The ground of yourself

Remain rooted in the ground of yourself

Even as all of these waves of feeling

Rise and crest and break

Carrying you towards

An understanding

Of how undeniable the forces of change

Can be to life

Still amidst all of this change

There is a ground within you

That is unchanging

That partakes of the Universe

There is a root within you

That connects you to

Your Universal Source

At one

And yet set apart at times

By our ego

We lose the way to this sense of

Our implicit value

Our underlying interconnection

Breathe into your body

Feel there deep inside

Your attunement to the stars

For you are a being of light

Who society often denies

The way to truth

But if you trust yourself

And anchor yourself within

Finding means to stay connected

To the foundational root

You will find all of the love you ever needed

As well as the unending proof

Of your soul’s eternal

Spiritual connection

My heart was a stranger

For so long my heart was a stranger

With all of the feeling I had to close the doorway on

I became a prisoner in my mind

And there in that wilderness things became so cold

I could not see as clearly before

How much in my younger years

I roamed about

Lost

In a kingdom of ice

But with the easing of the way in

I found this warmth that rose

Even as the hurting began

That I shut the door upon

For so long

A fire you taught me to fear

Was unacceptable

No one could understand

What was happening to me

They only saw me moving

Further and further away

Now I see how it was

But I also know there was no other way

Things could work out

And so if,

Over so many years I cried

As all the inner frozen rivers

Thawed carrying me to the ocean

Where I dissolved

Then there I also saw the dark face of God

Reflected in the face of a black woman

With eyes like moons

That spoke of infinite sorrow

She showed me

There could not be another way

To birth

There would be so many days

I was paralysed even after this

But now I understand

Why it was the doorway to my heart became barred

By all of these scars

All of this confusion and pain

I bore

In silence

Echoes

There is an echo here

It speaks your name

Familiar in its candesence

As I sense it rise and fall

My soul rides the tide of feeling

That pulses

With the longing I felt

To be close to you

When you withdrew

If felt as if the Sun was gone

How would I ever find the courage

To live on

Without you?

And so my longing for you made me become

A ghost

And the haunting of that

I carried so deeply and quietly within

Until it became

My wreckage

Now I see

There was

A necessary abyss I had to fall into

To find the way

To myself

You were part of the body that held me

As a child

And when you disappeared

I became an ethereal thing

But my body in all of its suffering

Called me home

So often

With only these echoes

I tried to silence

Until the buried scream became

Deafening

And there was no way

To run

From the fire

Of my becoming

So if I burned

Now I know

The heat was necessary

When you finally left

Some aspect of me was finally freed

Even if it has taken 7 long years

To understand it all

So now I draw close to these echoes

At night and in the quietest moments

They bring me comfort

For in time I have no doubt

You and I will

See each other

And sing together

Again

Understanding why

Our earthly lives

Unfolded

Exactly as they did

A new beginning

I will go down to the ocean

I will board my boat

A boat that can carry me far from here

Far from this dark shore of suffering

There is now a way to be free

From all of the demons I witnessed

That then began to migrate

And live deep down inside of me

This heavy burden of shame

That made me feel I had done nothing

With my life

Not true at all

There is a rest now that wants

A chance to be

There is a softening

I need to embrace

Harsh realities I need to replace

With tender seeds of hope

Some say this earth is doomed

But is it possible we could undergo

A renewal?

Will it all end in ice

Or fire?

Well the truth my friend

Is I have known both

But I prefer to belive

What ever its end

Will bring

In time

From out of these germinating seeds

A new beginning

To heal, to support, to inspire, to grow : to give voice

When I think about my values and the purpose of my blog these four things come to mind.. It is inspiring to me when via this medium we get to connect with others on a journey of inner growth and can help each other.. Along the way of my own blogging path so many people have showed up, many of them moved on but I learned so much from them and I hope at times I in taking the risk to be vulnerable, honest and open in sharing somehow helped others.

I am constantly deeply moved and also inspired to read of how others work to process their trauma in therapy and by other means and am also inspired by how poetry can also help us. I was just reading further portions of Kim Rosen’s book on being healed by poetry in which she shared how the poems of Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Juan Ramon Jimenez among others inspired her..She then shared one of her own poems :

Not the high mountain monastery

I had hoped for, the real

face of my spiritual practice

is this:

The sweat pearls on my cheek

when I tell you the truth, my silent

cry in the night when I think

I’m alone. The trembling

in my own hand as I reach out

through the years of overcoming

to touch what I had hoped

I would never need again.

There are parts of us that can be bound in shame and touching them through active imagination or even writing can be a perfect way of externalizing them. It may take a real act of courage to do this but its important we get it out. After all once we bring these things out into the open then we can explore them and they may even get a chance to transform, at the very least we get to form a relationship with our inner world and that of others and so we can grow, heal, inspire and connect.

I was also having some thoughts about this issue of shame yesterday in terms of generational influences..I was wondering if the generation of millenials (born 1980 to 1996) and then Gen X suffered as much from these shame bound feelings as my own…. Baby Boomer generation (born 1946 to 1965). I am sure that feelings and our need to be in touch with then often stay problematic when their expression was seen as an inconvenience or mistake in some way and it becomes harder too to expose the self in a society where not making it or succeeding becomes a sign of a your lack of worth.

I see signs around me lately that this may be turning around but I also see how much people struggle with their own fears of vocalising or being honest..In fact I was just listening to a program on the benefits of singing to babies and young children to help them learn and the lady interviewed spoke of the fear many parents have of signing as they were told they could not sing growing up or missed out on being selected for the school choir.. How sad then for them to close down that avenue of expression.

The need to be perfect can be so crippling, the need to adhere to rules or strict parameters of expression or non expression may continue to trap that silent scream down deep inside of us.. In fact googling that term yesterday I came across what looked to be a very good book by the same name of poetry written by a solider with PTSD that had received interviews full of praise and admiration on Amazon. I then came across a wonderful painting done by a fellow blogger along with a piece of writing which spoke about this silent scream (see link below)

https://wishing-tree.org/2021/09/17/the-stories-we-hold/

We never know what silent secret we have buried may help others through the telling of it. For myself, I have seen the damage of silent histories never spoken of in both my family and the lives of others. The bringing out of the secret may bring some shame down upon us by others invested in it remaining silent, but never the less we need to speak it out. and then we can possibly bring wisdom, compassion or understanding to that situation of constriction or restriction. At the very least even if we can never erase the pain of what happened, in acknowledging it, sharing about it, exploring its dimensions and has affects in our way of relating and making sense, in also seeing how it connects our being and soul to the being and soul of others we get an opportunity to build bridges inwardly and outwardly and also help to reduce in all of our lives the crippling silencing power of toxic shame which unrecognised fuels the separatist nature of the inner and outer critic.

Quietly

I wote this several weeks ago

I loved listening to the things Sonia Choquette spoke of in the video she posted on the throat chakra yesterday.. in the video she spoke of how full our head so often are of noise, we may not even always be aware of the running commentary we have going on but for me when its slows down or stops completely that for me is the best time, the time of peace.

Maybe I gravitage towards loving evenings more than mornings having been born just after 7 pm. Its always a relief to close the curtains, finish dinner and then just sit quietly in the silence for a while, I have been trying to do more meditation of late and not get so swept up in ‘drama’. I had to cut contact completely with Scott he would not respect my boundaries at all and I am so exhausted by his problems.. Part of me judges the other part that is protecting her peace but to be honestly I do not think empaths learn to self protect enough. We seem to feel its some kind of gold star to be always caring for others problems or taking them on. That said this is not about shutting down feeling..

For example today when I saw my elderly neighbor walking around earlier with her stick I went out to say hello and find out how her husband is. sadly he had a seizures several weeks ago and had to be put into hospital and sadly with Covid restrictions here it was hard for Roz to visit but she told me today that she managed to be allowed one visit to him last week.. I really did feel for Roz, its such a tough thing to be separated from those we love due to Covid especially when they are going through so much.

That kind of caring does not have to take away the peace.. And the simple joy of just being able to be quiet and not focused on problems.. God knows there are probably lots of things in life we would change if it was in our power to do so, but somethings we just cannot change. Its a relief to be able to get into bed lately, to know that for those 6 or 7 hours I will not have to focus on the problems in the world and even when awake make sure I am putting my focus on something enjoyable.

Today it was a visit to the park and finally getting to watch the movie My Salinger Year. I had been wanting to see this movie for just under a year, and when I asked a friend to go who is quite dominant she suggested we see another movie which I really found far too violent and did not enjoy, in contrast the movie is so charming with great performances especially from Sigourney Weaver who plays the female boss at a literary agency where the central character Joanna goes to work. Joanna is an aspiring writer who moves to New York with high hopes of becoming a writer.. instead in her role as assistant to Margaret she becomes a kind of secretary with the key role of reading and replying to letters addressed to the famous reclusive writer S J Salinger. Salinger lives in isolation and does not want to be bothered by fans, so its Joanna’s task to read the letters and then shred them replying as necessary but it does not take long for her to begin to be entraced by some of the writers and then she takes it upon herself to become more authoritative in her replies.. It is a great movie to watch for anyone who is a fan of literature. The relationship that develops between Margaret and Joanna is very touching and emotional, Margaret is not dissimilar to the kind of tyrannical boss played by Meryl Streep in the movie The Devil Wears Prada but in time she has to bring down some of her defenses as slowly the engaging, perceptive and softer nature of her ‘prodigy’ open her up, particularly after tragedy hits..

I have seen it written that people with high sensitivity enjoy most a quieter life that is peaceful and that we gain especial pleasure from movies, books and poetry.. That seems to be true in my case.. The more I center myself within this quiet and peace the more complete and whole and centered I experience myself to be and the less fragmented.

I wrote this post a few weeks ago and then I seemed to hit the wall with a bad fall inwards last week but I just took a look at my drafts folder which contains 102 items and I am going through the process of editing some of the poems while trying to work out which posts to trash.. I thought I would post this today though. It was a really happy day spent finally getting to see a movie I did not get to see due to putting someone else’s preference first.

Every challenge in life brings gifts

So true.. all of our experiences can be seen as gifts..

How to feel better

It may take a while before you can find it in your heart to change how you view your pain, but even in pain there can be value.

Stronger because of the powerlessness you suffocated in. Kinder because of the fear that tore you apart. More compassionate and humble because someone shattered your sense of security into a million pieces as he forced himself over your most sacred of boundaries.

Grateful because you made it through, you got back up. You can be a shining light of hope for others. Every challenge in life brings gifts.

View original post

On poetry and trauma

“I’ve seen that life’s worst experiences can exist as strangers in us, separate, like people we don’t know and don’t want to know. Yet these worst experiences remain our passionate life companions.  I’ve seen that our emotions after life’s worst experiences can be sealed in a variety of containers, some buried, or in a black hole, some that explode unexpectedly, some that exist only in the public realm, some that exist only in private, some that exist in one part of ourselves and not in others. But I’ve also seen that through poetry, people can open these containers, and move their contents, these painful emotions, into new frames that are more open and repurposed for a meaningful life.”

Richard Gold “Poetry Saved My Life”,

The concept of opening containers, letting loose things so tightly held down, puts into words perfectly the release I feel when writing out my own experiences. So often, we bury things that have hurt and changed us as far down as we can while we struggle to survive them. While this may be necessary in the moment as we emerge on the other side of pain, blinking in the sunlight and struggling to see, eventually a part of processing, for me, is digging down and understanding what I’ve hidden and why.

—

As a tool for therapy, one that’s accessible and creative and heartbreakingly personal, poetry for many is a lifeline. A thread that can reconnect us back to ourselves, our experiences, our bodies, and make them our own again. Where our own hearts can sometimes fail, poetry can step in and begin to build that bridge between our words and our souls. I’m no therapist, just a girl who’s seen a lot and lost a lot, and poetry has helped me heal time and time again.

Annamae Sax : Understanding Trauma, the Healing Process of Poetry

“Another element of poetry’s capacity to act as a force of healing is its grounding in connection and interconnection. There is solace in recogniz­ing that whatever happens to a person, someone before us has known it as well. Poetry’s evidence tells us that we are not singled out by our suf­fering; we are brought into the shared life of all who have lived and died before and with us.”

Jane Hirschfield

Link :

Understanding Trauma: the Healing Process of Poetry

Your soul’s journey

I connected with a person last night who was close to my older sister who died in 2014 in the years before her aneurysm and had a chance to observe my place in the family during those Pluto years 1979- till after it happened in February the following year.. He said that the way I spoke to him at that time showed I did not identify with my family on many levels, that I saw their behavior as confused. It came to mind later that, at that time, I, too was confused and became even moreso in the years after my sister came unstuck.

It got me to thinking after our long chat last night of the soul journey that is particularly ours in our family, that we may go through experiences to learn and as an empath it was the compassion I could feel even for behavior that at times was problematic and hurtful to me that most struck me. Was that due to me being ‘different’ in some way? As the one to lift the lid on the addiction and neglect issues reaching back it has been a huge journey in many ways for me. Knowing just what I can and cannot be responsible for in this life.. I think too of when my second sister fell ill with breast cancer she almost suggested me into having it, urging me to go for tests and I was the one there to support her through both her own tests, results and surgery, but of course by the time I had to operated on she had gone away and was not able to be there. I do remember her younger son visiting me with his soon to be wife at the hospital two days after my surgery, they were in town for a short visit before leaving for the land of our ancestors to be married that April.

Sadly at that time (2015 – 16) I did not have a good therapist.. my older sister had died the year before and that was a painful year, at a party my other sister threw for my mother’s 90th, a elaborate ‘performative’ affair, she talked about me behind my back and smeared me to her sons and my older sister’s sons, when I tried to confront her over how wrong she was about me ‘envying’ her, she at first tried to deny it and then said that my other sister’s son had no right to tell me what she said.. Then she said “I always thought that is how you felt” That was like a cold hard slap. How wrong could she have been? How often did she hurt me by her own misattunement and even my her condescending judgement? But then sadly she had to put everything on appearances rather than inner substance and after hearing about that and being in pain over her denying and not even feeling genuinely sorry I went over on my right ankle while trying to run off the anger and anxiety on the spot in my living room one night.. I was not able to walk for about 6 weeks following that injury and of course the breast cancer followed about 15 months later. That all arked up today in twists and surges and a huge fall back to sleep after them around 7 am. Only for me to wake at 9.30 all twisted around more and struggling to stand up.

When I had the massage on Friday it seemed to shift the swelling around that right ankle connected to the mass on my left hand side shoulder around the site of my 2016 surgery… There is a lot of anger and pain inside of me. and then I see that where I got captured in the family was about so much unresolved in both me and the family and yet the truth is that I no longer need to be trapped there any more.. patterns are breaking down. .. That longing to be seen by, as well as connected to those who could not see me is fading now. I see how it gets triggered in the present at times but that that pain can be responded too from within myself from the inner parent to the abandonment feelings of the aching child with tenderness, compassion, understanding and love.. In those past years I did not have sufficient ego strength to not be drawn back in, especially when Mum pulled on me again after my sister had a fall due to over-medication in the years following all of that angst.

Did my soul choose this family, or was I just a continuation of the ancestral line and all of the emotional neglect? Was I the one who would be the so called ‘light bringer’? Or is this that a kind of ego hubris?

My family friend was not aware of the pain both Mum and Dad carried but as an immigrant to Australia he understood Dad’s millionaire project.. In a way my Dad’s empoverished Venus opposing Chiron in Aries and squaring Pluto in Cancer was the catalyst for so much that went down for my older sister.. She also has the cardinal signs strong in her chart.. her aneurysm hit under a transit of Neptune to Mercury but an astrologer had told her in the year before that a critical event would hit her in the following year that would either transform or destroy her.. My family friend told me last night my sister came back to Canberra hell bent on proving herself to my business family.. but it was a project doomed to fail and in the end it was that overwork that made her ill along with lack of self care and over use of both alcohol and drugs as well as cigarettes.. If only she could have loved herself. If only she and her husband had made a life apart from my Dad’s wound and my Mum’s wound, I am sure her life would have been so different.. Sadly she was not the golden child and she would have been far better off out of our family system.. In the end she lived her life as the disabled scapegoat.. but the system failed her in some way and she was not conscious enough to break free.

Good as it can be to take the so called ‘long view’, that Neale Donald Walsh talks of in the previous quote I shared, many of us also get entrapped in family systems and the family fate and on some level I do feel as a culture we also suffer from the absence of connection to the nurturing feminine energy. Technology and industry did bring benefits but they fueled greed and ‘affluenza’ too and when we disconnect from the maternal wisdom in our body organically we do suffer, an awakening around this realization may be a powerful theme of the awakener’s (Uranus) passage through the feminine Venusian ruled sign of Taurus.. in esoteric astrology Venus in Taurus relates to the earthly side of value and nurturing and what we value can affect how well we love, care for, treat, honor and show respect for both the earth of our being/bodies as well as those of others and how connected or disconnected we become from the loving nurturant inner feminine is so important.. In much of our collective a subtle kind of misogeny ran rampant for so many years… Especially during the 60s we saw a rebellion here upsurging. The feminine was trying to find a kind of emergent power after centuries of being over run and devalued by a hubristic power driven disconnnected ego, a hypermasculinized force torn away painfully from its feminine ground.

It is hubris in some ways to feel we have a power we lack at times due to unconscious and unresolved needs that may stretch a long way back.. I have been feeling compassion for both brother in laws of mine demonized by the family, both had massive emotional neglect too, but they lacked the financial power and in time they got hurt in the system and had to leave it.. My attempt to break free in the years 1999 to 2002 also failed in many ways when my own marriage hit the wall.. I lived and learned, often through excruitating agony…and through a crippling bang to the head when transiting Chiron in Aquarius hit my natal Mars Moon Saturn in the sixth house (body) in 2005…so it was I got pulled back home as it was hard to take care of myself after it. I had that time in the ashram after the family I was lodging with in typical narcissistic fashion shamed me for being in recovery and injured, the one friend who would have supported me over there I had to run from due to this.. So many things went down in those painful years.. In many ways I was a rapidly drowning person struggling to resurface as herself while taking many hits due to the unconscious panic driven choices I was making in the aftermath of being flung back so naively and unconsciously into the family ‘soup’.

It would take that head injury and yet other damaged relationship to finally wash me back up in my home town in mid 2011… and its been 10 years now of trying to break free of the family enmeshment, 5 of those in therapy now with a very very helpful therapist.

As Saturn now moves towards 7 degrees of Aquarius it is finally breaking free of its slow square transit to my natal Mars Saturn Moon conjunction which is very much tied up with our maternal collective inheritance of trauma addiction and emotional neglect.. The transit of Saturn is now applying in a challenging square to my natal Neptune in Scorpio at 13 degrees in my third house of siblings, communication and perception. As it does Saturn moves back into the collective square to transiting retrograde Uranus in Taurus now at 13 degrees too. We will all be feeling the growing tension of this squeeze between the two ‘biggies’ rulers of the incoming Aquarian Age.. Something that I noticed lately was that here in Canberra, Australia we went into to lock down when Uranus stationed retrograde around two months ago. And we are coming out of it as Saturn stations direct. Everywhere I look I can see the struggle of these two forces as we attempt to come to terms with a whole lot of new rules and regulations promoted and generated by our fear of dying or being immunologically compromised if we dare to take the risk to interconnect (Saturn in Aquarius brings fear of or restrictions around community interaction and connection).

The truth is our individual souls floats in an interconnected sea of many energies and tides. There is the ocean of family, of nature, of friendly interconnections we make via attunement and resonance.. this latter seems most especially to be very strong as so many of us now share our journeys via social media groups or in an online community. but we also need the connections that come from body to body not just mind to mind. Then there is the inter connection we feel as souls on a collective journey with very deep archetypal themes of longing, loss, fear and love, hope and despair.

The collective mind is how almost externalized on some level via this vast web of intercommunication that is the internet.. The internet has so many positive benefits for us but we must also remain grounded and ‘earthed’ even as we use technology. This is a dynamic balance we all need to find I guess. Too long on the computer and we lose our way to the natural rhythms and especially if we allow these to interfere with our natural winding down sleep cycle.

What we ingest too has affects, not only in terms of foods that feed the brain in both our guts and head but in the type of sustenance we take in as a kind of soul nurture.. In this regard music, arts, painting, craft, walking in nature, cooking, massage, gardening and connecting to the stars and night sky all have a role to play in helping us on our soul journey as we grapple with both carried wounding as well as with deeper spiritual urges within us that lead us to ‘rise above’ as well as break free of old unhealthy patterns and childhood wounds that block formation of a connective, loving ego in service of the loving soul and not just the fear bound shame bound critical super ego.

I seemed to go into bit of a rant in this post which morphed over the hours of writing it. I hope it speaks to others on some level.. For me I want to take the longer view on both my ancestral and family trauma as well as my personal trauma.. I see the part that my own attachment to the old ghosts can play in blocking connection at times but I also see the need for soul care too, in a world often hostile to anything soulful… So it is at this profound time of Mercury retrograde in the balancing sign of Libra that I put everything on the scales of perception and play with exploring all of the many resonances in my life and the lives of friends and family members.. I thank God today for manifold blessings and that in some way she and her angels kept me safe even during those times I was so alone and in the words of the AA Big Book “far from human aid”. I am grateful for the 12 steps, for a mind of inquiry and I no longer abandon my body as much.. It even allowed me an extra 2 hours of sleep earlier today. That, for me, was a much needed gift after the past 10 days of inner work on deep issues of how my own life force so often got slammed back inside or mercilessly derailed. But then, maybe every hard knock just had to happen to force me back to the ground of being that needed me to anchor there before I could form the wings to fly above it all and see it all from a far wider and more deeply integrated perspective.

The heart that welcomes you

You forget about some poems you write. This one was so resonant for the surges and dips I still deal with due to Complex PTSD .and thanks to the person who drew my attention back to it by ‘ liking’ it today.

Emerging From The Dark Night

The heart that welcomes you here

Should have been your mother’s heart

A heart open to love

Without a locked door

With all feeling sealed shut inside it

With a door bared by rage

That now becomes massive compulsive cleaning

Never giving you a place to rest

Driven out of your body and your mind

Your innocent body begins to hurt

And so you seek succour in substances

Substances become the warm heart of the mother

Absent for years that welcomes you home

But over years that heart grows cold

And you find no rest

Within this icy kingdom

That draws you in with false promises

It will be a journey over a wasteland of ice

That finally leads you to the place

Where you can light an inner fire

To thaw the traumas

And terrible heartbreaks

That froze your soul

Don’t go towards the coldness now, love

Stay here by…

View original post 34 more words