Bodywrithe

We go deep. Apart from the conscious part, there's the swirling undercurrents that pop themselves up when you night dream, when you daydream, when you create. Then there's the different layers, the different parts of your brain and body which sometimes can be at cross-purposes with each other. The limbic part, the one linking us to our deep ape ancestors.  Our bodies. We treat our bodies the way we've treated the earth - as dead living slabs, to be done with what we will.  But both our bodies and the earth have a language all of their own.

There are different dances you can do that don't even involve music or dance floors.  This latest one I tried, TAT, made my body writhe.

Christi Nielsen (creative commons)

Down in the deeps my body is scared of males. Up top here in my mind, while they can perturb me and even dismay me, I'm not scared of them the way I am in the part that I didn't even know was there.  My body in tandem with my limbic system trips me up at inopportune moments that have nothing to do with anything except memories that I have now forgotten. 

Last night I practised this simple technique. It's like others I've done.  They have all made me excited and in wonderment at my body speaking out and releasing the stuckness you knew was there.  Last night I brought to mind several recent incidents, all of which involved my partner, who in this instance is entirely innocent except for being a trigger.  I feel ashamed, the shame dripping down from my head through all my organs, dropping in wet clumps from my heart onto my stomach, looping down through my gut, gushing down my legs, running out the soles of my feet like piss.  This hot shame, as if I should somehow by now have dealt with all of this stuff. 

This stuff, this stuff, all of this stuff.  Some of it is from my own history, some from my parents, my grandparents and theirs, all the stuff passed down through the ages. Sometimes I wonder if some of it is from other people who appear to be entirely unrelated to me.  I mean, where do we stop and others start?  Where does I end? Sometimes, I think there is no stop and start.  Sometimes, I think we are all me, I am all you, and we are in some strange way our worldview has blinded us to, all together.  Walruses included.

God, I wish John Lennon was still here. 

This trauma is like a hidden layer that is almost invisible when I'm out in the daylight.  I can be myself without its interfering.  Then I go too far and suddenly up it pops, like one of those air-filled men that fly around outside shops selling vacuum cleaners.

Last night I allowed my body to do what it wanted to do.  This space for allowing seems to be a primary aspect when I do these sorts of exercises.  I have to sort of tell my body that it's okay if it wants to do its thing now.  Otherwise it sits patiently for decades, carrying its load.  It's not like it bursts into flail while I'm walking in the park or sitting at the footy.  I have to be alone, it has to feel safe, I have to say yes.

When I say yes, it beings its slow writhe.  In response to the technique I did, which is below, for about 20 minutes or so my body moved itself about in different directions.  No pinched muscles this morning, though it wouldn't be surprising if there was.  But then, my body doesn't jerk like the vacuum cleaner man when it's doing these gyrations.  It's so smooth in the way it moves, though I don't understand its dance. What is the meaning and the beginning of this arrow thrust of movement up my spine?  I can feel and see its progress, like the wind, by the way my prone body lifts up a little as the energy travels up, kind of like the way it looks when people have ECT, only not so violent.  Or the way when you orgasm.  The arrow keeps moving, travelling right up my back to the top of my spine, pushing up my shoulders, my neck, my head forward, on its way to my brain.  Being lifted, for a second, by electricity.  Gut and brain talking.

At another point the energy flows into my right shoulder, the one that's been a little sore the last few days, and it pools there.  It turns me slightly sideways on the couch, so that my shoulder is pressed into the cushion, and here it stays for 10, 20, 30 seconds.  I lie, submitted to whatever is going on here, trusting this body even though I am disappointed in its failings.  This is an oasis in a sea that taught me to do the opposite of trust.  This body, which is treated as an object, as a walking dead slab of matter by this stupid world, is speaking.

I wrote about this this morning.  Hopefully one day I can finally shake these traumatic reactions, I wrote.  Haha, shake these reactions.  I wrote without realising the deeper impact of those words.  Where does that term come from?  How did people know they had to "shake" something off?  Animals know how to shake it all of and continue on.  We are in the process of relearning what we've forgotten.

Is Pyroluria Trauma?

Last year I saw a psychotherapist.  It was very cool because it wasn't just simply sitting in front of someone talking, talking, talking.  It involved also using my body.  Sometimes I would draw what I was experiencing in my body and then we would use different techniques like emotional freedom technique (EFT) and eye movement integration, etc, as part of working through them and understanding them.  It was a little strange and discomfiting, but it also kinda rocked because it fit into paradigms I am entirely comfortable with (namely, that we go way deeper than we are consciously aware of).

Once, near the beginning of our sessions, I wrote down on index cards the different effects I could expect in my life once I had successfully resolved the troubling, traumatic, long-standing and deep-seated situation I was seeing her about.  When I had written something on each card and drawn an accompanying representational picture, I then put them down on the ground to form a path, and walked through the middle of that path.  It was a literalisation of the process we were undertaking.  It felt good.  It felt stupid.

I first had experience of therapy that incorporated something greater than just talk when I began doing art therapy about six years ago.  That was such a profoundly awesome experience for me.  To be surprised by something you make, or a picture you draw or paint, to have it reveal things to you about you, slowly and meaningfully, so that you can see something you couldn't before, as if you have externalised something of yourself that is now giving itself back to you ~ it's hard work and it's awesome.  I have forever been ruined for straight talk therapy that doesn't involve using your body and/or your creativity.

If you're overly logical and a little weak on imagination, then maybe doing stuff like this mightn't work.  It requires laying down of the security that a logical way of approaching life offers and looking through a rather different lens.  It's an entirely different kind of practice; it's subjective.  It's also real, powerful, potentially massively meaning-making, something which can garner great internal change - surprising yourself about yourself and healing things that are broken.  Those spaces have always been dangerous thresholds to cross.  They continue to be so.


Doing this kind of stuff, though challenging, is powerful if it's your bag.  I suppose some of the techniques we used would be classed as neurolinguistic programming.  That is a compartment with a big pseudoscience label stuck on its outside.  Now, just because it's a cultural belief that anything pseudoscience is therefore false and wrong and stupid doesn't mean that's not a simplistic distinction.  Sure, some of what's called pseudoscience is peddled by shysters and snake oil salespeople, and we do not wish to be taken advantage of.  However, it is simply not possible for everything to be effectively funnelled into a scientific tube, into something externally measurable and quantifiable.  If something sits outside science as pseudoscience, then what that means is determined by what it is.  It can be bunk ... or not.  It depends.

One week I talked to my psychotherapist about pyroluria.  It was the latest thing I was working on and I was hopeful that it would help me with symptoms I was experiencing, namely massive fatigue and anxiety.  The next week, she came back and said that she'd read up on it a bit, and that while she did not wish to minimise in any way my diagnosis, that those symptoms sounded very much to her just like trauma.

I recognised the resistance in myself as soon as she said it.  Straightaway, it felt like she was dissing a new, possibly large, jigsaw puzzle piece that would help further explain what was wrong with my body.  The same body that had been causing me grief for the previous 15 years.  In 1999 I contracted glandular fever, and since then things have never been the same for me.  Chronic fatigue syndrome, adrenal fatigue, all wrapped up a bundle that has caused at best medium and at times severe limitations.  To have felt that I had come upon something that might give a physical explanation, and then to have someone suggest that it was maybe, like, emotional ~ no, I didn't want that.  I wanted it to be entirely physical, because that way it was simpler and cleaner.  If pyroluria turned out to be the physical manifestation of trauma, where would that leave me?

It would leave me feeling weak.  There's the rub, and here's the split:  a purely physical explanation would get me off the hook.  It would be mechanical.  Or it would somehow be my ancestors' fault.  It wouldn't be mine.  Whereas if pyroluria was trauma, then somehow it would automatically all be my fault.

Funny, isn't it, how we make those distinctions.

In practice, the body is not a dead piece of machinery with a big long stick coming out of it with a mind or a brain attached.  It is all one thing, and it is a joy to experience that.  And you can't understand it from a study (though we do know there is a type of brain function that occurs in the gut, and also in the heart).  You have to experience it yourself.  So is pyroluria trauma?  Maybe.  Maybe what we see with pyroluria is the long-term effects of trauma on a body, on the blood, ending up with a greater need for B6 and zinc, amongst other things.  Maybe we see the spiritual, emotional and mental effects playing out on the physical plane, like wind on water.

There is often just as much power in the immeasurable relationship between the things as in the things themselves.  It does seem as a culture we are finding it easier to recognise the spaces between things and how everything is affected by everything else in ways that are not always easy to forecast (especially in terms of globalisation and climate change). I tend to think that though Descartes' thoughts that translated out into the mind-body split still run like water down through the middle of our culture, causing division only in our perception, that we are beginning to close that particular gap.  In one way you could say that that is the defining argument of the age, one that surely must be felt in the area of science most keenly and confusingly.

In the Midst of Summer I Am Dead

The Sinusitis Blues.

Today, it is almost-midsummer and

I feel as dry as a leaf at the end of autumn and

As dead as the midst of winter and

As fragile as a spring shoot.

Today, I feel like I have lost myself again.  I lose myself every day and then find myself again.  Reborn every day.  Today, I feel the monster reaching out his claw from the green murk to clutch my ankle.

I look back on things that I have written in previous years and they sparkle in a way that I feel like I have lost, at least for the moment.  Today, I am beaten down.  Perhaps it's just simply the fact that I am in the midst of yet another sinus-related thing, and I feel bad because I feel useless.  I feel like I want to be a hermit and never go anywhere and yet I feel guilty about that too.  I do not feel like I will be able to sparkle anymore.  But then I look at something I wrote two weeks ago and there it is again, the sparkle.  And tomorrow or the day after or the week or month after I will be back in that space again, actually walking around in it, all three dimensional.

Time is becoming stranger to me as I go on.  And I know that it is a false conception to think I sparkled in previous years more than I do now because I wasn't sparkling then, any more than I am sparkling now.  It's just the benefit of hindsight, the safety that comes from the past that is sealed, combined with reading the things that come from the writing space where I feel more myself and safer than the me who walks around bumbling.

Some days, I feel so exposed, like other people are tsunamis and I am a baby beech.  Some days, I feel like the stuff that is in me, the good and sweet and lovely, is not for any of you to see because how could I trust anyone with that?

I know what this is.  This is trauma.  This is limbic and wordless.

I have gained some traction with this space, believe it or not.  I will tell you about it sometime soon. 

But today, I feel so beaten down by the world, by everything, by the spaces that I love and which for today at least are lost.  I have lost the Godspace.  Which probably means it's closer than ever before.  Sometimes when you feel like you are losing something, what is actually happening is that you are gaining something new.  Transmutation.  My word for the year.  Sometimes the monster swims up from the depths into the space where you can see him.  He's been there all along, under the conscious sea.  But when he comes up, though he is you and he has lived within you perhaps for your whole life, you recoil from him in horror.

But perhaps he is a monster only by dint of him being the Other within your own body.  You react the way all humans react when they are scared and something other than them is facing them:  you feel an antipathy, a horror.  Sometimes the horror is in direct correlation to the things that are stored without your knowing in the undersea of your own self.  And then someone out there pops up and presses buttons you don't even know you have and would be horrified to know that you did.

We are a deeper sea than we like to think.

But it's not all clunking chains and dead carcasses and hairy monsters down there.  There are the most beautiful schools of fish, made of gossamer.  There are laboratories of alchemy down there, sealed from the water and hidden from sight.  The You that you don't know very well is cooking up things and while S/he does, it feels like it is some sort of evil.  It feels like you are dying.  But sometimes hairy monsters do not stay hairy monsters forever.  That's why stories exist about frogs and princes. 

I feel today like I am dying.  But everyone who swims in these waters knows, that's not the end of the story.

And yet even so, I feel like help!, like I have lost myself again, and that feels very unsafe. Even while I know it's not the whole of the matter or the end of it either.

Freeze Frame

You fall into the vat into the vat into the vat into the vat and

time-past freezes into time-present

But not in a nice way.  Not in a Live In The Moment kind of way but a

kind of way where you're walking along in the moment in 2013 and then

wham!

you fall into a ditch from 1982

or 1977

or 1975

and you feel the terror wash over you again.

It's a terror whose depths have taken you years to realise.

And no one but you knows that you're not in 2013 anymore Dorothy.


And you become repulsive

and you feel completely alone and

upset because no one comes to help but

no one knows you're not here and
no one ever did come to help in this particular way because
no one knew you were in the vat and
when it comes to this sort of thing

no one can help except you.

Ahh.



Now, the problem with that is that

whenever you fall into the vat from 1982

or 1977 or 1975

what comes with you is exactly not what you need

But there's nothing else here that is easily seen.

Nothing else but the terror and that voice

The one that says stuff about you that in daylight hours

you do not believe.  Stuff about how you're the shittest piece of shit that

ever did live and how completely pathetic you are and seriously

you wouldn't talk to a moldy sock like that.

Or your worst enemy.


Your task, should you choose to accept it

is to find the good voice in that space
the real one not the shit one that is itself shit but says it's you who are shit.


And you do accept that task and

you take it on and

some days are better than others and

others are really just shot to the shit.

Pic Deeo-Eleclaire

Making the Shift - Pain versus Pleasure

Goodness me, this post from Michele Rosenthal at Heal My PTSD could have been written for me.  One of the biggest challenges of my entire life is about this ~ about getting past pain and allowing myself to experience pleasure.

This seems to be a rather common occurrence among some of us - we do not feel that we are allowed somehow to experience pleasure.  And by pleasure I don't mean flopping ourselves in front of the TV.  I mean doing those things that really bring us joy in some way.  Why is it so?  Don't we all experience suffering in some form?  If the answer is yes - and it's always yes; even charmed lives have their share of suffering - then why do we not comfort ourselves with pleasure?  Where does this puritanical tiresomeness come from?

I have a friend who does not seem to have this battle as much as I do.  She allows herself to experience pleasure whenever she wants, and her life, as a result, even though filled with suffering, also has a certain kind of ease that is awfully attractive, not least because I feel like my life does not have that ease. And it seems to come easy to her, but when I talk to her about it, really, what the difference is between she and I is that she has the same sorts of thoughts and feelings I have around letting go and doing things that give us pleasure.  It's just that she ignores those thoughts when they come, whereas I treat them as if they are some great god thundering from a mountain.

Enoughness.

I think, if I am really very honest, that so many of my struggles to sit down and write - and pretty much all of my struggles to sit down and play with clay - are because somewhere in my mind, and somewhere very obviously in my culture, I don't feel like I am allowed to do these things. I'm not allowed to do them because I enjoy them too much, and because I'm not working enough, and until I spend enough time each week working at a stultifying soul-destroying job in some capacity, I have not earned the right to do those things.  Because everyone knows you have to eat your meat before you have your pudding.  How can you have any pudding if you haven't eaten your meat?

What would happen if what the world needs most was a whole bunch of people all eating their pudding at once?

That walk from the TV to the clay, from the TV to the computer to sit down and waste time writing stuff - or whatever your personal bliss is that you don't feel you have the time for - is the single most challenging and enlightening walk that you can take.  One of the most important ones, but the absolutely hardest one because it is a walk you need to take alone while the internal voices shouting that you don't have time and haven't earned this are completely meshed with the outside societal voices that are in total agreement.  And too often we listen to those voices.
 
How very strange, to be in a situation where the most courageous acts I can do are to do things that bring me intense pleasure.  How very, very strange.

But not uncommon at all, I don't think.  When life is pulling us in directions that distress and/or depress us, our first instinct is to try harder.  When in fact, what we really need to do to rest, and recuperate, and recreate ~ in the very best sense of that word, re-create ~ is to stop trying so hard, let loose, loosen our hair, take off our glasses, pick up that guitar, have a shag, listen inside for some whispered secrets that may well surprise us about what we really want to do that would give us joy, because even though L'Oreal has co-opted the saying, we really are very much worth it.

Let us all eat pudding.

Pic by Ucumari (under a creative commons attribution/no derivs/noncommerical licence)

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