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A friend I met in a college art course over 30 years ago called me this evening.  She has lived in Manhattan for a long time now so we don’t see one another often.  As she gave me a report on the past six months of her life she told me of at least ten people in her circle of friends who are either battling cancer or have died of it in recent months.  One of the people battling uterine cancer is my friend’s dear sister.

How good we are as a society at blandly accepting the tragedy and devastation of major sicknesses of all kinds while we seem equally adept at pretending to ourselves and one another that we simply do not understand how these bad things happen to us!

I enjoyed telling my friend of my new actions to take control (finally) of the state of my body although my entire day – and probably quite a few more to come – looked exactly like this:

“WHEN WE SAY CLEANSE, WE MEAN CLEANSE.  All this can have quite a laxative effect.  Green juice alone can do it.  This is the way your body physically gets rid of the acidic bad stuff.  It doesn’t just evaporate.  This is just what you want:  to make sure you get rid of the pollution that has built up in your body, and in particular in your small intestine and colon.  Until you know your body’s response to the program, it is wise not to have anything else planned so you can focus on the pH Miracle Whole Body Cleanse — and just stay fairly close to the bathroom facilities.  Be prepared to pay a visit to the bathroom at least six to ten times a day as the acidic toxins clear from your body.” — by Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health – Page 175

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I am fortunate to be home in order to do this cleanse, although the reasons I am home do not make me remotely happy (trauma caused disability).  What would happen to us as a nation if we all decided we have had ENOUGH of our ignorance and of our stubborn refusal to see what is actually right in front of our face if we quit believing all the lies we tell one another and believe ourselves? 

What would happen to us if everyone working decided enough is enough – “We want to LIVE and do so WELL?”  What would happen is that water usage would go way up as people going through detox made very good use of their “bathroom facilities” as the vast amounts of toxic waste in our bodies left us behind. 

What would happen is that the amount of CRAP FAKE PRODUCT we pretend is food and beverage would crash the market as sales plummeted while green vegetables of all kinds could not be found in enough mass to feed the starving masses (that is what we are actually doing as we consume “food” that is not really food).

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I have never wanted to be one of those “weird health food nuts.”  Yet if I don’t get with the health program I know for a fact I am going to meet an ugly demise due to death by an awful disease that will take not only my quality of life away but take away my very life.  These are not “bad” people that we hear of with diabetes, thyroid, autoimmune diseases, arthritis, heart disorders, depression, digestive disorders, “nervous” disorders, cancers – the list is seemingly not only endless but is growing.  Who is immune?

Who will bother to spend the time and money to click on the link of this book (above), pay to order it and then READ it?  Nobody.  That is my guess.  Nobody who comes to this blog will hear a word I am saying.  Nobody I talk to about the terrible consequences we are suffering due to wrong DIET and unhealed emotional difficulties including high stress will listen.  Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies make billions right along with the medical mainstream establishment from our stupidity and stubborn refusal to learn the truth about what our BODY NEEDS us to do for it so that it can heal itself.

Why am I surprised?  I look around myself from my little corner of the universe and detect daily the evidence that the human race is truly insane.  That is just one more species-wide sickness to add to the rampantly disintegrating state of our world. 

Yet one by one we can make different choices.  What I am doing now is mentally and emotionally nearly as challenging to me as were the horrors of my chemotherapy treatments five years ago.  People loved, supported, cared, helped me THEN — but here I am alone racing against time to the toilet as I try to FIX the mess that I have created (with major help in the beginning of a psycho abusive madwoman) in my body so that I can BE WELL and not get SICK.

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Nobody attends to us when we do this kind of work.  Do we LIKE being sick as a nation so we can get attention?  From family members and friends who feel so badly for us because they love us?  From doctors and medical professionals whom we PAY huge volumes of money to when we fall on our pathetic backsides?

I guarantee there is NOTHING pleasurable about doing what I am doing now — but boy is this making me THINK, FEEL, WORK, STRUGGLE and GROW!  I find myself wondering how, when, where, why did we ever come to believe that eating our food was supposed to be right in line with the major Hollywood entertainment industry?

There is nothing particularly charming about throwing 10 fresh spinach leaves and broccoli florets into a blender to make the required juice for this first healing cleanse.  No whipped cream?  “I want a potato chip!”

Petulant child in me wanted a potato chip tonight.  I don’t EAT potato chips.  I just want what I can’t have.  I want to eat totally useless CRAP, pretend that is fun because everyone else is doing it, and remain immune to the consequences.

“Linda, you are turning 62 years old.  GROW UP ALREADY!  Get informed and get busy!  This is the only body you are going to have in this lifetime and you trade its health for brownies and nachos?  Girl, you are gonna get what you ask for.”

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P.S.  I am up writing this two hours after I tried to go to sleep.  As I lay there in bed for an hour I noticed something interesting as I continue to struggle with my breathing.  I suffer from chronic dissociation that began with severe infant abuse.  I have Dissociative Identity Disorder without the identies due to the horrendous abuse I suffered for the first 18 years of my life.  Tonight I clearly discovered that there are multiple “mes” each trying to breathe at the same time!!

Of course one of those breathers still smokes which is making the breathing increasingly challenging for the rest of me/mes.  I didn’t take time to read the yoga book on breathing today that I mentioned in my last post.  I have enough on my plate right now — well, no, that’s not quite the right analogy!  I actually have NOTHING on my literal plate as I live for 7-21 days on a green vegetable juice “feast!”

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I have been thinking back over the 4+ years I have been posting on this blog to see if I can remember ever having recommended any specific book not about what happened (especially) to change the earliest physiological development of severe infant-child abuse and trauma survivors but rather about HOW TO HEAL from what happened to us.  I can’t think of one book, or even of one train of thought or practice that has yet struck me as holding forth the kind of practical hope for healing that I would demand of any particular healing or “therapy” technique.

Not a one.  Not one approach has captivated, intrigued, impressed or ever struck me as being of such vast and truthful importance that I would ever say to myself, “Gee Whiz!  This is a SURE BET for MY healing!”  Certainly if I could not find that book for myself I would not ever recommend or even suggest it to my readers. 

I have two books in my possession that lie near to me at hand right now that I believe FINALLY hold hope for my own progress in healing.  I find that fascinating!  I consider that both of these books, as I mentioned them in my recent post, contain accurate information that lies at the foundational level of what I need for my own healing.  I will turn 62 at the end of this coming August.  It has taken me a long time, I guess, to be ready for these books and therefore to be ready to recommend them to this blog’s readers.

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I am only at the starting line regarding what these books have to teach me.  Both of them deal with the BODY.  The first one – the revised and updated 2010 edition of a book written by Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health is the most worthwhile book I have ever read – and read – and read again.  I feel as though I have entered a university course on my own body, and I have a long way to go before I can say I truly understand what this book is truly telling me.

That means I still have a long way to go before I understand how my body operates!  I know as a trauma-changed person that it is most important for me (and for others like me) to understand how the “stress” of the massive amounts of trauma I have experienced are affecting me today.  How I digest the food and liquids I put into my mouth matters no more or less than how I digest my own personal experiences with trauma in all the ways it has made my life hard to live – and harder to love.

I survived advanced aggressive breast cancer (I actually had two of them) through “western” medical means 5 ½ years ago.  I am 100% convinced that if I had known the information in this book and had been able to put it into practice years ago, I would not have gotten the cancer in the first place.  Certainly if I had known and applied this information once my cancer was diagnosed I am certain my body could have healed that cancer all on its own.

I of course can make this statement regarding nobody but myself – but I now fully intend to heal through this information other problems I can no longer outrun, which include osteoporosis that is already destroying my bones, chronic diarrhea (I had to consume 8-10 antiD pills per day of my travels), and my fear that my cancer will return.  Through this process of learning and applying what I am learning I have true hope that trauma-related PTSD, chronic depression, nasty anxiety that plagues me and even my dissociation can begin to heal.  I have never had this hope before, but neither have I ever had the information this book is giving me.

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The other book is in an area I have never considered for myself before now.  I am a serious and very long-term cigarette smoker.  I already have onset of COPD – and I CANNOT FIND THE WAY TO QUIT!!  I did quit once 27 years ago for 3 months.  Something very stressful happened, I had one puff – and that was THAT!

The Yoga of Breath: A Step-by-Step Guide to Pranayama

Richard Rosen

ME?  YOGA?

I have only made it to the third page of the first chapter so far.  This book will take some time!  But – I have hope!  Many times I find myself holding my breath.  Seriously holding my breath, as if in the midst of a terror that makes terror pale.  I feel very small.  Well, we all know how that terror feels when we are very small and our attacker is deadly mean and at us….

BUT…..

I often search for word origins to deepen my comprehension of the meaning of words in English.  I have for many, many years felt a special delight when I find an English word whose origin or word family connects back to Sanskrit.  I have never even known why I feel that way!  It’s a sense of rightness.  A sense of having found my way home.

At the risk of making this a long worded post, I am going to share some of the author’s words in the first three pages of the first chapter (pages 13-15).  They speak to me.  Perhaps they will speak to you, especially if you have been confined for your whole life as I have been under the influence of a body changed by trauma.

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Yoga

“The classical or literary language of India is Sanskrit.  The word itself means “well or completely formed, perfected.”  Sanskrit is indeed a beautiful and highly evocative language.  Many of its words remind me of a Russian doll, which opens up to reveal a smaller doll inside, and which in its turn opens to reveal an even smaller doll, and so on and on until the littlest doll is exposed.  Even though I don’t know the language well, I can find my way around a Sanskrit-English dictionary [I want one of these!].  I like to look up words in the yoga lexicon and pull them apart to see what’s inside.  This often gives me new insights into my practice.  We’ll be unraveling Sanskrit words as we go through this guide.  Your practice will be enriched by the hidden meanings in this perfect language.

[What a concept!  A perfect language!  Perfection is healing, I think.  The idea of it inspires me.  Being in the presence of perfection is healing.  But this is a paradox.  It is not that literal perfection is possible here on earth – but there is the best of the best of the best….  All of life is going in that direction.  One way or the other.]

“Let’s start with a word that may already be familiar to you – the Sanskrit verb yuj, which means to “yoke” or “harness.”  It’s a relic of an age, many thousands of years ago, when Indian warriors rode into battle in chariots.  These wagons typically carried an archer and his driver or charioteer and were drawn by two horses, which had the reputation of being rather ferocious.  “At his deep neigh,” sings one old hymn about the cry of a warhorse, “like the thunder of heaven / the foemen tremble in fear.”  It was the charioteer’s task to hitch these barely tamed beasts to the chariot, no small feat in the days before the invention of the yoke.  He needed both extraordinary braver and skill, and as a consequence, his position was highly esteemed.

“In the everyday language, yuj assumed the sense of “unite, connect, add, bring together,” as well as – since the occupation of yoking or harnessing implied that the charioteer had learned a particular technique that got the chariot up and running – “made ready, prepare, set to work, employ, apply.”  Two notions, then, of a desired end and its means are conveyed by the verb yuj and its several derivatives, including the masculine noun yoga.

The practice of yoga is very old.  There were surely contemporaries of our charioteer who were engaged in some form of yoga, though it probably didn’t exactly resemble what we call yoga today.  In general, yoga has four goals:

1.  Regeneration or health, and the end of suffering

2.  Skillful action

3.  Integration or self-knowledge

4.  Liberation

[All sounding good to me and related/connected to what all of us trauma survivors are doing all of the time just by remaining alive!]

“In much of the sacred literature of India, liberation (moksha) is explained as the yoking or joining of the embodied soul (jiva-atman) to the Great Self (parama-atman).  Both yoke and join, by the way, are cognate with yuj and yoga.  This is a pointed allusion to the charioteer, his horses, and the chariot.  One of the most famous parables in the Upanishads [a collection of philosophical texts which form the theoretical basis for the Hindu religion.] recalls and plays upon this root meaning:

Know thou the soul (atman, self) as riding in a chariot,

The body as the chariot.

Know thou the intellect (buddhi) as the chariot-driver,

And the mind (manas) as the reins.

>>  The senses (indriya), they say, are the horses;

The objects of sense, what they range over….

>>  He who has not understanding,

Whose mind is not constantly held firm –

His senses are uncontrolled,

Like the vicious horses of a chariot-driver.

>>  He, however, who has the understanding of a chariot-driver,

A man who reins in his mind –

He reaches the end of his journey,

The highest place of Vishnu.

…However the supreme attainment is imagined, whether as a blissful merging with the Great Self or the quelling of the vicious horses of consciousness and nature, yogis emphasize both practice and study….

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NOTE:  My mother’s severe psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mental illness took away from her the ability to DO what this poem is suggesting — she was forced to live this poem’s opposite….  A disaster.

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This idea struck me, the thought of our body being a chariot in need of an expert driver.  A trauma-changed body changes the entirety of a survivor’s life!  What do we have the power to change about the way our body IS in this lifetime – with us being taken along for the ride?

What choices can we make to change – I mean REALLY change – our BODY?  I choose to smoke – for whatever reason.  I choose what I eat and drink.  I choose a lot of things that, according to both of these books, have great influence on HOW I am WHO I am in this lifetime.

None of this is EASY!  Heavens!  No!  But I know for a fact, for example, that even READING this book — The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health WILL change a person’s life for the better! 

(I also make a note here briefly that infant abuse survivors have been deprived from ever having built true HEALTH into their body in the first place.  This is true in some way for every early abuse and trauma survivor but ESPECIALLY true for infant abuse, neglect and trauma survivors.  That means for us, when WE heal, we are giving something to ourselves that we have never had before.  This is different for us from “reclaiming” a total health that we were prevented from having from the start of our life.)

Miracle is exactly the correct word – but this is much bigger than the title of this book implies.  The MIRACLE is exactly THE BODY that we live with – no matter how tormented it has been, how trauma-altered its development was – this book explains HOW our body works in relation to what we eat and drink – think and feel – and DO with our life, one moment in time following another one.

This IS something we can do!  I have no doubt about it.  Our life is not a competition with anyone else.  We are our own charioteer.

And this charioteer needs to eat RIGHT and learn how to BREATH so that I can LIVE!  Not subsist, but LIVE!

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I tried to create a slide show of the pictures I took while visiting my youngest brother and his wife the first week of June onboard their boat, Room Seven.  Included are the shrimp which were obviously caught and prepared before I ate them!  I don’t know why these uploaded out of order but I don’t dare to try to change a thing.

I have never slept so perfectly in my life as I did during this visit!  My love of Alaska has never faded and if I am fortunate I will be able to return there again to live at some point in the future – just not yet.

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+WHAT WAS OUR FAMILY ALASKA HOMESTEAD FROM THE AIR – REST OF MY ALASKA VISIT PICTURES

June 23, 2013

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June 13, 2013, Thursday.  I have been waiting since my return home from my travels on Tuesday afternoon to write a post until my thoughts cleared and organized themselves.  I might be waiting for quite some time for that to happen, so I will trust that somehow whatever I find myself writing here will make a kind of sense of its own. 

Most simply put, my life is going to change drastically in the upcoming weeks because I changed during my travels.  As my friend so clearly put it today, I have passed through “a spiritual portal.”  He is exactly correct.

Once a person has indeed passed through a life-changing event how possible is it to look backwards to track exactly when the changes took place?  I know the time duration of this portal travel was literally from when the airport shuttle picked me up at my house to take me the 90 miles to where my flight took off on Sunday morning, June 2nd to when it dropped me off when I arrived home.  I was one person at the start of this adventure and a different person when I returned — or so it certainly seems.

In between I was loved and was able to spend a short time with people in my family I love.  It has been too long since I have seen these people.  It has been too long since I have seen Alaska, land that I love as well.  When I arrived home in this hot dusty desert I knew that although I have been happy to call this high desert land home for the past 14 years — it is now time to leave it to travel and live in the northland again.

The first step of this move will land me in Fargo, ND first where my daughters and my preschooler grandsons live.  This place is flat with a Siberian winter — this is not a land that I love.  But there are people there I love very much and for a time, I am not sure for how long a time — at least for a year — I want to share my life with these people who are precious to me.

Then – perhaps – I will make the full circle to return to Eagle River, Alaska where I was raised until I left home in 1969 at age 18.

How will I move?  I do not know.  What will I take?  What will I leave behind?  How will I feel in the darkness of frigid northern winter?  I don’t know.

What I did become very clear about is that love is the most important experience of my lifetime.  I consider love to be a spiritual quality.  It became clear to me that even though I have had a respite – a very nice one – from the north these past 14 years, even climate and yes, even geography is of this material world.  I wish to put the spiritual value of love first — and if that means a sacrifice of some physical comforts – so be it.

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I have had enough times of being homeless in my life to know I HATE that state of survival.  It will take some particular care and planning to orchestrate this move north given the limitations of my financial affairs.  I look around me now and in this home I see there is nothing but a few changes of clothing that I need to take with me.  Anything else – like taking my tools with me especially, will be a luxury.

I did not in any way anticipate having myself change in these few days of being gone from here.  I will feel a loss leaving friends here, leaving my garden, but my mind is made up.  I am moving.

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As far as the book writing process seems to be going – or more accurately, not going – I am done with it for now.  Once I arrive north and can spend time with the grandbabies my daughter will have time freed up to complete the editing of the 10 waiting manuscripts.  She has been hard at work on the edit of the first book while I have been traveling.  I thank her with all my heart, but I still cannot go back and read a single word of what has been written.

Neither can I write a word forward right now.  If I was reading along in a book I would say it was like I turned a page and the next one was entirely blank.  Not a word on it.

I have reached that point in my writing.  I have not a single word to say next for those books.

I am too aware of suffering.  I need some balance of love, peace and laughter.  I need loved ones to play with.  I need to experience my grandsons’ coming into this world, and I need to experience being with them as they take their steps into their new and exciting future.

Meanwhile I need to find boxes.  I need to fill a few.  I need to find homes for many objects around me that will not be traveling forward into the next stages of my life with me.  I hope good tenants can be found to respect this house, to enjoy life here, to care for the gardens – and hopefully even for my hens and my two cats.

In the meantime I am studying the book titled “The pH Miracle” by Robert Young (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED).  I am changing my diet.  I am also studying my first book on yoga as it is concerned with breath – and I am preparing to successfully quit smoking cigarettes.  It hit me on my travels that if I am going to work hard to improve my physical health to prevent cancer from returning and to help my crumbling bones and to inspire my breath in better ways, I need a future that does not leave me aching with all my heart in loneliness.

I have other homes.  I am going to take actions to enjoy them.  All this is happening before my 62nd birthday this coming August 31st.  There are so many things I cannot change in this crazy world.  But then again, there are also many that I CAN work to change.  It is to those that I currently look.

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June 1, 2013.  Today is my last day at home before I travel.  I was finally able to fall asleep last night shortly before dawn.  The intensity of my anxiety (that’s all I knew to name it) gripped me and seemed to be building toward a crescendo that never appeared.  It included a growing paralysis that literally took my breath away.

“Who am I if I cannot even breath?”

It seemed as though that was all there was left of me — a focused concentration on finding a way to let breath into and then out of my body.

“This will not do!  What is the matter with me?”

Finally, left in a state of panic, I forced myself to put into thoughts in words everything I could imagine that could be tied to this state of such heightened distress.  I tracked all my thoughts carefully, meticulously, one by one, until they led to one feeling:  sadness created by great loss.

Because of the severe abuse I suffered from birth until I left home at 18 I know that sadness has been as much a part of my physical body all of my life as terror, feelings of foreboding and panic have been.  But I know I carved out space within which I could experience a gamut of other feelings anyway.  That’s a complicated, intense and difficult way to live — never being free of trauma emotions while trying to make myself bigger than they are.

Why now is my universe seeming to collapse with me in the center of it?

I write this now because I have figured it out — how I am being affected by the loss of the love of my life and of my greatest friendship.

I cannot write of this love.  Its details lie in a circle around me sparkling against darkness in moving circles of ripples wherever I look.  All of this rests in mystery like life itself.  Like death.  Like change.

Thirteen years ago I met this man eye to eye at my gate on the property I used to live on then.  Literally as our eyes met it was love at first sight.  In an imperfect world, or at least in a world too complex to understand.

What I learned last night about myself is that in the past five months since a great change in his life removed him physically from my life I have been left without our conversations which meant more to me (and to my well-being) than I have yet allowed myself to realize.  I have left untended the millions of ways that the unavailability of this friendship has affected me.

When the hurt comes from this loss I have turned away in a different direction refusing to face what I cannot change and can no longer deny:  The loss of the marvel of this man has made everything about me in my life harder to endure.  Not only is he not present to help smooth my way but the loss of him is amplifying every difficulty as it sustains great difficulty of its own.  Trouble does not diminish as it used to.  It has grown in these five months until — as I found last night — it has nearly buried me alive.

I am suffocating from the loss of this relationship.

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It is not only that I cannot share what confuses and perplexes me with my friend that has gridlocked me.  I also cannot share with him my hopes, my joys or my enthusiasms.  (I find myself so many times a day holding my breath.  Just now as I wrote those words — a deep SIGH!)  As I prepare to launch into the experiences of this coming trip I begin tomorrow I feel such a loss in not being able to share this adventure with my best friend.  He is sick, in pain, suffering and closed within the circle of his family who — for reasons so far beyond me — despise me.  (I am 61; he is 75 and is making his own choices.)

Time does not evaporate such mutual affections as my friend and I share — and will hold dear far beyond either of our last breaths in THIS world.  But time brings with it obstacles that cannot be altered by sheer will or hope or desire.  These changes are very real.  They must be accepted.  Must be included in some way in both of our lives.

But what way is that?

All I know is that for myself I must FEEL my way along a road I have not chosen but that has been chosen for me, nonetheless.  Against all odds this man and I found one another but neither of us were free to leave what remains of our destiny in this lifetime.  Our two destinies run parallel at a distance from one another — and that distance is growing.

Ours is a mysterious love that is complicated by life but not destroyed by it.  Of this I am certain.

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