Retreat : some reflections

Retreat from life, in the service of loving ourselves and finding out who we are in our soul is important, but when it severs us from outer connection and the warm exchange of love and understanding with other humans and nature that is when it turns toxic. Suddenly we start to see enemies out there and life becomes a threat.

I am awakening to levels of pain I never knew before at the moment, seeing how my own wounds left others feeling alone and how they struggled to understand the depths of me. That was most probably not their job, but a human soul craves warmth and understanding and empathy most of all. And in the absence of this, as was pointed out yesterday by the woman that heads the neurotech institute, without human warmth, direct eye to eye, person to person contact and skin on skin touch our neurochemistry suffers…. It is shown by recent studies that empathy, being seen and touched and understood increases the positive chemicals in our systems such as oxytocin while reducing cortisol. Being spoke to harshly or having our bodies treated cruelly brings us stress and increases cortisol…. our words too need to be carefully chosen. And being left alone for long periods of time is positively dangerous.

I think now of how I retreated into my isolation and it was not a good thing. I wish at that time I had been able to be taken into a facility to be with others, that said I visited this deep place of knowing as well where I heard all kinds of voices of the deeper psyche, probably not unlike Jung when he had his breakdown in the early part of the 20th century. But as I look back those long periods of being alone without love were agony and the truth is at the coast I did find the love in nature and then when my ex partner Phil and I connected it was warm for a time but the misunderstandings between us, in time bought far more pain. In a way I am grateful I had that relationship in order to learn so much more about myself. At the same time it bought up deep wounds.

Now that my heart is open and I am longing for connection again and ready a lot of pain is bursting forth. I guess this is a kind of healing or watershed in a way. I am learning to be more forgiving when people struggle to understand my level of trauma. I forgave Chahir for going absent over the intense dental pain time, while allowing myself to feel old anger at my father who left me at the hands of Mum’s frenzies and never put up the stop sign. I can do this because I get the empathy I need in therapy but struggling as I have most intensely with the storm of body symptoms I have suffered since the dental surgery has made me ever more aware of how my body is craving nurture.

I see more and more how I have been conditioned to be hard on my body and to push it at times. I also see how joy was not encouraged or actively killed off all around me when growing up. If you felt joy it was a reason to be squashed under the boot of someone invested in you not being ‘so full of yourself” and happy : how positively sick!!!!!

I need to start addressing slowing down a little while letting myself engage in activities that bring joy. I am going to look into getting a good massage therapist… this came to me today because my body went through a lot of hurt with the surgery and its still playing out…and at night I experience the storm of what happened to my head over that ordeal as well as the smash up. The body unconscious gets awakened the minute I turn out the light at night and then a storm starts up that may last half an hour until I can finally settle again. People who do not have PTSD of a physical nature can never understand how long that trauma can remain stored as vibrational charge and must be ‘unpacked’ very very slowly.. which is why even deep psychotherapy can take us years of healing and there is a coiling and uncoiling that is associated with the trauma vortex that can spin either way … I experience these flows in my body as it goes through its motions or waves of stored charge and emotion unravelling.

Chahir sent me the most beautiful Rumi poem this morning and asked me to be patient with him. I know in relationships its important to be able to express how things affect us. I could not do this in a way with my ex partner before and he would bat off my feelings. At the moment the love of myself is the most important. Its taken me years of therapy to begin to even make a start at throwing off the self blame pattern that came from invalidating parents and an emotionally negating family, one in which we were taught to shut up and just suck everything up without protest. Now I feel stronger in my own truth and more grounded I feel safer. But at the moment I need to feed by body and soul’s longings for goodness, empathy and nurture…….. It really is the time to be my own best friend, while taking the risk to keep reaching out in love for more emotionally connected connections.