How to engage? : making peace

I have struggled to know how to engage in the world. That said I need to accept that the long period of introversion I have been undergoing since 2002 has been for a very valid reason. When I go out into nature and feel the affects of a rapidly heating climate I remember what was coming to me around that time about being ‘out in world’. I felt the rumblings of both destruction and change and I had work to do on my past. I had a huge watershed breakthrough in therapy in December 1999 after a powerful shiatsu treatment. All the grief I had stoppered up with addiction prior to that just came pouring out an then I felt the huge pull back to my home and my Mother and sister. I went back only to leave again (twice).

I remember most the dark, sad, lost months in Glastonbury following my head injury wandering around between the various little churches and cathedral, having deep discussions with new friends and visitors at Shekinashram where I was staying. Doing 5 Rhythms dance groups each week which focused on one of the primal elements. And on the day that we danced water my ex husband visited me to tell me he had met a new love and would be with her because he was too lonely. My heart broke into a thousand pieces and I cry deeply with the remembrance of that utter pain now. I remember I danced through the grief and collapsed spent with tears on the floor as other dancers cradled me, Glastonbury was just the kind of place that other lost souls and spiritual seekers could answer my pain with love from their hearts.

After a brief time in a B and B I had the opportunity to move into a flat for a low rent but I didn’t take it, I aborted again and travelled back home to Australia. I had judged that Glastonbury was too ‘alternative’ and I felt too lost. And so started 10 more years of pain in my family and trying to come to terms with my legacy. In the end I ended up in complete retreat at the coast house my Dad and brother built in the late 1970s and where I was taken following my near death accident in 1979.

I was truly amongst the ghosts there. That part of coast is said to be also haunted by the spirits of indigenous peoples massacre close to the bluff which falls away below where our town house sits. I got pulled into the relationship with Phil there in 2007, he came painting the units there and we struck up a conversation. He mentioned an ex partner who went ‘psychotic’ from drugs. I shared with him that I was sober (14 years at that stage) and loved nature. He asked me on a date but things he said early on alerted me to the fact he may not be healthy for me. I believe his partner had very valid reasons for going off the deep end and lots more came to light about this after we finally broke up and Phil’s ex wife’s, ex husband filled me in on some of the truths that Phil covered over and lied to me about.

I wont go into the ins and outs of all of that now. It is truly in the past. I learned a lot and got damaged a lot too. My boundaries were not strong. As I look back I see I needed better therapy at that point which I eventually got on the return to my home town in 2011.. although I went through 4 other therapists before finding Kat in 2016 at about the time I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I remember that as what felt like the final cruel blow. It was just shy of 2 years following the loss of my older sister and reunion with her four sons in the aftermath, they having been estranged from me for many years after their father sent her home to us with a one way ticket and lied about it. So so many broken relationships. Was it any wonder that I struggle so with fear of intimacy and engaging deeply with others, always finding a way to put the stops on?

I just got a burst of ‘oh no’ when an alert came through on the way home from a drive to the lake about emotional withholding abuse. It said that emotional withholding is one of the most powerful and painful of abuse tactics which is most covert. Withholding abuse was done to me in my family at times to try to bring me back into line. And I am sure that at times I shut down and withhold too when really really angry with someone and not knowing how to address it overtly or directly due to fear. But is it any wonder with my past history?

I also self comfort with substances still, like coffee and sweet things. I need to walk a soft line with myself over this as I don’t have a lot of pleasures in life so the odd piece of chocolate or cake or ice cream probably isn’t life threatening but I still need to be aware of when I am using it to avoid feeling something.

Lately I feel all this love energy that I have and how much I truly wish from the bottom of my heart to engage deeply in the world in a meaningful, giving and helpful way. I know as nice as it is to please myself I love it most when I truly connect with and am of some benefit to others around me, it’s what I truly live for. But I still have not found my pathway out into the world. Kat said yesterday that psychologically I am ‘hatching’ now as an adult. I saw so clearly yesterday how I have lived most of my ‘adult’ life as an emotionally arrested child. And trauma and addiction in reaction also leads us to emotional ‘arrests’.

I see my sobriety as a gift as well as a beginning. I see my sensitivity and trauma as painful dark gifts too, all of it happened for a reason, I am sure. I think many of us at this critical time of change and chaos and global threat are being asked to explore the nature of both our personal and collective woundings, most especially to the deep feminine feelings and instincts and nature. I see addiction as a global crisis of disconnection from love and committed healthy active heart centred peaceful engagement.

That said we also need our warrior spirit to fight forces of darkness and lack of love from the past. I love the term coined by spiritual teacher, Kyle Gray “Light Warrior”. A light warrior has to get to know their interior world and emotions well, they need to understand where past wounds lay that have a multigenerational aspect. I truly believe that ‘crisis’ stands for danger and opportunity, as the Chinese character for crisis attests. Many of us are being called through our dark nights to come to the light. Life needs our fully awakened hearts and minds and souls, nature needs us to come back into balance from where we have been cleaved off or separated in the past.

I look back now and see when my dark night began. I see that time in Glastonbury as critical. I wanted to share at the end some words I wrote in a card to my older sister at that time. I found this when Mum and I were clearing out the room she occupied in the home for acquired brain injury where she lived from 2002 until her death in 2014. I read this now and think of myself, the sad lost girl who was also in many ways coming alive and awake, who still had such a long way to travel to find back her heart and power. I shed tears for that self now knowing that I have changed and am always changing and yet so much still remains the same, the memories, the loss, the hurt of the past none of that can I change. All I have power over today is what I make of it and for today I want to make of it this : love, acceptance, forgiveness and peace.

Dear Jude

I am staying for a month on retreat at Glastonbury and think of you most days. You would love it here… it is an ancient spiritual town with an old Benedictine Abbey which is where I bought this card (an image of the Archangel Raphael).. it is also called the Isle of Avalon.. associated with the myths and legends of King Arthur. In AD63 Joseph of Arimathea was said to have bought the chalice used at the Last Supper full of Christ’s blood to Glastonbury and now at that place there is a beautiful garden with a natural spring and well, called Chalice Well. I visit it a lot and pray and meditate and wish you could be here to see it it has a strong and powerful mystical and spiritual energy. I’ve been feeling very close to a complete emotional breakdown some days but have met some lovely people at the retreat where I am staying. I feel very undecided about staying in England and so alone and frightened some times. The countryside around here is very beautiful though, the retreat is built at the bottom of a big hill called Glastonbury Tor. I have been doing a dance class where we dance for 2 and a half hours… so much fun and we sweat A LOT… its like moving meditation. Hope all is well darling Jude, love always you sister Debs xoxoxo