Waking Up

Waking up is hard for me with my PTSD and anxiety/depression.  I get very fixated on all of these strange pulls and symptoms in my body, muscles and cells which are so hard to explain.  I feel as though my soul is all awash in my body and then my mind turns towards the latest concerns of the recent days and goes looking for impossible answers.  Today it was the conflict I feel in relationship with my Mum between the deep love and soul ache I have for her, particularly in later years when pain medication seems to have made her more unwell and her deep grief lays so unreceived underneath the surface of things, and the desire I have to live a separate life outside of her pain grounded in my separate skin.

I carry my own pain over the loss of both my father and my sister.   In my father’s case he was never a warm emotional presence, he was a distant force to me, a person whose soul I sensed but never fully knew and he died a month before my 23rd birthday after 4 years of massive trauma in my life which I have shared about in other posts.  A near death car accident, the cerebral haemorraghe of my sister and her subsequent breakdown/psychosis abandonment and suicide attempt and then my own struggle in a relationship with a guy who was emotionally unavailable (like my father) which involved two terminations of pregancy I hid from everyone but he and a friend.

After Dad’s death I went out alone over the other side of the world, then lived in a town away from all my family when I returned home at the age of 25.  I descended into addiction but really what the truth was, I was very lost.   It’s one reason I identified with the poem of Samatha King which I shared yesterday : Perfect.  I gained some relief in my own life when I came out from under a mask when I got sober in 1993 and was able to start to see the solution to my problems lay inside.  I was lucky enough to be in 12 step rooms where people were making an effott to be honest.  In fact some of my favourite words come from the AA Big Book “many of us suffer from grave emotional defects but we do recover when we find the capacity to be honest”.

Honesty to me, on an emotional level and openness from that place was what I missed and longed for,  in a family where more emphasis was put on being ‘nice’ and doing the right thing.  My family’s belief was if you worked hard that would solve everything but in our family working hard and leaving the emotional truth buried or undiscovered led only to breakdown.  Its one of the reasons that 11 years into recovery I decided to stop working and focus instead on my inner work.

Anyway I seem to have digressed in a post where I began to speak about my struggle to awaken on any morning, but really I have not digressed but instead expanded or tried to unravel in this post how waking up on that physical level mirrors a deepening awakening to the unconsious both within and around me.  I was aware when I woke today I had had several powerful dreams.   Some of the content was illusive but at one point in one dream I joined my mother and best friend on the tiled rooftop of a building that overlooked a city.   I was thinking of them both being Scorpios and having an eagle’s eye view in later life after losses they both sustained. The rooftop seemed in the dream to me to be a place of vision, elevation and freedom.

I got myself slowly out of bed and sat quietly with my dog Jasper in my living room, thinking of how much it hurt to see my Mum in such pain when I visited her yesterday, remembering how in therapy I spoke just before that with my therapist Kat about how I am beginningto be aware how much young me, in the absence of attention from both Mum and Dad became fixed on serving them to and of how much I am growing in awareness that all the sacrifices I made in my life to stay close ended up costing me in ways that couldnt really help the other person or take away their pain at all.  Never the less I found myself crying a lot while stroking Jasper’s soft fur, and he is now sleeping contentedly beside me snoring quietly 🙂 bless him!

To help with waking up this morning I just meditated for a while with focus on my breath and I then wrote three poems as I cried and released my feelings around my Mum and Dad.   I am going to share the first poem here and the other two in other posts,  My body focus symptoms have abated now and I will be able to get on with my day without my thoughts and fears and sadnesses possessing me so unconsciously from within, due to the fact I took some time to sit with them this morning while doing self compassion work with my scared sad overwhelmed self.  It really works for me.

Aching to be Known

I am your soul

I am asking you to know me

I have travelled through a thousand lifetimes in this one

And there are depths of me you do not yet fully understand

Rest a while here in me

When the softeness of morning surrounds you

Surrender to me a little while

Before the pull of the day

Draws you towards 10,000 things

Let me be known

I am aching to be known

In this deep quiet wordless place

That restores you