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A Shaman Daughter

Fourteenth Thought

Friday, July 11, 2008

I cannot write right now.  All the distractions today, of going to work, running small errands, entering the grocery store, have sent the fragments of me so flying I cannot associate with myself right now.  That is why I took Monday off, so that once I find my writing self this weekend I can let her be and let her work at least a day longer this way.

My senses get rattled and irritated, like raw nerves, disquieted, shaken up, like too much foam now and not enough substance – or any that I can find.  I think I will sew for awhile to get grounded.  I lost my connection to my writing self and I don’t know how to get her back.  Not right now, anyway.

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It’s rather strange not knowing where your self is, but for people like me it’s a common occurrence, happening many times throughout the course of a day.  Like the pop beads are all pulled apart, no snap to indicate that something is linking up back together.

The sky is gray, the temperature perfect as we share in the wonder of another “monsoon” season in the high southeastern Arizona desert.  I don’t have to water my few plants today.  Door open I see the mountain in the distance, dark gray against gray, tree reflections like shadows in the red brown puddle water at the edge of the street in front of my house.  Listening to the children, some speaking English which is rare in this trailer court that follows the Mexican wall.  They know it, but they don’t use it often during their long hours of social play in groups, always getting along, happy, busy doing nothing but enjoying one another’s company.  Strange to me, so strange.  Never a world I was a part of at any age.

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Most people take themselves with themselves when they go somewhere out in the world.  I don’t.  I have to leave Linda at home, she doesn’t like to go out among the irritations of noise in the world out there, the stress of it, the disconnectedness of it.  But I can’t always find her when I come home again, like she’s wandered away – me having left her behind like a spurned lover.

Like I’m that scared parakeet flying around in grandmother’s house when I was five just before we left for the airport to head to Alaska.  But right now I’m not even visible.

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The title that came to me this morning was or will be something like

Rotten childhoods and the traumatized self

Thing abut this is that rotten is rotten.  Nor sort of rotten or kind of rotten or maybe rotten – a person’s childhood was either rotten or it was not.  That’s up to the individual to determine, but from the title they will know fairly well what the premise of the book is and what the book is all about.

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I cannot take my secure base with me when I go “out there.”

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Saturday, July 12, 2008

I found a connection between theta activity, the development of it in children, and consciousness and self and spirituality in

CRP and Theta Reverie:  Theta training and co-consciousness in shared journeys by Iona Miller and Graywolf Swinney, IACS, 2001

Storm here

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strange connection I just found in my readings

Your Brain on Religion:  Mystic visions or brain circuits?

By Sharon Begley, Newsweek, may 7, 2001

Under “Measuring Spiritual Force”

“”In people whose unconscious thoughts tend to break through into consciousness more readily, we find some correlation with spiritual experiences,” says psychologist Michael Thalbourne of the University of Adelaide.  Unfortunately, scientists are pretty clueless about what allows subconscious thoughts to pop into the consciousness of some people and not others.  The single strongest predictor of such experiences, however, is something called “dissociation.”  In this state, different regions of the brain disengage from others.  “This theory, which explains hypnotizability so well, might explain mystical states, too,” says Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, which debunks paranormal phenomena.  “Something really seems to be going on in the brain, with some module dissociating from the rest of the cortex.”

“Newsweek On Air:  God and the Brain”

“THE NEURAL BASIS FOR RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE”

“that dissociation may reflect unusual electrical crackling in one or more brain regions.  In 1997, neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran told the annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience that there is “a neural basis for religious experience.”  His preliminary results suggested that depth of religious feeling, or religiosity, might depend on natural-not helmet-induced-enhancements in the electrical activity of the temporal lobes.”

“Interestingly, this region of the brain also seems important for speech perception.”

Author goes on to talk about Broca’s area being able to identify the source of a voice, though at times the religious experience is suggesting to us that the “little voice” is outside of ourselves.

Reminds me of the “not as bad as your mother says you are” voice of my childhood

If sensory information to Broca’s area is restricted, brain can’t tell where the voice is coming from.

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I still have a chemo brain effect happening here, I can feel it.  For all that I read today, nothing has really stuck so that I can think about it, not consciously, anyway.

But it was fascinating to find by the end of the day that my process led me back to Teicher’s work, and to the vermis, without me even knowing how I got there.  It is all related in thought, but I can’t retain the thoughts, can’t track the connections or the process.  I cannot remember what I read.

I am hoping so much that I will go through some kind of a “snap” that I will actually feel when my brain wakes up, because it is sluggish and seems to erase things as soon as I read them.  I hate it.

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Sunday, July 13, 2008

It’s like trying to think in invisible code.  Like trying to find my way in an unfamiliar pitch black room, stumbling and trying to feel what’s around me.

But what a beautiful monsoon season day, sun glistening on everything.

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Theta seems related to empathy, to co-consciousness, to meditation, and is a “normal” “vibration” for children.  Seems to me that events in childhood as processed by a theta brain wave based child, appear much different to them than to adults.

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When we are on a journey we can pay attention mainly or exclusively to where we are going without thinking about point of origin.

But if we wish to journey while paying attention not only to the journey itself and the intended or hoped for destination, and we include our point of origin, then we will most likely need a map.

Somehow my writing process is connected to this, in part because putting a book together requires that there be a beginning and an end, and that the book proceed from start to finish in some kind of ordered way – chaos does not make pleasant reading material!

Also it’s relevant because this is a book that is looking back at a beginning in order to find out how the beginning influenced the entire journey.

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My internet process today led quickly (somehow) to language.  From theta and empathy to words.  If I have trouble with the spoken word, then I most likely have trouble with the written word as well, though I don’t know how that difficulty expresses itself in my writing process.  I will detour here – if it is in fact a detour – and consider that for a little while.

I did not get out of my childhood unscathed.  My brain pays the price.

Here comes a storm

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*Age 57 – Dec. 2007 – July 2008 – (A Shaman Daughter Pages)

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