Dining with the Dragon

Sometimes, insights gotta come slowly.  Especially when the insights are around traumas, when Whatever It Was split off into a hundred different pieces, sent itself all around your body so that you could walk around and be in your life until it was time as a big girl to begin to piece it together again.  But first you needed to begin the slow long remembering that you had forgotten to feel it in the first place.  And then one day/month/year/decade you slowly start waking up.  And you start feeling your body, and feeling yourself, and you watch yourself ~ the ocean watching the wave.  And you come upon many things that are ugly, things that have come out of your trauma which are not your fault, things which go out into the world and misrepresent you, which are flaccid where you want to be ripe, and straight where you want to be a circle, and mean where you want to protect yourself, and harsh where you want to be sweet.  They are not your fault, and you need to learn that first before you can begin to change them.  Because they are not your fault but they are also your responsibility.

You come upon all of these ways you've learned, from in your beautiful protective self, to run away from the things you could not bear.  Those things have been pillars for you to hold onto while you've been growing up into the process of being able to bear up, as a big grown up girl, under their weight.

And you have learned again today what you keep falling across in the last week or so, in different places and at different times, that you still are not living in acceptance.  You are running from the dragon.  You keep being surprised by the fact of your non-acceptance.  What you think is acceptance is at times a rolling in the waves of retrauma, where the past is present, and you can't even tell the difference between what is safe and what is not.

You are reminded today, by the words of another, that there are times when you are too courageous.  It washes over you like a mother and like comfort.  You are not not-enough ~ you are trying too hard.  There are times in your courage that you can retreat.

And then you love you, because yes, you've always loved your own courage.  You are the girl who wants to pat security dogs.  She lives alongside the scaredy cat with the resilience of a wet paper bag.

But now yes ~ you see that you have been trying too hard.  That when the waves broil is not the right time then to turn and face the dragon.  That you get to turn your hypervigilant back on that dragon and swim away to a safe place.  That this is the best sort of fight-or-flight, when it is a flight to safety, the safe places that you have still not quite learned to develop within yourself even though you are wrinkly around your eyes and your tits are starting to sag.

But you begin, and you've begun, and you pat yourself on your heart and you say, "It's alright, darlin'.  I'm looking after you," and you remember once again that this is still what you do not yet know to do, the fleeing to safety.

It's only from there that you turn to face the dragon.  It's only from there that you are strong enough to stand so that you can look him in the eye and witness his transformation.  Your running from him, in your trauma (my God, you really can see it now how traumatised you were - how we all are) has made him bigger.  But it's a paradox that you need to sometimes run from him to face him.

And then from that little distance, a few centimetres away from your amygdala, he too is the ocean.  He is the deep at the bottom of dissociation.  But the light shines even in the darkness of the deeps, and even he is able to be welcomed into Rumi's guesthouse for dinner, for acceptance.

Until the next time that I forget, and the next waves that come, and the next time I am caught up again, until the time when the waves aren't quite so high, so that I can remember to swim to safety first.

Listening to:  Meditation and Healing Trauma by Tara Brach

Breathe by Lucid Light