Sometimes when I think of all the hurt in my family I cry and then become grateful these tears highlight me to what went wrong and how it REALLY felt. Today I met with a family friend who can validate how wrong it is that my brother is holding back the inheritance my Mum left from my sister and I. She worked for he and Dad for many years and told me of times he withheld things even from his own wife she needed despite having so much money.. It made me feel sad for him and the frustration for us is very very hard to bear, I feel it is affecting my sister deeply.. I have to find a way to fight for what is ours somehow. I don’t know how to break through to him, so I will pray…. maybe get some other legal advice? We need a miracle right now.
It hurt today to consider how those barricaded against pain and feeling can go on to hurt those who feel so deeply.. I know if I ever lashed out, there was a good reason and of how much I love my inner self now. The truth is I had to bury the little child in me who was vulnerable and needed and somehow I see more and more lately how the inner tyrant savages and turns against this part of me. I believe my mother and her mother were savaged in a similar way but they also had to fight so hard in the absence of support and care…. I no longer blame my mother for I see the forces affecting her so clearly and I cry, but I let go too and then the pain subsides. I know it is equivocally my own job now to parent myself.
It was so good to fall into the sadness in therapy on Monday as I sat looking at the gray rug with wave patterns and felt the centuries old longing for a mother who was loving.. I have a belief that this wound lies deep in the heart of many of us in the current technological age and we make the mother earth carry the wanting for us expressed in rampant materialism and disconnection from nature… It is something Jungian therapist Marion Woodman wrote a lot about and observed in the hunger of a hundred clients…..manifesting through rappant self rejection, addictions, eating disorders, defensive perfectionism and the drive to repress an instinctual animal nature at times feared and seeming to run out of control when not mediated.
When the longing to be received and loved is negated it forms a terrible hole in the soul. I find the filling of this void comes for me best through poetry, time in nature, sending and receiving love and presence gaze to gaze with dog Jasper, as well as in breathing in deeply to experience my heart and all that it contains of both joy and sorrow. It has taken me time to accept is I who must open to my own healing, I cannot expect others to carry it but I can share about the journey knowing so many others, too are now struggling to find the way back to self love and respect for their bodies, souls and mother earth. I can also read how others cope and what they confront and know for sure we are all very much in this together.
I am with James Hillman when he says he believes we blame our parents too much for wounds we need to heal. I will share below a paragraph taken from his book The Soul’s Code in which he speaks of how children naturally connect and find a refuge in nature and how so doing, often opens them (and us) to the creative soulful imagination. I wish we tried less to fit kids into boxes but know its also up to us all to find and locate the personal daimon or guiding animating spirit that fill us up with light and life and joy.. We cannot expect the world to mirror what we are too scared to open to express. A fear of rejection may make us reject the true self for too long.
The truth is as I cried in therapy I also opened to the joy of my inner child, that soulful, real, joyful, spiritual part of me that feels most “me”. Sometimes in therapy Kat and I sit listening to a song as feelings burst through, in my minds eye I saw my child self as she was at 5 dancing all around the room as I loved to do before the world told me in a thousand different ways I was being ‘too dramatic’ or sensitive for being expressive. now I know better. How deeply does that fear of being judged lie within all of us?
I know when I am in touch with my soul, I also know feeling genuine hurt cannot be bypassed in life, it seems to be our destiny for many of us to come to earth and get wounded. Knowing what the healing balm is takes time and how to apply it skillfully to the wound, is, for each of us, a deeply personal journey and no one can take but us. My feeling is that if we refuse it and decide to close there will be a day of reckoning, if not in this life, perhaps in the next, a time when we have to face that which we felt it was too painful to and had to shut the door on… And we may not know until then, how much our shutting down, both hurt others and set them on their individual path.
The following is from James Hillman :
Children, especially recognise (the) nurturance and instruction offered by nature. According to the observations of the brilliant pioneer of ecology, Edith Cobb, the imagination of children depends wholy upon this contact with the environment. Imagination does not grow all by itself in the household, even out of imaginative tales told by parents. Children are, ‘by nature’ at home in the world, the world invites them to grow down and take part… their imagination and minds feed on a nature that is also their parent. Therefore, if our children today are disordered, it isn’t so much parenting (or even teaching) they need as perhaps less parentalism, which keeps them from trust and pleasure in the natural world.
Emerging From The Dark Night 