Filled with light, filled with life

I wrote this earlier in the week.. Coming alive and wanting to be happy sometimes felt wrong.. it should not really.. but this is an ongoing attempt to explore the formative influences in our family and as my psyche tried to express them through a dream I had at around 8 years of sobriety.

Sadly in my family to be full of energy and life meant you were due to be taken down a peg or two. It was the same with the Nun’s they didn’t like all the joyful exuberance maybe due to the fact their own inner children were similarly squashed in youth.. I had this dream many years ago at a critical time in my first early therapy where I came across a class of children all behind glass. the kids were in stocks and pacing around them was a Nun with a huge set of keys for the stocks.. In the dream I was being dared to break them loose then the dream shifted and i saw a little child reaching too close to the fire. I missed that opportunity to set them free.. These days I see this as both a personal and a collective dream.

After this dream I derailed my therapy in the UK. I had the walls closing in dream in which I was nearly crushed heading into the last Saturn Pluto opposition which spanned the period 2001 to 2002… I aborted my psychological astrology studies at the end of the first term. As I look back now I see I feared being successful or rejected.. So I ran, but there was also the fact Mum had fallen and was in crisis as was my older sister and they were alone without much family and so I returned back to Australia while still keeping my distance living three hours away..

I see now more of the meaning of that dream. My Mum was put in stocks and joy for us or ‘overspending’ was seen as a sign of mania, but it was not that at all, it was just a bid for life and energy and light and joy.. My Mum squashed both of my sisters, I do not even think she was aware of doing it at the time.. Dad squashed us three girls too . to study was useless if we were eventually only going to be wives and mothers….. I think my Mum got squashed by so many killing forces herself and yet she fought..Dad was a victim of the old patriarchal mindset.. As I have shared before Mum battled to get a tailoring apprenticeship, to start clothing shops and stock the latest designers who did not know her from Adam.. to rise in the world and be seen as glamorous while hiding so many insecurities and passing so much anxiety down.. I see more of my Mum’s gumption now but I also see these massive insecurities and anxiety she carried as well as her loneliness and grief. I wish she was here now for me to say sorry again even though my therapist always tells me I have nothing to apologise for.

Tonight I can feel joy, tonight I can feel hope.. I am calling people even if they don’t reach back, I am opening my heart to love and trust. I am choosing faith in instead of fear even as the inner killer tells me I will be destroyed by some force if I choose to be well and happy even in the midst of darkness and challenges.. I am aware of the inner schema that tells me I will be rejected, that I don’t matter but I know it does not speak the truth.. And the truth is life asks me to live it.. To open my heart and most especially not close it upon my own or any other person’s suffering

I understand so much more about my Mum now. I understand that she gave me a lot of positives too.. She gave me strength.. She could be compassionate to those she loved, not so compassionate to those she felt wronged by.. it was hard for her to understand human frailty and weakness at times.. today I celebrate my Mum and I thank her for all the love she gave.. maybe because I am making my peace with past trauma it is feeling safer for me to come alive.. Sometimes it felt I may be killed if I was too happy, joyous or exhuberant.. I thank God for my lovely dog who is always this way and mirrors for how it feels to be so fully alive at times.. .