Feeling alive : more journeys with body memory, anxiety and felt sense

I have been getting my body moving and out and about the past few days. Yesterday’s anxiety level was intense but I do think some of it had to do with Jasper having been hurt during his last trip to the groomers. I don’t know if any one else has really bad associations to ‘grooming’, as a youngster my Mum decided to chop off my own long golden hair, it was just a bother to her as she had to help wash it which took up a lot of time. But having my hair washed by her was one of the few times we were close because she was always so busy working. When she decided to have my cut off it was a wound. I read about something similar happening to a woman as a child in Tara Brach’s book on True Refuge, I even think I wrote a piece on it a while back, the incident really affected the woman involved in a similar way.

Anyway that was not only my unpleasant grooming experience. I was very young when both my older sister and brother got married and I looked pretty so they both wanted me for their flower girls but it involved the torture of the hairdressers and I was only 3 when Jude got married but I was dressed up in identical outfits to the older bridesmaids complete with a pillbox hat with lace netting pinned to my hair which was swept into a huge updo and I clearly remember the discomfort of being at the hairdressers having it done. There are photos of me taken outside the church hiding out behind my sister’s skirts and looking very overwhelmed following the wedding, lost in a sea of grown ups far far bigger than me.

It was a huge wrench when Jude got married as she left on a boat for New Zealand the next day. I read some of the letters Mum wrote to her which she saved and were in the room where she lived with acquired brain injury for the last 10 or so years of her life and Mum was missing her so much and desperately sad to see her go, I must have missed her more and Mum told me I would go to the letter box each day hoping for a letter from her as this was in 1965 before the days of email, smart phones or even computers.

When my brother married there was similar torture with the hairdresser and in photos taken that day I look just plain bored, and sad and lost. There is one taken with Dad holding my hand, he has a silly smile on his face… I love my Dad but he kind of just looks like a big kid in the photos.

Interesting that all of these memories and associations have been sparked by Jasper’s trip to the groomers yesterday, which ended up turning out really well despite all of my anxiety. It just goes to show that just because something a little challenging happens once it doesn’t mean that thing is going to keep happening over and over and over again. He actually looked pretty happy when I picked him up late yesterday afternoon, if a bit worn out by the experience.

Today I feel more alive than anxious. I slept pretty well but I had to be up early as we were alerted that the power was going to be switched off today between 8:15 am and 4 pm for work to be done by the energy company. I needed to shower and wash my hair and because I could not cook anything by then I decided to take Jasper out for a walk to the gorgeous old park by the lake and go down to the Foreshore development to have breakfast. We had a great walk. Jasper looked very spiffy with his haircut and we sat by the lake for a while before returning back to the car. He is now snoring very contentedly in his bed just across from where I am writing.

It is so interesting to me how many anxieties can lie underneath the conscious mind in our lives. This current Mercury retrograde which begins to go direct some times over the next 48 hours has shown me a lot of things. Its interesting to me how in mythology Mercury or Hermes would travel up and down between upper and lower worlds between the present and past making linkages that tied experiences together. One of the symbols for Mercury/Hermes is one the medical profession uses ; the winged cadeucus. It has a spiral going around a central axis, I have felt this spiralling for many years and its something Mark Wolynn talks about his clients experience as they navigate ancestral trauma.

Suffice to say for today I am reminded how our minds can be like this, at times we live above ground seemingly anchored in present time, at others a whiff or intimation of something will trigger a memory either in the conscious mind or body memory, something Michael Brown in the Presence Process calls ‘felt sense’. Body sensations may tell us much, highlight us to when something is triggering, echoing or resonating deep within us. We can attune with our perception if we just open and stay unconditionally present. Michael advises we don’t get too caught in the story lines but follow the feelings more to find our inner truth and wisdom and knowing and joy. When we get lost in the mental plane we can get a bit stuck in repetitive feedback loops, but we there is a way we can use the mind to touch the inner feelings and relate with then in a grounded way which brings us back to a natural alignment as well a offering us a sense of aliveness, vitality and joy even through navigating our deepest darkest places of pain and suffering. Knowing this just fills me with so much hope and practicing the process and experiencing it working fills me with far more feelings of aliveness than anxiety to day. For that I am so very very grateful.