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June 30, 2013.  Words.  A few words.  What is it about writing that holds hope for me that once I have put a collection of words together I will somehow feel better?  Which is to say that at the moment I don’t feel “better” at all!  Nope!  Life seems too complicated for me right now to give me any sense at all that everything is going to be the proverbial OK EVER let alone soon.

Did I bring “this” upon myself?  Yes, if I am accountable for being myself in the first place.  That I am in a state of unmet need and perplexity about possible options given my disabilities and very short financial resources deeply affects me – and what I can find to do about “this” seems so pitifully meager as to seem as NOTHING to me in these days.  These changing days.

I knew when I returned home from my Alaska-Seattle travels to see family at the beginning of this month that my needs are NOT being met here for meaningful relationships with people I love and who love me.  I have to leave here.  To go where?  When?  HOW can I move when I am living dollar to dollar with very few left at the end of each month?

I started dismantling my home anyway.  Growing stacks of boxes begin to surround my floorspace as I stack them along walls.  How can I know what I can keep if I know none of the above?  How can I find and keep a sense of magnanimous equilibrium in the midst of my growing sense of chaos?

I can handle chaos if it is constructive with a goal at the end of it, a goal in my mind.  Whatever goal I am working toward is nebulous.  I am scared.  I am sad. 

But I also know if all of my belongings have to end up in a storage locker then that’s what will have to happen because deep inside of myself I know I am not staying here.

I take baby steps each day the best that I can.  I am still involved in my cleanse as I have written about it recently although I took last Friday off to travel with friends the 90 miles to Tucson to visit a spiritual healer.  I am still stopped up from the antiD pills I had to take to get out my front door for the day.

Now THAT was a trip and a half!  All ended well post-driver getting lost and us ending up to our appointments late so that mine was cut short.  Which it didn’t have to be except that me being me gave the friend of my friend the first one knowing that I am too dang tough not to end up doing just fine if I (rather than her) was the one rushing pell-mell through such an important session.

Life being what life is with its twists and turns with surprises along the way, I made my right choice.  Courtesy and concern for others when I can show it helps me in deeper ways.  But the rushing through the information the healer, Christy, was sharing began the instant I walked into the room.  I knew it was not her descriptions of what needed to be healed for me that were of substance.  I needed and went there for the healing itself.

And the healing DID happen.  This woman has studied with traditional Native American healers for 30 years.  She is gifted in energy flows, in healing auras and chakras.  I have never given those much thought, and never have I studied them.  But I have known a number of women who, along with their friends, have gone through healing with this woman, Christy, and all have glowing reports. 

So I went with confidence. 

One important point Christy made clear to me is that healing itself as the body and soul respond takes time.  She did not use the analogy I recently used of “peaks and valleys.”  She referred to the image of a pendulum as she told me that in the days after this healing my inner pendulum of experience would swing first widely and then gradually settle down until the swings stop at center.  I am waiting for that day.  It is not here yet, and I suspect that much of what I feel today is part of the swinging effect.

I never realized that chakras can be damaged.  Well, evidently they can be, and certainly because I know of the severe trauma I have lived through it didn’t surprise me at all as Christy described to me what she “saw” and what she was going to heal.  I feel extremely fortunate to have found out about this woman and to have been taken by my very busy friend up to see her.  I am grateful for this healing.

Meanwhile I am living through the healing itself on so many levels that nothing about myself in my life feels “right” to me at this point in time.  Christy complimented me on how strong and healthy my “spirit chakra” is.  But living by faith and trust that there are higher powers that guide my life and make clear the way is not easy, either. 

I am doing more than transitioning.  I am transforming.  This is a difficult time for me.  I am not surprised.  I don’t LIKE this stage, but it is necessary.  I know that.  I am doing my part to make these levels of healing successful.  Along the way sometimes I simply MUST complain.  It is a part of my human process.

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Silly me.  Of course my healing journey must include peaks and valleys!  Healing is not something separate from life.  Life certainly has those peaks and those valleys.  What was I thinking?  I cannot separate out what I choose to accomplish toward my healing from my life itself!  “This, Linda, is a ONE THING!”

Night before last was an awful sleepless night – simply AWFUL!  Yesterday was no day to “write home about,” either!  Now, the day before yesterday was one of the best I have ever had.  It is so rare for me to FEEL GOOD for that many hours in a row!  And then the dark came – as it does – and BAM!!!!!!  There I was in an emotional crisis that lasted nearly 24 hours!

I did not understand – and still don’t – what triggered my crash.  I did NOTHING, thought NOTHING that I could track, and certainly did not ask to feel like absolute HELL.  And there I had been doing so WELL!

Dang!  Seemed pretty unfair to me!

I went hunting in every direction I could think of to find “what I had done wrong” that had created “what had gone wrong,” and I could find nothing.  My fall from my state of grace had simply taken me over without explanation!

The best I could come up with was that Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young who wrote the book that is my guide to healing, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health left out an important piece of information!  Leave it to me.  I found it.

These authors describe what they call a physical “healing crisis” that must nearly inevitably erupt for people so drastically changing their lifestyle, especially if they undertake the organic green vegetable juice (I strain mine) cleanse that I am in the middle of.  This is what they wrote:

WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR

“During a cleanse, toxins are dumped from where they’ve been stored in the tissues into the blood so they can be eliminated.  This means that for a while your blood is actually dirtier than it started out.  You may feel worse before you feel better.  Different people experience varying degrees of unpleasantness, or none at all, during this “healing crisis,” which may include nausea, weakness, dizziness, headaches, light-headedness, rashes, bad breath, flu-like symptoms, and fatigue….

“A healing crisis is actually a good sign.  But it can be too intense, and therefore discouraging or even harmful.  So monitor your progress closely .  Some mild discomfort can be expected, but you should not experience undue discomfort.  A healing crisis should be short-lived.,,,”  (pages 176-177)

As I have mentioned in previous posts I seriously doubt these authors come from the malevolent world of severe early abuse and trauma, so it would be natural for them to “forget” to mention EMOTIONAL healing crisis that must, I believe now, be a natural part of this detoxifying process for we survivors.

I am grateful that last night I went to sleep instantly and slept just fine.  Today I am better than fine because I am so aware of how painful the hours of yesterday and the night before were! 

I am so determined to accomplish this life change that will enable my body to heal itself that no drift or crash into a healing crisis of emotional HELL is going to keep me from continuing to move forward.

Everyone I know in town today who saw me when I went in to run errands commented on the incredible transformational changes in me!  I have lost 20 pounds since the beginning of this month, have a buoyancy in my gait I haven’t felt for over a decade, my spirit shines with new intensity in my eyes, and hope and confidence inform my every spoken word.

What is this?  Could this be life?

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There are times in our healing when what we need is so important that we must find a way to translate what is nearly always written by non-severe early abuse and trauma survivors presumably for the SAME — into something we who ARE such survivors can understand and work with.

My guess is that as Shelley Redford Young and Robert O. Young wrote the words I am going to include in this post in their book, The pH Miracle: Balance Your Diet, Reclaim Your Health they had no thought for the kind of lives — usually greatly difficult and shortened lives — that infant and child abuse survivors endure.  Because I don’t see how I can continue to live much longer or with any quality of life in a body that has lost the ability to digest ANYTHING without a run immediately to the bathroom I am left without any choice but to try to find a way to help myself to heal.

There are wonderful ideas in the following passage and there is nothing actually preventing we survivors from apply this wisdom to our own situation.  I do feel it is important for me and other survivors to keep in mind NOTHING about our life is as it might seem to people who are completely uninformed about what early severe trauma can do to its victims.  Yes, STRESS is STRESS – and even though we have lived with great traumatic stress and its distress, the physiological impact on our body CAN be lessened.

Enough.  Here is a section from the chapter “Motivation — How to Get It, How to Keep It” from the book mentioned above that is the basis of my current cleansing, healing efforts.

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THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS

“Those who wish to regain their health [note:  Severe early abuse and trauma in childhood greatly interferes with our ability to grow up entirely healthy in the first place.  This in NO way prevents us from healing to the best of our ability!] or prevent health challenges must be properly motivated to address the issue on all fronts, including eating, drinking and thinking.  This is not just a diet; the true pH miracle is a lifestyle.

“The eating and drinking part is actually sometimes the easiest.  The “thinking” part includes your thought processes, belief system, psychological health, emotional well-being, personal level of consciousness, and an entire host of attitudes, feelings, and behaviors.

Emotions can cause even more acid [not good, harms the body] than food and drink.  Powerful negative emotions come from all sorts of places and in all shapes and forms.  They can include thoughts, feelings, experiences, conscious and unconscious memories [I certainly include the vast amount of body-based trauma memories survivors of infant and child abuse trauma and neglect carry], and dreams.  Any of the many and various problems in living can cause emotional trauma.  They all come under the umbrella of “stress.”  And stress causes signficant amounts of acid to be dumped into your body.

“The great majority of people, even people in the most profound medical crisis, can return [note:  Don’t let this concept stop you!] to an excellent level of health if they conscientiously work to rebalance the body’s original alkaline design.  Conscientiously changing their eating, drinking, and lifestyle, and carefully following the pH Miracle program, they can and will be successful.  They can return to a level of health they have no experienced for many years, a level of health they never even quite imagined.

“But a small percentage of people fail to find full good health despite working hard to change their unhealthy eating and drinking habits.  They share one crucial trait in common:  They are challenged by psychological, emotional, behavioral, or spiritual problems that, perhaps, they do not fully address [note:  Well, we survivors have more of these and suffer from them more intensely than I believe these authors could ever “quite imagine.”  Improved health is STILL our birthright!], and in any case do not fully resolve.  [note:  Personally, being honest and completely realistic, given the extent of my infant-child abuse history I don’t believe it is humanly OR miraculously possible to “fully resolve” the extensive trauma-based troubles I AND my body face.  But I am giving this my ALL anyway!]  Where they fall down [note:  Grr!  Knocked down and nearly crushed to death during our most vulnerable stages of development is more like it!  I have to say, this kind of bias IRKS ME!  I’d like to see any non-survivor live through and live with the consequences we survivors do!  Anyway, continuing to focus on the positive, I continue.  We DO do some of what the authors describe and we can always make improvements.] is at the “thinking” part of the pH protocol.  Their patterns of thinking, ruminations, and emotions aren’t addressed in enough detail.  Unhealthy beliefs, attitudes, biases, value systems, or a diminished level of consciousness hold these people back.  They seem unable to bring an end to ongoing guilt [note:  I would certainly add shame.], grief, blaming, resentment, anger, self-pity, fear, anxiety, feuding, self-loathing mistrust, greed, false pride, spiritual confusion, and son on.  Perhaps they need professional guidance to deal with whichever of these issues dogs them, but do not seek it.  The stress of all this adds significantly to the acid in the body, and not even an alkaline diet can fully balance it out.  [note:  I would say the diet changes are a very good start!]

“When physical health challenges are accompanied by serious emotional and psychological problems [note:  I would say, very frequently so closely caused by these that we have huge difficulty disentangling the two.], you must somehow address them.  Despite what you may be thinking, it is not always a “shrink” that provides the answer.  There are many ways to relieve stress and begin to reduce this part of the acidic overload.  Of course it’s true a well-trained and experienced psychologist, psychotherapist, or psychiatric social worker can make a critical difference.  But so can a minister, priest, rabbi, or other spiritual adviser with years of experience and wisdom.  A good book can set you on the right path.  Reading the works of great thinkers in the realm of intellect and spirit is an excellent way to change your mind-set and quietly challenge the type of thinking that keeps your body mired in an acidic lockstep.  (Some of our favorite books are by David. R. Hawkins, MD, PhD, who writes about the body/sense/mind/intellect/spirit continuum so clearly that simply reading his work will immediately raise your level of consciousness.) You may want to study the stories of miracle workers, saints and mystics, religious martyrs, past-life experiences, near-death experiences, people who apparently died and came back to life, and the lives of Great Spiritual Souls such as Jesus, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and Shirdi Sai Balba.  As you become more aware of how higher consciousness actually operates, it helps you leave behind some of those thoughts and behaviors that pull you down.  Higher consciousness equates to more peace and alkalinity for the body.  Lower consciousness equates to more turmoil and the creation of unwanted acid.

“To fully experience the pH Miracle for yourself, you must explore, pursue, investigate, read, inquire, and search for answers that set your mind at ease.  Why do bad things happen to good people?  What are we to learn from accidents, devastating illnesses, or setbacks in life?  How is it that some people seem to be able to forgive and forget or simply turn the other cheek?  How can you learn to do that?  What does it mean when people say, “Expect a miracle?”  What does it mean when people say, “There are no mistakes in life?”  These are questions that everyone must answer for themselves.  Look for ways to answer.  Develop understanding.

“To gain or regain your ultimate goals in health and wellness [note:  Well put.], your motivations must reach out far enough to encompass the broadest spectrum of the world around you.  You must strive to eat the foods that bring healthy physical and mental processes to your life, drink the fluids that help to cleanse and purify your body, create the thoughts in life that allow you to forgive yourself, cut others some clack, look only for the good in every situation, and bring peace and understanding to yourself and those around you.

“The value of change is the result.  In this case, the peace and harmony that can arise from embracing the change of this program as part of everyday life are yours for the asking.”  (pages 240-242)

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Late last night as I sat outside in a gentle breeze under a brilliant moon to the south (to become a full “super moon” of even greater beauty tonight) I looked toward the northwest where my neighbor’s huge pine grows.  The sky was dark indigo in that direction.  There I saw a very bright white light.  “Is that a planet,” I wondered.  “What could be that bright?”

It was not a planet.  It was moving, but moving to the southeast too quickly to be a satellite. 

It seemed about as high as the jet planes I occasionally see flying at night over the Mexican border line.  I wondered about passport and customs checks, about who was on this jet and about what their destination might be.  I waited for the sound of the jet engines.  Only silence.  There was no sound of motors.

I noticed the light grew larger and I wondered if a particular turn of the jet had caused it to catch a full reflection of the light of the glorious moon.  By then I was becoming extraordinarily intrigued in this object.  “Am I watching my first UFO?”

I had never seen a night-flying jet heading into Mexico whose flight path took it right over my house.  Just as I expected it to reach a point nearly right over my head the light blinked out as if it had never existed before.  Gone.  Vanished.  “What?”

I stood and walked around my yard to see if I could see where this object had gone on its pathway.  There was no sight of it – anywhere.  No trace.  Gone.

On this warm summer night I believe I finally DID get to see my first UFO.  I have spoken over the 14 years I have lived in this high desert on the Mexican line to several people who grew up here and remember seeing them – some of them rather closely – all of their lives since childhood.

Well, I believe I saw one and the experience has somehow gently, subtly changed me.  It makes me wonder what other people’s personal experience is when they see their first one.  Not overly wonder, but wonder just the same because I suspect such a reaction must tell a lot about a person’s beliefs about being alive and about their spirituality.

I also smile a bit at the lore in our family about my maternal grandmother having formed the first UFO abductee support groups in Los Angeles after she moved there with my mother in the 1940s.  True?  I doubt we will ever know what grandmother was up to, but the stories fit what I know of my grandmother.

Personally I have no fears that any UFO’s inhabitants have sinister intentions regarding humans.  I think they watch to see how we mature as a species.  I see no harm they could inflict upon us that could be greater than the harm we are already doing to ourselves, to one another and to this precious, glorious planet we have been gifted to reside upon.

Was that some craft built by our own species?  I certainly don’t know.  I do not believe that it was.

It doesn’t matter to me.  I matter to me and somehow I feel a little more special for having seen what I did last night.  I only sense beneficence from this experience, a warm sense of not feeling so alone here.  That comforts me as if I was briefly in the presence of benevolent angels that for a few moments I could actually see.

My take is that I feel safer, more protected, more connected in grander ways to life itself.  My response brings me an expansion of my soul and mind to include an increased felt sense of how intricate and HUGE the web of life really is that we are all a part of.

I feel gladdened and encouraged to continue my own healing journey because I believe every choice and action every person makes and takes influences the healing of all and an increase in goodness is shared by all life – near and far.

I contemplate that because there is only one God Who made everything everywhere, there is no stranger to us in existence.  I find myself thinking that it may well be that our species has been chosen and designated by God to be the mirrors of His spiritual light so that we will become the spiritual leaders of all of his creation.  All of it.  This would mean that ALL that exists on this side of the next non-physical world NEEDS us to grow up and do our job.

Maybe those who visit us in UFOs know this as fact.  They are then waiting for us to figure this out.  It may be that the sooner we grow as the blessed, great spiritual species of power for goodness that we are the better off all of life will be.

If this is true everything all of us do matters a great deal.  It is important.  Today I am even more inspired to do my part.  Back to my green organic vegetable juice cleanse I go!  Yet I will never be quite the same now that I both saw – and then did not see – that brilliant moving light as I was before.

I have a renewed sense of purpose and a new sense of hope.  Nothing about being in this life looks or seems the same to me as it did before last night.  I am glad.

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Our species has been given our detailed instructions that tell us how to create true and lasting peace and well-being among our species on earth.  What part will we choose to play in this grand unfolding?

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In today’s fast-paced world of junk food and junk news it’s a welcome moment when gentleness makes its appearance.  It’s in the world.  It’s in plants.  It’s in animals.  And it’s in many humans and many creeks and many breezes.

Do we bring out the gentleness in other people?  What brings out the gentleness in me?

I feel much better today and even did my 45 minute walk with no trouble today.  Gone is the scary ugly feeling of the previous two days when I could hardly lift one foot to place it in front of the other one.  It’s been 5 1/2 years since my last chemotherapy treatment for advanced aggressive breast cancer, but I know THAT feeling!  That is exactly what I felt like these past two days, like I had been given chemo.

If it takes a diet of strained fresh organic vegetable juice and a temporary life in my bathroom to clean up the toxic dump that the inside of my body has become then I am willing.  I can pray all I want to God for healing but I know faith is a partnership.  It is my time to do my part no matter how new and strange and uncomfortable this journey may be.

I am determined, and fighting my way through the effects of infant and childhood abusive severe trauma has taught me that my determination is my formidable friend.

I am drinking fresh juiced aloe right now.  As I strained it I realized I could put the little bit of fiber left over on the skin of my face.  Such small new learnings!  As I came back later to wash my face with tepid water I realized what a gentle plant aloe is, what a gentle action I was taking for myself in making space in my life to let it and all the other wonderful foods I am learning to consume (even if only in strained juice right now until my system has healed enough I can handle any fiber) to help my body to heal itself.

This is an extremely grueling routine.  I won’t say that it isn’t, but I am no stranger – no stranger at all – to grueling.  I can do grueling.  If I could not I would have long since been dead.

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I am finding that I am for the first time in my entire life bonding with my body and becoming consciously attached to this physical system that keeps my soul in this world.  Being born to a psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother (as I mentioned in my previous post) left me being hated and abused from birth through the next 18 years. 

I am not complaining.  That has never been my style.  But I was born a newborn.  I was born gentle.  I did not come from the devil at his bidding as his child with the desire to murder my mother as I was being born — as she so permanently believed (and “punished” me for).

To FEEL the truth of my innocent gentleness is coming through taking the best possible care of this body that I can.  This is serious cleansing and I need it to continue my life.  I kid you not, there is a plastic drop cloth pathway across my carpet – and you can figure what that means.

I am — we all are — always in the presence of angels.  As I go through this process I can nearly feel them touching what is becoming new skin, the new skin of Linda.  Our body uses every possible avenue it can to get rid of the toxins in our body — and certainly the horrible toxins created in our bodies given to many of us through early abusive trauma have residues inside of us that I believe can be released through a healing cleanse.

I am losing weight as the toxins stored in fat cells are released, giving the fat cells no reason to continue to function in my body.  I feel lighter.  The world is beginning to look brighter.  I have a long ways to go but for myself – I am heading down a gentle road of healing.

(More info on my cleansing is in previous posts.)

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I just had a realization that stuns me.  I didn’t plan WHAT I would experience as I drink nothing but strained green vegetable juice to alter my body pH to alkalyn so it can heal itself in areas that greatly trouble me.  (See recent posts.)  I live very near my bathroom, of course.  I am hungry all of the time.  But I am SO focused and SO determined to follow this through correctly.

This may take 7-21 days.  I don’t know how I will know I am done.  I am learning as I go to recognize what my body is telling me, especially about need for repeated daily doses of calcium, magnesium and potassium supplements.  But there is far more than just physical processes involved here, unless I include in “physical” the person that I am living in this body.

I have recognized how food is such a comforter to me.  I would reach out and consume all kinds of things if I could, and because I choose not to (can’t by the “rules” of this diet) I am left feeling exactly that hole inside of me that so desires to be comforted.  Food, of course, NEVER does that.  I don’t believe I am alone in my interactions with food that believes it can comfort me.

A few minutes ago I realized that in literal, physical ways I am remothering my infant, newborn self!!

Because my mother suffered a profound and permanent psychotic break during her labor with me that told her the devil had sent me to kill her (I was a breech birth), she hated me from BEFORE I was born for not being human, for belonging to the devil, for intending to murder my mother.  Nothing ever got any better.  (Mother suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder with psychosis.)

There are plenty of readers who come visit this blog whose mothers were profoundly abusive and NEVER gave for one INSTANT the kind of love, affection, care and comfort to them as infants.  This is infant abuse.

Every part of my life was contaminated with the toxins of trauma through Mother’s hatred of me.  Coming all the way down to my age now at 61, I realize that being limited to ONLY drinking strained green vegetable juice during this cleanse is like feeding infant me not milk, but the greenness of life itself.

I realized this as I prepared aloe juice for myself and set the timer for 15 minutes so I could go back for another 4 swallows.  I realized that from here on out I need to keep a detailed record of which vegetables are in the juice, when I consume the juice, how much I drink, how fast I drink it, and what happens to me afterwards (you know, the diaper part).  I need to maximize this whole process by gather information about myself in interaction with my pure “infant” diet.

I realized I am doing for myself in a very similar way exactly what I did for my 3 babies, what I would do for ANY baby!  And in this cleanse I trust absolutely that toxins of all kinds are being found and removed from the INSIDE of ME.  That’s what bodies are designed to do, and once the toxic waste dump that my body has become is all cleaned out, something new and wonderful is going to happen.  I know it.

A body that is clean and fed correctly is designed to heal itself.  I want to know what that feels like!  (Timer went off!  I will be back after my 4 swallows of fresh juiced aloe.)

I am confined to my home as much as I would be as a newborn.  I had to plan my entire morning’s intact of fluids and juice to make sure I could run to the post office in the afternoon to mail an important package without exploding before I returned.  I made it but barely.

What will I do with my time?  I have less energy, which is to be expected, although I still walk at least 45 minutes in the morning before my first juice.  I am learning to give myself permission to LAY BACK and to take it easy!  Not easy for me.  Not at all easy.

I sadly think of the children being born in our country who are (unless their mother polluted them while they were in her womb) perfectly pure at birth.  Then, a floodgate of polluted “food” is forced into their mouths!  This continues and continues until when we begin to choose our own food it is the COMFORT we are really after, the illusion of trust, feeling safe and loved.

I have posts on this blog – I don’t think I can find them now – where I wrote about the connection between community and food sharing.  We are a social species.  We are designed to be loved and to get along with one another.  When we are at war with our children, when we are at war with ourselves, there is no comfort in our eating!  When we choose horribly toxic food to consume, which is what 99.8% of the space in our grocery stores are full of, we are putting so much toxins into our acidified body that there is little hope we will reach our older age without suffering from some (surprise!) terrible illness.

Well, for now I will be my own GREEN BABY.  I am doing this cleanse because I realized for the first time in my life I can feel it inside myself that I WANT TO LIVE.  I CHOOSE LIFE!

I didn’t feel that at all 5 years ago through cancer treatments.  What I felt was that I didn’t want to die.  That is far from being the same thing as wanting to be here, to be alive, and to do so as healthily as I can manage.

I imagine there are schools of therapy that would “do” rebirthing processes with me.  Certainly my birthing was HORRIBLE!!  I don’t choose to go that way, it would not accomplish what needs to be done.  I need to take serious measures to bring my own body back to life — no matter how difficult this process may be.

After this is all done I know I will never be able to return to the foods I have eaten all of my life.  There is no magic.  I won’t get away with it any longer.  So be it.  I am ready.

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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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