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Some days I wake up with a feeling I cannot name that seems to consume my body – nay, more like possess it.  At those times I have to work hard, and consciously as if to wrest my own body away from this feeling.  If I give a pause to this conscious work the feeling is back again and it seems that I all but disappear in its wake.

What is this feeling?  What is it that is so important my own body would rather experience just that single very limited and limiting feeling rather than open itself up to the ACTUAL conditions of my personal environment?  I can only imagine that my body, left to its own devices, has a set point within it that it returns to like the proverbial apple falling from a tree branch to the ground below.

When this feeling is here, as it consumes my body, when I as a separate person (is that even possible, to be separate from what ones body knows?) have to carve out a ‘second life’ for the day, one in which I attempt to control what I feel with my mind, I realize this feeling is one that I have run from all of my life as I try to stay just ahead of it, just ahead of the roaring monster who is chasing me, who hides around every corner, who pounces on me when I least expect it, who wishes more than anything in its existence to hurt me as if it wishes to devour me.  But I always knew from the time I was born until I left home at 18 that this monster did NOT actually want to eat me alive.  It wanted to make me suffer.  A dead child does not suffer, and to my mother, of what use would I be to her then?

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I looked inside of myself this morning for some new word I have never used before – in my thoughts or in my writing – to use as I might try to tame this beast, this devouring monster that grew itself into my body from the time I was born.  What word?  Yes, I could say this is all tied to a sense of foreboding.  But that is a worn word.  I began using that word for this feeling about four years ago.  It is obvious to me this morning that this word has no power to banish my body’s memories of the attacks of the monster-beast.

A new word.  I ask my brain-mind for a new word.  It gave me this one:

Prescience

: foreknowledge of events: a : divine omniscience b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight

Origin of PRESCIENCE

Middle English, from Late Latin praescientia, from Latin praescient-, praesciens, present participle of praescire to know beforehand, from prae- + scire to know — more at science

First Known Use: 14th century

For pronunciation of ‘prescience’ click HERE

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“Well,” I say to myself, followed by “Thank you.”

I realize as I study this word that it has more power to help me heal myself than my old word, foreboding, could ever contain.

THIS word, Prescience, has within itself a connection to ME – to my powers, to my abilities, to my SMARTS!

I have said over the span of many years that as I went along in my infant-childhood life I was NEVER prepared for my mother’s attacks upon me.  Always they seem in my memory to have happened ‘out of the blue’, without my having seen any single one of them coming beforehand.

BUT!  Maybe (as this new word suggests) I ALWAYS saw them coming, I was ALWAYS preparing myself for the last attack at the same time I was trying to recover from the most previous one, along with those connected in the entire line of attacks upon me my mother had accomplished over the span of my entire existence up until each new attack began.

What did that mean?  What does it mean to me today?

“foreknowledge of events: a : divine omniscience b : human anticipation of the course of events : foresight”

Of course my body had this foreknowledge.  It had it from the time of my birthing, from the time I was born.  Never had there been a time my mother did not believe I was the devil’s child, not human, sent to kill her during childbirth.  Never had there been a time from that moment when her psychosis came awake and completely colored her relationship with me, her firstborn and perfectly beautiful daughter, that I was her enemy that she had to destroy.

Having ALWAYS had this information in my body – having it build itself into my body at the same time my mother’s traumas built my body in response to her – means that there was NEVER a time I didn’t know how in danger both of her impending attacks and of the very real possibility of my imminent destruction.  Never did I experience either a safe PRESENT moment or memory of a safe past moment so that I, in my growing body-brain could experience with anticipation a FUTURE moment in which I would be safe.

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So perhaps today as I head out to cut my 5-gallon white plastic ex-pickle buckets in half to make them each into two short buckets – so that I can stack them pyramid fashion as I create a tower to plant my new tiny strawberry plants in – I can think inside of myself, “Good for you, Linda!  Good for you that you were able to transform the certain knowledge that you lived always in such an unsafe world into the ability to move forward in time carrying your OWN self right along with you!  It is your OWN self that can see the possibility of growing luscious red happy strawberries in those (what’s the word the kids use today?  Oh, “repurposed”) buckets.”

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I don’t seem to have a way to make this feeling of ‘prescience’ go away, any more than I can continue living if I made my body go away.  This feeling is part of this body I live in.  This feeling is part of who I AM.

This feeling is different than what I have always considered it to be.  It is NOT just fear.  It is NOT just heightened awareness that any danger can lurk anywhere in this lifetime.  It is NOT just paranoia, not ‘anxiety’ and not just foreboding – although it can seem to feel just like all of these survival-based states of being combined into one.

This feeling is a special gift I have been given from the time I was born – although I had little choice other than to nourish this feeling once my monster-beast very ill abusive mother herself nourished the seed of my prescience ability in my newborn infant body.  She – and I – in interaction together formed patterns of survival within my body that will NEVER leave me until I breath my last breath.

She hurt me terribly in every way she could think of (and get away with).  I responded by enduring so that I survived her.

PRESCIENCE.  Yes, it all began before I had the ability to develop even the tiniest thought within my body-brain consciously.  Preverbally I became an expert at ‘pre-science’ – that science of being able to combine all the genetic abilities I had been born with into a professional-level science of being able to not only STAY ALIVE, but to also stay alive ON MY INSIDES where my truest soul-spirit-self lives.

I used everything my mother ever did to me to become such a PRESCIENCE professional that my prescience abilities will NEVER leave me!  “This, my dear Linda, is a GIFT!  Do not fear this fear of fear itself!  This is NOT fear.  This is NOT anxiety.  This is NOT foreboding in any ordinary sense of the word.  You, dearest charmed one, are an expert, professional PRESCIENTIST!”

And not many alive today, really only those who have had to develop this gift within their body so that they could endure the unendurable from the time they were born – those whose main enemy was the same mother who brought them into the world in the first place – have this amazing ability to NEVER lose sight of how the body and the self are so intimately connected that one knows what the other knows NO MATTER WHAT – so that BOTH can respond appropriately should any danger appear within the immediate world at any given split second in time.

ON THE OTHER HAND – knowing at the same time that the PRESCIENTIST retains its gifts that planting strawberries CAN HAPPEN ANYWAY IN A SAFE AND REASON-ABLE FASHION lets me get on with my day.  I know I want not only to endure today, endure into the future moments of my life – I ALSO know that in my future I want STRAWBERRIES!

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