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Yesterday I spent all of the generously given birthday money I received on drip-soaker irrigation supplies.  It just struck me as I decided to write a post that my thoughts FEEL about how that collection of pieces, parts, hoses and tubes looks like in their pile on my kitchen floor:  JUMBLED.

Then I thought, “Well, if one of the key indicators of a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern-disorder is ‘incoherency’ in the narrating (and living) of one’s life, then figuring out how to put together a complicated working irrigation system for my back, side and front yard is actually a similar process to organizing BOTH jumbles — the one on my kitchen floor and the one inside of me.”

OK.  Then, “If it isn’t necessary to put together my irrigation system in a simple straight LINEAR way then it isn’t necessary to put my thoughts together in a linear straight way to make them organized, oriented and coherent, either.”

I will certainly admit that putting that watering system together so that it actually WORKS within the limitations I have both financially and expertise-wise, is intimidating.  Both involve a learning curve, and if I want to get both jobs accomplished, I have to start at one single place:  THE BEGINNING.

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Regarding my jumble of thoughts, I will go back and pick up a little piece of information I found on a website early in the week when my daughter and I were discussing (via email), “How important is it for an infant to crawl before it walks, and how is crawling related to the ability to read?”

From the Minnesota Learning Resource Center I found an article titled, Movement and Brain Development which states:

“Fascinating research informs us that the baby’s brain develops through natural movements of nursing, tummy time, rolling, creeping and crawling. Baby’s most complex senses, vision and hearing, are also organized by doing the same movements.

Developmental movements organize and structure the brain for cognition, attention asset (vs. attention deficit) and emotional regulation, the ability to modulate between calm and excited states. The earliest learning takes place through movement explorations. Baby’s natural movements also provide a baseline of core strength and good coordination.”

(Bold type is mine)

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I had never until the moment my eyes scanned these words heard the term ATTENTION ASSET.  “Well how cool is that?”  I thought to myself.  “Like in so many cases, what we tend to hear about is the negative side of things.”  That’s what I have finally come to understand about all the public hoopla around ‘the stress response’.  We are not likely to hear about the other part of the WHOLE that makes up our body-brain-nervous system responses to life — THE CALM AND CONNECTION SYSTEM which is exactly part of the SAME response system.

In the same way we are likely to hear of ‘attention deficit’ without hearing at the same time about ‘attention asset’.

So, I appreciated LEARNING something new just from these few simple words.  At the same time I know that ALL learning IS MOVEMENT — and also that because I have some particular prior learning, I also understand that the interactions an infant has with its earliest caregivers ALSO are also exactly building these same abilities in the infant body-brain at the same time!

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But what I am particularly thinking about right now is about how MOVEMENT is essential throughout our entire lifespan so that we can both continue to live as we continue to GROW.  We make no significant, meaningful progress on ANYTHING (even staying alive) without movement taking place.

All the so-called ‘anxiety spectrum’ disorders that pile up inside our body-brain due to our having had to grow and develop our body-brain in the first place in horrendously inadequate, traumatic, abusive, malevolent infant-childhoods ALL involve some complication with our attention.  As our body responds continually to our environment, we are often left with a disorganized-disoriented (dissociated) condition that saps our life force and deprives us of the ability to focus our conscious, self-directed desires and will power into the channels that would allow what REALLY MATTERS MOST TO US to manifest in our lives.

I am thinking not only about dissociation, but also about ‘depression’ and ‘posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’.  If I don’t build my irrigation system exactly right, water is going to leak and spill, overflow itself in its hoses and in its tubes in the wrong direction, overwater, underwater, and basically NOT end up where I want it where it is needed.

That’s very similar to how my thoughts and my energies (ALL of them) end up much of the time if I am not very careful to take care of the JUMBLE inside of me.  The ability to focus ATTENTION and to be resiliently flexible and responsive to our inner and outer environment has been DISRUPTED through the horrific experiences in our infant-childhood that we survived.

As a consequence, I believe we survivors have to build our conscious awareness and power of directed CHOICE every moment we are alive.  We cannot take for granted that either DECISION or CHOICE comes easily to us.  All severe trauma has the power to change our body, and if the stress response end becomes overtaxed — and hence takes over the utilization of our energy and life force on the AUTOMATIC AND UNCONSCIOUS LEVEL, we will have (pardon me) a HELL of a job (if not a battle) getting control of our own energy and life force back again — for our SELF.

The ONLY way I see to improve our well-being and the overall quality of our (survivorship) life is by finding as many ways as possible to NOTICE both what is happening in us that DOES NOT HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention deficit) and to what DOES HAVE OUR CONSCIOUS ATTENTION (attention asset).

If I simply turn on my outside water spigots and let them run, the water will go wherever it wants to because I have not both paid attention to how the water is directed AND found ways to make it go where I want it to according to my conscious CHOICE and intentions.  This jumble of $147 worth of irrigation ‘stuff’ piled in my kitchen has no use or purpose whatsoever until I make the movements — ALL of them — that are required to make something out of them according to my wishes and my intention.

On a personal level, I have to ask myself, “What is your investment, Linda, in directing the flow of your own life today?”  In the same way that I have invested all of my birthday gift money in my hopes for a finished and working irrigation system, I need to FIND, KNOW, VALUE, and INVEST in my hopes for myself in my life regarding every part of it-me that I can wrestle away from my body’s automatic pilot that my trauma-built body-brain runs on — naturally.

Sure, my body has hopes, plans and ways to keep itself alive — but, “Wait a dang minute here?  Where is MY choice in all of this living?  What do I want, need, desire, hope for?”

Staying alive isn’t enough.  Building my irrigation system right isn’t enough to promise me a beautiful yard.  I need the plants.  I need to amend the soil, pull the weeds, chose the right plants, feed them, give them enough water for their needs, make sure they have the right amount of sunshine.

And — I need to enjoy them!

I am making all this yard-related effort and movement for simply THAT reason — it is a part of who I am since my earliest memories that I love flowers.  Along the way I figured out that growing food is also a good thing.  What I love CAN have a ‘lionesses’ share’ of my attention.  No matter how great this struggle, the more I learn how to organize and orient myself according to what my passions can make clear to me, the more I can direct the flow and consequence of my own energy and life force — at the same time I diminish how ‘anxiety’ rules my life.

The physical exercise that gardening (and my addition of adobe into the landscaping) gives to me benefits me in exactly the same way the author referenced above says about little tiny growing babies.  We NEVER leave behind the need to MOVE.  (Contrasted to being miserably STUCK anywhere along our life’s journey!)

And if I can’t get outside due to weather to do what I want to, I can jog, I can dance — I can do SOMETHING.  And I have to because physical movement of the body is absolutely necessary to human well-being.  I am convinced of that fact.  Movement helps cure the ‘jumbles’ — so off I go with my attention focused on my intention to make SOMETHING GOOD happen in my life today!

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