It felt so good to have a free day today to get back to my favourite Tuesday routine, get up have a leisurely breakfast, do some gardening and get out with Jasper in the bright sunshine for a long walk and to run around the oval and then go for our morning coffee and come home to write… I had the thought driving home that maybe its better when things we try for and think we need don’t end up coming to pass and maybe its the journey or actions we take along the way : all the feelings, disappointments and conflicts we experience which is where real soul life lives, not in the achievement of a projected desired outcome.. I am speaking here of ‘Scott’ not turning up 3 times and of how yesterday in therapy I was exploring how, 4 months nearly to the day Mum died I connected with him, while my sister fell into deep depression and endured about 3 more hospitalisations for the grief…
I see more now how we both played our own roles in the family that was full of emotional neglect and how different our journeys have been, and yet, still along the way we have been able to keep love in our hearts for each other and keep reaching out to connect… and we were both undergoing our own grief process after Mum died and it manifested differently for both of us.
Maybe Scott not turning up was for the best, maybe resistance to what is causes us the most pain, that does not mean we don’t have associated emotions to the disappointment, if along the way in life we missed out on so much….
The truth, I am realising lately, is that even though it can get lonely on my own at times, it is not all of the time and though I fantasise of how it would be to have a connected relationship with a loving partner and a fully embodied physical relationship it isn’t the be all and end all of life, and yet this desire for such seems to occupy such a huge part of our modern dream… the idea that one day, we will meet that perfect someone for us who will help us to know love.. I am not being a totally cynic here.. I have seen real love in relationships between men and women but I have also seen relationships which over time become a prison, stopping the forward growth of one or both people… and we all know that relationships involve a degree of compromise in order to allow the other person a pathway to unfold their own dreams, desires, spirit energy and life.
I look back now to my marriage of 11 years and see things a lot more clearly. I don’t blame myself any more for the way things worked out and I am grateful for those two and a half years we had living in a kind of freedom in Cambridge.. I will always have those sweet memories of our little terraced house in Selwyn Road, so close to the meadows and of the wildlife living in our garden… be able to recall the cycle rides to work, through the meadows at Grantchester and to town… the bookshops, library and coffee shops we loved, our dinners out at the Rupert Brooke pub where they serve the hilariously named pudding ‘Spotted Dick.’ Where else but in the UK??? And most importantly it was here in August 1999 I embarked upon my oh so important first Jungian therapy after a dream in which I dreamed she rescued me from the Nazis giving me safe passage to escape via a garden and back fence.
I can now also fully embrace the dark years that followed when I decided to come back to Australia and my very ill family. Even those years of isolation and heartbreak lived at the coast trying to be seen in a relationship that I never could be, because in the end I had to see and hold myself were necessary to bring me to now. Surely even all of those conflicts with Phil helped me to form and know myself and my wounds, all of the buried thwarted longings, killings, lack of holding and attunement, emotional blind spots and deficits as well as my gifts and my empathic strengths (which he so often saw as weaknesses). Today I know myself a lot better and I know why I attracted that at a certain astrological stage in my individuation journey…. People do show up in our lives manifesting certain planetary and archetypal energies in my experience when we are undergoing certain Self shifts.
I also represented a part of Phil, in a way, a part of him he only wanted to judge or run from and could not embrace.. I remember at a very low point in our relationship when I was reading all I could about narcissism in order to figure out why I was being treated the way I was and we were having such conflict that this thought came to me “a person cannot reject you, they can only reject a part of themselves..” I still believe this to be true.. to me the shadow is a very real energy and we so often meet it in relationship. Phil just went his own way and pleased himself, my feelings were not that important to him and he could not embrace me in my anxiety and give me the comfort that would have soothed me and I only triggered his neglected inner child too.. Its taken me 8 years of therapy to sort out it wasn’t my fault and yet I was responsible for putting up with things too. And maybe in the end I needed to become a little like that myself.
Today I am also far more aware of what lives in my unconscious and that Jungians believe the body is the unconscious.. all of our memories and imprints live wired within the limbic brain which is connected to every single cell and related to nerves.. I still wake with the shock imprints I was born into in a family affected by the complex history of multigenerational addiction, separation, trauma and neglect. I felt that stress and anxiety when my sister turned up unannounced on my doorstep yesterday, part of me wanted to run but it was only because when we meet we each carry our portion of that history and for me, not having gone down the drug pathway I am more aware of it and of the schism between the two brains.
In the end it was lovely to see my sis.. She stayed for a cup of tea and she bought me some covers for my food and some stay fresh bags for veggies as well as some of Mum’s costume jewellery she has been sorting out.. I realised this morning how generous my sister is and so were both of my parents even though they did keep a tight rein on things at times due to their poor backgrounds…Dad always used to say you don’t buy anything you cannot pay for up front, but such standards can be a bit limiting when they become intractable rules..
Today I am grateful for all of my past.. I cannot lie and say I have know known excruciating heartbreak, loneliness and pain for much of my life, but I also know it wasn’t entirely my parents fault for acting out what they did not know…Mum put on a big pretence at times and its something we discussed in therapy yesterday, how like the Wizard of Oz who hid his true vulnerable human self behind a curtain, Mum did the same with clothes and jewellery and immaculately groomed hair.. People who knew my mother well often said how elegant she was, what they did not see or know was the terrorised little girl who lived inside and had to take on so much karma and emotional absence, both early and late in life… Like Dad Mum came from families with no father and had to struggle on through the depression and war years with minimal support…..
My parents passed on so much to us we could just never know without a lot of inner work and therapy… I know I help my sister and other family members (at least the ones who are open) by sharing what I have found from my 26 years of emotional uncovery work in sobriety and that to my mind is not even very long considering the complex history we carry multigenerationally on both sides…
Mercury is stationing to go forward at the moment opposing my Uranus today, that is shedding light.. Uranus suffers for the knowledge he gains from where light got obscured by heavy human manifest conditions…his inner knowing and ‘revelations’, like those of his brother Pluto, are not always welcome… We who come as the light shedders or water carriers have a big job to do, but we are far from alone in the tasks allotted to us presently.. to reclaim land from the sea, a personal self from the collective unconscious and myriad surrounding societal forces…
Freedom from pain is possible once we can fully feel it, we find the liberation by facing into it and not resisting it, nor arguing with the reality of what just had to be and could be no other way…until we can accept this and suffer for the knowledge, it is my experiences that we do not heal nor burn through the pain to become the eagle or phoenix. able to fly freer in liberation above it all with the necessary wisdom gained and integrated..
Uranus (or Prometheus) may suffer for his knowledge but in the end that knowledge must come to light… For as Jesus said in the Gnostic Gospels… “you must bring out of you what is buried inside you, for it you do not, it will destroy you…” And it is a sad but true fact that many forces in life are invested in that suppressed or buried knowledge never seeing the light of day
Emerging From The Dark Night 