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I hope from the article posted yesterday that we can begin to understand how what happened to us at the hands of our mothers created patterns in our body and our brain that affect us every moment of our lives.

Change can happen, and when it does it affects our genetics just as the article describes.  What we need is gentle kindness from others we participate in life with, and from ourselves.  Kindness happens in little ways, as each moment moves into the next.  Kindness comes as appreciation — a particular kind of understanding that allows us to appreciate how our anxiety, PTSD, depression, dissociation, and the processes of our free will and choice is fundamentally connected to our SELF within the body-brain we live within (and at one with).

Gentle kindness can come from these new levels of understanding, along with healing.  Just as who we are happens with molecular changes that bubble up to our consciousness, so does change happen the other way around.

I was disturbed in my sleep last night as I seldom am, and cannot remember my dreams except that I need to make certain I learn ‘happy’ songs first as I learn to read music and play this piano because I was ‘told-shown’ that these songs can change me on my insides.  “OK,” I say.  I can do that.  I can learn to play the happiest songs I can find — each tiny note and pause at a time.

I can pay very close attention today to all life’s gifts around me and bring gratitude into my thoughts during this day that I started with feeling (inexplicably) so very, very blue as if I woke an entirely different person than the one I was yesterday.  And I very possibly am.

So I anchor and ground myself in my body in this world, in this sunshine, putting real blankets on the real clothesline to make them smell so sweet and fresh when I put them back on my real bed tonight.  I use real water to take care of my real cats and my real plants.  I peel real oranges, and dig my real coffee grounds into my real compost pile where the real curling gray worms can really eat them up and give me back healthy soil for my little gardens.

The chronic stress reactions my body knows so well, communicated through my vagus nerve to my brain and back again, need me to constantly be aware that time is real because peritrauma timelessness can so easily take over my experience, and steal my life away from me.  Anxiety makes things unreal to me, and feeds that continuing sense of disconnection I feel between my self and my self and my self and the world.  Paying close attention to the littlest things is kind and gentle to me.  I can watch it with my breathing, “Exhale, Linda, Exhale,” knowing as I do this my vagus nerve begins to smile and with every careful, mindful breath and with every careful, mindful action I can steal another instant of my own life away from the trauma that built my body and experience my life as ME.

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