The struggle to live as me

Contemporary interpreters of certain yogic and meditative traditions speak of keeping one’s awareness right with any emotional pain or physical discomfort, as that is where growth and change occurs, right at the edge of intensity, before pain or avoidance overwhelms us. It’s a subtle business for sure, but what else are we going to do when life is showing us that backing up and looking within may be quite revealing.

Mars Shows the Way, Mary Plumb, Mountain Astrologer.

Anyone else out there currently undergoing or experiencing frustration or banked up anger from incidents long past that strangled or disabled your true self, desires or needs?

Its Mars slowing to station direct territory and currently we are in the intense building part of the retrograde (Mars moving backward) cycle. In two weeks Mars will slow to move forward on the 23rd degree of the sign Scorpio, anyone with important planetary energies in the fixed signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius will be feeling it, but not us alone, for Mars turned retrograde in the early degrees of Sagittarius some months ago.

For myself at the moment in my therapy I am touching base with intense feelings of frustration and anger towards my now dead father over the way he prevented me from returning to study teaching at a critical time of pain and stress in our family, forcing me to go to secretarial college which I loathed.  At that time typing was on manual typewriters it had to be done in triplicate with carbon samdwiched between pages and if you made more than two mistakes per page you had to throw the entire thing out and start again.  We were stuck in a room for 3 hours each morning or afternoon doing that mindless task, the other part of the day being given over to shorthand.

My rebellion was silent, secretive, I started smoking a lot of dope and going out on wild weekends to the local punk disco and having lots of random, casual sex, really I was longing for love but going about it in all the wrong ways. Eventually I met a guy still in love with his ex addicted to dope and fell pregnant twice, I was taking no precautions as I had been too shy and distant from both my parents to have the talk about sex, which was a subject of intense fear and shame due to my dysfunctional Catholic background. I had also been shamed for something intensely private surrounding my bodily insecurity at a tenuos time in adolescence that led me to distrust my father and fear him even more.

By the age of 23 when my father died, I was carrying deep in my body so much trauma, so much shame, so many secrets. Returning to live with my parents just prior to my fathers illness in late 1984 and then postponing my trip to meet my boyfriend due my father’s sudden death in early January 1985 I received a 4 am phone call from India asking me not to join him there as planned, since he no longer loved me.  We had just buried my father.  Mum read my diaries at that time found out about the two terminations and confronted me with the shame, no empathy expressed.  I was then pushed to get myself overseas just one month following Dad’s death, no place to grieve no place to be comforted only comfort a one litre bottle of Johhny Walker scotch.

I remember arriving to bleak cold Heathrow in the early morning dragging two big bags, boarding the Tube and having no idea where I was going.  Higher power stepped in at the eleventh hour and in the first hotel I visited there at the reception desk was a friend from the town we used to visit for summer holidays, Caroline, bless.

It seems that where this piece of writing started has led to another destination.  It began with the idea of what happens when the very thing we need and desire, the stepping stone to developing and manifesting our True Self in the world is thwarted or stolen from us and that frustration is buried only to emerge at a later time. NOW.

At business college I had no connections, my best friends (a close knit group) were all at the college I was prevented from returning to, my ties to them broke and we are only now reconnecting, they had no idea of all I suffered, cast out for so many years, only now returning. Is it any wonder I often feel propelled away from groups?

It would take seven years for me to get off the secretarial train led for dead end street and attempt in so many befuddled ways to find a new avenue, two more terminations of pregnancy, so many lost years of addiction, more painful relationships, and three more years to find recovery arriving there, dragging behind me a body loaded with the dumped unconscious wreckage of years which I have hauled along and sought a place to unpack over 13 more years.  Rivers of tears that hid the deeper rage, the primal scream of thwarted frustration, a forest fire dampened so many times by others invalidation or stuffed back inside again due to their fear..feelings shut down so many times by unhelpful platitudes : he did his best, just put it behind you, do anything but feel.

Well fuck no I will no bury this anger any more Dad..it wasn’t good enough, you didn’t see me or ever support my true self and all these years I’ve grieved a ghost who I never connected to on any conscious level, only on a deeply subconscious one.  You were a refugee of War thrown into a self imposed exile to pursue a dream that cost us all far too much in terms of connection and of feeling, and in the end your dream stole your life and prevented us ever knowing each other as adults,  these are the bones I’ve grieved over, holding the anger and grief inside and all these years I’ve been cast out, forbidden from grieving here with you my family.

Wow good to spit that out.  Without my loving therapist how would this ever have been validated?  I am realising that for all these years I have blamed myself for something far bigger than me that was never my fault.  I have denied my self true life as I was taught to do.  All that I have lost, all the potentials lost must now be laid to rest, so the future no longer becomes an echo of the past, for the truth is I deserve so much more than this and no one will give it to me now but me. Is there hope now that I can fly free from this place of pain, release and unload all of these painful feelings?   I cannot change the past.  But I can live now as me, owning this, denying nothing.

And no I cannot go free without feeling the anger I’ve had to bury and not without realising how damaging and powerful the rationalisations to deny its truth have been and what they have cost me and my body. And not without grieving what has to be grieved.

Mars you are the fire we need, you fuel our Sun and without you all becomes soggy and shapeless, and we become lost, ghosts aimlessl wandering in an empty wasteland, hungering, hungering the hungry ghosts Gabor Mate speaks of in his book on addiction.

Mars you are the sword we need to cut through the bullshit, the admonishments to feeling what is true and real cast upon us by less aware souls, shut in by lies, fearing us finding and owning our power and truth.

Mars you will not allow our grief to undo us but will rouse us from our numbed sleep and call us to awaken and remember the very real truth of who we really are and what truely happened to and hurt and scarred our souls so deeply.  Through connecting with you in our bodies we can find the power to live who we truly are and shine like the Suns we were destined to be

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