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I am discovering something important as I take my first piano lessons as I near my 60th birthday:  The mountain of my mother’s verbal abuse of me is still here inside of me.  Never in all my adult life have I heard my Borderline Mother’s verbal condemnations against me so clearly as I have been during my first stages of working my way through my piano practice.  If I list any of what I am ‘hearing’ it will be in the pages of the book I am writing, not here.  In fact, I don’t want to face them at all — but I do want to learn to read music and play music.

I am noting this experience here because I am now suspecting that those words have been working against me all of my life in ways that I have never even guessed at.  I also have new concerns that they are working against me through all of my writing efforts, as well.  I am humbled to realize that her words are still a part of my body-brain-mind.  They come to me as clearly as they would if I were still a child and my mother was beside me, or more likely, towering behind me every time I sit with my fingers on those keys.

In order to learn to read music, to play, really PLAY with this music I am finding ways to erase those words at least from my conscious awareness.  But I am not at all sure her words are actually gone from me.  After all, they have must have always been there somewhere or they wouldn’t be showing up now.  They are horrible.  They are appalling.  They are wicked and mean and evil words against me.  They are words I heard in some version or form every single day of the first 18 years of my life (perhaps with the one two-month exception noted in my most recent posts).

Her words were (and are) life-stopping words.  They are well-being stopping words.  They are happiness stopping words.  THEY ARE HER WORDS, and I need to tell myself that continually every time they appear.  Her words are music killing words.  They are joy deadening words.  Her words are thieves that steal me, my passion, my desire, my hope and my belief in my own potential and right to be happy away from my self.

It might be easy for me to mouth some simplistic rhetoric about how they are ‘lies’, about how I replace them with positive rhetoric of my own, how I can ignore them, etc. ad infinitum.  The fact of the matter is that my mother’s words must still be so much of how I know myself in the world that I must barely recognize and know my true own self at all.

That is tragic.  That is heartbreaking.  And, that astounds me!

After all this time, after all these years have passed in my life, how could it be that my mother’s VOICE — and yes, I don’t hear just her words, I hear her VOICE (How sad is that?) — HER VOICE saying those abuse litany words as I move my eyes over these sheets of simple music before me, as I stumble my fingers over these keys.

Her words were always meant to stop me from being happy at the same time they were meant to keep me from knowing myself.  There is nobody who I can hire to come teach me to erase Mother’s words from my brain-mind like I can hire someone to come to my home and teach me how to learn music.  I have to learn this part for myself, and I am learning it.

At first I thought I had to get my OWN critical self out of the way so I can learn piano.  Now I realize I have to get my very ill and long dead mother out of my way.  I feel like every cell in my body was branded with those words, and no matter how many times those cells have died and reproduced themselves over these years, brain cells do not do that.  They remember remember remember remember……..

Verbal abuse is deadly.  Researchers are discovering that verbal abuse is worse for a child than any other single form of child abuse.  (Google search:  “stop the storm verbal abuse” for some of the posts on this blog on this subject.)

These researchers are not lying.  This experience I am having as I learn to play music is excruciatingly real, as well.  I am glad I have finally seen how those words are still a part of me — but I don’t know that I can find a way to keep them from creating the same toxic interference with my writing that they showed the power to do with my music.

I suspect that perhaps learning keyboard has awakened the voice of the sleeping Mother Monster that was beaten into me because it so thoroughly invokes, awakes, and involves BOTH left and right brain hemispheres.  Learning is a vastly stimulating experience.  It shakes things up.  It re-forms people.  Learning rearranges people.  It changes them.  Learning makes us grow.  And some of us have to fight our way through and past such condemnation programmed into us from such an early age that it actually seems a miracle we can learn anything new at all!

I no longer wonder why I waited until I was this old to decide to learn something I have thought about wanting to learn all of my adult life.  I couldn’t let myself know how much I really wanted to learn music before now because I believe it is ONLY now that I am strong enough to battle my way through this learning PAST the horrible words that have attacked me in this piano/music learning process.

But I am happy to report that at the time of last evening’s practice I heard fewer of those hate filled words.  I felt less of a depth in the gashes of the lashes those words have always carved so close to my soul and so far from the range of my conscious awareness that they were even there.  I am not that mute and dumb to them  now.  They have forced their way right up to the surface perhaps in their programmed intention to STOP LINDA FROM BEING TRULY HAPPY!

Perhaps there has never been any better way for me to overcome the power Mother’s words have had over my entire life than to do and accomplish this one thing:  To be able to read and play and find great great joy in making music.

No longer does the black ink on white on music-filled pages look like chicken scratch to me.  I want to HEAR the sound that came from the minds of the people who wrote that music.  I personally can’t imagine any way to more closely KNOW a tiny piece of another person than to hear their music — as my own.  Maybe it will finally be the power THAT sound has that will finally erase for me the sound of my insanely abusive mom.

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I’m not sure I could be more thrilled!  I can almost play this on my keyboard, my very first song!  I’m Gonna Build a Mountain!  For me, nearing my 60^th birthday on the 31^st of this month, this is a REALLY BIG THRILL!  I am DOING IT!  I am learning to read music and play piano!

This has NOT been easy.  I am learning lots about myself, combined with what I am learning in my book writing.  When I found my 8 ½ year old self high on that Alaskan winter mountain with my Borderline mother in reprieve from her illness, I found a gem for my own crown.  That little girl, sad as she was, crushed as I was in so many ways, had a heart so pure it could shine back in fullness the pristine beauty of that wilderness.  And it is to my heart then, my pure, pure soul that I now look for my teacher who can love me enough to learn to play this instrument.

Once I understood the other full moon lit night that “I am not a self with a soul, I am a soul with a self” I got my most important priority straight.  My self, who had just barely begun to form itself by 8 ½ — less so than a normal child’s self would have formed by age two – did manage to grow itself as I have lived through my adulthood.  But that self is too well connected with the horrible verbal abuse I grew up under to help me learn something this new, this complex and this brain challenging.

My SOUL-heart, on the other hand, that heart I have had all of my life and that shone so brightly when I found myself on that mountain at age 8 ½, is full of natural love.  It is not harsh.  It is not condemning.  It is not judgmental.  It knows how to reward me with smiles.  It knows how to complement and encourage me through a difficult learning experience.  Yet as this love begins to flow like a dam has finally been unblocked, the learning itself is beginning to bring me true joy.

My self, who tried so hard to please a mother that could not be pleased – though I didn’t know it – was bewildered with rejection on a continual basis.  Except during those marvelous two months I wrote about in my previous post.  Now I see that I was, in effect, on a runway of my own, taxiing down it throughout my childhood so I could take off flying when I became an adult.

Only that just barely happened.  Somewhere along my way, and I will know more when and how this happened inside of myself as I move forward in the book writing, I found myself on a different runway taxiing of in a different direction.  It’s pretty hard to live through a literal HELL of a childhood and come into adulthood not having lost one’s way.

I could call what I am experiencing now healing, or change, or transformation – but it really is SHIFTING!  I am shifting my conscious center of my SELF from my wounded self that struggled so hard to come into existence at all over to my SOUL who is full of wisdom, love and pure kindness.  This SOUL-self of mine now can have true conversations with my other confused and struggling self – and together you can bet WE are going to learn to make music on piano keys!

I can feel both hemispheres of my brain, left and right, now cooperating with one another toward a shared common goal-for-good instead of my self working and battling my way toward a goal that – ironically – cannot be won without letting off the pressure that my learned self so well incorporated into me.  My LEARNING self now says, “Play your way through this, Linda.  With joy, play your way through this!  You can do it!  You will do it!”

I want these piano keys to be an extension of my entire self.  I am learning (and yes I have been blessed with the perfect piano teacher) exactly correctly as best I can the techniques that I can build and build and build on.  I know ‘the music’ is in me.  It has been in me all along.  My mother, though she didn’t even know it and could not stop herself, almost beat the music out of me, but because BOTH of me, my SOUL-heart self and my learned-self actually have a helluva beat shared together, there is nothing in me that will stop me now!

I am back on my own runway now — and if it took living all the way to this upcoming 60th birthday for me to find my own runway again, so be it.  I am grateful.  I value this learning now probably more than I ever could have as my my soul-heart-self puts itself/me back together again, had I been raised in a normal fashion.  I would have taken this miracle for granted.  Perhaps I am gaining what people my age are SUPPOSED to have — wisdom!

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How different it is for me to be writing about my childhood not in bits and pieces as I have done before, but in one continuous line — which is the way I lived it.  I am going to take a few minutes right now to jot down some points right now as I take another little break in the book-writing process.  This helps me to digest my ‘food of discovery’ so that I can receive new nourishment that will give me new strength to forge ahead in my task.

I have become very clear that nothing about what I am doing as I search backward to find who I was and my reality as a child has anything to do with who or how I was THEN.  It does have everything in my universe to do with who and how I am NOW.  I trust everything I am learning right now, every discovery, every insight, every new step of growth I take NOW because I know in my heart I am doing all in my power to track from the beginning of my life what the TRUTH was THEN and therefore what the truth is NOW.

This is a comprehensive journey unlike any I have ever taken before.  As one of my dear friends reminds me, there are no formulas for writing one’s ‘memoir’.  There is, however, one single factor that leads this way:  This unerring light of the search for the truth.  This truth is MY truth.  Everyone has one — a personal truth.  That personal truth flowed all the way through every single instant of my childhood just as it flowed through every molecule of my body.

One of the most important discoveries I made last week as I wrote through a two month period of time when I was 8 1/2 — and as I work to create an amalgamation of my mother’s written (letters and diaries) words about this time, is that something happened then that created for my mother, for her children, for her husband, and FOR ME, that for that two months HEALED my severely ill Borderline mother.

Instead of all the factors in her life that conspired to make her life one of misery and tragedy — a Perfect Storm — during this particular period of time all the factors needed to create its OPPOSITE were present.

In the midst of the Alaskan homesteading process — for those two months — my mother experienced Perfect Peace.  During those two months she lived in a state of perfect grace.

Our whole family did because during that time our mother was WELL!  I cried my way through that whole section of writing as I recognized with absolute AWE why I have always so fondly remembered those two months.

I know the truth now, and that truth was of such beauty that it has changed me forever to recognize it.  If my mother, as sick as she was, could find healing for even ONE SINGLE MOMENT, let alone for two whole months (actually it was seven weeks), then that lets me know that healing is possible for a severe Borderline.

Of course she was not cured, and as ‘usual reality’ began to encroach back on her life, her healing diminished and again reached a state of total eclipse.

I cried through my realization this loss of my mother happened as well.

I cried — as I have so many times before — for the terrible disease that ate my mother by the time she was five years old.  But at least now I realize there was at least those two months when she escaped its effects upon her.  I wrote that there is no cure for Borderline, but there CAN be healing.

The only cure for my mother would have been if the circumstances of relationship traumas in her earliest life from birth had never happened at all.  The cure is in the prevention!

The factors that led to my mother’s state of Perfect Peace were so extreme that they are nearly unbelievable — but she DID experience that state of perfect grace.  And during that time there was no hatred.  There was no abuse.  I was included with my siblings as a part of our family.

These two months, I believe, were the only WELL time of my mother’s entire life.  They were, therefore, the only well time of my childhood.  No wonder I have always remembered this time!  Now I know why.  My mother’s soul was free to shine, shine, shine, shine because the obscuring and obliterating powers of her physiologically-based severe mental-illness simply evaporated during this period of time.

She had no way to keep that state with her.  None.  So she lost it again and never got it back.  But there WERE those days!  Those very real days of bliss, love and happiness for my mother and therefore for our family — and for me.

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I know for me there cannot be profound healing if I try to look at what my parents did to me separately from what was done to them when they were little that changed them so much that they became perpetrators themselves.

I’m not sure there is another book in existence that includes the words of the abuse perpetrator combined equally with the words of the ‘victim’ hero child abuse survivor.  I cannot be interested only in my part of the story.  I am equally concerned with the factors that created the conditions that caused this abuse to happen in the first place — and to continue unnoticed.

There is pure, absolute beauty in everyone’s childhood – no matter how harsh, no matter how abusive and traumatic.  I do not believe we would have survived if that were not a fact.  It is as much my task to find that beauty as it is to tell the truth about the trauma.  If the beauty is hard to find OUTSIDE the child, then look INSIDE the child.  But LOOK!  If you do not seek, you will not find!

I don’t believe there is any better way to straighten out a crooked pathway through adult life than to go back to the beginning, find the beauty, pick up that thread, and follow it all the way from THEN to NOW.  While the long ago child cannot be changed, it can be found — and this journey of seeking, finding and following will change the adult writer in the ongoing progress of moments in the present, into the future — for the good — and for forever.

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I AM AIMING FOR THIS FEELING!  Joy SOUNDS LIKE THIS

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This morning’s email to a friend:

Last night was not much for sleeping.  Finally gave up trying and up to the glorious full moon by 2:30 a.m.

Something is happening to me – the transformations this writing is bringing.  I am too close to this now.  I cannot tell in what ways I am changing.

I am accomplishing what I intended to.  I am locating my child self in time and space.  I guess I had no expectations about what I would find.  I guess that left me open, because my search was always only for the truth — the best I could find it.

What I have found so far in myself by age 8 1/2 is that purity of soul you and I ‘talked’ about yesterday.  Last night that purity must have caught up with me!

At 2:30 a.m. I had these words appear in my awareness:  “I am not a self with a soul.  I am a soul with a self.”

As I went looking for ‘my self’ as a child I did not know that when I found ‘her’ that is exactly what I would find:  my soul.  Not that I have ever ‘lost’ my soul, but as I got up and wrote ‘for the book’ I realized my soul from childhood did not grow up with a conscious connection to ‘my self’ — I was ‘just’ a shining pure mirror soul who only very very gradually found a ‘self’ at all

and mostly that has happened in my adulthood.

That would be a search far outside of ‘this book’ being written, to follow my self from age 18 through my adult life to find out when ‘my self’ came on stage — and then took the stage.

I have never lost sight of God, or of the ‘idea of soul’ — but last night I FELT the connection between my soul and my self – consciously — for the first time in my life.

I wanted to share this with you.  In the end, it all comes around to the writings at this link — not sure if you wish to read them or not, isn’t important — so much — but I guess if I use that word ‘healing’ something healed for me last night.

I love you!

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:08-Ea5QmdA4J:reference.bahai.org/en/t/c/BWF/bwf-2.html+baha%27i+soul+mirror+dross&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

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A strange sort of suffering.  Five words.  One incomplete sentence.  Timid, and “Dare I?”  One full week I have been away from the writing for the book, so intense was that work last I left it a week ago today.  And, yes, I am timid and it is hard to dare to say what I need to say – so I fight it and I ignore the writing.  Will I be able to force myself back onto that task tomorrow?  I do not know.

There will likely reach a point when I am so miserable avoiding what I have committed myself to doing that going back to the book writing can’t be a misery to beat it.  Or so I tell myself.  I must be almost there, sitting on this powder keg of mine, hoping……WHAT?  That I will magically become a different person with a different story to tell than the one I DO have to tell.

I tell myself “There are much worse stories to be told in the world,” and answer myself, “SO WHAT?”  That is so entirely NOT the point!  Authenticity in telling the story I do have to tell is what matters — right up there with telling my story AT ALL!

Getting caught in this “It doesn’t matter one way or the other” place does make me miserable.  Not believing in myself.  Denying my reality, being afraid to learn any more about myself — because learning I am doing as I book-write — and sometimes, like happened this past week, that learning is SO MUCH WORK without a single word being written.

So, I feel like a coward right now.  I have my alarm clock set for 5 a.m. — so I can take my new (used) bike out onto the town streets when nobody is around to see me — and learn how to ride it — hopefully without killing myself!  Then, once I do my 45 minute morning walk, eat oatmeal — well, let’s see!  Whatever I find to do I hope to see myself back at this keyboard tomorrow with two important Word document windows open:  One of my own writing and one of my mother’s writings that allow me to locate myself in my childhood in time and place.

All I know is that this past week was a rugged one and I am afraid to go back to work on my childhood story for fear I will ‘get worse’ than I already feel tonight.  “In other words,” I tell myself, “You are going to be a strange person in a strange state of mind until you finish telling your strange story, so get at it, my dear!”

“Tomorrow,” is my answer, yet again.

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PAIN AND SORROW – Paris Talks by Abdu’l-Baha on November 22nd, 1911.

In this world we are influenced by two sentiments, Joy and Pain.
Joy gives us wings! In times of joy our strength is more vital, our intellect keener, and our understanding less clouded. We seem better able to cope with the world and to find our sphere of usefulness. But when sadness visits us we become weak, our strength leaves us, our comprehension is dim and our intelligence veiled. The actualities of life seem to elude our grasp, [p. 110] the eyes of our spirits fail to discover the sacred mysteries, and we become even as dead beings.
There is no human being untouched by these two influences; but all the sorrow and the grief that exist come from the world of matter—the spiritual world bestows only the joy!
If we suffer it is the outcome of material things, and all the trials and troubles come from this world of illusion.
For instance, a merchant may lose his trade and depression ensues. A workman is dismissed and starvation stares him in the face. A farmer has a bad harvest, anxiety fills his mind. A man builds a house which is burnt to the ground and he is straightway homeless, ruined, and in despair.
All these examples are to show you that the trials which beset our every step, all our sorrow, pain, shame and grief, are born in the world of matter; whereas the spiritual Kingdom never causes sadness. A man living with his thoughts in this Kingdom knows perpetual joy. The ills all flesh is heir to do not pass him by, but they only touch the surface of his life, the depths are calm and serene.
Today, humanity is bowed down with trouble, sorrow and grief, no one escapes; the world is wet with tears; but, thank God, the remedy is at our doors. Let us turn our hearts away from the world of matter and live in the spiritual world! It alone can give us freedom! If we are hemmed in by difficulties we have only to call upon God, and by His great Mercy we shall be helped.
If sorrow and adversity visit us, let us turn our faces to the Kingdom and heavenly consolation will be outpoured.
If we are sick and in distress let us implore God’s healing, and He will answer our prayer.
When our thoughts are filled with the bitterness of this world, let us turn our eyes to the sweetness of God’s compassion and He will send us heavenly calm! If we are imprisoned in the material world, our spirit can soar into the Heavens and we shall be free indeed!
When our days are drawing to a close let us think of the eternal worlds, and we shall be full of joy!
You see all round you proofs of the inadequacy of material things—how joy, comfort, peace and consolation are not to be found in the transitory things of the world. Is it not then foolishness to refuse to seek these treasures where they may be found? The doors of the spiritual Kingdom are open to all, and without is absolute darkness.
Thank God that you in this assembly have this knowledge, for in all the sorrows of life you can obtain supreme consolation. If your days on earth are numbered, you know that everlasting life awaits you. If material anxiety envelops you in a dark cloud, spiritual radiance lightens your path. Verily, those whose minds are illumined by the Spirit of the Most High have supreme consolation.
I myself was in prison forty years — one year alone would have been impossible to bear—nobody survived that imprisonment more than a year! But, thank God, during all those forty years I was supremely happy! 112 Every day, on waking, it was like hearing good tidings, and every night infinite joy was mine. Spirituality was my comfort, and turning to God was my greatest joy. If this had not been so, do you think it possible that I could have lived through those forty years in prison?  [unjust imprisonment from religious persecution]
Thus, spirituality is the greatest of God’s gifts, and ‘Life Everlasting’ means ‘Turning to God’. May you, one and all, increase daily in spirituality, may you be strengthened in all goodness, may you be helped more and more by the Divine consolation, be made free by the Holy Spirit of God, and may the power of the Heavenly Kingdom live and work among you.
This is my earnest desire, and I pray to God to grant you this favour.
http://reference.bahai.org/en/t/ab/PT/pt-35

NOTE:  This post won’t accept any other formatting that what it decided to include all by itself, hence no paragraph indentations, etc!

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