Another tough day

My inner censor is prompting me to keep the following blog under wraps.  I am not going to listen to the censor too much today:

Tough day of really painful symptoms of grief today.  Before I manage to tap into it I am not even sure that this is what I am undergoing.  Feelings occur first for me on body level as sensation, before I can even recognise the feelings I am having are feelings of sadness.  I feel like I am being dragged sideways, or pulled down a plug hole,  I feel though there is a huge stone on my chest holding me down and it is hard to breathe.  Then a portal breaks open somewhere and the sadness just rises up and floods the landscape of my being with tears.

I just had a terrible reaction after trying to eat my breakfast and that followed a long struggle to wake up, feeling like last night I had been weighted down my magnets.  Was it that or was it that my body was responding to the relaxation prompted by the tissue salts I have been encouraged to take to help with my PTSD symptoms?  Going to sleep and waking up for me triggers the old trauma of coming to and finding out my body has been smashed up.  Its a weird feeling of being suspended between two worlds, rendered powerless, feeling incapable of moving my body, feeling I have been taken over or invaded, that my limbs wont work or carry me along.

Anyway after an hour of trying to stretch out of it, as is my way, the flood of grief flowed out.  I had been free from these post breakfast attacks for quite a while but over the last three days they have returned with a vengeance. I am not sure why but I know I get affected by things and lately I have been watching a mini series on the Kennedy family which is full of very painful dynamics between the characters.  It is also filled with loss, trauma and grief, Joe senior’s stroke (which evokes powerful memories of my own sister’s stroke) and of course the loss suffered by the family and Jackie Kennedy in particular after JFK and then Robert Kennedy were gunned down in 1963 and 1968 after Jack’s administration, under the direction of Bobbie Kennedy, attempt to go after the American Mafia.

I was prompted to look into the astrology of it all last night and I found a website devoted to the Kennedy curse, where an astrological chart was featured of the marriage of John F Kennedy’s parents Joe and Rose.  Prominent in this chart is a Saturn Pluto conjunction at 2 degrees in the sign of Cancer which has to do with clans, family, close ties of psychic enmeshment and suffocating parental holds on children.  it was noted on this particular blog that this conjunction was activated when critical events occurred for their children.

The astrological synchronicity in all of this for me is that currently I am undergoing the Saturn square to my own natal Pluto in the first house.  Bobby Kennedy in particular had a very strong Plutonian signature in his own chart with three planets including Mars in Scorpio and trine to Pluto. Our own family went through some very powerful Pluto transits and Pluto squared my own natal Mars Saturn Moon when my father died, in addition my oldest sister suffered a cerebral haemorraghe on a Pluto transit to her own Saturn.  The dynamic of an attorney general (Bobby Kennedy) going after the American Mafia bosses is a very Saturn Pluto signature.  And Saturn Pluto speaks of defences erected against powerful feelings of fear in reaction to dark issues of power, control and other deeply transformative elements in life and nature.

I am aware this blog is skipping between some seemingly unrelated subjects but I have been wondering today if the issue of family grief of the Kennedy family has triggered for me this week, powerful imprints around my own family trauma.

I spoke to my sister yesterday and often when I speak to her I find myself encountering feelings of great sadness.  She has been on medication for bi polar for many years and at the moment they have changed her meds and she is feeling very low and nauseated.  My Mum rings me in tears about it and I feel the full weight of it all.  We have our own fairly heavy family legacy which comes from a similar theme to the Kennedy’s.  My Dad was also a migrant trying to escape the poverty and powerlessness of his past and his own daughter came unstuck by overstepping the boundaries to try and achieve within this family dream. My older sister who had the stroke, ended up permanently incapacitated and died last year had bi polar as well with strong Jupiter Saturn, Saturn cut down the Jupiterian impulse to endless outward expansion and flight.

All of these associations are on my mind today, and I am interested to remember that last night I dreamt that I was visiting a close friend in hospital.  She told me that she had to go no contact with her family and since she had she was feeling so much better, “its what you need to do too”, she said to me.

My pathway began to diverge from the family when I got sober in 1993, but with my strong Saturn Moon there has been a gravitational pull back, due to the fact there are so many hidden feelings over the buried trauma that dogged our family from 1979 to 1985 when my father died.  Its been a burden to work to bring consciousness too the entire thing, something I been working through over the past 20 years in different recovery programs and therapies.  There are some days when I become overwhelmed with feelings of sadness over the dark years of our family and my own personal trauma, as well as the sometimes very lonely path that has resulted.  Its not that I am consciously even thinking about these things, but I do feel that since I started to watch this Kennedy mini series last Tuesday I have been feeling the weight of things quiet a bit and maybe my dream has messages for me.  My mother actually gave me this mini series to watch and I think it had powerful synchronicities for her own grief.  Maybe I need some distance from it, or maybe I just have needed to feel all of this through in order to connect the dots.

Just a short time ago my mother called.  I was very sad today and she was distressed by it, which also saddened me, but then again feelings are better off shared.  While I was having my attack earlier I had the impulse to call someone and inside my head I heard a voice say “don’t you go bothering anyone with this burden of yours, you will just ruin their day”.  I am aware that the adult thing to do is to acknowledge my feelings and hold my hand in the midst of them but its also so important to be able to share our feelings with someone empathic, I think this was an old message.  I let my Mum know I didn’t feel it was her responsibility to fix my feelings, I would be happier for her if she could enjoy the outing with her best friend she had planned.  She didn’t feel good about it, and I felt sad for causing her distress, especially as I know she is very worried about my older sister at present and I am sure she is aware of the burden we both carry which is ancestral too, really.

After I got of the phone, I just sat and wept.  I felt the huge heavy weight of it.  I then checked my phone and saw an email notifying me that someone had liked a recent post of mine :

https://emergingfromthedarknight.wordpress.com/2015/09/03/coping-with-the-really-tough-days/

which prompted me to re-read it and doing so actually helped me to move through the sadness of today and the heavy weight dispersed after I decided to write this post.  It seems all blogging is really for ourselves?  Hopefully it helps someone else too.

Its clear to me what helps me move through the pain.  It is so important to try to recognise what my body is carrying so I can find love for myself in the midst of the pain.  This is what helps me, this is what soothes me, this is what turns a tough day of pain into a meaningful day for me, being able to write and share, to make some small sense of what at times feels very overpowering and burdensome.