The soul in silence : reflections on solitude, trauma, wounding and healing

All the beautiful responses to my recent post/poem Trust in Silence have really got me thinking today of how important silence is to being able to be with and connected to depths of our soul.  When we are struggling or suffering often we can be abused by being told we need to ‘get out of our own heads’, “get off our pity pot!’, (yes readers I have heard this one many times in 12 step meetings) or that we are ‘isolating’ and at times there can be some truth to that, sometimes when we need the loving touch or support of others or look for the gifts or message in a painful experience,  but in world that find it hard to stomach or fathom certain truths, is it any wonder we learn to turn more and more towards the silence if we can, deep in that silence, find an inner source of soothing, calm and healing?

I know for myself the healing to be found in the warm of the sun, in sitting in a shady spot with doors open, Jasper at my feet just feeling the sense of connection with the moment that is awesome, magical, healing and mysterious and beyond words to fully describe (though I make stumbling attempts in poems).  Then there are the times when the silence is more like a deep dark indigo ocean that almost squashes me, I feel myself subsumed or I feel the cresting of a wave of anger or grief or sorrow that wants to rise up and sweep through me, possibly even sweep away some debris from inside, memories or feelings I buried long ago, and if I just allow myself to surrender than I can expand rather than contract in response to that and feel the beauty of having touched base with my soul.

And lets face it, for many of us who have endured depths of loss and trauma others do not, have not and could never know the depths of we are not going to find that recognition or acceptance and allowing of our process from most people and my personal feeling is that therapists also don’t always know the territory themselves.  I was told by astrologer Melanie Reinhardt 13 years ago after my last major accident which was a repeat of my near death one at age 17 that most therapists would not be able to fully understand the deeper spiritual dimensions of the wound of nearly losing my life as well as all the deeply Plutonian experiences that followed over the next 30 or so years for me.  She directed me towards the work of Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron and said a soulful meditative practice would be the best therapy for me.  Sadly I got into another relationship two years later with someone who saw my need for solitude as pathological.  According to him I had agrophobia!!!!  Anyway don’t really want to go back into the relationship today, it was a learning curve for me and I got some good things out of it and deeper understanding due to all the pain we both acted out on each other.

Lately I am learning to accept and validate more my need for soulful solitude.  It is where I create from.   It is where my deepest healing happens.  I don’t feel that level of connection in may relationships in the world, in some I do.  I feel it here because I feel here other trauma survivors and people in recovery are on the same page.  Just connecting with you brings me SO MUCH HEALING.  I was blown away yesterday by the love shown to me on a really tough day, coming out of a painful and challenging week.

I wanted actually to post another Thank You blog too as I was so grateful yesterday and today to open my page and see all the comments and love on here.  As well as responses to other comments of mine where I am trying to support others going through trauma and meeting misunderstanding and woefully inadequate response to their Complex Trauma.  I really see my life purpose to be as a Wounded Healer and it is what Melanie Reinhardt teaches about in her work on Chiron.  Its really only us who have navigated the depths of trauma that fully understand and since all traumas are also different in some ways we wont understand everything as we all have our own unique journeys, but in time I want to set up some kind of site to offer help.   If my journey and suffering and losses and gains can be used to help others that is what really makes me happy, it gives me a peace and feeling of wholeness that really lays so far beyond words.

But as I read this back I am mindful too that the healing for all of us lies both in connections with others, but more paramountly through the healing that comes from connection to our deepest soul.  I feel collectively we are trying too, to heal a deep split from nature and instinct and the divine feminine.   It is hard to articulate this in a post but there is a source of power that to me is Goddess like,  I don’t find the concept of a male God as personally healing in my own journey unless I think of the Frank Lloyd Wright quote in which he says he believes in God but his God is nature.   We are part of this mystery and so is our deepest soul and many of us are on a journey now to connect more to that source both within and without in order to find peace and love after years of separation, fear or trauma.  And to recognise more deeply our essential kinship with all living beings as well as the deep silence.

 

Silenced, I hear more

My mother has tried to silence me, to get me to turn myself away from the self that is really myself and become another self, express another way, a way which will not threaten her nor awake all of her defences and possibly ask her to confront her own pain that she does battle with nightly but won’t admit in company.  “We have all suffered”, she keeps saying.  Did I say we had not, I was talking of how I felt and was then told everyone feels differently, thanks for that, really validating, Mum.  Thanks for meeting me? I really felt you got it?  NOT!

“Don’t you think its time you got over it”  I’ll be happy just to get through it but what is the it and where does it live and does it ever go away  because the past is still present it isn’t even past and sometimes it rears its head out from within the deep basement in order to be revisited and re felt again only to recede again like the tide.

Wave upon wave has passed and I have been washed up feeling often great liberation, relief, release and peace, at other times really deep lethargy and depression and futility.  A hopeless feeling of no point and no possibility of freedom ever.  But not tonight.

I named this blog Emerging from the Dark Night as I feel that light always emerges out of the dark times.  I can be taken down into the pit and its a terrible nightmare for one day or a few but the next day is light and all that pain has disappeared. Where did it go?  I don’t know.  I only know all is an oscillation and I here am attempting to walk the tightrope and sense where to place my feet to achieve optimum balance for a time.

Tonight as I enjoy the dark simmering silence of the approach to midnight everything is singing.  I have known the dark for many years.  At times it feels as if the entire journey was dark, from the very start.  Saturn Moon is a dark Moon and its a new balsamic moon, there is no light, and yet in the dark there is a dark light too not only darkness.

Stream of consciousness seems a very common thing at night when the unconscious is opening to me peeling back the layer of consciousness from within its naked sleep and sending up a flow of words from an underground spring that disappears in daytlme.

Silence I know you so well.  Sometimes a great comfort, often a great revealler of truths that could not come when we are caught up in a field of noise.  Turned back on myself by being turned inside out and silenced I am aware in ways I could not be before.  Does it make any sense? Who cares?  Its just a stream of consciousness flow as I wait for the bed to warm and go to draw about me the blankets of sleep of dreaming, remembering and forgetting the day, the night, all the life before.