I did a series of three videos by the lake earlier. I will post the second one after this… It helped me to see the resonances at this time of year, hearing of my good friend’s brother’s illness and knowing how my own life was touched with loss and how I had to take flight at that time.. I also am aware of the hurt I felt in not being supported in the career I wanted to pursue by my father, but all of that happened in the midst of two major traumas, my near death in 1979 at the age of 17 and my sister’s aneurysm and psychotic illness, in 1980. Dad got ill around 1983 but was not diagnosed with cancer until late in1984 and was dead within five months of the original diagnosis. I never got to say goodbye or even see his body as I missed visiting him due to being ill the night before he died. My brother thought it best to step in quickly and manage everything, just as the organising of Mums’ funeral happened too quickly for me to feel fully involved at the time but in hindsight I found it hard being involved due to some of the complex feelings I had around family.
I cried a lot today about the sadness of taking distance and pushing people away at times in the video I made today. When angry with my mother after my second partner left in 2011 I ran off to Sydney for 6 months making things far harder for myself and everyone else… it was hard to be validated and I was my own worst enemy at times, but I could not trust at that point. Now I am practicing forgiveness but see also HOW HARD I PUSH MYSELF AND HOW DIFFICULT IT CAN BE TO LET GO AND RELAX SOMETIMES. I have always had to fight or take flight.
I just hung out my washing after eating lunch and thought ruefully of how Mum’s favourite song was My Way by Frank Sinatra.. I don’t really like the ethos of the song, because its not about moderation at all and the lines that were going over in my head were “There were times, I’m sure you knew, when I bit off more than I could chew, but through it all when there was doubt I ate it up and spat it out”. Its such an aggressive way of not admitting any vulnerability much…Yes he took the blows and stood tall, I guess we have to but sometimes that song just breaks my heart, maybe I am too much of a softee, I don’t know.
I remember as a child dreaming of flying in dreams to escape a villainous pursuer. My boundaries were often over run. For example Dad thought it was a great joke to tickle me until I was in pain and then laugh, it was unbearable and I could not make him stop, and I see that transferred in my life with boundary issues. A friend mentioned this theme of tickling abuse earlier in the year when we met for lunch one day and certain things fell into place about how overstimulated and powerless it made me feel.
I have often bitten off more than I can chew… its an apt description of addiction in many ways.. I can chase that taste or sweetness until my teeth ache.. My therapist might say its good to be this alive and no longer paralysed all of the time but we also need moderation in life, there is a time for stopping and deepening within to feel what is really going on and a time to pause before engaging in an ‘acting out’ reaction.
Today I believe I am more grounded than I was before.. I can be with myself some of the time, although not all, I can reach out in a way I could not before, and even though I get social anxiety before I can understand why it was I feared that connection… I thought it was interesting today the shift I felt as Venus goes direct very soon. At the moment she is squaring my Chiron in the seventh (planet of wounding in the house of other and relationships) and Pluto in the first (planet of death, rebirth, transformation and what is hidden and powerfully affects us in unconscious ways… often ancestrally carried.) I thought to day of how I took flight to go back to the land of my ancestors about 4 times and of how Thomas Matts Trudgeon and his wife Eliza made that sea voyage in 1874 and never got to return. I think of how Thomas reached out to me and how I stayed at the coast house when I heard a ghost telling me I needed to be there but of how I longed for the land of my ancestors and still do. Maybe the ancestors always make their presence felt in the shadows in some way… and it was recently both Thomas and Eliza’s birthdays.
Today I can have my emotions and they pass, I have all the memories of a life of trauma and they will never go. I need to speak them to honour them, just as now stories of the aboriginal peoples need to be told. We cannot say ‘its just a story’ as those things we tell of REALLY HAPPENED and the body holds them. So I will try to post my emotional v logs of earlier.. being that naked emotionally takes courage.. and who cares what others think… I have learned more through my tears and I can laugh after them now.. Somehow through it all I ‘took the blows’ and I have not fallen over completely yet.
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Emerging From The Dark Night 