Translate

Monday, April 26, 2010

Suffering......Disease?



Shadow Walker in our work together informed me that he thought I had created a dominant system with suffering. A system can be understood in psychobabble as a rule that the child adopts in an effort to make sense of their world, whatever the circumstances they find themselves born into. For me, it was a crazily repressed, Dutch Reformed, women un-friendly bubble within the rest of suburbian society nevermind the world. This bubble would then see to a violent bursting, absent father and siblings, a mother hospitalized with "psychosis" and a little old me trying to decide how to conduct myself in the world, while recovering from childhood rape and it's repercussive abortion. I apparently, had created several systems or threads of a system about this but the predominant one was suffering. I should also say that in this paradigm, which if your into labels is derived from Radical Acceptance, our systems are deeply connected to love, our sense of abundance or lack of it, our perceptions and mis-perceptions about it. Seeing that we're all pretty much walking around un-rooted and looking for some glimpse of a reflection of ourselves, some familiarity in something or too numbed out to even notice whats missing, love, or our mysterious human relationship with it seems to be an issue for everyone. It also makes sense we'd all have our own quirky relationship with it, having the passion to drive us to absolute madness, blissful joy and suicidal heartbreak. So...my experiences as a child, in this view, taught me that in order to receive love I would need to suffer. "And so", Shadow Walker explained "you continue to create situations which make you suffer so that you will get love".




He has a way of stating things matter of factly, just as simply as the sun rose at 4:52 this morning. Radical Acceptance after all was not about naming your shameful dysfunction, that part of you that was broken, that needed to be repaired, that you best get busy on before it has time to see the daylight of exposure. No, Radical Acceptance was about saying "Yes, I am this, how am I going to engage it?"




The only problem was the choice of how to engage it. The perfectionist in me that needed to draw a duality to outcome brought with it a staggerdly shame. On one hand I would need to learn not to engage my suffering in exchange for love because let's face it, that was a lifeboat, huddled with wayy to much weight and than hoping it wouldn't sink. And I couldn't ignore that a mainstay of my life had been suffering, but a big part of me keeps wanting to defend it. The reality was however, that I had been trying "not to suffer" for a very very very very long time. But I suppose thats not really "radically accepting" my tendency to create suffering, thats still looking for a way to change that picture. Our patterns after all on many traditional paths involve the learning of lessons, the cultivation of knowledge, the knowing that our struggles, our lives, our experiences brought forth the very tools already embedded within us to be born into the world representing our contribution.




If I asked Elder Becker about me and this system of suffering I'm sure she would say "nothing, you can't do anything about it. Your too young, maybe when your much older you'll be able to tweak it, but for now all you can do is watch it. Tonight between the enclaves of suffering and creativity and suffering and disease, I got to noticing, that it just might be this system of suffering that has always driven this pursuit of knowledge related to suffering. The questions that plagued me about mental health, unhappiness, the answers that I couldn't provide my clients, or the theories that never really gave the whole picture and the despair I felt about the pretending to know social worker role and the openly unknowing human one and the possible pain I would pentrate as a result was what drove me to stopping. But I only stopped after the holes of new knowledge began poking through the what used to be knowledge i had once so plainly understood, but after my experiences with the guessing game of psychiatry and what it did to my mom, I couldn't be the experminter. But in the meantime, I've uncovered some pretty important questions, brought light to many shadowed areas and continue to search for better answers, a means of not neccessarily understanding but being with this life. Does it not make sense that my continuous fascination with the human experience and the existential longings/knowings is consistent with a system of suffering, but also one that spurs me forward. Maybe it's what brought me here and doesn't need to be acted out anymore. Maybe in accepting it, I will become aware of how and when and what i do when interacting with it and bring forth some wisdom to share about the nature of suffering. Maybe that is my gift, with a variety of mediums to which to actualize it.




Is suffering a disease? Garry Greenberg in his book "manufacturing depression" raises similar questions about suffering, here speaking specifically of "depressive" suffering




"It could be that the depression epidemic is not so much the discovery of a long unrecognized disease but a reconstitution of a broad swath of human experience as illness. Depression is, in this sense, a culturally transmitted disease, the contagion carried not by some microbe or gene, but by an idea transmitted by subtle and not-so subtle means including clever direct to consumer prescription drug advertising, ruthless drug company dominance of medical education, research and practice, those dire statistics, state laws ordering insurance companies to pay for the treatment of depression as they would for diabetes or cancer therapies a new DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) with even more subspecies of depression and casual conversatins with diagnosed and medicated friends. ......The DSM is an unparalleled literary acheivement. It renders the varieties of psychospiritual suffering without any comment on where it comes from, what it means, or what ought to be done about it. It reads as if authors were standing on Mars observing our discontents through a microscope".




I had also been wondering about this for awhile. Another major obstruction to managing the rigidities of therapy in the Western structure. In the works of art, the stories of the sacred, the pilgrimage from seperation, brokenness and alienation to wholeness, healing and balance, the journey often demanded a series of "breakdowns". As Jeff Brown would call "breakthroughs", a coureagous ability to cave within to the depths of one's breakdown in the death preceding the re-birth of transformation. That, in my experience is the process. But just because the breakdown is often neccesary in order to break through , that doesn't mean the rationale behind the fall makes the fall a joyful one. It is often full of suffering, no matter how controled, how obscure, how bizarre or how quiet, it is suffering and who says suffering is bad after all? In one of my favorite poems about the human emotional experience, the human is compared to a house full of rooms which was open to any emotion sweeing the house, the wise one between the lines asked us to welcome each one at the door regardless how beseiging to entertain them and allow them to teach. For now, in a culture that uses my crevices of psychic weakness, my personal neurosis and imperfect perfection to sell me another something therefore also reminding how much that hole inside should never be faced but continually stunted, I have to do an incredible amount of self supprotive talking to just allow myself to be there with it, that suffering.




My relationship with my soul has taught me that at other times suffering can be a dis - ease. A fixation on my seperation and alienation, a kind of self-perplexed narcicissim. That in the moments I let go of all of these questions, directions, needs of explanation and just rest into it, joy employs.





Today, in the midst of all my systems of suffering, I felt joy. A radiant, awe-inspiring day bursting with joy at all the seams. A creative Granny shack, was the place that finally took the chance on an abondoning therapist trying to make it simple. I loved this place and stopped here often in search of Nag Champa, shell necklaces, wood rings and Lucid Dreaming teas. A little old church, converted to a house, than converted to the Grannie shack. Sparkles, the owner of the store was flamboyant, creative and full of an easy non-challant acceptance of people, process and things. She spoke sometimes of her own inner battles, but she dealt with it, by avoiding process, ditching scheduling and rigidity. The only thing she asked of you is that you did what you needed to do as an employee, but she didn't care how you did it and expected you to do it your own way. She encouraged me to express myself, to use this space as a space to create. "If the sun is shining and you feel you've been indoors too long, go outside and garden" she said. "Get creative with the store, put it in your own way...and don't worry if i move something, it doesn't mean anything about you, just a whole lot about me".




Her store reflected her. Every corner of the store was eccentrically different from the other, yet all the peices weived themself into a bright and brilliant eccentricity. She lived in Bali, part of every year collecting products for her stores. Ran the stores the rest of the months, one in a quaint little country town and the other in cottage country up North. She had started as an artisan, a beader on the craft market and now married to another crafter with eccentric shops and lots of room for sustained creativity, she could continue to bead at her counter, selling the things that represented her and talking to people that came in search of her expression rather than attempt to change it. And in one day, just one with six customers, I already began to see how her little cove of the things she thought were beautiful, however weird and outlandish, was also a refuge for those who were wrestling with their own spaces of conformity and authenticity, their stories of what they did with their lives and how those events connected them to the spaces within this store. And here, with the garden and the beautiful things that i too eccentrictly felt connected to, the gathering of oddness, and the appreciation for what is and what can be if only within our little haven of a store...was exactly what I needed. And in those moments, I found joy.




PS. Who else gets a hug from their boss in the morning and at the end of the day? Thank you Sparkles for allowing me just a little time in your soulasfying refuge.




Sunday, April 25, 2010

The narrative of story.....

One of the major crossroads that has made itself known as I continue to traverse this inner landscape is the perspective of story and the way they often prove to be coming from different places and moving forward in different directions in the fields of spirituality and the human experience.

For as long as I can remember, the human experience has been an incredibly interesting, complex and beautiful curiosity of mine. In all of it there was always a story, one that told of events the individual in question experienced, the ways in which they made meaning of those events, the questions left unanswered, the goals, desires and longings never persued, the logic behind the ways in which they made their decisions and prioritized their priorities, the things that made them laugh, made them passionate, their greatest sorrows, their greatest joys. The Indigenous of Turtle Island speak about the importance of always speaking one's individual truth, for in expressing one person's truth they bring forth their own unique contribution of teachings to benefit of the community, hence why they will tell you "your life is your medicine bundle". From what I have understood from spending time in these areas, the spiritual or metaphysical is not apart from these experiences that comprise the human story, in fact spirit is infused into every moment, no matter how sacred or mundane. Creatively bringing forth just the right conditions necessary to spur one into the next set of questions, the next set of experiences and essentially the next set of lessons.

Simulteanously, most would agree the human experience also brings with it the darker representation of story. After walking through a paralysis of lethargy that drives one to do little more than sleep, eat and poop or awaking on a cold tile floor after a night of substance induced vomiting, the story of those events often come with a wisdom, a backwards reflection on a compilation of knowledge you have gained, an awareness that lay blinded by only shadows before ripe for the sharing. It may also accompany a sigh of gratitude both for the things you have learned that will give you a protection from returning and the fact that the rawness of those times and events have passed. But in my experience, when your in the middle of them, it feels human, there is nothing airy fairy or beautiful about them when laying in the middle of it. In it, has meant for me a feeling like i am locked into a war i have no way of getting out of. To go through those moments shows me my humanity. To me, those are the cornerstones of what it feels to be human, probably why we have often refered to it as "the human condition". Therefore, the human story if made to be pretty, in many ways for me looses it's essence, it loses it's purposefullness or it's well deserved recogniton of the courage, bravery and tenacity of spirit that it took for that one single human to keep facing the life threatening shadows, keep moving with whatever light they knew was there and trust the process enough to keep walking towards truth, even if it meant allowing themselves to just sit on that floor and feel the density of the vomit against the ice cold tile floor.

Story, in the language of spirituality I have often found brings a different message. In some lines of thought, one would suggest that in order to spiritually actualize the harvest in the soul, the individual will have to lose their human story all together. That the human story is simply a joining of dots of perceived fact, more representative of the ways in which their self-delusions of seperation, personality and doing serve to keep them ignorant of the divine nature of all things. Unitive conciousness, asks that we see everything as part of a unitive whole, that the mind in it's monkey nature works tirelessly to create seperation, but the seperation is our delusion. Teachers of this realm, tell us to lose our story, not take anything personally, not indulge our dysfunctional emotional patterns and see through the illusion, nobody is doing anything to us, nothing is really happening. And so the discipline begins to witness the antics of the mind with de-tachment, to feal our feelings but not indulge them, to allow the story to leave.

I often wonder if the conflict between these spaces in the context of story, comes from my own tendency to create dualitys to which I have always been reminded by people I have encountered along the way, that everything is shades of grey, no single truth, no right or wrong. Kathy would say "our tribes never partook in Holy wars, they knew that everyone was right". Yet again, if it were so, what about murder? abuse? terrorism? genocide? Was that right? A divine peice of order, or was it reflective of the ways we had fallen away from our spirit?

That day on the mat, for the first time seeing the void, this place of completely peaceful surrendered order, said very calmly and peacefully that everything was always happenings as it should, there was nothing to be concerned about and as Shadow walker whispered in my ear "Racism, genocide, war, terror, hatred, abuse, rape.." in this place of witness I could see clearly my monkey mind freaking out, getting angry and political, the warrior in me that had fought against it most of my life, but there in my centre..all was well....a gaping chasm still a long way from obtaining a bridge neccessary to cross this divide.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

"I'm in the war of my life, at the core of my life...."

I had a short conversation over the web with Shadow Walker yesterday leaving me reeeling and obviously triggered. Yet it seemed in the course of events, what became uncovered for me, was one of the greatest stunting blocks appearing on my journey for the last couple years. Our conversation was about the nature of feeling, thought and fact and the decisions we make accordingly.

There is no question that relying on thought as an indicator of truth, is ludicrous. In my experiences as a therapist and a spiritual traveller, thought is fleeting, born of a history an an internal narrative that continues to be repeated in mantra form until we bring an awareness to thought and question it's relativity. Than there is feeling, a quandry that brings up all kinds of junk for me. Thinking deeply on this I think it's fair to say that feeling although strongly present all of my life, the validity of feeling was something I didn't factor in to decision making for the greater half of my life but instead found a consistent means to eradicate, along with what i perceive to be a healthy percentage of North American Society. Feeling depressed? Push it down and keep working. Feeling heartbroken? Push it down and keep working. Feeling like something isn't quite right? Don't entertain quandry, push it down and keep working. I had for the greater part of my life created a relationship with feeling that said, my feeling faculties were untrustworthy and part of my dammage and had hence spent a lot of time investing myself in the great art of "therapy" and self-help expenditures to fix those feelings that continued to rave as an uninvited guest until I met the spirituality movements in the post divorce years and finally received some validation, that my feelings were in fact important and contained within them was a budding wisdom that could teach me something about the space in my life that i was in and where to go from there. So I spent a great deal of time teaching myself how to listen to these feelings, how to honor them and most importantly how to begin trusting them. Many authors, teachers and gurus alike, do differentiate however between the nature of feeelings and e-motion, too lengthy a discussion to get in here, but one that I will be looking into further. Then there is fact. When we began conversing about fact, it seemed i had entered the ocean of the unknown and one in which i worried often that I would begin drowning in without a life boat to bring me ashore and catch some ground. When Shadow Walker suggested I not come to make decision based on feeling but rather a micture of feeling, thought and fact, thats when i began to swim, while moving into an ocean of overwhelm, i discovered it was my newly formed relationship with feeling that i was trying to protect and more importantly the question of fact that lay at the very bottom of the ocean floor begging the movement of it's tides. It was the nature of fact, once so solid, distinguishable and trustworthy, that now seemed so elusive, fleeting, culturally specific and untrustworthy.

Defined by the Oxford Dictionary, Fact is said to be "a thing that is known to exist or be true, an item of verified information, truth/reality, a thing assumed to be the basis of an argument". And just a few words apart from Fact in the dictionary remains the word Factitious defined as "specifically contrived or artificial". I think it's fair to say that this war that continues to churn within me finds itself exactly there...inbetween the places of fact and factitiousness. It seemed the events and experiences of my life had brought every element of myself to play on that battleground, family structure and life, career ambitions and livelihood, beliefs, direction, knowings, personhood and agency. All of it was there and in many cases the ambivalence about decision making that had arisen since my call to investigate the role of spirituality in my life, was right there between fact and factitiosness. If i knew the facts I would have a sign post on which way to direct my ambitions, if they were ambitions at all or just a delusion/fantasy of the mind. The spirituality movement would say, that there are no facts, everything is an illusion, so gauge your wandering by your feeling. When i say feeling in this sense, I am talking about the place deep in your gut that tells you oh no, this is not a good situation, not neccessarily i feel like shit today so im not going to do anything, even though some would argue thats a good basis of self-care and others would call it an indulgence of a fleeting equally as untrustworthy as a thought. So what really are the facts about all of this?

I am currently reading a book by Gary Greenberg entitled "Manufacturing Depression" to which he explores the disease climate of mental health as a product of capitalist consumerism, rather than truth, but none the less has been daunted by physicians, pharamceutical companies and helping professions alike to exist as a fact. While reading it today, again the space between fact and factitiousness arose. In it he writes.

"..even as I walked to his (the psyhciatrist) office for the first time, it had dawned on me that this whole vast apparatus with its towers and pavilions arrayed like castles of the magic kingdom, its maze of bustling streets - the doctors checking their watches, the patients, some wheeling IV stands down the sidewalk, the family sitting crying on a bench - was a monument to one brilliant and magnificent idea: that our suffering is caused by diseases that can be cured by medicine. Well actually those are two ideas - that disease exists in nature and that we can improve nature by finding the culprit and getting rid of it-and they seem, like all common sense, to be unassailable and timeless. They may even seem not to be ideas but simple facts. But they are ideas, invented by people rather than discovered in nature and much newer ones than you would think".

That's really it, the fact that ideas invented by people are so tritely contrived as fact for purposes often not aimed at the greater good, continuing to beckon me into further exploration or abandonment, I havent quite figured that one out yet.

I will never forget the moments in which I began to question what it was exactly that as a social worker I had been trained to do, and who was I doing it for? At the mercy of provincial legislators and , agency executives struggling to attain adequate funding for any social program, let alone an innovative one and among social workers that had at times either been too rooted on the personal pathology platform of assessing human behavior or too burnt out to really care about anything other than carrying forward protocols, I knew somehow that what I was seeing and what we were doing were not headed for a happy marriage but instead a turbulent divorce. The biggest problem of this one that one side had wayyy too much power and money to even respect the flicker of a flame in the other, while the other had no means of even attaining a little lighter fluid if only to thicken the fire.

I have always been drawn to the concept that humans are inherently good. For thinking that I have been called many things. Neive, youthful, idealistic, optimistic, daydreaming, ungrounded and stuck in the ethers. I haven't figured that one out yet either, but I know its a part of me that will not go away and therefore have some appreciation for it's prescence. I am not saying however, that human nature does not have the capcity for "evil" or is incapable of commiting atrocious acts 'nor does not regularly express self-absorption, greed, jealousy and all of the other "deadly sins". In theory, one could argue that although as humans we have drawn bilateral lines of duality between behaviors, thoughts, lifestyles, choices and labelled them "bad" and "good" while attributing praise to acts deemed good and shame to those deemed bad. That first, all which are subject to differnt meanings, expectations or ways of being based on culture, cultural sub-groups, families, individuals, really breaking it down to per person, therefore static and always changing. Better yet, like many of the great philosophers and mystics have stated before us, that none of these events exist in duality, but instead are neutral. As Shadow refers to by regularly reminding us that "if the wall isn't green, there's work to do".

But because we are human, I do refer to this neturality as something theoretical, spiritually comforting in times of healing, reflection and change and as a concept we work more and more to integrate. In the meantime, in the fronts of trauma and desperation, all I could really see in the people I served were good people that for all different reasons had come from a soil that hurt their growth process and sometimes extreme and floundering efforts to regain their balance. These manifestations come out in all different forms, sometimes shocking, other times gentle , unexpected and sometimes with more predictibly, but each time, without a doubt if you listened to the story, paid attention to the soil of the climate, political, social, spiritual, it all seemed to make sense. We were living in a chaotic and unpredictable world, the notion of anything larger than us, in the many ways we call god had been displaced among the assurity of scientific theory and brilliant ideas smothered and discredited in the mask of competitive survivalism more wrought with politics then genius. Our governments although shrouded in curtains named democracy leaked of tyranny no different than the noted corruption of the countries we remained at war with in the name of. Our information sources distorted, our food manufactured with great cost to our health, our lifetsyle and in many ways living conditions (not in terms of affluency/poverty, but rather structures, dominating thought) imbalanced to such a degree that we were not only succeeding at destroying the planet, but we were succeeding at killing ourselves. So of course people were anxious, of course they were wrestling between degrees of apathy, lethargy and depression, of course they were angry, traumatized and sometimes out of control. Some of us, for reasons that might always be unknown to me had become de-sensitized and continued to plow through all of it in our expected roles, completing the neccessary tasks, reaping whatever joy we could through meeting externally imposed goals, pretending that all that was being revealed we just didn't see. Then when faced with the raw expression of human nature, in ways perfectly natural and some might say appropriate in light of this position we find ourselves in, in shock, fear and ignorance we seek to repress it in any way we can. Sometimes it's some medication, other times electric shock, shaming, imprisonment, seperation, alientaion, humiliation and control, designed out of the order of "good" and "bad". I had persued this work, hoping to learn how to help people find their way through their suffering, I had not gotten into this work to help them be "normal". "Normal" had once meant to me "well", yet the more questions I asked, the more I listend to the stories of the people that sought help and the more I paid attention to what was happening around me, the more and more it became difficult to define what in fact was "well" and what was "normal".. Everything in it's own way made sense. And the chances of "psychosis" getting out of control was the highest when you failed to validate the individual's particular place in time, most of the time people just needed a sense of feeling heard and understood. They didn't always need some grand concotion or reason for their suffering, sometimes they just wanted to be treated like they were normal.

While working in a residence, I was warned about one of the individuals I would meet in my time there. She had a reputation for making accusations completely unbeleiveable and far out there and then customarilily flying into "psychotic episodes". Her reputation among staff had so far exceeded her, I felt as if I had already armed for her attack. Finally, one night, while speaking to a colleague she approached the desk. Fragile and nervous, not more than 98 lbs, as warned, she informed me she was at risk of a bacterial infection because of the scent of the garbages. Instead of challenging her, I went upstairs, bagged and tied the garbages and removed them. She looked at me in sort of a soft surprise and quietly went back to her room. I learned quickly, that the reasons for those "so called psychotic rages" was because she was not being heard, instead challenged, labelled and disciplined. I didn't think her complaint was so psychotic. I had heard of people with different sensitivities and for some of them it was scent. Sure, I didn't smell anything peculiar about the garbage, but whose to say that she didnt? I also doubted it would give her a a bacterial infection, yet with a different chemical responsible for a wealth of disease found in many of the products we approve safe, and the mass of fear produced around the climate of such activities, who could really call this paranoia? We all have something that drives us crazy, the scares us to death, that we find ourselves obsessing over. All different depending on our life script, the events, the experiences, the feelings, the thoughts, the story we told ourselves about our lives, the world and our place in it. So hers might not be mine, but it's hers. More importantly, if one person actually stopped to listen to what she was up against in her day to day reality, in a system that is oppressive and unjust in so many ways, it also made perfect sense when she was treated yet again like she was "crazy", discarded, looked through, unvalidated and instead scolded, that she would fly into a "psyhcotic rage". But was it psychotic after all?

So here I sit..between the place of fact and factitiousness...We argue that the world is a social construction, made of human invention and story, yet there is also a nature to it with an order that we try desperately to understand and bring forth new ideas, conversations and explanations about what exactly it tells us. Yet with every generation, each story is refined to another story, and another thing called fact comes with it a story of its creation, the mistakes that were made in it's creation and out of it's critique yet another fact. Add the dimension of the spiritual, the existential, the metaphysical and one that in recent days begs us to consider the entire thing that we call reality simply a reflection of the inside of our own brains and the space between fact and factitiousness gets even more complicated. My practicum supervisor told me that philosophy had no practical value to social work. Yet in the revelation that we conceptualized everything in the way we orientated ourselves to the world and than proceeded to regulate human behavior by, I couldn't help but think if the questions I was asking were indeed philosophy, how it didnt have a place in social work. Shadow walker, when faced with my question as to what indeed was fact responded in a similar manner. "I'm not interested in philosphy" he stated "if you choose not to acknowledge any knowledge of fact, than it would seem you do have a problem on your hands". He's right, I did have a problem on my hands, but I still couldn't figure out when and how I chose it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PVlyXS0MhQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZEVOenOwYU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo5bX8rgT4U

Monday, April 19, 2010

A Letter to my Sisters

I wanted to share this article by Jonathan Evatt, a mystic from New Zealand that was originally composed to a female friend of his in reference to the expression of the feminine. I really thought it was beautiful and comforting in so many ways...


Dear friend and beautiful Being that you are...

I thank you.

Yes, in my experience you are (relative to most of the people I meet) a very "open", empathetic and caring person that gives quite freely of herself to others.

I suspect that that natural openness has in the past perhaps resulted in you feeling like you've had your fingers (and perhaps your heart) "burnt" a little by the actions and not-so-open and other-than-loving nature of other people. Such unbridled openness and authenticity in a women can—when expressed not from the context of a consciously self-aware, deeply empowered, and strongly centred woman-hood / feminine essence, but rather from a somewhat innocent childlike disposition—can very easily result in a women pulling back... feeling all to sensitive to allow that rich yet soft part of herself into the world—a world that can appear to be so harsh, so dishonest, and so based on the rigidity of the male-dominant rational mind with almost a complete absence of the sweat nectar of the Human heart anywhere to be seen.

I see your "holding back" as being a healthy act at this time. I see that it serves you in important ways. I would say it is giving You time to feel your way into the outer world whilst you also get in touch with your relationship to your Inner World and building a solid relationship with that part of your Being.

I know that there will come a day when you will hold nothing back... yet simultaneously will only reveal in each moment exactly what that moment can handle and embrace... yet within yourself this will not amount to holding back... for your Love and Spirit will be fully unleashed at all times... whether the world gets to see it and drink from it or not will be dependant on it's readiness to receive something quite sacred and splendid. Perhaps this makes sense to you... perhaps not. Either is okay.

In my world a person's first and foremost relationship (and responsibility) is to themselves. Chaos and pain is certain if this relationship is not honoured at all times. For those that are interested in living in a state of religiousness (Union with the All) then this relationship to SELF is synonymous with a their relationship to GOD and is eventually the deep inner experience and knowing that the Self and God are one and the same... "I" (in it's true sense) is "God individualised"... and that "I", that I AM, is the "I" that is You, and the next person, and God.

You mention finding your boundaries and learning to honour them.
In the last year or so I have discovered that it is important to have "boundaries"... although this should not be confused with "barriers". Hence I would perhaps define the phrase "personal boundaries" as actually being about "self definition". And it here is that we meet another great mystery of life...

The greater my experience and unfolding of self-definition the less I experience myself as being separate from everyone and everything else. The more I move into clear and pure radiant self-definition the more I move into Oneness with all things.
... another example of how Divine Logic is the the exact opposite of Human logic.

I suspect most people would say that the more a person takes on self-definition the more they become separate and apart from the Oneness. This is not, however, what I perceive and experience as being true.

Freind I honour and respect your journey into woman-hood and self-definition. You have a lot to offer this world—or shall I say, there is the potential God to offer a great deal to this world through You—so may you take all the TIME you need in order to find your place in That. I pray that the love I feel for you, the Love that I AM, might somehow play some small part in nurturing the developing "bud" within you as it makes it's journey of metamorphosis into the beautiful Blossoming of Love and Truth from which all beings may enjoy the sweat scent of your Heart and Soul.

Take your time. Honour your Heart and your feelings. Love yourSELF. Be true. Be kind to yourSelf.

With love, respect and blessings...

Jonathan

One clumsy step at a time...

This week, like the ways in which I envision an actualized "authentic" life, took the shape of a rollercoaster determined to run it's own track. Yet as it followed the coils, ripping through rust at some points while at others gliding across the shiny rails like a freshly zambonied peice of ice, each cart brought with it it's own space in the line. Some brought excitement, some fear, some raging out of control, some completely surrendered into an empty space of peaceful infinities although directionless comforted by some strong sense of purpose.

The idlecy of being in between spaces, having some knowledge of where you come from but not having any clue as to where you are going had officially begun to take it's toll. As an extrovert by nature, four months of cocooning has felt like withdrawing from life leaving me wondering some days if the degree and depth of the emotions that have visted me could be explained by this fact in itself. Yet I must astutely surmise, that this cocooning has been neccessary. It reminds me of a youtube video I saw once by a woman talking about the nature of prescence and suffering in which she gave the example of how an individual could create unneccessary suffering simply laying in bed in the morning. Her message: there was no use in bantering with yourself about how you "should" be getting up when you're not, when in the intelligence of the universe, you know that when it is time for you to get up, you will, and in the time you've wasted bantering about it, you have missed the opportunity to receive it's gifts.

I had a similar conversation with the dude yesterday about the nature of relationships. It has always seemed odd to me, that two people could be brought together, share, cherish, appreciate and love so much of the other while they were in union and than when it comes time for their paths to seperate, in the midst of anger, pain and often times betrayal, they go on to chalk this experience up as one of the mistakes in their lives and leave behind all the gems of learning that could have taken place. When not headed for the finish line, life has a way of bringing forth a bunch of richness and 1000 things to be grateful for that often get taken for granted in the pursuit of going somewhere. Today, I am in reverence of those very little things that have made their way into my life of late and with each new arrival, a little more of my faith in the universe is becoming renewed. I get the feeling I am completeing another circle of growth, heading into the levelling out period, rested and cracked open just enough to leave my uni-verse ready for it's next wave.

ThunderBear, in one of our many tea setting, kitchen table talks about the nature of this journey and what it will demand of the seeker told me a story about a woman he went to visit, on one of his calls for healing. "She had so many questions" he said "and had read many many books. I only told her one thing, don't read anymore books, instead begin practicing what you have learned". His words couldn't have struck a deeper chord as i had floundered around in this existential abyss for the last two years, feeling like a broken tree swung around constantly by a wind that kept changing direction. Once ego-tistical scholar whome presumed to know the truth about the nature of suffering while giving a long list of reasons for it alongside potential remedies to than turned new-age love and light, hippy freak I had no idea what I was in for when I entered that Masters in Aboriginal Social Work. In my entrance interview, sitting in a circle with a professor, the coordinator/creator of the program and who would become my first Indigenous teacher, a gentle petite wise woman that always looked like joy emanated from every pore, I was asked if I was aware that the program was transformative in nature. Naively assuming I knew all about transformation, after my own divorce had rekindled a light inside me and bringing with it a tidal wave of events that although painful brought a lasting peacefulness, I said "yes, of course" confidentently thinking to myself that they had no idea how well versed I was at this already. What's another transformation when youve already had time to familiarize yourself with it's currents? " So, you are aware that you will leave this program with a responsibility and a different knowing that will ultimately marginalize and alienate you from others?" asked Elder Becker. "Already there" I said giggling, again with a surplus of naieve confidence as she laughed gently with me and said "okay, welcome to the program".

As my answers effortlessly rolled off my tongue, I could see the auspicious look in Elder Becker's eyes, that seemed to glimmer a knowing that I had signed up for something I didn't quite understand and the humorous chuckle that I would know in time. I already had some experience with seekers thinking they understand something only to be dropped down into what feels like a pit of never ending hell created only by coming face to face with a self that one had abandoned for so long, they knew not it's infinite source but just the carefully constructed stories they had told themselves about their lives, personalities and states of being when illuminated by conciousness proved more devastating a tale than one could have imagined. But I was sure that in time, Elder Becker would have a chance to know me, to hear my story, the ways in which i had fought from childhood to survive a history of trauma, betrayal and abondonment and ended up on this quest for meaning, an existential hunger that when i finally allowed it to reign realized it had been there probably from the very moment of my birth.

Yet in post-graduate recovery, where the experiences of one single year of sharings circles, sweat lodges, medicine walks and vision quests had hammered me so hard that it demanded yet another year of stillness, most times in the deadening pits of despair, it was true, in that smudge filled peacefulness of that introduction circle, I had no idea what I was getting into.

I did know however what was left. And what was left was a big, gaping existential abyss. The word abyss, was never a word I had chosen conciously to describe it, instead it was the only thing that came into my mind everytime i desperately persused a beautiful array of descriptive adjectives and poetic devices in an effot to somewhere in someway explain to those that intersected my journey what in fact i was experiencing. Finally in a conversation with my friend, whom i will refer to here as earth mother to which i used the word abyss, i was finally asked to define what in fact that word meant. Abyss as defined by the oxford dictionary means "deep chasm, immeasureable depth" and equals apparently "bottomless". Given that definition, it was the most suitable word I had been given to describe the process that I infact had found myself in, a deep chasm of unknowing that called everything I had known to be true into question, leaving what was a well organized, directed and committed fountain of so-called wisdom, directionless, lost and completely unknowable. What my first initiates on the path of divinity has failed to tell me about transformation is that it doesn't stop after one. It continues, continously to infinity in a manner that is best described by my teacher Shadowwalker "as a journey that takes everything from you, leaving nothing in return".

But it had left me something in return. It had taken the identity that i had falsely ascribed to myself yes, but it had left me teachings in it's trail meant to act as a lamppost guiding at least the place i would find myself in, shedding a little direction, maybe only as fleeting as a shadow, but none the less some direction as i made my way into the unknown. But lost within the madness of my intellectual mind that demanded more reasoning on the divide that had occured in my faith between Indigegogy and what was left of the love and lighter, i wanted some sort of reasoning or sound intellectual analysis before dedicating any teaching into action. So as I bounced from days full of deadening despair where i could hardly imagine scraping myself off the pavement to a flurry of desperate attendence in healing circles, medicine teachings and radical acceptance retreats, every time I asked the many questions that whirled within me, I was given slight modifications of the same response. "Put your tobacco down and pray and you will find your way" and remember, in the words of ThunderBear "Walk slowly and breathe deeply, the only mistake you can make is to stop moving".

Finally, I put aside the intellectual debate about what constitutes faith and reality and kneeled humbly on the grass outside my house, placing tobacco on the roots of my Pine Tree. "Creator, God and Goddess, Universal Energy and Divine Light, I will go to British Columbia, I will leave what I need to behind, all I ask is that you open the doors I need to walk through to make this happen for the good and best of all and close the doors that no longer serve me".

Within a week, I had a job that paid more than I had expected in a tiny, ecclectic, nag champa hippy shop, the kind of place I had always longed just to spend time in, as a healing outlet for my soul which started as part-time and in one day moved to an offer of full time. I had found two places to stay in the remaining five weeks of my stay in Ontario in order to pocket some cash and had gotten a call from my day care provider that approved my subsidy until October. My faith in the universe was finally returning, one clumsy step at a time...

Thursday, April 15, 2010

A trip to exposure...

Yesterday I awoke with what felt like someone sitting on my chest. Of course there wasn't somebody there, just panic, pressure, constriction.... breathe, Erica. I stumbled out of bed and attempted to manage the swirling of panic and tension while attending to Madison's morning routine, un-noticed. It's always hard to tell if she is aware of my mood shifts, other than the obvious days when i finally cave and let her know that tonight will be a floor picnic night, 'cause mommy's just not having a good day. I struggle with this alot. On one hand, I feel like my parent's don't ask don't tell policy led to a lot of confusion. Intuitive by nature as most children are, I was able to pick up on the incongruency between what was being acted out and what I was feeling and it only led to a mass of confusion. It can also be argued to have majorly contributed to my inability to get angry or the plaguing guilt that keeps harrassing me unwelcomed when it begs to be entertained for just a moment. So in that way, I don't think I am doing her any favors by plastering a fake ronald mcdonald smirk on my face and pretending that life is peachy behind these rose colored glasses. Sadness, grief, pain, loss and depression are also a part of every human life is it not? I've spent thousands of dollars on so many self-help books and the best of spirital, philisophical and existential literature that also say so...But some of them also say, that it doesn't have to be painful, that it's really my attachment to things that cause me pain and so i work hard at non-attachment which i suppose is really attachment afterall and everytime that sluggish blood sucker of an emotion rears it's head, I begin to feel like i have failed again. Of course there are all those triggers that remain from my own childhood with being unable to make my own mother's ills go away and always coming up short. Gone were the days of laughter and standard were the days of me trying to mastermind a plan for her cheer. And in the meantime, I lost my own happiness and I don't want Madison to carry that responsibility. But at the same time, I, like my own mother, despite my best efforts to put things right, feel a constenance of pain with short interludes of bright. Theres that split amongst realities again making things complicated. If i could just decide which way of thinking was more aligned with the truth of the universe, than i could decide what was the best teachings to pass on to Madison or better yet make a decision about how to proceed from here. The day had not gotten off to a good start.

This was also the day I would be heading to the local community college with the dude to check into the potential of doing some work as a life drawing model. Shortly after the divorce, I began sleeping with an artist. I remember feeling magical and warm inside everytime I looked at his hands. Just as he brought characters, personalities and stories to life with the simple strokes of his hand, the way he moved his hands across my body from dragging it across the curve in my hip to the enclave of my inner thigh felt as if he was creating a masterpeice. To him, it was suculent, picturesque and awe-inspiring. The first time he drew me, his hand effortlessly moved along the white page, his eyes focused on my contours with the excitment commonplace to a little boy at Christmas welled within him. "I understand now, why artists have their muses" He said quietly. When he made love to me, he never lost that curiosity, exploring the shapes of my body with the reverence of a traveller quieted by the depths of breathtaking landscape. My experiences with him, made me question the ways in which I had disowned my body, making every effort to punish it, hide it or change it instead of celebrating the mystery in every crevice, every curve, stretchmark or blemish. For it was mine, it was beautiful, I was woman, she who brings forth life.

In an effort to break the shame, I talked a lot about posing as a life drawing model, but other than doing a quick google search, had never really taken any action towards it. The fact that i was moving across the country in four months, seemed to bring just the right mix of apathy and lethargy to drive me to break through the cocoon I was in. So yesterday was the day. The dude and I were going to go to the college and enquire. How does one become a life drawing model anyway?

By the time we got there, my anxiety was in full force. Not the deadening pressure of panic that I had woken up with, more like this feeling that everyone around me could see this broken, confused and fragmented person hidden behind this mask of togetherness. Raw, vulnerable and bruised. I'd been carrying this for a long time, I suppose also one of the reasons I yearned for the exposure that life drawing would demand. Standing naked in front of 40 pairs of eyes focused on all the parts of me that I worked hard to modify, bury and hide for 26 years, just might liberate this persistent fear that won't let me unveil myself.

When I finally found the information counter, I stood awkwardly in line, the dude lingering behind me, practicing the line within my head. "Hi..um..uh..I was just wondering where one would go to enquire about..life drawing modeling?". Although practicing the normality with which those words would roll off my tongue, I couldn't help feel like what I was about to ask was just about as shameful as a corner street hooker offering up a blow job. My logic informed me they weren't equivalent but it seemed the good moral standing of my Christian upbringing still relentlessly reminds me when i should be heading to confessional to admit the sinful nature that plagued me. I suppose another reason, why everytime the shame came to visit in her pushy, overbearing manner i rose to meet her instead of cowering to her domination.

A petite, red haired young woman with pin-striped pants and a curt vested top approached the counter, gently pushed her sign to the side and gave me a shy smile. Sure, I thought, I get the virgin girl next door as my priest stand-in at confessional, I am officially a prostitute. In a calm collected manner I approached the counter "Yeah..hi, I just had a general enquiry" I said as if asking which way to the cafeteria. "Do you know where one would go to enquire about life drawing modelling?". "Hmmm.." she said non-chalantly. "A good start would be to go to the program office of animation and design", proceeding to give me instructions. I thanked her and went on my way. If she was thinking a line of dirty thoughts concerning my motivation for being there, what kind of person I might be, or what elequent adventures I'd already had in my life that would lead me here she never let on. Maybe she wasn't a virgin after all.

The dude and I made our way down to the office and found an empty chair at the program assistant's desk. "This way to program officers" marked the sign on the desk pointing up to a large open space full of cubicles and small gatherings of people chattering. There was no way I was going to invade one of these circles and ask for assistance with numerous people listening. The dude suggested we wait fifteen minutes and try the program assistant again.

As we wandered down the hallways of the art school, the dude shared the memories that being within these walls provoked in him as I carefully studied the youthfulnness of the students, the nature of the art work displayed on the walls and tried to imagine what they would think when i took off my robe. "Why do animators need to study life drawing" I asked him. "In order to animate, artist's need to know how to draw people and the ways in which they move" he responded. Would I know how to move? I thought to myself. It seemed my questions about my capabilities weren't specific to social work.

On our way back to the office, a serene looking woman wth greying brown hair walked past in her blue bathrobe. I tried to avert my eyes and gently nudged the dude. "Look" I whispered..."a model". "Yup" he said casually. "They just walk down the hall, naked, in a bathrobe and slippers?" I said trying to come to terms with the terror and panic beginning to swirl again, asking me if i had officially lost my mind. What kind of honorable woman walks around in public in a bathrobe, only to walk into a room and completely disrobe and be reproduced in different ways, different styles and on many different canvases? I thought to myself. The model had a peacefulness about her though, the ebbing of a natural wind moving silently through the world and deep down I yearned half excitedly for that kind of liberation.

We returned to a stern, conservative woman still packing away her lunch into her bag at the program assistant's desk. No longer as nervous having muttered the question once and still slightly exhilirated by all of this boundary pushing, I asked her about the process. In a short snappy voice she muttered "I'll give you the model coordinator's number and you can call her". This woman, was not impressed with me, the actor in my shame monologue had successfully cast her well-deserved judgement, I was a failure, a kid from the streets of poverty, abuse and abandonment that once thought she could show everyone up by establishing a successful career in social work, not only then would she not be fucked up, she would be a voice of reason for those who were. But instead, I had failed at that too and was here instead, wanting to feel the carefree liberation of complete exposure that honored me as a masterpeice, as my own masterpeice regardless of all the things the voices imprinted from those i had met along the way persistently screamed at me. I am a daughter of the Goddess, how could I truly be any other way.

I was quiet the whole way home attempting to hear out the warring parties within me and picked a fight with the dude in an effort to distract me. After he dropped me off in a fury of frustration and our usual routine of he said she said, I thumped into the house, drained of enthusiasm, the dread of my self-hatred looming and tried to call anyway, praying for the Coordinator's voicemail. "Hello, Joanne speaking" came a confident sturdy voice. I hesitated, placed the phone in my lap for a minute and then hung up. It would have to wait till tommorrow, with hope that then I would feel stronger.

The crushing lethargy returned, I felt guilty about not having the free wherewithall to upbeatedly usher Madison home. "I'm Sorry Mads, mom's just not having a good day. Let's get some movies and subs and have a picnic on the living room floor". "Okay" she said excitedly. "But do you think mom, that soon on a nice day we could picnic outside?" she asked in her sweet little manipulator voice. "Sure we can" I said admiringly, secretly wondering if that energy would ever return.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Pause...

After such a clear and joy filled day yesterday it was painful to wake up with what felt like bodies laying across my chest, making it hard to breathe. I called out to the God and Goddess, the Great Mother, the spirit of the universe and she sent me Artemis to reassure me that all was well telling me I was safe and protected by the spiritual warriors and to resume my holy mission without fear. In honor of that, I would like to say little and give tribute to Artemis, protector of women and children.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Eat, Love, Pray and......write?

Sister Sue has been reading "Eat, Pray, Love". "You'll have to read it when I'm done" she said when I was there last week. I had seen it in the bookstore on one of my many excursions of waffling through literary love and bargaining with myself about how many books I could actually afford to indulge at the expense of my oftem empty pocket book. It had never really called to me. Worse, I had noticed it on the favorites list of a new-agey self-help guru, to say the least, that I'd rather not have been acquainted with. That sorta sealed the deal, if she was into it, I wouldnt find much wisdom there. Yet in the middle of drop in dinners and endless loads of laundry, i took a chance and enteretained some of the pages. Today I read..

"Virginia wolfe wrote "across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side of that sword lies convention and tradition and order where "all is correct". But on the other side of that sword if your crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention.."all is confusion", nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman but you can bet it will also be more perilous".

Damn, I could relate to that, for that was the cliff I had been wandering along for awhile..to do or not to do, to love or not to love, to heal or not to heal, that is the question. But the truth is, as i found myself dancing within the adventures in her book, i realized yet again, i do an awful lot of "fixing" and not enough of "living".

A couple of days ago I wrote on the status line of my beloved facebook page (the only current outlet for unveiled self expression in the support of community i have had), "what kind of career path will pay you to meet a ton of interesting people, completely submerse yourself in your experiences with them and then write about it". My best friend sparks explained thats why he stayed in school, "noone is going to pay you to do that" he said, that shutter of reality breaking through my dream world again. A fellow wanderer said "yeah..let me know when you find that path, i've been wondering about it myself for years". Of course I thought, there was that ruthless dreamer in me again denying all conventional wisdom that i had been imparted on these 26 years of travelling for truth. Yet here, in the middle of Elizabeth Glibert's pages, was a story of another woman denying convention, looking to calm the valiant tides that continued to beckon inside of her, answer the bugeoning questions she had about the universe and her place in it and come to terms with her unabashedly but enduring wandering nature. Better yet, she explored it through the daily experiences of her life, an interweaviing of the dance between her internal world and the gifts the universe brought her in the external world with which to explore them. Best yet, she got paid to write about them. Aha...the writer rises again. But how does one really become a writer? Do they go back to study the art of literary prose, the dos and do nots of the buisness, instruction on style, ettiquette and sequence, only to have the creative passion born in them squashed out of them anyway? Do they wander around aimlessly, working for minimum wage by day and in the shadows of the night bring forth what lives within them? Like anything else, I'm sure the industry is messy and competitive, some over zealous tyrants worried about making the next big buck, telling you what it is that you will write about or threatening to destroy your contract. Just last year I re-acquainted with long lost childhood friend that in her love of books had idealistly entered the publishing world, only to have been heartbroken by the politics of the industry, dream shattered, tail between her legs returned to university to be a librarian.

Amidst the decision to move to BC, I remembered a medium I had seen at Lilydale (a spiritualist community, or home to many a medium for at least 120 years now) a couple of summers ago and that he had mentioned prospects of this move. Eagerly I sought out the tape and strained restlessly in the midst of a crackled, soft recording what in fact assurance he was going to provide that i was making the right decision. For the first twenty minutes he went on about my career, stating that the woman that was communicating with him in my reading, one of my stubborn spirited female ancestors more specifically, was insisting I not take my hard won rights of the feminist movements for granted. I had freedom, she insisted, freedom to learn, freedom to reproduce or not to, freedom to marry or not to, freedom to, in other words not far off from the words written by Virginia Wolfe that inspired me to write this entry. At the time, I wasn't surprised, a studious social worker steeped in the work of women's advocacy, born of a path i'm sure intended it (thats a story for another day). And just before my less conventional-defying gramdother stepped in to remind me that although divorced twice at 24, i should be stabley married by 26, she insisted I write. "Do you write?" the small magical man asked, "because she is insisting you begin writing on the internet". Write on the internet? I thought to myself, hmmm, maybe she was asking me to blog, which ironically i had only started a week before at cosmic claire's assertion that the rich tumult of my inner world would perhaps make for some interesting reading. It had only taken me three years to put into action, but I suppose it was good that my life was in it's own weave bringing forth the nudgings that i left scattered in the dust as i hurried along trying to become somebody.

Last Friday, after a week job searching and some painfully awkward waitressing interviews that highlighted the fact that i could not just put my analytical therapist role behind me and go back to a time where my mind had no awareness of such things, a little voice within me said.."Go to Gifts for the Soul". Gifts for the Soul, is a quaint little metaphysical shop I found in my early days of "awakening", offering a place of quiet solitude from the chaotic productivity that threatened to sweep me away on a daily basis in the early years post-divorce. Owned by two very different, yet equally intiguing female partners and home to the best kept women's secret, the Ya-Ya sister circle, it seemed a good idea to follow that nudging and see what came up. When I arrived, Adelle, a sweet, retired, school teacher attempting to answer her own questions of the journey she has walked informed me that Sandra (Owner #1) was away, caring for her mother and Terry (Owner #2) was in the healing room conducting a clearing. I would wait, I told her, to touch in with Terry, in the meantime loosing myself in the sweet smelling incense, rippling symphony of soul-i-tude and the beckoning of a surplus of metaphysically saturated literature.

"What are you up to these days?" she asked. Eeeek, the much dreaded question, that despite it's persistent prescence in my life, i still hadnt mustered the right methodically plotted answer to. "Well" I sighed..."I suppose I'm on a soul-a-battical". Her face lit up with interest..."ooo that sounds so interesting...are you a writer?" she asked. Half perplexed and half chuckled I cracked a sheepish grin and said "well that's an interesting question, what made you ask?". "The word you used" she said "Soulabaticcal...Where did you hear it? did you just make it up?". I laughed, I wasn't sure if I had just made it up or heard it somewhere, it just seemed a good word to describe my current place in the abyss. Where i was going to or what i was doing, all seemed a mystery, the only thing I new for sure, is at this point in my life, I was most definately lost and it seemed a much prettier way to describe the churning of my internal processes than the pragmatic day to day reality of a struggling single mother, poorer than a rusted out garbage can, attempting to justify that her direction should actually bear a purpose.

I told her about the budding practice i had just left, the place of unknowing i sat in while i awaited the move to BC with no real plan about how that was going to come together and the irony of her question about me writing. I began "It just seems like i live between two worlds.." before she cut me off in excitement. "Write a book" she stammered "just as you speak i can resonate with what your saying, which makes me think there will be hundreds more that will feel the same". Was this a nudging of the universe? Of course in my morning stress about how to go about getting some kind of short term adequate income before the move and that little voice inside asked me to go to my sanctuary of all things metaphysical, surely I didn't get any counsel for my existential abyss, practical opportunities for employment, but I did get a woman that was insisting I write a book, just weeks after the visit from my cassette player and the shaming incistence of a spirit from the women's lib, urging me to take heed of my opportunities and begin writing on the internet.

If i had a dime for every time I was told by someone brave enough to listen to the hallows of my journey in this world to "write a book" i'd have enough money to pay a writer to write my story and give all the royalties to charity. I can still remember in vivid detail sitting in the steel laminate desk in primary school, in the midst of what felt like some cosmic joke, the pleasure i took in learning each new word, the way that it came together, what it meant and how it sounded. Syllable dancing. The memoirs of my childhood most delicately illustrated in my carefully worded stories and the tattered journals that were always found in my purse through my adolescent travels. I decided very young, that it was important to keep carefully recorded passages of how i felt about the events of my life, what questions came out of them and how i sought to answer them. I told myself at the time I kept them because as i began to develop a conciousness about my place in the world there were so many questions, always left unanswered and when i would seek solace from my parents, that they too had asked themselves these questions I was often met with "I don't remember". I thought maybe, if i could record these experiences, the ways they made me feel and the way i found myself through them, that my children might feel normal when they too found themselves in stuck in the swamp of the unknown. But maybe that was really about something larger, a seed that the pragmatics of poverty, trauma and survival had stolen before it made it's way to germination. That now, even amidst those same conditions, the difference was, that I had done everything the world told me to to seek to rid me of my existential ills. I had married twice, had a child, went to university, got 2 degrees and a chance at a road out of the misery pragmatics, but yet, i still wasn't satisfied. Yet in truth, it was more than dissatisfaction, it was a complete pausing, a feeling that something bigger than myself was not going to let me rest until i made a clear stop and took a big breath before burying myself into the next perfectionistic direction of scholar-dom or productivity.

I had always written and always loved it, before "responsibility" showed it's face and convinced me creativity was best left for retirement. I thought of things in pictures best scowered with juicy words to give breath to that which only seemed a fleeting thought but could become a masterpeice. In my scholarly work, acclaimed for my writing, first pick editor in most job sites right up until my practicum supervisor in grad school stated that she thought I was more of a researcher/scholar, better at writing about therapy than actualizing the demands of a therapist. The truth is, I always did feel safer writing about it than doing it, in the comfort of a blank page, with time to take a step back, i could offer up the best explanation for what was going on in a way that almost anyone could understand, but put me there in front of the client, i felt like a clown wearing a priest outfit. "I know your suffering, because i've felt it too, more close a friend of mine than anything other along this path and ive read, learned and scowered the wisest minds of what to do about it and have yet to arrive at a satisfying conclusion so what can i really tell you?" Anything else, felt mechanistic, unreal, full of deciet and hypothetical yet packaged in fact. Yet in grad school, after my deadening "awakening" had spun me back from a slow methodical enquiry into the chaotic neruon-planet that i was, i was told my writing was incomprehensible and the culprit...too much retreat into poetic prose for the likings of the de-tached writing of good rigorous scholarly enquiry. Spirit met me again and the language of my soul was becoming born without any permission or encouragement from me. So maybe I write...for now...I need to make an income.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Blessed Standing People..


Walking into a forest is like coming home to me. Whether it was Snow White and the magic and enchantment of the birds and the bees in that darkened forest or the cold chill of Christopher McCandless' solitary hike into the wild, somewhere my spirit knows itself best there. Since my time in the Indigenous program, I re-enter the natural sanctuary each time with different eyes and each time, a little more of the colonized veil punctures and I am aware of man's dominion over rather than relationship with. It feels like such a big peice of us becomes lost in our dis-connection with the natural world, recognizing our wild nature as part of our place within this awe invoking and mysterious universe and more clearly the ways we have denied our space in it. We have done it for so long, we don't even seem to recognize that we've lost it and it's heart breaking.

On my first medicine walk, Anishnabe-que, Kathy, instructed us to give tobacco to the land before we enetered the forest. She explained that giving tobacco is a sign of respect and honors the value of reciprocity (to give before taking), and asks the community that dwells in the parts of the forest that you will be walking in, permission to pass through it's territory. I was humbled by the degree of respect inherent in this act but well aware of how awkward it felt for me to "ask permission" from a tree.

As we entered the forest, Kathy advised each of us to pick a place that we fell drawn to and introduce ourself to the community, explaining why we were there and what we were seeking. I immediately approached a tree, or as the Anishnabe of Turtle Island have taught me one of the Standing People. Again, being introduced to a tree as a Standing Person at first felt really awkward. My mind has been taught to see a tree as a "thing", with no real value or essence, nevermind "personhood". Yet as I gazed in perfect awe of the mystery and wisdom, solitude and pacifism of the Standing People as I wandered through the forest today, I couldnt imagine how I only knew this magnificent part of creation, a few short years ago, as simply a tree. A paper source, that thing that provides oxygen, a source of shade and pretty to look at. Oh no. As I reached out to touch their mosaic of size, texture, strength, shape and way of being with eachother, one at a time, the Standing People shared with me their gifts, a comforting witness to the beings that passed there, an open acceptance of what nature delivered to them. They supported eachother,

unconcerned with the entanglement of their branches, or the ways in which some leaned on others, while others were standing solidly alone. They bring life not only to us, but support an entire community of life in the eco-sphere. They teach me of a soulful surrender, allowing the breeze of the winds to sway them when it comes, sometimes breaking parts of themselves that simply get cast away and still they stand there with open arms, calling to the sun. They, birth life, allow its skin to shed when it's season has passed, await it's death and continue to grow again. All of this they do quietly, soulfully and humbly.

As Madison was keeping five feet ahead of me, excited about the diversity of sights that called her to explore their mystery, I focused on walking within the rythym the forest gave to me. Thunder Bear, one of my teachers, always reminds me to refrain from running as I walk this journey in life, to walk slowly and breathe deeply. Here, in the foilage and serenity of these wise elders, and the amass of critters, creatures, stone people and water, it takes no effort to remember Thunder Bear's words. All one has to do is walk within the rythym the mother provides, the rythym that when I look around me, most other life has not forgotten. Still, as I felt her rythym pulsing within me, I saw signs of our disconnection everywhere. Joggers came whipping along the trails, immersed in their music and excercise routine, pausing only to smile at fellow trail walkers along the way. The solitude of the place they were in affecting only their subtle energy fields no doubt contributing to the joy on their faces, yet as the kept up with the briskness demanded of rigorous workout it was clear they had no idea how many things they were missing. I looked at Madison, in her youthfulness still experentially curious about any new little finding and as she walked through the forest, told her to pay attention to what she saw, what she heard and how things felt. When the wind shifted through in a swift but warm flutter, Madison mentioned she could feel it on her skin. "What is it saying to you?" I asked. She looked perplexed. If you listen close enough from that place we talk about that's quiet inside, you'll hear what the wind is saying to you. Everything in nature brings us a message" I said. She looked curiously around her for a moment and walked some moments in silence. It's important to me that she learns to build this relationship with the mother, while she's still young, inquisitive, interested and constantly questioning. That way, even if she abandons all of the ways in which I have raised her by adolescence, her foundation will always be strong.

http://www.naturalheroes.tv/vod.html

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Meanderings Amore

The dude dropped in this eve, in one of his usual blaming, complaining tirades. I had been dropped into myself for enough hours prior to his arrival to not engage or usual drama's. In my work on the mat, Shadow Walker has talked lots about owning your triggers. "Triggers" he describes, "are yours, the charge fueling them is from your own emotional material, use them as a teacher". In the moments, where i've needlessly argued him in needing validation on external blaming, he would say "Erica, if there was no charge, you would be able to sit back in amusement".

Tonight, when the dude launched into the usual drama. I remained completely disengaged. The more disengaged, the angrier he became. In a mist of anger and frustration, he gathered his things and stormed for the door. I sat in silence. He returned after a few moments and said "your, just going to let me go". I told him he was an adult and could make his own decisions. But i watched in amusement.

This was one of my distractions, one that I was especially responsible for because I had been concious of it. Ken and I had enacted our drama's in our marriage unconciously, feeding into each others systems of dependency, powerlessness, power and control. When I left him, the cracks in the shell became visible and my anger at him slowly became neutralized. He had been a powerful teacher, I lhad learnt much about myself and the ways in which I engaged my emotional material in relationship, I was co-dependant. When i left, i vowed not to make the same mistake again in relationship. The system the dude and I have developed is no less co-dependant, except the energy manifests in different ways, I don't make my decisions around him, I've never disillusioned myself about the nature of the relationship, continue to live alone, am non-committed. I learned much in this relationship about the balance between staying in one's own integrity of other while honoring the self. I also saw much of my shadow. The powerless aspects of myself that had been victimized, in the reclamation of their power raged with avengence, releasing a long left un-expressed anger at men. He was in his own drama of powerlessness and blame and locked in, my system was the perfect sustenance to keep his alive. So, I was concious of my behaviors yes, but the hitch was strong. Not only did our relationship provide an outlet for my anger, our sexual relationship offered the perfect distraction. Somehow in all our suffering, projections, blame and despair, we found a way to perfectly unite on profound and beautiful levels, taking us to a glimmer of heaven in 30 minutes of bliss. That was the hitch and it would keep us at it for four years.

It has been time for me to take responsibility for that and choose differently for a long while. I haven't had the courage nor the endurance to withstand his relentless attempts to come back and i suppose as one of the final resting places of this stage of my journey was another good reason to move. I'm not superwoman, I can only manage what i can and i don't think there is shame in that. I know that it is not he or my ex's that have brought this pattern to me, but one of my threads, one of my long standing issues of this life wrapped up in just the right conditions of my early life to bring forth this journey. So, I am aware the unleashed energy will go searching and seethingly attempt in it's desperation for safety to latch on to something else. But i have different skills now and an ability to see into the internal abyss and the pace, size and length of it's waves, the way that it moves and a way to learn from it. I'll have to continue to work the process, but I need a new landscape to rebuild.

Confusion says….

In his book, Jeff Brown talks about the nature of confusion that erupts on the soulshaping journey and the importance of holding space for the confusion rather than drowning it out. As I write this, my mind is questioning why I believe so strongly in his work, and it comes from a strong place of resonance, a finding myself among his pages, how can I separate my alignment with his work from my own walk, to deny the truth of his teachings would be to deny my own experience and after all..your life is your medicine bundle. My critical judge states…are you happy now that you’ve justified your position by providing rationale?

The confusion…a strong sense of confusion has walked with me for two years. Elder Becker informed me that “I am not confused, it’s just a thing I do”. Shadowwalker has suggested in my therapeutic work with him that “confusion is just a defense mechanism that I utilize when I’m failing to see the truth of what is before me”. But none of those land deeply within me, they don’t strike an absolute chord consistent with the result of an internal discovery. The confusion heightens in the moment’s I try to make premature movements in the world, just as I am about to move into the decision, the confusion rears beckoning me to allow something to be heard. It’s almost impossible to just walk through it. It’s as if you are walking across a tightrope between two spaces, and as you get into the middle the two ends connected to the opposing solids break, and all that remains is the center part that you were walking along, but you can’t just stay there because the stability of the rope is missing, ‘nor can you go back because the road to your starting point has disappeared and you can’t go forward because you don’t have anything pulling you there, in the moment before you fall, what do you do?

The space in between is what I refer to as the abyss. The abyss is sort of like a void, not black or light, just there. There is no real particular passion or attachment to anything, no real opinion on matters, goals, desires or dreams. It’s more like an open space where you’ll take whatever happens. But my mind wants something to happen, but because it doesn’t feel any real desire, intention, path or goal all it puts out is a sense of urgency about a place your needing to get to. “I’ll go, where you need me to, but I just don’t see where I am to go” comes the desperate voice from within me. This voice is also the voice that gives an emotion of helplessness is prone to panic and anxiety and insidious attempts to maintain a negative self concept. This is quite possibly the victim. Then another voice makes itself known, this one a taunter. She reminds me of how useless I am and berates me for considering the honoring of my truth. “You have a daughter to support, stop entertaining your childish fantasies, your making up a story to give you more hope and inspiration rather than face the reality of your life”…definitely the critical judge. The artist comes in whispers. Small whispers not of a particular path but of the necessity to pay attention to my creative expression, that ends up accompanied by a full bodied hunger for chanelling out the continuous river of reflection and the magnificence of it’s individual parts through, dance, painting, writing, singing….flowing with it. But just as it rises up, critical judge flies in with avengeance….”artists are struggling while being expert at their craft. You my dear, don’t even propose a practiced skill, and to start one now and than expect to make a living is sheer madness…oh and once again..you have a daughter to support”.



At this point the artist is no contender of the judge, wise and well versed in the ways of rationality and common sense. They will begin bargaining for their parts. The artist, says therapy is my craft, that is my practiced skill, I can actualize it through there. Out of somewhere in the corner, another voice breaks through.. “but how can you do that? Where is room for creativity, healing and self expression?. Your work there has always been stifled and you spend more time fighting for the permission to grow, rather than doing what your doing anyway”. The judge returns “listen to you, creativity healing and self expression, look at the world out there, who has room for that, are you really that privileged?”

That war has been in existence for awhile. The what used to be dense unconsciousness to the internal world has now become a battleground. I have choices about how to engage that battleground. I can get real busy doing people favors and sorting out their lives, I can get wrapped up in a romance that is doomed from the beginning, I can eat a bunch of junk food, smoke a lot of pot or watch a bunch of movies and finally..bury myself in a frenzy of mind blowing sex. All of these, drown out the voices of the internal world. In fact as I write it, I am aware that has been some of what has made this particular part of my path so excruciating. I have done so much work, in building up my capacity for independence and separating myself from what other people think I should be doing, but the capacity to make those decisions for myself is still such a small seed, trapped in the hunter’s snare. Fear kicks in, and I go back.

When I finished my Master’s Degree in Aboriginal social work, the final requirement was completion of a vision quest. I spent four long days and nights in the bush. No food, no water, a little cedar tea one day, no distractions, just me, my tent, some sacred items clothes and the bush. I fasted for guidance. The dream about moving to BC continued to nag at me. My opportunities for work were here, but everything else felt so suffocating. But who was I kidding, trying to solve a restless continuous internal angst by moving across the country. When I left the fast, I had bargained a deal with the inner churnings. I would take two weeks to go explore out west and feel out the land in my heart. Then I would return to Ontario to begin my practice. There was just enough money left in my student loan for 16 days of backpacking, buses and trains, carpools, hitchhiking, ferries, sheds and couchsurfing, so I went. I had never traveled alone, put my trust in strangers, or dared independently venture more than two hours from home. This was the perfect opportunity to test myself, and though fear reared its head, it felt like the right thing to do.

It was a beautiful experience, refreshing models of community and ways of being, that made me feel ordinary, but more comforting than anything I had known. But the locals of the small communities in which I encountered this ambience spoke of the same things I wrestled with in Ontario. People moving in with money, turf wars between the hippies and the rich, lack of housing and work…..some becoming touristry and loosing their once natural way of being that made people visit in the first place. The cities I went through, weren’t a whole lot different from the places I’d known in Ontario and offered little pull. But the landscape was amazing, it wasn’t a relationship like in Ontario. I wasn’t watching the beauty within the landscape as I do at home, I was one with it. Daily it took my breath away. I visited with diverse and interesting people and expressed myself in fearless ways evident when traveling in landscape you don’t call home. I was refreshed and set home energized to begin my practice.

Everything worked out how I had envisioned it. I would come home, claim a position in the downtown coffee shop with a soothing yet festive atmosphere so close to the lake and work at building up my practice. There would be lots of paperwork, a lot of initial fees and a necessity to keep a stable income while doing so. I worked forty hours a week in the coffee shop and worked at developing my groups and designing my programming. I created brochures, designed forms, consulted a variety of my colleagues and mentors in establishing. I took a business course (which I didn’t complete) arranged a space between three clinics that adored me and gave me the space to do whatever I needed. But everything felt like a struggle. Like I was dragging myself through the motions of something I no longer wanted to do. I couldn’t imagine myself any other way, so I persisted with trying to argue myself into going back into the work and doing it. My friends, colleagues and supervisors mentioned they saw my fear and wondered if my lack of commitment to it may be a fear of success…a fear of inadequacy…a defense mechanism. I continued to work though the research and necessary tasks needed to build a private practice in social work, while plummeting myself into Radical acceptance mat trips on the weekends, therapy once a week, a healthy balance of inward time and socializing time, mindfulness, journaling, seminars and talks by medicine men, authors, shamans. I learned lots about the internal struggles, the voices that lived inside of me, the ways in which my body notified me of it’s knowings, but I grew less and less passionate about what I was trying to build. A long but slow sense of suffocation was setting in, something that just wanted to break free.

The voices began to war again. “Who the hell do you think you are, entertaining “what might be” from your soul? Don’t you see the suffering all around you? The wars? The poverty? The fights for freedom on political, physical, social, legal levels? You vowed to fight this war, you spoke against people who turned their backs on these struggles, and now look at you, walking away on the childish basis that it doesn’t “feel right”.” It’s mocking ran through me. That is terribly selfish and at best surreal, people don’t understand you even in the conscious circles you lack the ability to communicate what your feeling. Maybe these are your fears of success, get out of pixieland and build that career, I thought to myself. But the waves would just not let me rest. The small subtler, quieter background voice returned “following the call of your soul, which now pulls you west for reasons you can’t explain is not an independent act. You do it for the collective. You are teacher, you must follow your call in order to help others, it is the actualization of your gifts”. But what fucking gifts says the frustration in me. My gift is as therapist, in Dr. Blair’s words… “in ten years Erica, you’ll be the best of the best”. And here I was abandoning it all with not one clear thread in sight.

http://www.soulshaping.com/flash/ss_3.mp3

Monday, April 5, 2010

The Rising of the Tides

The inner tumult was abreast today, the churn of the unsettled seas coaxing me into their dance. The waves too strong for me to resist their undertow, i thrashed around in the confusion of the abyss once again. There is a war between two forces, one from the internal world and one of the external and they are loudly resisting their ability to co-exsist together. The path of integration.

It seems the last four years of my life have been concerned with de-constructing the external world that began to show holes in the face it displayed to me. This was a neccessary process to bring me into the illuminated spaces of my internal world. Yet having what feels like a good amount of time spent in response to the internal world, it is now time to bring them together. My friend jenn called it a couple weeks ago, the marrying of the earth energy with the light energy.

In one of Moji's recorded talks, he spoke about the deepening of conciousness, explaining that in some states of awareness, the concepts that meant something to the one who witnesses, would no longer hold any relevance, they would be dead concepts and not worth entertaining. I relate that to the strains on my relationship with social work. For the past few years, everytime I have sat in clinical settings or amongst fellow clinicians as they engaged in dialogue about client case scenarios, diagnosis or assessment, my internal world turns into scrambled eggs. I feel as if I am sitting in a room, with a crowd of people speaking different languages, quickly and relentlessly, that all seem foreign and overwhelming. Than when a silence intercepts and I am asked for my input, i feel perplexed and without comment just before the panic sets in that what used to come to me fluidly without question now seemed something I had only dreamed. The panic arose from the validation, skill and prowess i once delivered and was admired for. I had been evaluated as the top 5% across twelve schools of social work for my level of analysis in assessment. A case analysis was like a puzzle that i looked deeply into, examining the variance of threads that appeared to come together and reporting in good time a thorough review, analysis and plan to bring all of the peices together again. Yet the experiences of my own life in the last year demonstrated for me definitively that all was not as it seemed, the devisement of the intellect disillusioned if taken for reality on it's own, the answers to what was going on, no longer clear. Maybe that's what Moji meant, going further into the mystery drew massive crevices into what at first seemed real and now appeared no different than a cookie cutter, simple joining of dots created by a constructed lens. I suppose this heralds a success in soul step, but for me it has also meant the ripping of a well developed skill that promised a lining to the grey cloud of poverty and survival. I suppose simulteanously it also reveals the strength of my need for external validation is still alive and well....maybe just the right conditions to continue nurturing the seed of loving myself, a task that still requires work.

Yet my commitment to the honoring of my call makes peace with this sacrafice in the light of the following steps awaiting me. Except that part is never clear. There is so many threats to it's revelation, it takes real work to hold the space for truth to become known. That part...is also the difficulty. The outer world is noisy and demands time and investment in responsibilities, however few they might be. For me it's raising a daughter singlehandedly and constantly meditating the doubter who incessantly chatters about the realities of the external world, the conditioning, mindsets and governing values and how they intersect with our "modern ideas of childrearing". She taunts me with her insinuations of "bad mothering"...."get off your hippy head trip of fantasy and lore and living the questions that live inside of you, you may only be 26 but in ten years, you'll have a sixteen year old waiting to go to university on a tuition you swore you'd never make her earn". Than there's the soother who calmly steps into the chaos of the doubter and assures her that there is greater value in passing on the wisdom of engaging one's life and the honoring of her call, than discarding herself to the slavery of the herd in an effort to steep the child in excess. Madison after all, has always had what she needed, her dad and i devoted to providing that for her and in discussion tonight, he reminded me that on top of having her basic needs met, Madison was blessed to have so much community around her that loved her, people of so many walks of life that come in and out of our journey. She has been given exposure to sacred rituals and rites of passage and been raised in an openness that has allowed her to express herself in the ways that are of within her. Surely, this was the wisest path.

What seems so unsettling about following this journey with child, is that life born of the actualization of spirit leads one to avalanches with no certainty to what comes after, it could also demand sacrafices that upset the whole system of balance, but in writing it, i suppose what scares me most is the level of responsibility it demands from you. I could see as I was typing that a life born of ignorance would demand no less but would come in slower transitions and leave people free of the burden of carrying responsibility as their actions are more reactive than preemptive. But my journey has shown me that when one commits conciously, the tides move quicker, the stakes are higher and you can't really go back, however much sometimes you wish to.

Today was one of the days i wished to. There are parts of me that so strongly want to run back to the embrace of social work, to feel the joy of being there again and the passion of the struggle. Than there are stronger parts of me that know I can't. I hear the echoes of a reader that read for me 7 years ago in the back of my mind.."you will always need a place to grow and are a quick learner, you will only stay in places for a little at a time before you have mastered the skill and are called to move forward". I guess this is what she was talking about. But for a lone wolf always in search of community, it feels scary and devastating to leave "social worker" behind. It's possible as one of my teachers, Shadowwalker suggested, that growing comfortable living within the emptiness is the work that needs to be done and does not require my abandonment of my career, but for now the inner voice is insistent i take some space and i knew i had to leave the landscape here to give it the space it needs. But that doesnt mean that i am visited by the voice of fear at least 20 different points of the day....thats desperately devising a plan for my return, yet when i stop and breathe, i look back at the last four years of my life and see each step that has led me here and the small subtle quenching of every internal nuance that suggested i might need to look a different way.