Beyond Broken

Self Exploration

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.

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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.
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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?
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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.…

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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….

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