It’s funny when someone likes an old post you wrote, in which you were beginning to touch base with so many deep feelings. This post was about being left and feeling so unheld and the grief it stirs up for me and relates to what Lee Harris guides the Zs said about our amnesia around the heart collectively. It was about the mother/nurturing wound in me, about feeling unseen, deeply unrelated to and so cast out figuratively on such high wild emotional seas in a world that also seemed to neither see nor care.
Lately in therapy I am facing the full brunt of how much that all hurt my heart and body not to mention all the surgerys for sinus and breast cancer as well as the damage it did in separating me from knowimg how to practice both self care and self love. Since I was unheld in this way as a child I never knew how and neither did my parents who also carried that lack of care, hard task master energy of the ancestors. Tying to hold myself together amidst the messy emotions, well even the idea I have to do that so as not to be rejected is such a tough one to face, so often I was rejected for carrying and expressing deep feelings others did not want to know about, so being with others and fearing overwheming or being overwhelmed by them is a big one for me to handle and its made getting close to others tough. I am only slowly finding my words for deep feelings..
I also realized today having to drop Jasper to the groomers early how important it was for me growing up not to be messy or expressive either of these seemed to get me into trouble. I recognize more fully now how deeply bereft of care and consolation my mother’s young life was and how I could not see all that from my heart as deeply when she was alive and yet in those final years I was there to see and love and care as her poor body went through so much.
Sadly Mum.had a second knee replacement surgery go wrong in 2012 and then she struggled so much and had several falls the final one which took her out 5 years ago in a week’s time is the anniversary, maybe a reason I was crying so deeply on the way home from therapy yesterday.
I felt a lot of anxiety dropping Jasper off today, I know the dog groomers is not a natural animal place but a human tidy up place and that affects me. It was hard to wake up too possibly as after a therapy day I am integrating so much and due to battling this anxiety. My brother also called yesterday which is highly unusual but he’s off overseas today and that broke me down in tears, it like he runs or emotionally avoids at any anniversary of grief he has buried. He was calling about money too and that breaks my heart at times, he’s not even having Christmas with his wife and older son and daughter but overseas with the younger son and his wife’s parents which again seems highly ancestral as this is the time of year that my ancestors set sail for that long and arduous immigration journey in 1874. In fact Mum’s death anniversary on the 12th is the date they left as a family for New Zealand from Cornwall. Anyway I do feel maybe the family also may struggle with him taking himself off. Maybe it’s the only way he knows to cope and is part of his North Node in Cancer battle..
I am glad my other sister and I can talk all this through and try to make sense of it, I was in tears with my brother and he must have told her, so she called me yesterday which warmed my heart and she always tries so much to understand an allow my emotions. We spoke of how strange we find this intimacy void in his marriage but he’s such a loner my brother he’s a lot like my father in so many ways. Going so far away from the family who love him, but possibly also lack intelligence emotionally around his inner sensitivities. I think all of us kids were highly sensitive just like our parents. my older sister who died so often seemed the stronger one. At least my tears were expressing a reality.
Wow what a struggle to get to the shops with Jasper, to walk the block, to manage a bit of breakfast amidst texts from Scott about money and things, but I did manage it.. There was a lovely dog at the groomers and he had the most beautiful eyes so I calmed myself and raised my inner joy, love quotient today looking into his, as I walked off after dropping Jasper off his gaze followed me.
It a big thing for me to understand how fearful I feel around being an emotional ‘mess’ and its good to acknowledge that the one I am most in need of holding from actually does live inside of me.. call that force God or love or a higher power, it is the containing, embracing force that negates the inner critic who tries to shred me or others. Maybe at heart my fears so often do speak of a truth as in a world at times ruled by a heartless hierarchy we do struggle to be real and hibesr emotionally and not to feel shamed, dismissed, rejected or judged.
But I do know this. Our hearts most certainly to need to be known and to be lovingly beheld by others otherwise we go to addictions seeking a holding and a warmth or asuccor that really must be found by doing the work of building emotional bridges of love between our heart and the hearts of others.. As Mark Wolynn notes in so much of his work when this love connection or flow is blocked or prevented flowing forward it backs up in our body and does real damage cellularly and emotionally.
Emerging From The Dark Night 