an environment where our significant others interacted with us in a way to make us draw these conclusions.  For example, one of my client’s Dad was a policeman.  When he came home after a long day of work all he wanted to do was watch police chase videos on TV or Pornography on the computer which was in the living room.  His Dad did not delight in him or show interest in him.  He drew the conclusion that he must be an idiot and he now has trouble focusing on tasks — finishing things he starts.  This of course confirms his phrase “You are such an idiot”.

The healing of this dynamic has some challenging but very clear steps.  Self-contempt is in our control.  First we have to excavate these phrases.  Listen for them in our background thoughts and self talk.  Then we have to challenge their validity.  Is it true I am idiot?  A fat pig?  This challenge immediately softens the energy these phrases carry.  Next we have to go into the early scenarios that began this self talk.  Go into the living room and feel how much you wanted your Dad’s attention and how he was not interested in you.  As you feel this also allow yourself to feel how this really happened to you.  You were a cute, creative kid.  You deserved attention and support.  You needed it.  Once you allow yourself to feel your feelings and really validate what happened, you are on your way to healing.

And we can get stuck here.  We can shift from self-contempt to contempt of the other and what they did and how bad it was.  This is a step in the right direction but not the end goal.  Staying in the loop of “it is me that is bad” or “it is you that is bad” is strong and compelling.  Self-contempt or contempt of others is self-betrayal.  It is only when we accept our selves and what really happened on our own terms and for ourself that we are free.  Then we can move to the next step.

Given what happened to you, anyone would have some of the problems you have.  It is real that we need support and attention when we are young and we will be left with deficits without this.  Pride or self-will may make coming to terms with our deficits difficult.  “I was humiliated for this as a child.  I do not accept the limitations.”

Pride and “you are a fucking idiot” often dance back and forth in a lockstep.

Try this exercise given by the Guide in Pathwork Lecture #240.  In meditation, bestow tender love upon every aspect of yourself, every neglected part, every attitude, no matter how distorted. Face yourself in truth and see if you can then find your true divinity and perfection.  This love must come from and to yourself and not by means of hating or rejecting parts of others.  Self hate is a prison for all of us.  See if you can make it conscious and know that it is not caused outside of you.  You alone can change this hate to love by accepting all of yourself without conditions. When we are in truth and love this is never indulgent.

The only way out is compassion. Compassion for our deficits and what really happened, and compassion for those who hurt us.

Then we can build a life based on what we need now.  My client is working on finding the attention and support he needs to focus and complete what he begins — to move through life with more ease and grace.

 

PURITY

While at the beach in Florida this winter I had a casual conversation with a stranger.  We quickly found we shared step-parenting.  Both of us each wrested with feeling included in a family not of our own making (at least biologically).

I agreed to send her an article I was reading about cultivating the good amidst our tendencies to see how we don’t belong or might be excluded.

The next day I saw her again on the beach and she said I had made an impression on her.  Like a yoga teacher she knew once, “I was pure”.  In the moment I dismissed what she said.  I found no place in myself to connect with purity.

I have fallen out of contact with Marie but her words stayed with me.  For a time they stayed in the periphery of my mind.  But I woke yesterday from a dream in which I was in bed, with purity as a young daughter lying  next to me.

What if I used the exercises of the great teachers, Tara Brach and John Welwood to make space and really embody this feeling of purity?  They both have similar four-part exercises to make space for, embody and receive support for difficult feelings.  What if this exercise worked for positive feelings too?

Today at a northern beach in the early morning I tried it. The first step in the process is acknowledging or recognizing the feeling. I acknowledged and recognized purity. That was not too hard. The next step, allowing purity, was more difficult.  Tara Brach says, “let it be as big as it is.”  This was challenging. I felt purity bouncing around inside of me ricocheting off all my un-pure, underserving places — whew!  The next step was to enter or get intimate with purity. This step was excruciating.  Images of destruction and crucifixion were swirling through me, of Christ on the Cross, parts of me dying so that purity could really enter my being.  Finally came the step of receiving support, letting my purity meet purity itself.  The bigger purity, the universal, non-personal purity.  In this step I merge with purity itself.  I let it consume me and it is me.  I have the the strongest and most pure sense of the true benign nature of the universe.

I imagine the color of purity and I let it fill me inside.  It is a light blue and makes my being translucent so all life and love and death can pass through.

 

 

 

Beyond Dreaming

Beyond Dreaming

We all dream.  Our dreams take the form of fantasies, day dreams and dreams while we sleep.  Dreams have different purposes.  One purpose is to correct reality.  You fix what is broken or unredeemable in fantasy — your wish for real life played out in dreams.  You  seek revenge or pride where there was humiliation.   You win where you have lost.  You are powerful where you were powerless.  Our dreams can be very soothing.  And it is very powerful to observe them rather than get lost in them.

Observing and evaluating your daydreams can help you categorize them. It is very likely that you produce fantasy fulfillments for both real and false needs.  Compensatory fantasies or daydreams may hold the secret to all our regrets, losses and grief.  These losses may need to be felt and lived through even as we dream about something else.

I am in a new beach house in a new neighborhood.  My fantasies run rampant.  I imagine I am a cast away on the beach, just my husband and myself.  I am trying to recapture a time I lost when I married him with two small children and we never had that ‘ newlywed couple time.”  I am popular in the neighborhood.  Everyone wants to be my friend.  I have a vibrant social life.  This fantasy proves all the people who have ever spurned me socially or personally wrong.  I will finally be queen of the prom — the prom I actually never went to at all.  There are many Jewish people here.  They are a bit older.  I fantasize the reconstitution of my broken family.  One couple is my aunt and uncle, another woman, a long lost relative.  I even catch the glimmer of an alternate life fantasy.  What if I never left my original Jewish neighborhood and married a Jewish man – my days filled with mahjong games and gossip.

I know I need to spend more time observing all these fantasies to determine which are manufactured by real needs and which are false needs.

In a dream last night I am in a comfortable private room in a hospital but then moved to a very uncomfortable triage room with harsh lights and a narrow bed.  I am waiting to be seen by a doctor.  It is 3:00 am.  I am getting angrier and angrier as I am waiting longer and longer in discomfort.  I am complaining to myself and anyone else who will listen, “How can the staff fall so far behind? It is 3:00 am!”  Finally someone hears my complaints and I am moved back to the more comfortable room and a doctor comes in shortly after that.  She holds a microscope up to my skin and uncovers a festering, blistering rash.  I am so relieved to know that something is really wrong and to be attended to.

Upon examining my dream, I find in myself an irritation and disgust with all my physical symptoms and problems.  I take care of them as best I can but I create in myself an environment like the dream’s triage room, barren and without comfort.  I put everything before them and refuse to make them a priority.  I make my symptoms wait until  3:00 am for attention, after I have done all other important matters.

Over the years I have found a new relationship with my pain.  It isn’t something to silence, suppress, avoid, negate.  It is a well I can draw from, a deep source of understanding for my clients and myself.  And it turns out there is more work to be done.  My dream points to a subtle harsh  inner environment that still exists .  And calls to me, “there is more attention, priority and comfort I still can provide”.

“A greater awareness of your daydreaming can bring many benefits. My advice to you on this path is that whenever you find yourself engaged in such fantasizing, develop a new approach. Observe, evaluate, weigh and determine, without strain, compulsion or pressure calmly and quietly. Make daydreams the useful symptom they are meant to be by learning about yourself, your real needs, your drives, your pseudo-fulfillment in fantasies and about their purpose.” PWL #98

Perfectionism stems from the belief that we are broken.  So we dress ourselves up in all sort of ways in our dreams and fantasies to make ourselves whole.  Yet we are already whole.  We keep doing things to get God’s attention and actually God is right there!

Reflections From Nature

Last Saturday the Alt Right came to Charlottesville.  We witnessed them from our favorite breakfast spot.  They marched straight down Market Street in front of our window seat.  We witnessed one battalion after another dressed in different colors, representing differing ideologies with shields and clubs.  Some were outfitted with heavy combat gear including large guns and grenades.  We went out to the streets propelled to make real what felt so improbable.  Pepper spray and crowd agitation chased us away.  A state of emergency was declared 20 minutes later.  It was 11:00 am.  The Rally was not supposed to begin until noon.

Later in the day we walked among one of these same groups with the accompanying feelings of disbelief, and disorientation – as if we had been dropped into an alternate reality so incongruent with our experience of our home which has always felt to be wholesome, safe and a place of retreat.

In this situation – two of us and many of them – I found myself reciting these words over and over again for comfort,  “Stay here and keep watch with me, watch and pray”.  The rendition is from the album Joy on Earth performed by the choral group Taize.  As I was humming the words to myself a thunderstorm opened up the heavens.  An amazing rainbow followed – nature’s equanimity or disinterest in our problems. It feels true to me both ways.

Another  line of the song continues “My heart is nearly broken with sorrow, watch and pray”.  And mourning doves begin to sing all around us – more reflections from nature.

Processing this has taken many days.  From Pathwork Lecture #180, The Spiritual Significance of Relationships”, this phrase helps me go deeper. I will paraphrase. “There are parts of you in a state of lower development which influence your thinking, feeling, willing and acting.  You are divided.  You push one side away and identify with the other”.  In the lecture we are asked to bring out the deviating parts of ourselves and face them.

Today in prayer and meditation I  feel a disenfranchised part of me come to life.  “Pay attention to me”, it says.  I am your most cast out part.  Bring me back home.

What is this part I have distanced myself from?  It reveals itself.  “I separate and I hate.  I can hate forever.  I am consumed with hate.”  Once it is here there are so many examples where I do this.  Sometimes the separation and hate flicker by in an instant, hardly detectable, and other times it is consuming, lasting for weeks.   In bringing this part home I must also love it.  From Pathwork Lecture #72, “Love is the one and only power. With it you are mighty, you are strong, you are safe. Without it you are poor, you are separate; you are isolated and fearful. However, this knowledge cannot really help you until you discover where deep inside yourself you cannot love, you do not want to love, and you do not know why you resist loving.”

The part that hates needs loving too.  It is activated when I am afraid I do not belong.   When I am afraid of abandonment.  I wonder if some of the Alt Right people feel this way too.  Maybe we are not so different.

I find some peace.