"But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world . . ." – The Little Prince
Even after dropping more specific labels such as runner or athlete, I still allowed myself to be somewhat identified by “adventurer” and “explorer”. Those our broad enough, right?
I also explained explorer (this is even in my bio in Light & Dark) as being a person willing to explore both their outer and inner landscape. This is pretty accurate. I just wasn’t doing it.
I was creating and forcing my own adventures. And yes, in terms of mountain adventures, you want to plan appropriately for safety reasons, yet the real grace is when you can let go of the plan and allow the Mother Nature and the day to bring what she will. Being a true adventurer is going with the flow. It’s accepting that when a door shuts on you, or it starts to rain, that you’re being redirected by something greater than yourself and toward something that is in your highest good. (You may have just avoided a huge accident by returning back to your car.) It’s realizing that an injury or illness isn’t punishment, nor is it something to push through. It’s the knowing that something greater is happening in the Yin (resting potential).
Being a true explorer means being curious. Honestly, 3 year olds are probably the best explorers our there. They’re just going where their parents take them and stopping to look at all the bugs and leaves along the way. Adults tend to plan and force, even when it doesn’t feel good or aligned with joy. We’re ruled by our minds and fear. Instead of looking to others for inspiration, we look at them through comparison…If this adventurer has a van, we need to have a van and YouTube channel too. If this athlete is running these races and that’s where the money is, I need to run those race too. If this wanderer is traveling to that state or country, then I need to wander over there too… Rarely are we actually willing to let go of plans and travel into the Unknown, allowing the path to be revealed to us.
Being a True Explorer is going into the Unknown with curiosity, trust, and joy. A True Explorer accepts the redirects of life and happily changes path. A True Explorer is guided by their heart rather than fear. A True Explorer lives from inspiration instead of motivation and comparison. A True Explorer is free. In actuality, a True Explorer doesn’t have to create or carve out a new path. Instead, she relaxes knowing that a unique path is already laid out for her. A True Explorer is willing to follow the breadcrumbs of Life, recognizing animal symbolism, dreams, and synchronicities as guidance.* A True Explorer trust that she will be guided to experiences for her highest good, that the challenges (often in the form of ego** slaying) are necessary for ascension, and that love not be searched for in far away places, but it is always there. A True Explorer is always on the Divine Path back to True Self.
*I just checked my phone and it was, of course, 11:11.
**When the Bible talks about “demons”, the metaphorical translation is ego.
A few weeks ago, I had decided to wait on getting a wisdom tooth pulled because of nice weather and already having a mountain day planned (I was supposed to “chill” for 4 days after the procedure). Even though I wasn’t in pain that day, I knew before even leaving the dentist’s office that I had made another decision with my ego.
9 days later (with the next scheduled appointment nearly 2 weeks away) the pain came back in full force, plus a little more—almost unbearable. You probably won’t understand the pain of a toothache (and infection) unless you’ve had it before, but it left me wandering somewhere in the liminal state between conscious and unconscious.
Pain, a Great Teacher, is also warning sign. It asks us to check in with our bodies and our hearts. Not listening results in…more pain, at increased levels.
I had again chosen a mind want out of fear rather than my heart want of a happy, healthy me. If I had gotten my tooth pulled the previous week, my last Autumn and dry mountain of the year would have been completely enjoyable.
Fear left me impatient.
Love does not fear time.
Pain lets me know when I am listening to my ego rather than my heart and soul. Whether physical or mental and emotional, the Great Teacher lets me know when I have chosen to separate from my true self.
I’ve ignored pain almost my whole life.
As a child, pain rarely brought me comfort from my parents, so I desensitized myself to it and learned to deny comfort for myself, too.
But, I don’t want to live in pain anymore. I don’t want to live in separation from who. I. am. I don’t want physical pain or heart pain for these elongated, semi-conscious periods.
I want to heed pain’s warning on the spot. To honor pain’s lessons and allow it to redirect me back to love.
My win on that last mountain?
Calling out my self-judgement and shame before it could grow. Even if I made an ego decision, I would not then let me ego again win in berating me for the choice and causing such pain.
…A final, free-writing journal question: Pain, is there anything else I am not seeing? Anything else you have to teach?
I am not an enemy. I am love in disguise.
Keep coming back Home to yourself. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just let that, Home, be your intention.
Thank you, pain.
(Much more on pain and it’s relationship to death coming soon.)
To what depths will you go in the search of
finding yourself?
Do you dare to stand in the lakes of your
pain and uncover the roots of your anxiety?
To upend the rocks that surround your heart
and move them one by one?
While you may go to the mountains, the lakes,
the valleys for solitude and refreshment of spirit,
you will not find yourself there.
Unless you have first met yourself,
you will simply see and grasp
at what you cannot yet feel.
You must go within.
Only there can you find what you seek.
Then, you will find peace in your place
of connection with all beings.
Earlier in the year, I made a decision based on a thought I had. The thought seemingly came out of nowhere, so even though my body felt resistance to it immediately, I rationalized that it might be a sign from the Universe telling me what I should do.
But that could never be true.
I was again worshiping the false god of the ego-mind which I had been taught was the truth. The Universe, Spirit, God…that Voice speaks through the heart. For me, as an empathic female, the lost connection with my own True Voice may be the biggest tragedy of my life. I lost trust in myself and gave my power away to the false god that family, school, society, and religion taught me was reality. Doubt consumed me. Hence the on and off struggle with the symptoms we call anxiety and depression (undiagnosable, which is an arbitrary system anyway) that I’ve dealt with since my pre-teens, when the innocence of my Little Self was lost.
In the fight for myself in the protective grips of my ego (fear) identity, the past few months have been some of the hardest of my life, although not as outwardly tragic as losing my oldest sister. I have brought light into the illusion of the ego and allowed myself to fully experience the pain (of separation) my body has held on to for 25 years. I didn’t just “deal” with my panic attacks…I experienced them, often using the simultaneous timing of my period (bringing up my pain and world pain) and the full moon (bringing up the unconscious) to rise within as I cried and breathed into my emotions, letting the energy to flow through my body. At times, I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to make it. (To go back to ego-rulership would be so easy.) I got so lost in the shadows that I lost myself at a level just short of psychosis (that I now believe many humans deal with). I am eternally grateful for the people and doG in my life that have been my Sunshines, as well as the little bit of Consciousness I was able to hold on to the last few rounds. “Ray, remember who you are”, became my prayer to myself.
As of this writing, I still haven’t fully reconnected to the Voice of My Heart. I am still remembering who I am at an embodied level. I am doing my best to lean into the trust of knowing that I am on the right path even as my ego-mind chimes in asking for power. I also write for You…to help You remember who You are. And, if you’re in a time in your life where you’re experiencing panic (ego) attacks, I want you to know that is your soul trying to escape the confines of the ego that have been placed around it. Freedom is found in the surrender, the letting go of thought, and moving in and through the emotions/energy the body has been holding on to for so long. I highly recommend seeking out support, a sun to your moon, someone to remind you who You are. Allowing someone else to be a light is a request of the heart, for only the ego values the false toughness and sense of separation of needing to do things on one’s own… Which may be your important first step of not feeding the ego-mind and instead reclaiming your heart and giving the power back to your True Self.
Recently, Obi-Wan* (my Reiki therapist) told me that even when I’m at my lowest of lows, I’m still at a higher vibrational frequency than most people. I gave him an incredulous look. He had seen me at some of my lowest points and even cried with me in his office (and that my friends, the masculine recognizing and being with the pain of the feminine, is the power that will heal the Earth)**. What was he talking about? How could that be true?
And then I realized he was right. Even when I was just feeling “okay” (sometimes joyful, sometimes still having ego/panic attacks), I had, without almost any effort, called in a 3 bedroom house on 5 acres on hidden piece of land that offers both privacy and easy access to trails (and, most importantly, is perfect for Pacer). I would have never even had thought to ask for such a large, beautiful space. I didn’t think such a space could be within my budget. In fact, I hadn’t even know the space existed in Salida.
The message for all of us: Maybe life doesn’t have to be so hard. Maybe, as Mary Oliver wrote, we just have to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” (Translation: To live beyond our ego (human) desires and allow our expansive, open, and vulnerable hearts (the voice of our soul) lead the way.) Maybe, when we relax our grip of control (fear) and allow life to unfold, we will be presented with more love and beauty than we ever new existed.
*I might have to change the nickname for my Reiki therapist as I recently met a man who’s last name is pronounced “Kenobe” and also holds the nickname Obi-Wan.
**Therapeutic cry: Obi-Wan wasn’t taking on my pain, he was simply bearing witness to it. As an empath, I would have tried to make him feel better if I saw him taking on my pain and then felt bad for having emotions. Instead, he simply allowed tears to form in his eyes while he energetically stayed both strong and calm so I could relax ( be messy) and release my pain.
My then boyfriend, now friend, can tell you exactly how I looked when he dropped me and Pacer off to start the Colorado Trail, just a few months after moving to the state and having only done one very, very, short overnight backpacking trip on the AT. He’ll tell you that I looked like I was about to cry, that he could see the fear written around the worried lines around my smile. I actually didn’t know he could read any of my emotions in that moment until he repeated this scene to me a few months ago, because at the time, he knew what he had to do. He remained stoic, not allowing me to linger too long in our embrace, and sent me and Pacer off down the trail.
My tears are usually a mixture of emotions. Sadness, fear, and excitement all wrapped into a ball, moving from my chest to my throat.
The sadness is partially still from the ending that transitioned right into the beginning, but also a grief for the people I can’t take with my on my journey. It’s a love, really. The tears if sadness also mix in with tears from pure fear…a new beginning is stepping into the unknown. And, even while at this point in my life I know all will turn out okay, the fear of the unknown seems to be embedded into my DNA. Its grip has simply loosened. Blending in with the fear then, of course, is the heart of my adventurous soul singing out loud in excitement, for there is surely much beauty to be seen.
So is the cycle of my life. An ending, a beginning, and all the emotions in-between. Beauty in every step.
The old debate among the spiritual community revolved around the question: “Is the opposite of love fear or hate?
When examined closer, we realize there is no need for debate.
We only hate what we fear, and we only fear what we don’t understand.
The reverse is also true.
When we shine a light on what we don’t understand, we begin to know its truth, and we can only love what is true.
We find that to know the darkness is to know the light.
**************
I can still remember the first time I heard the song “Accidentally in Love” by Counting Crows.
I can almost picture myself walking out of the movie theater after seeing Shrek with my dad and sister, when Parmatown Mall was still actually a mall and had a movie theater.
But the stronger memory is of the felt-sense I had of the closing song, how the high vibration of Accidentally in Love still reverberated throughout my body. The first Shrek was released in 2001, which marks the “post period” for me. Post death of my uncle (the firecracker of the family), post parents divorce, post Dad’s nearly fatal heart attack. Every once in a while, I still had the wild feeling of love, of zest for life still in me, when my mom let me wander through the trail-less woods alone or after seeing a movie in the theater, but for the most part, this light had disappeared. So when I heard Accidentally in Love for the first time, it was more of a longing that I felt within me.
Would I ever get that feeling back?
When I decided to take a deep dive into my healing journey a few months ago, I didn’t really understand what needed healing. I didn’t know something was missing. I didn’t know how deep I would have to go into the dark. I just knew I didn’t feel how I wanted to feel, and so it really was my emotions that pointed the way.
As it turned out, it all came back to returning myself, to the joy within me. To get truly excited about the little things, to the excitement of just being alive. Allowing my imagination to once again run wild. Getting back to art and creating, just for the sake of playing.
So when Pacer and I found ourselves at Great Sand Dunes National park, paws and shoes in the sand, without thinking about it, I just followed my urge to run. Then, on the drive back, I just started to sing to the songs on the radio, without hesitation in my untrained voice.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was me returning to my light. It really all happened accidentally. Falling back in love with myself and life.
By surrendering to my darkness, I was reunited with my light.
This feeling of joy, of course, isn’t constant. For like every other human on planet earth, I suffer from the collective amnesia. I still miss the man I fell in love with over two years ago, but simply because I miss his beautiful soul, not because I miss my own (insert Beautiful Soul by Jesse McCartney here). Sometimes I still wake up with a sense of unease, and not giving into doubt is still a daily practice. Yet I return to the knowing that I will always be okay. I look up and see the love around me, my sister and brother-in-partnership who let me join them on full moon skis, my dog, my Sunshine, who will follow me wherever I go, my dad in his willingness to fly across country, eat “weird” vegan food , and tells me and my sister that we are his “happy thoughts”, my mom who will text me jokes on a “FriYay!”, my sibling by magic (I’m a Gryffindor, they’re a Hufflepuff) in Denver…
…”You are immensely loved” the psychic told me. For the first time, I believed this. I felt it for myself. The more I come back to this feeling, the more I remember, and the easier it is to return to a state of joy. Of gratitude. Of love. Of light.
Pic 1: Me and Pacer (Sunshine) at Great Sand Dunes National Park Pic 2: It really is the little things…completing this puzzle with my family came with so much joy.
Not even 10 minutes into my Reiki session, I burst out crying “but why does it always have to be so hard?”
What I really meant was “why does it always have to hurt so much?” I felt like I had been cycling through periods of intense pain over the past several years. Even in just the last 7 months, I had been closely attentive to my body, battling to stay in it though I badly wanted to dissociate, and letting all my emotions arise as they came up. Yet it felt like it was never ending. And I was exhausted. While I never wanted to end my life, I had been ambivalent about living it. The voice inside of me that said “I don’t really want to be here anymore” was no longer unconscious. I heard it. Yet I quickly dismissed it with thoughts of Pacer, living in the mountains of Colorado, and having a loving family.
So, when at the end of the session my Reiki teacher told me the clear message that he had gotten for me was “Fight for Yourself”, I was confused. What did that even mean? I don’t even like using the word “fight”, anyway.
At my next session, two weeks later, even as he explained it again, I still didn’t understand. I would stand up for myself, I thought. I’ve fought against societal norms and resisted living a traditional lifestyle (not that there is anything wrong with that), and I had begun to actively speak my emotional and intuitive truth on social media. Somewhat frustrated, I said “I still don’t get it.” My Reiki teacher gently reminded me that I would, but that my focus should lean towards finding joy and not needing to having the answer. I left feeling somewhat better, less but still frustrated.
It was another week later, when I was listening to someone else tell their own story via a podcast, that I understood. It was that voice in me, that small, unhealed part of me, that didn’t want to live. That was my darkness. Could I fight for my light?
This may be confusing to some. For anyone who has followed me for some time, you’ll know I often talk about the magic and joy of life. And I 100% feel that that magic and joy. But I also can feel the contrast just as intensely (also finally understanding when Abraham/Esther Hicks talks about contrast).
Until that moment, I didn’t understand what a strong hold that part of me, even if small, had on my soul. How, sometimes unconsciously, it could stop me in my tracks. It could make me small and prevent my light from being fully expressed. Actually, I often hid between the shadows of my hermit archetype and introvert labels.
Yet, even as I understood that this was actually the part of me that needed the most healing, that I actually needed to fight to keep my light both going and growing, I didn’t know how. I still associated with this darker part of me. “How do I just make it go away?”, I wondered. I knew, deep down, I wanted to live and to live fully, but I wanted more peace and clarity inside of me too. Less pain, more joy. So then the question turned to, could I believe that was even possible?
It took me awhile to understand this part of me and how it showed up. In the morning, this was the taint I felt in my soul. In the previous years, it showed up as a heaviness in my heart and a shortness of breath that I described as “existential angst.” As I continued to heal and released some of the heart pain that wasn’t mine, it simply felt as if someone had taken a dropper, filled it with a dose of pain, and let it drip into my essence. Like a cloud inside my light, keeping it from shining at full capacity, from waking up in the morning excited about my day, even when I living a life I thoroughly felt grateful for.
Tracing this feeling back, I remembered the panic attacks I had in high school. Waking up early to run but not really wanting to face another day. The times I never felt good enough, the fear I held in my body at every basketball game, every social event. Luckily, I had a few good friends who never left my side and let me be me, but I still kept my pain away from them, and from my parents and my twin sister. We just weren’t a family who talked about these things. The one time, my twin sister, brave enough to say anything about her own pain, I clearly remember my stepdad saying “What do you have to be depressed about?” (I have so much compassion for my stepdad now and can see how he still holds on to and buries his own emotions.) And so, my pain became my secret.
Plus, even before high school, my pain was evident just by looking at my appearance. Anytime you see someone who is skin and bones, or becomes large enough that you can no longer decipher their true form, you’re looking at someone who’s “I don’t know if I want to be here part” has taken over. It may be unconscious, especially for a 13 year old girl, but it’s evident. And then, I was basically put on medication (that I would spit out), sent to various doctors, and a mental health therapist. All this told me, or rather confirmed, was that something was wrong with me. This was the belief I was already working off of and trying to cover up with perfectionist tendencies. (Obviously, I’m all for therapists now, but even if kind, the majority of therapists in the early 2000s were still working off of the disease model of mental illness.)
The origins of the pain were still somewhere underneath that. Contrived somewhere earlier on in childhood when I was punished or unseen, especially the part of me that has always been a sensitive, empathic soul. A gift my parents just couldn’t know was actually to be cherished, for their own world had been made up of harsh realities. They were simply trying to protect me from the pain. So my sensitivity became my kryptonite, a superpower better to be hidden.
The pain started to leak out in my late 20s, first releasing some of the pain I took on from the world. I’d see a video or get a piece of mail about the inhumane treatment of animals, and I’d soon be crying on my bathroom floor. I think it was easier for me to make visible the pain I saw around me than the pain within me. It seemed more acceptable, more honorable. And to be honest, my soul was truly confused and hurt by the created darkness of the world.
So, the battle in my 30s became the battle within.
My years learning to be a therapist, speaking to my own therapists, processing with my graduate school cohort, using my skills to guide others on their journeys… this all was a practice for my internal fight. Still, I hesitate the to use the word fight. With no offense to our military, I can only see the external wars in our world as nonsensical. How truly ridiculous that we kill each other over power, fear, and inflated egos? Yet defending beautiful, innocent people is another matter, and here I lean on the example set by Nelson Mandela and other great peace leaders. (This is too big a topic to dive into in this blog.)
The first part of my own battle was surrendering to my own pain. It felt insurmountable at times, as it had been built up for nearly 3 decades. Still, I continued to be a witness to my own suffering and eventually the edges wore off and I gained more compassion for myself. Yet even as the heaviness dropped away, the part of me that felt ambivalent about life still persisted. I didn’t know how to release that darkness, although meditations focusing on “breathing out clouds and breathing in sunshine” provided some relief.
Then, I had yet another opportunity to practice.
In many cases when I have a decision to make, I’ll stay stuck in a type of anxious freeze mode, and I have a debate in my head about my choices, over and over and over again, not making the final decision until I absolutely have to. Then, every once in awhile, I’ll rush into a decision… particularly around tattoos. It’s not that I didn’t want this last tattoo, I just agreed to a drawing that wasn’t exactly what I wanted before having it sketched into my skin. Actually, to make it worse, I only “semi” rushed…I actually had 2 hrs between seeing the image and agreeing to it, with a full opportunity to wait another week since the tattoo artist was heading out for vacation. For me, this was a perfect recipe of wanting to blame myself. While I’ve mostly trained myself out of negative self talk like “you’re stupid”, “I can’t believe you did that”, “why aren’t you better?”, etc., the internal feelings of shame that look like a panic attack on the outside were still very much prevalent. Could I choose to be kind to myself?
Could I choose to forgive myself for acting too quickly? (No wonder why the majority of time I can’t make a decision, if my other practice is beating myself up whenever I make the “wrong” decision.)
Could I choose, instead, to see the lesson?
This practice, too, was a fight. I wanted to go into self-blame. Being perfect and making the so called “right” decisions was what I knew how to do, how I had learned to protect myself from the fear of not feeling good enough. The hope, from my ego’s perspective, from this protection mechanism was so I didn’t make the mistake again, so I wouldn’t be the mistake.
Stepping away from the shame for a moment, I gave myself the opportunity to realize this was a lesson I had to learn. Humans, yes, are fallible. But is a person, a child, ever a mistake themself? Hell no. We simply become better versions of ourselves when taking the time to learn and gain meaning from our mistakes. The more simply stated, common phrase: sometimes we have to learn what we don’t want to know what we do want.
This tiny step turned out to be a big insight. It opened the door for me to forgive myself for a myriad of other poor (so I had deemed) decisions as well as times I had stepped away from opportunities and my own light for fear of being unworthy.
From this perspective, I could see my adult self giving a hug to the little me wearing a sunflower outfit (hat included) for her elementary school picture, who felt confused by the actions of adults in her life (as well a Catholic school that gave her the message that she was less than for being female). Then, to the high school me, who had learned to push so many people away because she thought her pain made her an outcast. I accepted these younger parts of me, showed them love, and brought them back home in my body.
In other words, I fought for them, and I fought for me. I fought for the part of myself that knew life was magical, a gift to be lived and expressed through my being. While pain, yes, may be a part of living, it doesn’t have to be carried with me on my journey. I was not my pain. I was meant to overcome my pain. To shine my light through it and to realize that my light was the only truth.
As I close, I can’t say the fight is over, the battle is just easier. The darkness is less powerful. I can see it for the fear that it is. I have more say in what I choose to believe and what I give my energy to. I can realize that my light, that I, Ray A. Nypaver, am worth fighting for.
May you always realize that your light, that You, are worthing fighting for.
*******
“I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call “The Physics of The Quest” — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: “If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself… then truth will not be withheld from you.” Or so I’ve come to believe.”― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
For what I am holding onto will not allow me to live.
The wounds of our past: slavery, separation, running from love.
Both Mother Earth and I know the depths of the darkness.
Wounds, resurfaced, by no other than a lover.
No longer buried deep, but instead, threatening to consume the light within.
The love within.
What choice will I make?
I hear my body groan in agony.
“Good”, instructs my Mother.
This is the release.
I can’t see the way,
but with signs, she assures me that she does.
My only job is to lean back,
to trust my fall into the night sky,
to trust the stars will catch me.
There is no doubt some type of death will occur.
In my sacred groan, I choose to release my pain.
I choose to let go.
My only chance to return to the Light.
Notes:
If you are in pain right now, know that you are not alone. This is part of the human journey. To transcend our pain. Not to hold it in, but to release it. To let it go. Realize it is not a burden to carry but a path to transformation. This process of moving through pain often requires more movement of energy than journaling or meditating. I suggest first moving the body and inviting any noises…screams, groans, cries, etc to come to the surface to be released. Then you may find peace in stillness.
I believe this is the difference between suicide and ego death, which is, I know, a big statement to make. But when we hold on to our pain, internalize it, keep it inside, it can absolutely kill our light, our soul. On the other hand, if we choose to step towards the pain and allow it to move, to be released, whether it be by groaning and physical release or talking to a therapist or friend, it is simply the ego that dies so the flame within can burn brighter.
The opposite of the sacred groan is, yes, the sacred moan. I hesitate to write about the sacred moan, for lack of many people understanding. There needs to be some conceptualization of sacred sexuality, even if it is only resonating with the term. The sacred moan is the mirrored twin of the sacred groan. It is the orgasm between two divine energies merging together to create something so expansive that it cannot be held within. It too, must be released. Yes, it can happen during sex, but it can happen outside of physical intercourse too. For it is in the energy, the pleasure, the love, the intersect of two divine energies coming together to co-create something bigger, more expansive, that one could have ever done in singularity.
The day Dad shared the news, I believe, started off as an ordinary day. My sisters and I went to school, came home, maybe ate dinner. That evening, before the announcement, he first took me, Sandi, and Amanda to Brookpark Fun & Games, which maybe I thought was a little odd, being a school night and all. I won a small stuffed animal. I don’t remember what it was, or how I won it. I just remember I had it when he sat us all down on Grandma’s couch.
I think he was standing, we were sitting, Grandma in the other room. He and Mom, he said, were getting a divorce.
At first I didn’t understand it. I think I was only 6 or 7. My only timeline is that my uncle, Dad’s youngest brother, passed away from Leukemia the year before. My sister tells me this is the first time she remembered seeing him cry, the second being just a few years ago when Amanda passed. Soon after the news, Dad had a heart attack, age 40, cause: a broken heart. I remember helping him put on his socks as he recovered that winter. I faintly remember mine and Sandi’s (my twin) kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade teachers feeling bad for us.
As I was sitting on Grandma’s couch, I remember picturing me and my sisters floating away in boxes in the ocean. Separated. It sounds silly, but I was so little, still partially dependent on my parents for shaping my understanding and view of the world. I must have cried. I just don’t remember. I don’t remember what happened next, when we saw Mom at home.
I think this is the day I first learned how to dissociate. My body partially shutting down and my imagination floating somewhere else, to protect me from my emotions, the emotions that my little body couldn’t yet process on its own.
I needed to my parents. I needed them to comfort me. To tell me that they loved me and that everything would be okay.
But they were in their own pain. They had learned themselves as children to shut down their emotions from their parents. A survival technique most likely used for generations to get through the hardships of life. And so, I was left alone, inside my own inner world.
For much of my life, I tried to dismiss my parent’s divorce as having any affect on my. After all, I figured, lots of kids experience the divorce of their parents. Of course, some of the wounds started to creep up in relationships as I entered my late 20s. Then, I recently learned that divorce, especially when kids have no voice in the matter, affects the part of the brain that associated with self-worth. [To be more specific, the frontostratial pathway, which links the medial prefrontal cortex (self-knowledge) with the ventral striatum (motivation and reward). Thank you Dr. Bruce Perry for sharing this research in What Happened to You? and https://www.huffpost.com/entry/self-esteem-brain_n_5500501]. I don’t think I felt that the divorce was my fault, but I didn’t feel like I had control of anything happening and I certainly had no one to comfort me, save for my stuffed animals Big Abu and Little Abu.
My brain, at the time, must have associated this with not being enough. A belief that I’ve only semi-consciously carried with me for the last 25+ years.
As a kid, self-soothing came in the form of eating, until I heard the “chunky” comments, and then I numbed my way to anorexia. Then there were sports. Sports, of course, aren’t bad. Except exercises fed my anorexia. Basketball, thinness, and grades all become closely associated with my self-worth.
Eventually, I became ruled by the belief, the fear, that I wasn’t enough. My body was too anxious to play basketball well. My shooting wrist would lock up. I’d have panic attacks, simply playing against boyfriends. In running, I was determined to leave the pressure, the past, behind me. I just wanted to bask in the freeness of running outside.
But you can’t escape the shadows that you don’t know are there. (Aka, the unconscious.)
I loved running.
Yet I got caught in the traps of a culture that said “do more” over and over and over again.
My body had enough. The left hip developed a “hitch”. On flat ground, I felt like I couldn’t control the leg’s swing. I developed calf strains. Running, limping, fainting 100 miles through the first one. And finally, an Achilles tendon injury that stubbornly wouldn’t heal.
I was frustrated for so long. Now I am simply grateful. I believe my Achilles was telling me “I’m not going to let you run until both you unconscious on conscious believes that you are enough. You don’t always have to do things to feel that way. You don’t have to work so hard to be loved. Only then will you know what it’s like to run embodied with freedom and joy. “
Joy and freedom have always been what I’ve strived for. And I have felt that way in the mountains, yet never without that little voice in the back of my mind too, coaxing me like the serpent of Eden, “You a have enough time. Do that mountain too.”
Now, there are times that I do want to extend the day outside. It’s the pressure in my body that feels awful, unloving, persisting even after I call out my ego and choose to stop. The should haves on the drive home actually driving me further away from myself, the home inside my body.
Striving, I realize, is not the right word for what I want to obtain. For striving for love is not love. It’s actually a returning. A returning to my 6 year old self, reminding her that she is loved. That she has nothing to prove, no need to claim her worthiness. A returning to that core truth, so when the world around her spins in a way she can’t control, only that truth exists. That love, joy, and freedom are always present, if not outside then within. The heart that exist outside of protections, ego, and human form.
I ran into the moonless night, not sure what I would find. Was I even searching? After all, I had no light, nothing, to show the way. What way?
Pulled forward only by something I could not describe. One blind step in front of the other, stumbling over rocks and roots. Falling. The dead leaves cushioning my hands.
It would have made sense to turn back, to the warmth of the fire. But in the pure black night, the way back had disappeared.
Then, in the stillness, in the silence of the dark, I heard a calling. So soft, I was temped to call it fiction. Yet fiction is not false. Indecipherable- was it coming from the sky? With my only choice to trust the yearning inside of me, I began to run again.
First hesitant, still falling- and then… Swiftly as a deer, the forest my home, I moved with primal, intuitive instinct.
I was running towards the light of the horizon, the pink and orange sky. My frozen breath, the only sign of my human body.
Until it wasn’t. Until I blended into the sunrise, leaving only footprints behind.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Without question, 2022 was a challenging year for me. While the events were not as harsh as in the year 2020 when I faced the physical death of my older sister, I faced my own spiritual death in 2022.
A great unshedding. Certain events led me to facing the pain inside of me, conversing with my own shadows, shadows that had protected me for so long…and letting them go. It was not an easy process, nor one that I would have necessarily chose at the onset. But I am grateful for it. It has already led to more love and joy in my life, or rather, an unveiling of what was already inside me. Of course, the journey is not over. I am still human after all. Yet I feel something shifting, slowly, and I am quite certain it is only because I had the courage to go into the darkness of my pain. Ironically, it is in the depths of darkness that one finds light.
A Dog and Her Girl 