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Ever since writing my last post I have a memory from 30 years ago that keeps popping up for attention.  It is evidently strongly connected to what I wrote about here –

+ACTION, REACTION AND CHOICE

I had known for over a year that I needed to make a decision about my 2nd marriage — to a very good man, but to a man that I could best say I loved as my brother, certainly was not ‘in love’ with as with a mate.

All the thoughts and feelings that had come to me appeared in what seemed to be a random way, and nothing about the pattern in which my ‘in-formation’ came to me happened in a useful, coherent way.  Nothing ‘stuck together’ so that I could begin to see what was my own picture of this marriage, of what was best for me (and hence for my children).  I COULD not make a decision.  I therefore could not make a choice to set change in motion in my life.

This memory contains what seems to be my best self example of how information from my right brain hemisphere trumps information that comes to me through my left one.

One day I was visiting a woman friend I had met a few years earlier in AA. I liked her.  I trusted her.  I resonated with her.  As we sat in her living room discussing the ins and outs and ups and downs and mysteries pertaining to my paralyzed indecision about ‘divorce this man I can’t even stand to sleep with’ versus ‘oh no, I can’t divorce a second time!’ — I saw an image.  It appeared so clearly to me that I could SEE it, HEAR the sound of it — and I still can in my memory.

As this image came to me I was able to describe it to my friend, and by the time the image brought itself fully and clearly into my ‘in-formation’ gathering process, completely consciously — shared with self and other — I had my answer.

As if held in 3-D suspended animation I saw a very large outdoor faucet hanging in the air in one corner of the living room.  (The proper name for this object?  A hose bib, though this has never made any sense to me.)

In the opposite corner of the living room, at the same height from the floor, came the gushing stream of water that SHOULD have been coming out directly from the open faucet.

Instantly I had my ANSWER!

Finally everything made SENSE to me.  This kind of sense involves the senses of the body as they communicate with the self about one’s reality — its experience and meaning — through the right brain hemisphere.  As this image appeared to me my senses of what it looked like, what the water sounded like, what it would have felt like physically to have held my hand under the stream all gave me important information so that this bigger SENSE of what truly made sense to me could finally come clear.  I sensed the sense of the image in every possible way.

My life in my marriage FELT just like that to me.  I was not ‘lined up’ within myself with the life I was living.  I was not living my own truth.  I was ‘off’ center, being pulled further and further away from who I was (though at this time when I was 30 I had no idea what that really meant). My inner core, my inner source of my life was split apart from the life I was living.

I left my friend’s house that day with no doubts about my decision and I have never regretted it.  I knew it was my honest decision and therefore was the right one.

No amount of trying to linearly or logically or rationally THINK my way through making this decision had worked.  I needed to know what I REALLY knew — and this experience was the only way that could happen.

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