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A dream came to me, as best as I can place it, around twenty years ago.  Given some specific events of these past few days I know it is not only time to write this dream but most hopefully to live now through its most important elements.

Last Friday evening I enjoyed a pizza dinner out with a new friend.  As we were parting in the parking lot he handed me a brochure about the work of a new therapist in a town about 30 miles away from this rural area where I live.

Yesterday I began to investigate if there might be some healing options open to me through this woman’s work.  I am on very low fixed disability income without any insurance that will cover the healing work that this woman provides.

Although this woman, who is a Holistic Healer named Jacquelyn Brenner, used to practice in a northern region of Arizona she is now close enough to where I live to be accessible to me.

Here is a link to her website:

Hollow Reed

While I suspect that I would benefit from more orthodox ‘talk therapy’ at this point in my life I very truly cannot afford that avenue to healing.

More importantly, I have reached a point at my age of 60 — after having spent half of my life pursuing healing for the consequences of the 18 long years I spent being severely abused by a VERY sick psychotic (probably Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)) mother — what I see appearing within the circle of my life is an option for healing that I suspect is far, far more necessary for me than any healing work with words could possibly offer to me.

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Those readers who follow this blog know that over this past year especially I have devoted the majority of my efforts toward writing my story of abuse for book publication.  I finished the first rough draft that will cover this abuse history up to nearly my 11th birthday.

My goal was to complete this first rough draft by last October.  I did.  Then when I began to work my way back through what I have written in that draft I reached a point beyond which I could not pass.  I have been at a dead-still in my book writing work ever since.

Most simply put what I know about how I feel right now is that VERY WISELY my own self is not and will not allow me to return to my book writing BECAUSE IT WOULD NOT BE WISE OR GOOD FOR ME TO DO SO.

It is the impact of how the severe abuse I suffered from the moment of my birth resides in MY BODY that has me stopped dead in my writing tracks.

Most simply put I can say it is my very wise fear of body memories returning to me in the present during a process of returning to my abuse history’s stories that is preventing me from moving forward.  I had one occasion happen to me already with the body memory overwhelming me in reawakened memory of a severe beating my mother did to me when I was 22 months old.  (It was when I reached my 2nd writing through this memory that the book writing stopped.)

I cannot now wisely open any door of memory right now that will enable any more of those kinds of severe beating body memories to awaken into my conscious experience in my present.  In addition I feel sick in my body right now, and it is scary to me not to feel myself getting any better.  My life force seems to be depleted — depleting — every day.  This is NOT a good sign or a good way to be in my body in my lifetime!!!!

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So, I have been waiting and I have been praying.  The brochure that was given to me last Friday does, I believe, offer to me the help and the healing I need RIGHT NOW.

In the listing of services this brochure describes is one I was (until I looked it up online yesterday) completely ignorant of in this ‘real time’ of my life:

Jin Shin Jyutsu

I don’t even know how to pronounce those words, but as soon as I found the first information online that is included if you click on those words, I KNEW I know — and have known since I was given the dream I am going to write here now — exactly what this form of healing bodywork IS.  Exactly.

At the same time I also knew yesterday that my prayers have been answered.  I telephoned Hollow Reed this morning and have an appointment this evening for a discussion with Jacquelyn Brenner about possibilities regarding my being able to work with her.

I am more than hopeful.  I am awed and extremely grateful that this healing avenue has appeared in my life.  SOME WAY will be made for me to access this healing.  The fact that this would be an issue for me was a very clear part of the dream I had 20 years ago.

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The Healing Dream

I was in full moving stride with one foot in the air as it was coming down upon the floor just under a wide arched doorway when I experienced a startled shock of awakening into this dream.  I knew I had just walked down a long (what I would now call) enclosed veranda that ran down the side of a very large ancient building constructed of massive chunks of cut stone.

I stopped walking as I stood gazing around me with an unsettled feeling that I had always known this place and myself in it — but that I had suddenly and inexplicably forgotten.

On my right along the wide tiled floor of this light filled passage I saw a line of great tubs filled with what I knew was hot mineral water.  The tubs and the walls around them were covered with deep indigo tiles, some of them painted with fine delicate yellow flowers with white leaves.

Many beautiful bottles filled with herbs in liquid solutions stood around the edges of each tub.  I knew I was here to soak in one of these tubs.  I knew I would know exactly which of those herb bottles I needed to use to add medicine to my water.

On my left was a wall of massive glass windows.  The window ledges were deep, the walls being very thick.  I gazed out at a forest of lush, beautiful perfectly healthy ancient trees.  My vision followed the flowing sight of them down the gently sloping curves of the mountainside far down to the edge of a brilliantly sparkling turquoise sea.  My eyes followed the sea to a distant horizon.

I turned toward a woman preparing to enter one of the tubs and as I spoke to her I felt distressed that I was speaking fluidly to her in a language that I knew I could no longer recognize.  “Where am I?”  I asked her.  “What place is this?”  Feeling foolish and conspicuous in my confused ignorance I also had to ask her what language were we speaking!

I do not remember what she spoke back to me but whatever it was, it was what I needed to hear to instantly feel completely comfortable in all I was experiencing.  After I soaked in my bath I dressed in clothing that had been laid for me at the outside corner of the tub’s edge.  Having (in this current life of mine) hand woven many fabrics I recognized the high quality cotton and the deep pure colors of the dyes used to create this tunic I put on.  It’s colors were of a range of deep indigo, sky blues, radiant aqua tones, emerald and light green — in other words of plant life, of water and of moonlight — laced periodically with very thin fine threads of sparkling silver.

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I then left this area  through tall wide heavy wooden carved swinging doors and entered a wide hallway very brightly lit and filled with streaming groups of many people.  I stood for a few moments once I passed through the doors gazing in wonderment at what I was seeing.

There were groups of people walking together who were wearing the same colors of woven cloth garments that I was.  There were ALSO other people moving both ways in this wide hallway that were dressed in garments of the hot fire range of orange, scarlet, deep reds, yellows laced with threads of gold.

These people were VERY tall and very thin and moved in a very straight line as they stared with stern faces straight in front as the walked.  Or, I should say, glided ABOVE the floor.  These tall stern intense serious people floated with their feet about eight inches above any firm surface.

The blue-green people were very much ‘on the ground’!  They moved like wind moves the leaves and grasses, like the moon moves the tides, like water tumbles over ledges and logs and stones.  They laughed as they chatted with one another, even stopping at times in the middle of the passageway, blocking traffic so that the stern people gave them invisible frowns as they had to alter their forward straight line glides a little bit to avoid crashes, as the blue-green people gazed at the expressions in one another’s animated faces as they talked.

(It seemed that many were going to ‘classes’, and while it might not be polite to speak ill of dream people, I could say that although perhaps the tall people were regal, it seemed to me also that they were intimidating in their rigidity, if not downright haughty and disdainful of those dressed as I was!)

Having come to some kind of peace with myself that it was OK that even though I had known these people and this place all of my life at this moment everything was entirely NEW to me, I felt inside of myself and noticed that what I wanted to do was to SKIP with abandon and joy down this hallway toward a door I knew I needed to enter.

But SKIP??  Could I DO THAT HERE?  What would the red-orange people think?  What would they do to me?  What would happen to me if I SKIPPED?  I didn’t care.  With the gleeful abandon of a happy, happy child I held to the wall edges of the hall and skipped through the next set of tall swinging doors.

Immediately after I had passed through them I made a left turn into another narrower hallway, and then an immediate right through a set of shorter, narrower doors into the room that was my goal.

The ceilings in this room were low.  The light was warm but quite dim.  This large room was filled with what I would now call healing stations, each with a narrow bed with a folded white sheet at the foot and a bodywork healer standing at the head.  I walked to one of these beds, shed my woven garment, laid down on my stomach and pulled my unfolded sheet over the lower half of my body.

The bodywork healer went to work.

I payed close attention to how it felt to have this healer work over my body without touching me with hands.  I could feel the work happening on the inside of my body.  I felt good.  Nothing hurt.  Until the very end when, having moved what I remember the healer telling me were my “27 points of darkness” to one centralized point on my lower back above my left hip bone, I was told that this would hurt as these points of darkness were removed from me.

And DID THEY HURT!  For a matter of perhaps 45 seconds I felt the most intense, excruciating pain I had ever known in my lifetime in this body.  The pain stopped.  I felt better than I could ever remember feeling.

I sat up on the edge of the bed, sheet wrapped around my torso, as I reached for my woven clothes that were folded on a low stool beside the bed.  I remember clearly thinking to myself, “This has been a fantastic, wonderful experience — but how am I going to PAY FOR ALL OF THIS?”

At the end of that thought I again ‘forgot’ about myself in that place — in other words I did the opposite of waking up into that place as I had at the start of the dream as I again was made ‘unconscious’ and asleep to it.

When I awoke to my regular life in the morning I remembered also that in the dream I had been very aware that I had been given a great gift in being allowed to ‘remember’ this place and this healing.  I was aware that there were what I might call guardian angels or spirit guides present with me as I was shown this experience.

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Yesterday as my eyes scanned the verbal information I found on that webpage about Jin Shin Jyutsu I knew exactly what is going on right now.  Why in my dream there were clearly “27 points of darkness” in my body instead of the “26” that this JSJ site mentions, I do not know.  Other than that tiny detail, JSJ is evidently the name for what it was that healed me in that dream (although I doubt the physical pain is a literal part of the experience).

A point on the side about this dream is that I mentioned the dream to someone I knew briefly those 20 years ago — I do not remember who it was — but I remember what she said back to me after listening to me describe my dream experiences.  “I know that place,” she stated matter-of-factly to me.  “I have been in those tubs.  I have seen those tiles.  I looked out those windows.  That place was Atlantis.   Did you know it was destroyed because those ‘intellectual’ orange-red people acquired the power to use the technologies they discovered in harmful ways and did not listen to the knowledge the green-blue people had about how to use the technology wisely?  You are not alone.  I and many others have dreamed this place.”

I could say, “No, I didn’t know that,” but I honestly do not know what I know — what I remember, what I have forgotten.

But I do sure know that I am THRILLED to have found this bodywork healing available to me now!  And there has to be a way for me to ‘pay for’ what I need in my lifetime – now!

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I received the gift the other day of meeting Laura at my piano teacher’s place.  She is a trained classical pianist who has played over 40 years by sight reading.  Now she is taking lessons to learn how to play by ear and to FEEL the music.  She so far has considered herself not as a musician but as a technician.

Sure enough Laura could play some of songs I wrote perfectly – technically – but I know what she is describing.  When I met this woman, who lives in Seattle with her husband but spends months in SE Arizona here every year playing golf at our tiny town’s impressive golf course (the oldest in our state).  When I met Laura I felt as if I have known her all of my life.

So the next day a song came to me titled “Laura’s Song.”  I am taking it to an office supply store to Xerox it today, and will leave her copy with our teacher.  Again, this is a song that is still quite above my pay grade – I cannot yet TECHNICALLY play it.  I have not written into the song all the musical signs and symbols that would tell another pianist how to FEEL the song – and I don’t wish to even hear Laura play the song note by note with mechanical perfection.

I would like to wait until Laura’s playing of it – perhaps – happens exactly as the last words of the song suggest.  I had the song completed last night, so I thought, until I woke this morning and knew those musical notes in the last measures were not meant to stand alone.

I awoke knowing the last line.

I have only been learning music since I began lessons last October.  What an amazing process!  I love it – and once I do have Laura’s technical skills honed a bit better for my own self – I can’t WAIT to hear what I will be able to play (as I write the music) THEN!

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Laura’s Song

I left my arrows with their feathers

At the back side of the sun.

I left my quiver with its beauty

At the bottom of the sea.

My bowstring is wrapped

Around the moon

My bow lies in the heart

Of a tree.

I planted my feet firm

And sent my breath out around the world

Out around the world.

My breath echoed back to me

Back to me

In sound.

I gather my arrows

My quiver

My bow.

I shoot straight.

I am setting my songs free

Free

Free

So now I play

Moon strings

As my songs play me.

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There are times when words we hear seem to arrive at the exact time we need them most, as did the words of my friend as I mentioned them in my earlier post, +WORDS FROM A FRIEND in which I found great comfort.  I needed to remember that questing is a natural inclination of being alive.

The questing that sometimes feels intensely uncomfortable to me is no different than what a newborn colt does as it asserts its powers to stand on its own four feet, or that a plant does as it begins to open the walls of its seed so it can quest for the sunlight.

Yet as survivors of severe chronic traumatic stress caused by malevolent treatment by our earliest caregivers, it seems common that many natural events and processes required for ongoing living get tangled up in so-called ‘negative emotions’ in the present.  Those emotions are NOT negative.  They are survival emotions that have always held special powers to help us stay alive.  They can SEEM negative when they are out of balance inside of us, thus masking our ability to FIND and to FEEL what we think of as our more ‘positive’ emotions.

Questing, by itself, is a wonderful process that I deeply know is directly tied to what I call the life of my soul.

As I have carefully and meticulously examined my own self in the midst of the horrors of my infancy and childhood of abuse, I have consistently found that there I was, right in the middle of those experiences of hell created by my mother (and allowed to happen by my father), shining shining shining!

I was consistently and brutally attacked in so many ways from the time I was born — but those attacks NEVER changed who I was then — who is exactly who I am now.

As I have recently mentioned, the continuously falling heaps of rubble that crashed into MY life — did not belong to me!  Yes, the experiences of trauma impacted and injured me greatly.  They changed how my physical body had to develop as I survived in the midst of that hell.

But in the center of that storm created by my mother’s terrible mental illness (most probably severe Borderline Personality Disorder with psychosis that centered on me), I stood as an amazing person as I walked through every moment of that abuse in GOODNESS!

I continued through those horrible and horrifying 18 years always carrying inside of me my own self — intact, amazing — and according to these new words that appeared to me this morning — MORE THAN PERFECT!!

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However I acquired my powers to quest forward into my life every moment of my early years, I do not know.  Through the grace and mercy provided by God, is my best guest.  I was gifted.  In many many ways.

My problem today is that I so often forget to remember this reality — MY REALITY.

Because of the continual severe abuse and trauma of my early, formative years, all of my movements through my childhood were mixed up.  The darkness of evil was so obvious that it has only been in these last few years of searching, questing for healing that I am able to begin to see that PERFECT goodness existed inside that maelstrom of troubles.

Goodness was ALWAYS present — because I was there — in my own life.

Just as I am now.

I have always been questing for a better me, for a better life.

It seems to be when I forget that goodness and am left only with the anguish of feeling that surviving is ALL that I do — that I have always done — that I lose track of my connection to my ability to feel great inner JOY.

I had that ability from the time I was born.  Standing inside my own body, intact with my own soul, my own self, I never lost the natural ability to hope that I was born with.  I never lost my ability to notice beauty in my world.  I never lost my ability to try, to the best of my ability, to make the right choice every time I possibly could.

I never lost my desire to hurt no one.

I never lost my desire to make my life a better one in all ways I could find that mattered.

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My soul has the ability, has always had the ability, to know right from wrong, truth from error, good from bad.  I didn’t know how to use those powers when I was very young, so I just CARRIED them with me as they carried me — forward, always forward.

I just carried the right, the truth, and the good along with me.  I didn’t lose these abilities.  I just tend to lose track of the part of me that knows that I know!!

I have, in fact, always been looking for deep, abiding joy — a spiritual joy that lies within and apart from the external events that life brings to everyone.

This kind of joy is, I think, not a temporary passage through momentary happiness.  It is a joy that is vastly connected to the ability to feel both compassion and awe.  This joy comes directly from God’s grace and mercy that surpasses any ability humans have to make mistakes.

Humans are born MORE THAN PERFECT because God gave us a most special gift to be able to know love because we have been made to know God.  As a little person struggling every moment to stay alive and to make it through a long, long tunnel of infancy and childhood that was so unbelievably dark, I never left the state of grace and mercy that God provided to me at the instant I was conceived and God created my soul.

I am learning to pray in ways I never had before because I know in the essence of who I am — that this connection to God, to divine questing for the good, that this connection prayer provides me to walk in the best way I possibly can through this life — is a uniquely human experience.

God’s forgiveness and guidance is what I seek.  In that seeking there is anguish and there is joy.  I am nothing like a ‘religious fanatic’ of any kind.  I just happened to notice along life’s way that this Unknowable Essence happens to be the source for all goodness in creation.  Probably even this ability to notice this is a divine gift in itself.

I would be NOWHERE, alone and completely lost, without it.

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abuse, adult attachment disorders, anxiety disorders, borderline mother, borderline personality disorder, brain development, child abuse, depersonalization, depression, derealization, disorganized disoriented insecure attachment disorder, dissociation, dissociative identity disorder, infant abuse, music therapy, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, peritrauma, posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD, reactive attachment disorder, trauma altered development TAD

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I am responding further to a comment left on the page + About this site:

“People who have experienced a lot of trauma have difficulty concentrating on abstract concepts. Thus understanding your excellent but technical information may be difficult or even impossible for them. If your readers are unable to comprehend, you can send them my way if you like. My job is to take the scientific data and put it into layman’s terms and simple graphics on radio and internet television.”

I added my response to this comment at the bottom of my last post, +HOPE FOR THE GENERATIONS.  Somewhat unfortunately, I need to say something else on this topic.

In this last post mentioned here, I also wrote about how my grandson noticed dust motes swirling in a ray of sunlight, and mentioned also that at his same age of 22 months I also noticed the same beauty.  I mentioned that my grandson and I lived in different universes.

I did not say different worlds.  I said what I meant – different UNIVERSES.

I hate comparing that new little precious boy’s reality with what mine was, but in this case I will say a few more words about the universe I was living in when I was his age.  Because my mother suffered a psychotic break while she struggled to birth me that left her believing I was the devil’s child who was not human, but who had been sent to kill her while I was being born – and that I was an entirely evil child – I never had a mother.

Her abuse of me began with my first breath, and by the time I was 22 months old I had already been forced to walk a road that no child on earth should EVER have to travel.

The day of my dust mote gazing – actually at the same time I noticed the motes – my mother was engaged in a terrible fight with her mother over me.  It’s a long story – but in the end within an hour of the dust motes my mother was home swinging me around in the air as she beat my little body as hard as she could until she finally let go of me so that I fell in a crumpled heap on the living room floor.  At this point she screamed at me how much she hated me, and how she couldn’t stand the sight of me.

I was ordered to go to my room, only when I tried to stand and walk I found the entire world swirling around me as I staggered from side to side – because get up and walk I did.  I had no other choice.  (My father witnessed this attack and did nothing.)

Now in my world terrible ‘relationship’ trauma had already long ago altered the way my body-brain was forced to develop so that I could survive the malevolent, traumatic universe I happened to have been born into – and not rescued out of for the 18 long years I endured it.

My point here is that I am NOT an ordinary person in an ordinary body.  Nobody who survived horrendous trauma especially during their first 33 months of life from conception to age two, is an ordinary person in an ordinary body.

As much as we might wish that we are, we are not, nor shall we ever be in this lifetime.

So I say be very wary, be very aware, of any information ANYONE gives you that suggests that our body can be changed BACK into an ordinary one.

Nope.

Won’t happen.

This blog is packed with – yes – complicated scientific information about how trauma during critical stages of our early development changed our physiology.

Yes, this information can be very hard to understand.  A quick scan through REFERENCES (main file) will lead to titles of many books and articles of information related to these kinds of developmental – trauma induced – changes survivors of severe early abuse had to go through to stay alive in a most hostile world.

But I say that any such survivor who finds their way to this blog is completely capable of reading and understanding ALL the information presented here.  If you found it, you can read it, you can comprehend it, you can learn from it – and you can begin to heal in new ways because of the empowerment you will receive by finding out the FACTS about how what happened to YOU – changed the body you live in for the rest of your life.

If someone does not want to go through the WORK of studying this information, that is one thing.  This does not mean such a person could not understand it if they try as if their life depended on it.  Because in many important ways a NEW life DOES depend on knowing the facts about Trauma Altered Development.

When I first read the comment mentioned above I sighed in relief that maybe FINALLY someone had appeared on the Stop the Storm horizon that could chew up the hard information and then regurgitate it into the gaping mouths of the little birds needing to know.

Alas, fairy tale BUSTED.  No such thing.  We are not baby birds in need of regurgitated facts to feed and nourish and sustain us.  We can chew up those words, sentence by sentence, making ample use of Google searches for words and terms we are unfamiliar with – and we can think for our own self!!!

And, perhaps most importantly to me, it is critical that we understand that the kinds of trauma changes that happened to us due to abuse and neglect during our critical stages of development ARE PERMANENT for the MOST part!  To suggest that we made it through our horrific traumas without CHANGING in our development is to deny the nearly unimaginable impact that infant-child abuse has to harm survivors.  No real harm?  No need to eliminate infant-child abuse!  A lie is a lie – no matter how reputable the source might seem to be.

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Something about this glorious full moon night forbid me to sleep past 2:30 in the morning.  Even though I am up well before dawn, the world is light out there with a gentle white light.

I am finding myself thinking about my grandchildren.  The first one turns 22 months old today.  This week he displayed his first clear creative use of language as he pointed excitedly to dust motes dancing in a ray of sunlight streaming through my daughter’s kitchen turret window, telling his Mommy, “BUBBLES!  BUBBLES!”

He knows bubbles from bath time and from blowing bubbles, but it so thrills me to know that this next generation following me is already noticing with joy beauty in the world around him.  I have a clear memory of my own self at his exact age gazing with joy at dust motes in sunlight.  But I was in such a different universe that I cannot even compare mine to this new little guy’s.

I have lived from the moment of my birth in a world that was tearing me down instead of building me up.  There was never a single breath I took during the first 18 years of life that wasn’t contaminated by my Borderline Personality Disorder mother in her psychotic abuse of me.

Her abuse and the trauma continually created by her in my world did not stop me from noticing beauty in the world around me.  I am thrilled that my grandson is already noticing beauty like I did.  And I am of course even more thrilled that he is free to exclaim and to be recognized as an amazing little person fully in his own right.

If I were to name one single wish I have for the world it would be that every child conceived on this earth be loved fully.

If we as the adult caregivers on this planet cannot guarantee that we can fully love the children we conceive, then we have no right creating these new precious lives.

I have lived in the shadow of destruction all of my life due to the horrendous abuse done to me.  I have fought all of my life to free myself from the terrible piles of rubble that nearly buried me alive from the time of my birth.

Yet somehow through a miracle of God I was able to pass to my own children incredible goodness.  The badness that met me at my birth was left in the rubble pile so that my children, and now my grandchildren, do not have to fight the battle I have had to fight.

The permanent physiological changes that extreme stress causes to little developing children guarantees that the consequences of this severe early attachment-related trauma will never leave them — it is built into their body, into their nervous system.

Our species pays a high and terrible price for not promising to the little ones brought into this world a safe passage through infancy and childhood.  Once our species grows up and becomes a spiritualized species, all preventable trauma to little ones will cease.

I pray that day is fast approaching!  I cannot describe the joy I feel knowing that love surrounds the next generation of people coming through my family.  I want that for ALL!!  We CAN leave the trauma behind us.

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Check out HEALING TALK RADIO

Yet I do have some reservations about how the information on this site might be erroneous in regard to survivors of extremely traumatic early infancy-childhood experiences:

Dear Diana Hoffman:

In response to the comment you recently left on my blog, I scanned your website this morning.  I see on your site you make this statement:

“Learn about the HPA axis that regulates stress hormones, how infancy and early childhood affects the development of this system, and how it can be retrained and reset from hyperarousibility to normal function.”

I encourage you to consider the fact that this retraining and reset ‘to normal function’ is most certainly NOT possible for many survivors of severe early trauma, especially in cases where early severe abuse and trauma altered development of the nervous system-brain during the first 33 months of life (conception to age two).

I offer these critically important resources for you consideration in support of this fact:

“Effects of Secure Attachment” by Dr. Allan Schore at

http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreIMHJAttachment.pdf

“Attachment and the Regulation of the Right Brain” by Dr. Allan Schore at

http://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreAttachHumDev.pdf

+Dr. Teicher’s ARTICLE ON TRAUMA ALTERED DEVELOPMENT

scanned at this link

https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/a-book-being-born/dr-teichers-article-on-trauma-altered-development/

I also most highly recommend Dr. Bruce Perry’s book, ‘The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog” at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Raised-Psychiatrists-Notebook–What/dp/0465056539/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1326201262&sr=1-1

It is critically important not to mislead the public, especially those who have been most hurt by early trauma that has caused PERMANENT changes in their physiology.

Sincerely, Linda

Stop the Storm blog at https://stopthestorm.wordpress.com/about-stop-the-stor/

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For other consideration:

*BEING A SPIRITUAL SEEKER

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I have been struggling these past days with the BLUES.  My flu is still not quite gone, so my low energy feeds into itself and it is a struggle to gain my good footing again.

Lack of joy and struggles with attachment vs. detachment — those are on my plate right now.  But it is the words a good friend wrote to me today that comforted me, and it is those words I would like to share here this evening.

I am actually trying not to think at all.  I am moving ahead with exercise, with house cleaning, with organizing my music books — doing dishes.  Remembering to eat and drink fluids.  Waiting for my energy, and for some useful hope to return.

In the meantime — from my friend:

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For me it seems so impossible to live this Earthly life to the extent I would like to.  Which translates into (I wish I did not feel inferior, not enough, etc.)  In AA and the short time it’s been around the program has helped so many.  Yet at best it claims about a 5 % success rate.  Most people even with long term sobriety go back and drink.  I know I could be one of those people and that would be a fate worse then death.  So I am always mindful to be grateful for my Sobriety and to remember the price I had to pay for it.

Yesterday I was reading (“Pass it on”) Bill Wilson’s biography.  After being Sober for many years and not long after the Big Book was published Bill met with a man, Father Dowling, a Jesuit priest responsible for founding AA in St. Louis.  That night, Bill told of his high hope and plans, and spoke also about his anger, despair, and mounting frustrations.  The Jesuit quoted Mathew: “Blessed are those who do hunger and thirst.”  God’s chosen, he pointed out, were always distinguished by their yearnings, their restlessness, their thirst.

In pain, Bill asked if there was never to be satisfaction.  The priest said: Never, never any.  He continued describing as ‘divine dissatisfaction‘ that which would keep Wilson going, always reaching out for his unattainable goals, for only by so reaching would he attain what- hidden from him – were God’s goals.  This acceptance that his dissatisfaction, that his very ‘thirst’ could be divine was one of Dowlings’ great gifts to Bill Wilson and through him to AA.

This last week I have been praying the serenity prayer many time through out the day and evening.  At night I pray that many souls I know would have peace in their lives.  You are one of these souls Linda.  God Bless you and let’s be grateful for what we have today.  Love

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It seems I have been far away from my blog for quite some time now, but I have not abandoned my post!  I am just turned around a little bit facing a different direction.

WordPress published blog stats for 2011, and I guess I wrote 565 posts.  No wonder I am tired and in need of some refreshment!  I am writing songs, and the one I am finishing today is based on these words:

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“I implore thee,
by Thy divine sweetness
and by the splendors of the glory
of Thy face,
to send down upon us
from Thy retreats on high
that which will enable us
to draw nigh unto Thee.

Set, then, our feet firm,
O my God,
in Thy Cause
and enlighten our hearts
with the effulgence of Thy knowledge,
and illumine our breasts
with the brightness
of Thy names.”

by Baha’u’llah

From page 191, in ‘Baha’i Prayers’

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The weather has been fantastic, warm and sunny.  It is nourishing for me to just be outside.  I am also involved in a little project crocheting very heavy rugs from cut rags to donate to residents locally in low income housing.  A closet-cleaning effort is also under way.

Now I have to de-pit my five pounds of cherries so I can dry them.  Oh, I need to bake some bread.  In a little while a couple of friends will be here for a visit in the sun.

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This must be, first and foremost, a blog about human toughness.  Toughness does not often show itself in people’s lives unless they are challenged by hardships and traumas — REALLY challenged — and mostly does not show itself unless the imbalance of power between those who are hurting little people and the victims of these attacks is so glaring and disgusting that all we are left to compare the experiences to those known by prisoner-of-war and holocaust survivors.

And yet the experiences of trauma and abuse that I know about and write ‘toward’ for survivors are so much worse than what even any adult I mention above could possibly know had they not received severe, horrific levels of malevolent treatment as little people.

I figured it out a long time ago in my personal studies and thinking and healing that being ALONE not only ‘against the world’ but being ALONE against a world so brutal and hopeless no ordinary person could even begin to think about how to survive in such danger and threat, is a critically distinguishing characteristic of severe abuse to little people who have no possible hope of protection or rescue from anyone who gives a hoot about what they are going through (at least while the ‘abuse’ is occurring, which often means a VERY VERY long time).

And so those survivors of severe infant-child who do just that — make it through horrors beyond belief — are amazing people.

Thinking about the bigger picture, I find myself today realizing that even when we can begin to know the truth about what we endured — and begin to understand the profound skills we used to continue to survive — the list of what was done to harm us is often so much longer than is the list of what was done to help us.  (Yes, we are talking directly about risk vs resiliency factors here.)

On a deeper level, we have to make sure our list grows to include the changes that had to happen on the deepest levels of our developing physiology as our rapidly growing little body-nervous system- brain was forced to react to severe trauma ALONE when we were so little-in-the-world.

This list, for most of us, is a long one.  Research firmly and clearly shows us now what these kinds of changes are:  Changes in how brain regions develop and in how they operate; changes in our most critically sensitive nervous system reactions to stress and threat resulting in anxiety disorders of all kinds; changes in our human attachment systems as the govern and direct all interactions we have with other people for our lifetime; changes in the development of our immune system; changes in how our DNA manifests and operates in every cell of our body — to name a few.

On this deep level it can be hard enough to learn to begin to recognize and to understand what these physiological reactions in our development in early deprived and dangerous environments actually are and how these changes affect us — but it is harder to go even deeper still to find the levels inside of us and the ways in which no possible abuse on God’s earth could touch or damage or change us IN ANY WAY.

The unchanged part of us lie so deeply and have been with us so long we would have to be able to go back to look at our SELF from the start of our life.  These areas exist way beyond a time when we had words or any ability to think conscious thoughts.

This does not mean that we cannot FIND these deep, most-important, untouched, unchanged, untampered with, unhurt, pure and strong and clear and GOOD parts of our SELF.

These characteristics, these abilities, these gifts, our innate goodness HAS to be placed on our lists somehow because this is what we USED to find a way to survive in hell — and barring the development during those early developmental stages of serious sickness and illness of the mind and body such as the severe Borderline Personality Disorder that consumed my mother during her own adaptations to trauma of her infancy-childhood — came out of hell as amazingly wonderfully GOOD people.

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The level from which I try to operate in my thinking and in my dissections of adult actions that are evil and inhumanely perpetrated against little people (in particular) might seem to be surrounded by ‘grayness’.

Yet in my thinking based on my belief, based upon my understanding of how Creation operates, nothing that is really true in any religion contradicts what is really true in any science.

If humans wander off-track by misconstruing what is currently ‘known’ about reality, that does not change reality.

In my world there is an Unknowable Essence that will forever remain exactly that – Unknowable.  Through the repeated gift of Manifestations on earth in human form given to humans to guide us toward ever-increasing maturity individually and as a species, we learn about true reality.

True reality is GOODNESS based on the absolute love our Creator has for us.

What appears to be evil happens when GOODNESS is absent.

Therefore, all humans are innately GOOD.  (again, see for broader perspective:  *NO MATTER WHAT – HAVE NO ENEMY)

Given this fact, and as the Writings at the above link discuss, there are three reasons why humans appear to be ‘evil beings’:  Through sickness, ignorance and immaturity.

I know evil.  My mother hated me and in her psychotic mental illness projected onto me the fullness of her evil-perception (from the time of my birthing).  She then was capable of hurting me nearly beyond belief.

This does not make her an evil person.  Mother’s sickness removed from her the power to choose between good and evil actions in anything like a normal, rational way.

True, there are people on this earth who have absolutely no excuse as far as I can see for the evilness of their actions.  God will deal with those people.  My mother was not one of these freely-evil-choosing people.  Mother had lost access to her rational mind.

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Now that I have traveled into this ‘gray zone’ of human thought and understanding where the words of science remain mostly absent and are replaced with untestable words like SOUL, I will say this is exactly where we have to look for the words we need to list on the side of GOODNESS to counterbalance all the nasty stuff that can’t be avoided on the hardship side of a severe infant-child abuse survivor’s life story list.

Yet on this side of goodness that is the reality of who we are because God made us this way — is one word so important that it takes all the real power away from the dark side and leaves us as survivors standing in the light.

NOBLE.

God has made every human being as a NOBLE creature.

Being NOBLE people abused little ones possess an innate dignity that cannot be touched by abuse.

We are independent creatures at our core, in our essence, belonging only in our dependence upon the God Who created us.

Nothing ever touched my mother in her essential nobility.  She retained her innate dignity.  But her sickness buried this GOOD core of Mother as surely as if she was buried inside massive piles of physical rubble.

Nobody noticed what happened to Mother.

Nobody saw the truth for what it was.

With her core noble good essence buried beyond rescue because of the terrible sickness of her body-mind, Mother committed ‘evil’ actions against me that nobody questioned, either.

And I survived what Mother did to me — with my nobility intact.  In my case, I did not develop a terrible sickness that barred my own access to my own inner core GOOD self.

I am forever grateful.

As I look back through the corridors of time, as far back as I can remember, I can now see myself standing in the midst of hell — suffering — but suffering WHOLE.

I am learning to toss aside the rubble of trauma and abuse that was done to me so that increasingly what is left of my history of 18 years of severe abuse is GOOD.  The BAD was — most simply put — UNFORTUNATE.

It is a quantum leap in a change of thinking for me to be able to finally replace the word I have used to long — TRAGIC — with one that is actually more accurate:  UNFORTUNATE.

I no longer wish to consider what happened to me as TRAGIC.  That word and concept belong to the rubble that I am removing.  Under the rubble is the truth — what happened to me was UNFORTUNATE.  It was not BAD in my world because it had no power to change who I essentially AM.

I can go back to see and feel and recognize and know who I essentially am once the rubble is removed and find that who I was THEN is exactly who I am NOW.

What has allowed me to continue to exist through all these 60 years IS TOUGHNESS.  Call it a protective armor held around me that kept me safe under all that rubble so that it could not touch me.  Call it protective armor inside of me as well, that gave the the power to make the right choice for my survival-in-hell every single step of the way.

But being as objective about my situations I have to say that what gave me toughness was FORTUNATE, and this FORTUNATE more than balances out the UNFORTUNATE of what happened to me.

Even though my mother was UNFORTUNATE to not only have to survive her own childhood in hell, but to also end up developing a severe sickness along the way — she was still FORTUNATE enough to SURVIVE — which did eventually mean that I was born at all.

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I wish to find the center hub of my life — which is what essential nobility and goodness is to me — and then follow the pathways of my life all the way back to my beginning, making them as rubble-free as I can.  As I now look back, see that central hub of life that is GOOD — even as I name the truth of what actually happened to me — those descriptions I can provide actually have no more power.  They are in the discarded rubble heap.

I am also learning to recognize that all the trauma-triggered changes in my physical body also belong to the rubble heap.  These changes — PTSD, anxiety, hyper startle response, inability to read human expression in ordinary ways, dissociation, depression in my autonomic nervous system built around abuse that stopped me-froze me dead in my tracks thousands upon thousands of times in my childhood — do not in any way touch the essential noble, good, whole, strong, TOUGH me one single bit.

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This is a long post, I realize.  But to readers who have made it thus far I say KUDDOS to you!  You would not be here reading my final words if you didn’t know EXACTLY what I am talking about:  That only GOODNESS matters in the essential end as we heal.  Goodness is all that is REAL.  We CAN learn to recognize what is rubble and we can discard it.  Yes, this is all WORK.  But it is THE GOOD WORK!

I am not saying that we diminish the greatness of the harms done against us.  I am not advocating minimization or denial.  I don’t think we can make it all the way to the TRUTH unless we accept the rubble that is rubble.  But it is our choice what we do with that rubble once we locate it.

TRASH IT I SAY!

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There are lots of trails of other stories attached to this one.  How many of them do I reel in here?  How do I say my wonderful recent telephone conversations with my oldest daughter — who turns 41 Jan. 6th — connect directly to my observations of my 21-month-old grandson who was just down for a week’s visit with his mother — because I saw the miracle of how ALIKE they are in so many ways — he now being so much like she was at his age — she having been that similar to him from the day she was born?

How do I say that as I stood in front of the plate glass nursery window in Balboa Naval hospital after she was born (when I was 19) that for all I had been through those first 18 years of my life in hell I was able to stand at that window, with her little baby body all tucked into pink flannel blankets by kind nurses who rolled her as close to the glass for me as they could so I could see her, FELT her INDEPENDENCE so strongly in those moments I never doubted the power in her little person that was there THEN and is equally there NOW?

That hospital doctor would not let me HOLD my own baby.  He told me I was an unfit (unwed) mother in 1971.  He condemned me to an aching heart and arms without her.  But there she was in her little bassinet.  Skin a perfect shade of grownup, bluest eyes wide open looking all around her, not a peep out of her tiny mouth; “OK, you GUYS already!  Don’t know whatcha up to, but REALLY this has gone on long enough!  Let me OUT of here!  I have an IMPORTANT life to live and it is time I got right to it!”

All girl with a plan, always a plan.  A girl with razor intelligence.  A girl born with an armament of dynamic personality in and around her that has ALWAYS let the world know, “Disrespect ME?  So NOT an OPTION!”

And here was this new little guy in the lines of my family — exactly the same way!  Undeniably….

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Put simply enough for now, I hope, because now I want to write about ME.

Me today at 60.  And the me I saw today that must have been the me I was and HAD to become to stay alive from the time I was born.  Yes, I must have been BORN with this independence gene.  And maybe I was also born with the ‘disrespect me not an option’ gene so that no matter WHAT my mother did to me — she NEVER BROKE ME!

Because where did big daughter and little grandson get that exact same combination?  Mirrors of my soul?

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Here’s me – sick.  Been very, very sick for a week.  I don’t ‘do sick’ because I don’t get sick — and never have much since birth (until the cancer visited 5 years ago).  I have been feeling a little better, but not much better, so broke down and finally went to doctor’s clinic today.  PTSD, severe child abuse survivor, high anxieties, bad combo with being at the hands of unconcerned cold strangers in cramped, closed quarters dependent on THEM for anything – let alone on their evaporated compassion.

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What did doc hear in my chest?  She did not say.  My oxygen level at 91 was too low (whatever that gizmo thing is they put on your finger tip to measure it).  First clue to doc I was not lying to her, not there to waste her time or anyone’s money, not there for ‘attention’ — what the HECK?

Did she believe me I was sick?  Did I cough and hack and spit gobs of gubers out of my mouth and leak slimy snot out of my nose?

Nope.

Did I look her in the eye?  Nope.  Learned a year ago in that clinic these are pretend ‘nice’ people – not real ones.  Nasty, that day was.

Did I act sick?  Not sick enough?  I guess not.  (How does one act sick, anyway?  Boy, as a child if I had been weak or shown weakness I would have died – I know that.)

Shades of my insanely abusive mother here.  Did little (or big) Linda ever show anyone how I suffered?  Did tears stream out in public?  No.  Did I show anyone my terror?  Did I shake as a child, squint my eyes in fear or pop them wide open?

I have been SICK with this flu for a week – nearly as sick as when I was on chemo – first flu like this in at least 30 years.  I live in this body.  I ought to KNOW and a doctor ought to BELIEVE ME!  Is that too much RESPECT to ask for??

I do not lie.

I could list you symptoms.  I could have done a far more convincing job in front of doc had I listed my symptoms – every detail, on down the line — I have been suffering with a long line of them, but why?  Why belittle my own dignity and undermine my own self respect by listing to this doc what any fool would KNOW are symptoms of a bad flu!  Do I look well?  Absolutely NOT!

Doc had enough history.  I was asked when I called for the appointment why I was coming in.  “I’ve had a bad flu for a week that’s not getting better.  I am tired of coughing ’til I throw up.  I need someone to listen to my chest to tell me what’s going on.”  Etc.  Was I do demonstrate?

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It was a surprise to me to find little girl Linda determined to survive right in here in my body today, right in my body in that doc office.

Doc had nurse give me a steroid shot to decrease bronchial inflammation.  She had them give me a breathing treatment (med in some kind of steam to breath in my mouth) – left me alone in the little room for 20 minutes with that — controlling my body/self to control the cough could not be done at the same time the medicine was being inhaled.

And sure as crapola Linda coughed.

Doc had wanted to prescribe cough syrup with codeine.  I asked her why take THAT?  She had NOT prescribed me antibiotics.

Why?  Because I didn’t start coughing convincingly until that med hit my lungs.

Guess she was satisfied then.  As I sat there and tried to breath lower than a medium depth neckline on a shirt into my lungs, down into my belly — the balloon breathing thing — I realized I had frozen my breathing.  I had to WORK consciously to breath and more deeply — and now I did COUGH – obviously cough!?!?!?!

I realized I had done this week and did in that office what I learned to do to survive Mad Mother from the moment I was born.  Lately when my coughing gets going and I can’t stop it, I cough ’til I pee.  I cough ’til I throw up.  Some deep part of survivor child Linda came up with a VERY effective and creative, independent-solution to THAT —

Breathing deep = coughing fit?

Stop breathing.  At least stop breathing as much as possible.

OK.

DID THAT.

STILL HERE.

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Down went the oxygen count in my blood – which the doc did see and believe – after all (no mother I did not control the nurse or the breath tester machine) – machines do not lie.

And eventually when big Linda got help today and as I worked with little Linda’s survival patterns so I COULD breath deeper, I did cough, did have the doc come in the room and say, I hear you are coughing from down the hall (BIG DUH ON THAT, DOC!); I am writing you a prescription for antibiotics.

She would not tell me if I have bronchitis.  All she said in way of explanation for her change-of-damn-heart was, “Well, we never know if bronchitis is viral and will not respond to antibiotics or if it is bacterial and will respond.”

OK, so let us DIE  without the help we need – what, just in case — of WHAT EXACTLY?  You want me to get sicker and have to COME BACK HERE?  To see YOU?

Just in case I am — what — a LIAR without a cough?

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Was she worried I was going to develop an antibiotic habit over a codeine one?

GEEZE!

But – I DID get to meet my very clever survivor child self on some level today, that’s for sure.  Never did I consciously know in these past few days that I had not been coughing as much or as badly because —

I figured out how to stop a cough attack by ‘not really breathing’ at all!  (After all as an abused little one I had to figure out often how to survive without access to bathroom, food, water, sleep — beat beat beat — well, another story….)

If I had come from a different, less malevolent, horribly hostile toxic life-threatening DANGEROUS world maybe I could see my reaction NOW as being tragic a one.

Nope.

Pretty powerful and amazing child I was THEN that I could survive to NOW, plain and simple.  And why would I WANT to go ask jerks in a clinic for ‘help’ now — exactly?  GGGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!

I was half way down the hallway to leave today when I made a GREAT decision for myself and decided to risk staff reaction if they didn’t like my request.  I decided I had a right to find out before I left if the steroid shot and the breathing treatment had helped – so I did not have to leave with the scary ’91’ in mind – but could rather leave feeling I was feeling BETTER!

I asked for the retest. Nurse was very sweet.  Up to 98 of 100.  Big Linda unfroze her lungs.  I left feeling better and KNOWING it!

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I am asking this question this morning:  “Is the person that I am — experiencing the experiences of my life — nothing more than just yet another experience of my life?”  At the same time I wonder if it isn’t only survivors of severe infant-child abuse attacks that will be able to resonate with the root of this question — because I suspect it is a deeply spiritual one.

I certainly had no sophisticated ability to think about myself in the world — not as a very young child, not even as a teen.  I suspect the difference between myself as a survivor of continual severe abuse for my first 18 years (along with other survivors) and those who did not suffer abuse is that there is a fork in the road that makes those two groups of children grow into their life, grow a body and a nervous system (including their brain) in two very different ways.

Research now clearly documents the serious kinds of body-brain changes that early abuse and trauma create in survivors.  It is far harder to find descriptions about what these kinds of changes FEEL like to us as we continue to survive – to endure — to stay alive — and to live the rest of our lives in our trauma-changed body.  (This blog is packed with information about these changes.)

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Being shocked, terrorized, violently assaulted, confined, etc. (!!) — often when I least suspected an attack by my mother — always HURT me terribly in many, many ways.  In other words, the sickness that pervaded my mother’s body and life continually interrupted my experience of myself having experiences of myself in my own body in my own life.

People who were never severely abused during their earliest most important developmental years of infancy and childhood did not experience the massive interruptions in ongoing life experience that violent attacks create in the experience of a little one.  Ordinary people grow a body-brain that appears to be seamless in its ability to process ongoing information in the present as the past moves smoothly into the future.

Brutally attacked little people are massively overwhelmed on every level by the amount of trauma being done to them.  Not only are they sidetracked and detoured away from going about their own business of being a little person learning about the world and about their own self in that world when violent, brutal attacks interrupt their life — they are also left unable to process or to integrate or to learn from or to make sense out of the MASSIVE amount of horrible information these attacks overwhelm them with!

These brutalized children are left during attacks all alone in the world without loving protection, help and support of anyone to take care of them.

There is a high price paid to survive the violent, violating experiences of early brutal traumatic attacks and the environment within which these attacks take place.

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As I ask this question I presented at the start of this post I am aware that what I am aware of in my experience of myself in this life this morning FEELS in my body memory to be very familiar to me.

I remain sick after a week of trying to fight my own way through this nasty coughing flu.  Doctors told my daughter that they could not treat this malaise in my grandson because it was viral.  I therefore have not sought medical help yet — but I will have to after these holidays because this is not going away on its own.  Something is wrong.

At the same time as I wander slowly through actions of my morning I realize this strange feeling of one part of me following my body-self around — complete with some part of my self INSIDE the body feeling sick and having the experience of no energy, hungry without appetite, long bouts of coughing that won’t stop no matter what, inability to sleep, ETC. — is yet another PART of me.

It’s like the timing of experience is separated, as in a movie where the words spoken by actors’ lips are not in synch.  The part of me hovering around the sick person’s body moving slowly through space recognizes everything that happens in a different timeline than does the part of me that is sick inside and with this body.

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I know this feeling because of the hard work I have done regarding the writing of the stories of my childhood of abuse.  Always when I locate myself in a brutal memory there is ME there experiencing myself in my little child life BEFORE one of Mother’s attacks.  Once her violent intrusion occurs, there is a break in my ongoing experience of myself in my life.

Suddenly — and I mean out of nowhere instantaneously — MAKES NO SENSE TO ME!  WHERE DID THAT COME FROM? — Mother would ATTACK ME!

Painfully in ways that only survivors of this kind of abuse know.  Extreme pain on all levels including TERROR in the body.  Those attacks MADE MY BODY HURT AND SICK.  Sick.  Like my body is now.

And just like now, just like then — there was a part of me that was forced to be OUTSIDE the physical experience of being IN that sick and hurting body of mine.

I could call this experience ‘dissociation’ if I wanted to — but quite frankly that word is completely pitiful to describe the BIGNESS and the SIGNIFICANCE of what I am talking about.

I do believe in a soul, that God created our soul when we were conceived — that our soul is connected to our physical body but not INSIDE our body throughout our duration on this earth — and that when our soul and body separate our soul goes on to live forever.

In this lifetime, barring sickness of the body that interferes with the ability of the soul to express itself in connection to our body in this world (as I believe happened to my mother through her terrible sickness — see: *NO MATTER WHAT – HAVE NO ENEMY).  I believe this ‘tampering with’ of connection is an experience — that can be EXPERIENCED in terms of what it FEELS like.

I am having that experience now.  I know this feeling.  I can recognize it exactly at the instant of every one of my mother’s brutal attacks of me that I can remember.  First the world I lived in would be ONE way

and then

BAM!!!!

it would be ANOTHER WAY!

I was NEVER prepared.  My mother suffered from insanity, though I had no way to know this as a child (and it took a LONG time into my adulthood to understand this fact).

The human soul, we are told, has a supreme power called ‘the rational ability’.  My mother’s particular sickness (I suspect severe Borderline Personality Disorder) barred her soul’s ‘rational mind’ ability from operating — which then enabled her in sickness to commit so much EVIL — ESPECIALLY when it came to her psychosis about me.

So NOBODY – most certainly not little me — understood what was wrong with Mother.  Her attacks were irrational and could not be predicted.

But when her attacks came they broke my ongoing experience of reality.  I would have to travel, then, through the very long tunnel of all the bizarre twists of abuse of all kinds that followed one of her attacks, all the way through coping in my body with horrific physical pain, until sometime LATER when she wore herself out on a particular attack — and eventually left me alone —

for a little while

so I could get BACK to being a child in my own life

until

BAM!!

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This flu is evidently a MINOR (though ICKY and very real) version of a BAM! as my body self is stuck living it

while my soul self (I bet) sort of floats along waiting

for this body to heal itself

to get better

to get back to the business of ongoing ‘normal’ life as I usually know it.

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By the way, I have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in consequence of terrible childhood abuse.  Going to a clinic is a trauma trigger for me in many ways — and is very hard for me to do — for many reasons.  I have no memory of the last time I had a flu like this.  It had to be over 30 years ago.  But if I can hang in there to avoid having to go to an ER and wait until the town’s clinic opens again on Tuesday, I will have to bear myself up to enter that confined, stranger-filled, claustrophobic space to get some help for this body.

I don’t like ANY part of how I am feeling right now.  But I am also very clear that it is not my soul (nor was it probably my mother’s soul) that suffers sickness.  Sickness happens to a body — and that sickness then interferes with a soul’s ability to express itself in the world.

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