Resting in the heart

My most favourite time of day now is the quiet still morning when there is a silence that is profound and for a time I hover on the precipe of consciousness awakening from a semi conscious slumber to the present moment feeling outside of my skin the arising of energy on a new day.  It wasn’t like this much in the past years.  I would awake at times with a start and feel my heart racing and I was never entirely sure if this was just traumatic recall, as I awoke from the pain of being thrown full force over the handlebars of my bike onto the road, splitting my head open on the iron foundry, just over 12 years ago on the first anniversary of my husband leaving me with an ambulance man hovering over me, which was in many ways a repeat of my near death collision all the way back in 1979.

No one who doesnt suffer from PTSD could really understand how such events can hold you captive with fears both conscious and unconscious for so many years.  The hardest thing for me was also getting involved in a relationship i 2007 where I was misunderstood and bullied for my symptoms.  My spasms or jerking awake on on the edge of falling into sleep were seen as an attack on this guy and he would react and often I was just filled with fear and anger and I would try to be as quiet as I could holding my body still, scanning the room for threat then slinking off to sleep in the other room.

I often imagine how my life could have been if I was in a more supportive relationship but since that did not happen and I had lessons to learn in that particular one, I will just now chalk it all up to experience.  I know the longing to find that kind of support for me seems to end in tears a lot of the time.  And no one is responsible for my symptoms but me.  In the end I need to practice my own self care.

Anyways as usual I have digressed, but its in the quiet stillness of morning before there is too much human activity felt that I experience a well of nourishment around and deep within me, a peaceful resting place when I make the effort to get my body moving and keep a gentle focus on my body but not allow it to totally capture my attention with all of its wierd PTSD symptoms.  At times like this I make the effort to breathe into my heart and then bring to my body nourishment of the kind that is needed such a water, a hot lemon drink with honey and ginger, fresh fruit and a cuddle with my dog which always gets me into the present moment.

This morning my attention was drawn back to a beautiful post written some time back by a blogger Telling Heavy Secrets on the Sufi heart

https://tellingheavysecrets.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/i-am-a-nomadic-soul-with-a-sufi-heart

I have also loved and found deep nourishment in the words of Rumi and the Sufi philosphy which is very much about non judgement and being centred in your own heart.  I feel that a lot of Rumi’s writing comes out of heart break and the purpose of such heartbreak is to open our hearts to find an inner ocean into which we can dive and then sometimes, sink, drown or be flooded.    From a Sufi perspective through this experience our souls are bathed in the effluent of love which at times can be full of toxic pain as well as blissful experiences of joy connection melting and dissolving.  Rumi’s belief is that we open to it all and embrace it all using it to transform us at ever deeper levels.

As you can imagine this kind of approach was met with condemnation by my ex, all the way back in 2007 – 2010.  Yep I stuck it out for over 4 years.  In his view you closed the door onto anything that didnt agree with your own rigid boundaries and by all means I can seee the wisdom too in that kind of view, but I do believe if you have experienced the level of pain and abandonment he had in his own childhood running away from it all the time in attack, defence and blame will only get you so far for so long.  There will be a time when the heart in you will ask you to open to embrace the full onslaught of the pain of your own suffering in order to become related to the vulnerable self in you that needs understanding compassion and love.  If you cannot do this for yourself, you are not going to be able to do it for others.  If you demand it from others without giving it to yourself, you will also not grow as a person.  Yes it hurt, yes it was horrible and yes you do have a right to be angry about it, but using that anger to dump on others who also suffered, well in my book that is just not fair.

Phew, that is lingering on my chest obviously as I am at the annivesary of our separation back in early 2011 at the moment which now follows hot on the heels of the annivesaries of Mother and Father’s deaths.  And I am so glad that over the past 7 years even though it has been painful I have had my time to just be able to keep the focus within my own heart as much as I could bear to at such times.

The beautiful quote by Rumi which is included in that post about resting in our own centre seems very appropriate to me as we head towards the Leo Lunar Eclipse in two days time.  I have some information about that eclipse which I will share in a post later today but basically Eclipses tend to be shedding times and when the Moon is full light is shone on our emotional life and we are being asked to become aware of and shed what is no longer working or is hurtful to us or causes us pain.  In order to do this, it is my belief that we must first fully enter our pains or reactions which are guides to as well as messages from our deeper inner life.

Leo is about the heart of the sun deep inside of us, that core of ourselves that radiates its own light when it is fully expressed.  At times our inner light can be dimmed by all kinds of factors.  We can have cold water thrown on it by others, or the collective at large, by messages we absorb from a distorted culture.    We may be forced away from it by being told what we ought to feel, express, need or believe.  But such values if externally imposed upon us only end up shrinking our hearts or cutting off our connection with it.

I personally know that the times I am happiest are those when I listen to the still small voice in my gut and my heart.  I know what happens when my mind or consciousness centred in reason or logic argues against these voices.  By all means if my heart is trying to draw me towards something that comes out of an old wound or unfulfilled longing from the past, that may not always be the best force to follow if it is making me gravitate towards something that may be part of a repetition compulsion, and yet even in that situation I have lessons to learn from my own heart.

Just after the accident I had which I mentioned at the outset of this blog I went to live in Glastonbury, UK for some months.  There on retreat I came to share a house with a couple of lovely guys on their own spiritual journey.  I was able also so share with them my tears of sadness as my ex partner had come to visit me just a few months after the first anniversary of our separation to tell me he had met someone else and was going to be with them as he could not bear to be alone and heartbroken.  My own heart broke all over again with that knowledge and it was a one of these times I remember one of those two saying to me “Deborah you have a Sufi heart, its a heart as wide as an ocean”.  I felt so recognised then.  It made sense to me of why even as a young girl I had compassion for those who suffered.

I remember on one school excursion to Sydney how a group of my friends where judging the prositutes in Kings Cross and I pulled them up on it, asking them how they dared to judge someone whose life they knew nothing about.  I have got myself in trouble a lot of times for showing this compassion and expressing controversial views.  At times I have ended up on the outside for expressing opinions or getting angry when I heard people being abusive towards others.  I have stepped in to situations in which a woman was being threatened in the main street.  People may say its foolish but I stand to my values.  I am glad that I am able to feel in my heart what I know to be important and of value to me and I am also grateful that I have learned over the past 13 years since that accident to open my heart within not only to my suffering but to the suffering of others and the world.

I know I DO have a heart as wide as an ocean and I also know there are those out there like me.  We can often suffer more because we do feel deeply and there does come a time when we can learn to put up some boundaries around pain and hurt so as to pratice self care.  Never the less I will always draw such comfort and sustenance from the Sufi way, from the beautiful poems and verses which, when I read them are like balm to me.

And when I gaze on nature and see it as an arising of the magnificent heart of God that issues from a force which I feel as love I will feel such gratitude that I was given this heart that is capable of that kind of depth and should never be shamed by those who would rather I was more shallow.