I seem to be connected to so many lovely people in a heartfelt way that lately is almost becoming a little too much to manage.. I know it is Aquarian time right now too, even if only the Sun is now in that sign this is a time to connect and I have been,,more and more each day, via phone, meetings, texts and my blog.
Today it was difficult to stand up again and re-gather my energy. So much has been swirling around in me with Venus now moving forward about the way I am being controlled and disempowered and the part i played in that by being too ‘nice’ and compliant. Dark of the moon times can be like walking through quicksand at times too. I have not had such a late night in ages (not falling asleep until 1.30 am) I woke not so much fighting again at round 5.30 am but sensing the inner emotional conflicts and pulls.. I connected to another kind man on Instagram 10 or so days ago, I do not go on there much I am not into posting much just the occasional photo of Jasper and other things of beauty around me, I do not link it to my blog at all, I like to keep that separate. But this person reached out and we have been chatting because he has a lovely energy and a really kind nature.
I also woke to find something that really resonated for me written about the wild feminine posted there, it said that some of us find no support in our fractured family or in society, that we go out into the wilderness alone and have to make our way there to find our own resources (just like the Handless Maiden), this particularly resonated for me about my time after the head injury where that family told me to leave for being too sad and I traveled to Glastonbury where i was in a deep dark place just a year out from my marriage ending in 2004. I still maintain connections with a couple of the women I met there, one is an artist who still lives there and was an orphan when we met, she had been on a spiritual path for some time, another was a follower of the Indian tradition of spirituality and still does a lot of chanting and really has a heart full of love and pays respect to the beauty of nature on her Facebook page all of the time. It was such a vulnerable time for me that period I had so much still to work through and was so so sad that my marriage had failed, though I now know it was all a part of the path.. the piece of writing spoke about how many of us on this path have to move on from relationships we outgrow all of the time in order to enlarge into our own being..
Looking back to this time, too, I see it really was a time of opportunity and possibility for me, but sadly I had not yet processed my past years of trauma and as much as we can say we do not want it to take a hold of us, in the end we must face our past, its really the only way forward.. We need to understand its influence on our lives in order to grow. Sadly at that time I struggled to accept the help offered me in Glastonbury, I felt I ‘should’ be closer to family but in the those connections were not as ‘spiritual’ in some ways I could not open my emotions in my family without getting into trouble on some level ad being judged as ‘weak’ or crazy (especially with anger at the hands of my bloody brother!!). Never the less in a way I feel grateful for the final 6 or so years with my Mum when I finally returned in here in 2011 and I was able to find out even more about her childhood.. Lately I have seen how much my own repeated hers, even if only in a different way and how the wound pulled me back and emotional ignorance and neglect derailed me.
This subject of Mum came up speaking to a distant relative I do relate to deeply yesterday.. Each time we talk we share so much, we recognize we suffered from similar wounds in our family, and wish no longer to be as entrapped in them, a lot of what we talked about yesterday was how we now try to observe our thinking processes coming out of past pain and damage and not get as caught up in the negative toxic critical inner spiral. Julie also told me she is wanting to improve her capacity to love and be intimate, something we both struggled with coming from a family influenced by many attachment wounds, flights from family and addiction as well as adult child issues.
Sadly since both of our mothers carried wounded inner kids, perhaps Julie’s even more so we, in struggling to bond with them and be seen by them, then tended to repeat not so healthy patterns in our relationships and most of the time lacked the capacity for true intimacy probably most of all with ourselves.
While taking to Julie I shared with her a lovely part from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh’s book How To Love that explains that until we feel at home inside of ourselves and have made a home inside of ourselves for all parts of us (wounds and rejected feelings, too) we cannot really offer that to another human being and helping to make someone feel at home is the best way of feeling true and deep intimacy..
Anyway, getting back to that idea of the wild feminine I think about how ‘tamed’ our mothers (and my two sisters) were expected to be this encouraged to deny, minimize, numb, repress and emotionally shut down to please men or the patriarchy or not be seen as ‘crazy’, having our bodily knowing overpowered by the masculine based medical model that removed spiritual or emotional aspects of health and allowed no place for them, ripping out wombs, making us cut and hurt and adapt our body to a fucked up cultural norm of so called ‘beauty’ that is just plain wrong and oh so narrow. And as I look deeper I see all of these as some of the major problems that derailed my sister since her own hysterectomy in 2003.. That really along with her husband’s betrayal and emotional abandonment did contribute a lot, that said it was up to her to do the inner work to heal.
After I got sober and stopped anaesthetizing myself as much, I began to see that our culture suffered from a very very deep feminine feeling wound.. I was very drawn to the writing of Jungian therapist Robert Johnson in the years of early sobriety as I felt my own damage more and repressed pain emerging and wanted to be understood and ‘thaw’. He discusses this wound in depth in some of his books.. The feeling wound he sees as laying at the depth of a lot of our modern problems, : behind our massive disconnect from nature, from a tuning into our own bodies, to a trusting of our own intuition and emotional signals, to a disconnect too from each other across the sexes and entrenched gender biases and ignorance, due to cultural biases which do not allow men to feel and acknowledge fears, emotions or vulnerability and that tends to judge the emotional wildness in woman as something out of order or psychotic and the sensitivity or fear in men an a sign weakness.. Those poor men coming back from wars were not allowed a place to rage and scream and holler over what they were led to like lambs to the sacrificial slaughter all to fuel the power drives of a few psychotic men most of them with so many inner child issues both personal as well as collective and multi-generational. These to me are some of wounds so many of us are trying to deal with at present.
Someone said to me on my blog the other day that she feels men only have three modes of being hungry, angry and horny.. that made me feel sad but it did hit a note.. What about the gentle men in our society too, the ones that certain dating ‘experts’ talk about who are trying to encourage women to look a little deeper to the way men may hide from or fear their feelings and help them to show some men need women to educate them in empathy while some woman who are so called ‘animus’ driven may just contribute to the ongoing shame/blame/dump cycle in our culture. I am sure in many ways the sexes do not always understand each other, perhaps we need to respect these differences and not continue to judge each other as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘ill’ for just operating differently.. what instead of showing genuine interest and compassion into how it is for each other in the different ways we perceive and experience the world out of long term conditioning.. Surely a man should not have to be gay to be sensitive? And a woman should not have to be gay to show guts!
The piece of writing about the wild feminine also spoke about how we are busted out of the matrix as we struggle on our own unique pathway to find the way home to the most vibrant, vital and alive parts of us so neglected and demonized in our culture.. I am grateful at the moment to be part of a very loving community on Facebook where grief and tears and anger are encouraged as legitimate reactions to the pains and craziness of our current times in which there is so much fear of death and anxiety over how actually to live balanced and meaningful lives..
Someone I noticed doing ‘shift’ work on social media this week was speaking about how he feels the vast majority of us are sleeping on earth at the moment.. we get very caught up in the collective trances and forced into narrow ways of being and perceiving.. In our culture its the magical mystical aspects of our being the get erased and at a terrible cost.. Psychotherapist Carl Jung understood this and its why he fell out with Freud who felt the sex drive lay at the base of everything and covered over the widespread incidence of Victorian child abuse
Something I am also noticing a lot lately is the absence of JOY in the collective mainstream, Even the content of a lot of shows and films lately seems so dark and has so much violence against women as part of it.. I just turn off a lot of stuff that is being aired these days as it just all seems to be quite low in vibration.
These seem dark days so often but the wilder part of us knows it does not have to be like this, it is something us ‘starseeds’ or ‘indigos’ or ‘light workers’ just know at a deeper level.. We bring the knowing in as a soul and may lose it this was expressed as ‘the shades of the prison house’ that come to cover our vision spoken of in a poem.
We instinctively know that there can be a better way, a way that puts us more in tune with something free and open and vast and moving, but at the same time we also need to slow down and breathe.. We seem all just so trapped in our heads a lot of the time.
Anyway its nice to have a quiet Sunday morning in which to take a rest and muse on some of these things.. I always try to find a way to honor that wilderness side of myself lately.. I get into nature, I walk barefoot on the grass, I do a lot of dancing and listening to music.. I also remember after I go to an AA meeting that I got sober and felt all of my trauma too so that I could begin to know and taste and experience some ‘joy’ on the other side of it, but sadly my own life is being controlled by my brother at the moment too.. I had a long chat with Julie about this yesterday and she works for a legal firm and said it seems to her very wrong the way my inheritance money is being controlled and my brother is vetoing what I can spend it on.. She said I really need to get advice about it instead of just roll over, so this week I am going to get onto that.. doing so fills me with fear but that is not a sign NOT TO DO IT.. After all as that lovely lady Suzanne said to me at the meeting yesterday we do deserve the best as recovering women, we were not ‘bad’ but traumatized and often given no way out.. but that means we do not find it, but doing so involves us going ‘wild’ or ‘rogue’ for a time as Glennon Doyle points out in her recent book Untamed.
The old compliant ‘good girl’ me is someone many of the men and hyper-masculinized women that surrounded me years ago wanted me to be, they did not want me yelling or screaming out my pain and sadly that was not helping anyway as I now see it was about deeply frustrated subverted life energy gone haywire that I have had to deal with over these past 6 or more years of ongoing psychotherapy..
The new me is more radical and does not want to toe the line and be as repressed any more but at times dero fear if this vibrant authenticity holds me in its icy grip.
Knowing how my brother is I need to find what Buddhist teachers call skillful means to approach this issue, as any kind of protest or fiestiness on my behalf is just all too quickly labelled ‘irrational troublemaking’.
Emerging From The Dark Night 