Here's
how I've experienced a different perspective on a life-long pattern.I'm
belatedly realizing that I've kept on the edge of things. I've
noticed recently that many creative fields interest me, and I think
to myself, if I were younger I'd learn all about film, I'd get
a degree in design, I'd go study with great chefs. I would commit
myself to fields of creative endeavor just for the great pleasure
of it.
And I think, well, why didn't I do that? Why didn't this occur
to me when I was young? For the fact is, it
didn't occur to me. There
was some reflexive decision to keep myself in a very small box. It
has resonated loudly throughout my entire life.
To
follow the thread of that ... in high school I was told that
I could pursue anything I wanted—and I found that extremely
unhelpful, puzzling—and untrue. I rather helplessly signed
up for a local small college, shrinking from going to the state university.
Too scary, I guess. Too much to aspire to. When my boyfriend insisted
on getting married, I abandoned college—at that time you didn't
do both—and instead worked as an x-ray technician.
I
had developed an idea that science was the only god, and
that anything other than that was beneath contempt. That
seemed to derive
from my family's position that feelings weren't OK. For me
ANY feeling was very much not OK, either negative or positive.
That acculturation—contempt
and punishment of any show of emotion on my part—was the precursor
for my seeming contempt for any field that involved touching into
feelings (or touching or being touched)—which ruled
out any creative field.
When
feeling totally at the end of my rope after years in an abusive
marriage which (of course) I couldn't talk about with my family,
I saw a therapist who helped me through the fear of being killed
if I left and annihilated if I stayed, until I could leave.
I entered, tentatively, into the world of feeling. If I hadn't
been so severely pushed, I doubt if I'd have gone there...
Skip
ahead a decade or so, and I found myself completing graduate
school and embarking on a career as a psychotherapist.
Remember the
saying, "We teach what we need to learn"?
As
a result of years of work on myself, and catapulted by
a piece of work I did with Robert Raleigh, in 1995, suddenly I
began to be able to
write. My work was published as poetry. When I took up
watercolors, I found I could draw and paint. I have paintings in
my cardiologist's office in Marin, in homes in Martinique, Italy,
and around the country.
So,
a gradual unfolding was occurring, with hard work and the
will to proceed with what I began to understand as
spiritual development.
A freeing of the self to be what it can be. My work mostly
nibbled away at thoughts and feelings of the present as they
were influenced/ shaped/ distorted by the events of the past.
Insight into how it/I came to
be was a
very useful first step. Consciousness—what a challenge,
what a gift! What we don't know CAN hurt us. If we don't
know what motivates,
us, it is in charge of us.
The earlier avoidance of creative stuff is the avoidance
of life. The immune system difficulties I've had are manifestations
of indifference to the life process. The opposite of love
is not hate, but indifference. Pretending people don't matter,
so their loss isn't devastating. My mother did it because
it was done to her. She wasn't the initiator of this deadly
configuration, only the carrier. Denial of, pretended indifference
to, life.
Enter Miasm Therapy. The idea of it totally engaged me from
the first moment. I knew the germ of how my behavior and
thoughts were shaped had to be removed in order for it to
disappear from my repertoire. It was very exciting to know,
at last, that a way existed for doing this that didn't involve
a lifetime of therapy, an excruciating revisiting of every
trauma, a reworking and revisiting of every thought and feeling
which STILL didn't touch the core.
What I've noticed over the year I've been involved with Miasm
Therapy is a gradual understanding of how I've put myself
together as a means of protecting myself and keeping myself
relatively whole. This time the difference is that I'm seeing
my personal set-up from outside. That is, I'm no longer so
deeply enmeshed in it that I can't see how it works.
It's
a sociological principle— once you are IN something—a
family, an organization, a relationship, even a country—you
buy into its unspoken rules and structure. (An example is the first
day at a new job—everything seems foreign, awkward, and weird—but
by the end of the week things start to "make sense"—you've
become an insider.) You lose your objective ability to assess
it or see your part in it. You are subject to its ecology.
When you are on the edge, however, you can see both how it
is inside, free from entanglement, as well as how it is outside.
Moment
by moment I'm noticing my increasing interest in creative,
expressive fields, looking intently at the layering
of meaning in
the texturing of various media—an excitement about
really exploring the luscious possibilities of each creative
field in a way I never had.
And, and ... what is incrementally being revealed to me is
how it all works. It can be written in a sentence, but the
discovery has come day by day, as I move from the subjective
position of being in the soup (or in the maze) to out of
it. What I thought was a part of me is clearly not.
I
am not a hesitant, reserved, cold person who approaches every
situation and person with judgment, with sensitive attunement
for
how I may be perceived as breaking the unwritten rules that
have been encoded in every cell. I am not the cultivated
indifference that has kept me from diving into live and love.
I am not about the appearance of ignorance of committing
to anything or anyone for fear of ridicule or abandonment.
That reserve, that careful containment, that incredible damping-down
of the joy of life—that
is not who I am. It's just not. I may have inherited it,
but it's not mine. And, I'm beginning, after all these years,
to see the truth.
I'm seeing the structure of what I thought I was begin to
break down, bit by bit. What comes with it is a recognition of many
small ways I have of alienating myself, of setting myself aside
as superior/inferior, of needing to be special to try to
catch up, of trying to vault myself out of the human race,
almost, in order to feel vaguely OK. That all these are merely
devices, strategies, that I've taken in and on as part of
myself. I've unconsciously used them to establish a life
course that has been cramped, narrow, and entirely beneath
me. It does not reflect the truth of me.
Most
of us have similar stories. That stuff we've inherited,
we believe it. But it's not like brown eyes—it
can be changed.
I'm
using generalities to try and describe a delicate, subtle
unfolding—like
the lifting of fog that gradually becomes a cloud receding
in blue sky. That's it, a lifting off. An allowing of sunshine
that brings clarity to all that was misty and unclear. Like
that. With no effort. Just a moment by moment revealing and
an appreciation of blue-sky possibility.
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