Beyond Broken

Trauma

YOUNG LOVE

“We sail and we sail together.
The name of our ship is the new beginning
and our sails are a hopeful color.
Filled with the winds of changing times.
We sail and sea around us waves.
And it swells as a great heart beating.
All the storms of night are passing.
How can we sink when we can fly?”

From the cover of my leadership camp’s handbook 1971

“When you are 15, or thereabouts, you love the art you love more passionately than you will ever love art again.  Around that time your sense of taste has only just recently come into being. ….. You have been transformed from a kid… to a young adult with an ‘aesthetic’.”

—From Jonah Weiner Rage Against the Machine, New York Times Magazine

In the summers when I was 16 and 17 I was sent, by scholarship, to a leadership camp in Upstate New York.  By day, we did social action, building a playground for migrant worker children and by night we discussed the deep questions of religion and spirituality.  On weekends we would clean up and dress in all white and sing and dance our hearts out.  This was my art, my aesthetic.  I fell in love.  Looking back 49 years later, I am sure that my fellow campers and what we created together saved my life.

Recently one of my best friends from camp found me on Facebook.  She then posted this picture from 1972 of the two of us sitting on the grass near our beloved pond – my head in her lap.  As I gaze at that photo, I know that is still me.  I love intimate contact, and thrive on the meaningful conversation.  We had many that summer about love, life and God…..

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Are You Resilient?

What is Resilience?

It has been called the great puzzle of human nature.

Is it something some people have and others do not?  Is it something you can learn?  Some research on resilience talks about genetics and a predisposition towards resilience.  Here are diagrams of a seesaw with a fulcrum to illustrate this.   Your life experiences and genetic predispositions sets this fulcrum to make your seesaw go up or down more easily.  Adverse childhood experiences make moving the fulcrum more challenging.  It can even make resilience out of reach for some people.

However, it is people who have had the most adverse life experiences and somehow have overcome them that inspire us the most.  Who are these people and what did they do?  The answer to these questions can help us understand resilience.

Resilient people possess three characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief  that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three.

Viktor Frankl was preoccupied with survivorship/resilience during his dehumanizing, life threatening experiences in concentration camps in Nazi Germany.  He later traced the roots of his resilience to a sense of purpose and the acquisition of meaning.  He then expanded meaning into three dimensions: purpose, mastery and autonomy. He wrote about in his famous book, “Man’s Search For Meaning”.

Other core characteristics of resilient people include the ability to form strong attachments to others and the possession of an inner psychological space that protects them from intrusion or abuse.

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom,” says Dean Becker, the president and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, quoting from Diane Coutu in her Harvard Review Article, “How Resilience Works.”

So how can we train ourselves to become more resilient?…

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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!…

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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.
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Are you keeping ‘cool’ this summer or succumbing to the heat?

 

Are you keeping ‘cool’ this summer or succumbing to the heat?

Learn more about what happens in our brain during ‘cool’ and ‘hot’ moments and what huge differences it makes in our relationships.

We are only three weeks into the summer and already there has been a lot to learn.  Most of us continuously find ourselves judging others and making assumptions about other people’s behaviors. We do this continuously in a scanning function in our brain. These assumptions justify our defensive behaviors. Our untested ‘realities’ give rise to disconnection, wall building and subtle and not so subtle negativity in our relationships.
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