Therapy

I think I scared some people with my last post. Eek! That is hard for me because for a moment I let myself fall into doubt. Is it too much? Am I too much? I feel like reassuring everyone, making my fear and darkness lighter, smaller. And then I gently remind myself that too much or not, it is true for me and feels worth sharing. And I remind myself that I do not have control over how other people respond to what I write. And then I let myself feel the depth of people's love and concern for me and I bask in it, feel grateful for it and come back to the page.

I will say that for me to write something like my last essay means I am no longer in that place. I've passed through it and I feel lighter and ready to share it because often when I do someone else is helped by knowing they are not alone. And that's why I believe God and She and the Universe give us grief and pain, but not all at the same time. So that there is always someone who can stand still and strong and hold my hand when I need it, to help me be ready to stand still and strong when someone else needs it.

In my deepest self I am more than ok. I am awake and interested and so very glad to be living this life. Yes, I do struggle with depression and anxiety. Often the path I am walking is not an easy one. I know I am not alone in that. But I am also so held. I have found people who are travelling similar paths with similar interest and commitment. I see how I want to travel even as I'm not sure where I'm going and even as I sometimes very much wish that I could just arrive already.

My first significant therapy experience began when I was 33. My best male friend, someone I love deeply and who surprises me with how well he knows me, suggested, not too gently, that I talk to someone about my issues. He is not known for his tact. I had tried therapy and hadn't loved it, mostly because I felt like I was trying to get the answers right. I felt tired in advanced by the idea of trying to find the right practitioner. At a party an old friend recommended her therapist to me. That's how I met Ame, a Hakomi practitioner. Hakomi is a body-centered approach and those sessions were really the first time I was invited to drop down into my body, to pay attention to how my actual physical body felt. I wasn't just talking about emotions, I was being asked to notice the sensations in my feet, my belly, my shoulders, when we talked about something or when she asked me to sit quietly and observe. It was hard as hell. Not just because my mind was always jumpy but because the response from my body was so very faint. I wanted to get the answer right and my mind would leap to the occasion, guessing how my belly might feel while talking about something that scared me. But when I quieted my mind, I often felt. . . nothing. Ame would take me through exercises of feeling my feet on the floor, feeling my butt in the chair, feeling my back against the cushion. I could feel the floor, but not my feet. I could feel the couch, but not my butt. It was like I didn't exist except for in my head. After many attempts she, my body, started giving me little, quiet murmurings--like a tiny little mouse peeking out of a long-inhabited cave. Whispers so faint that I wasn't sure they were there at first. And what she was saying to me made me cry because my poor body was so grateful to finally be asked. She wanted to talk and sing and yell and she didn't trust me one bit to actually keep listening.

In one of our sessions I talked to Ame about my years' long experience of feeling like two different people. On some days, I said, I felt light and open and happy. On those days I was energized and awake and could easily see the signs the Universe was giving me, telling me "Yes! You're on the right track. Keep going!" I loved those days. On the other days I felt heavy and dark and blocked up. I wanted to hide and be quiet and binge watch TV. I hated those days. I told her I tried to pay attention on those good days to make note of everything I'd done, what I'd eaten, if I'd exercised, so that I could try to have those days every day. I even said I was thinking I should keep better track of my cycle so I could see if there was a pattern.

She didn't exactly dismiss me but she essentially said that it was impossible to feel the same way all the time and that neither type of day was good or bad. I didn't have two selves, I was all the same self. She wanted to focus on my strong certainty that some feelings were good while others were bad. This was important because I did, and still do, fall easily into the belief that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything. I thought, deeply believed, that there were good things about me and bad things about me and therefore the obvious goal was to rid myself of the bad things, even if some of those things made me feel good sometimes. Ame introduced me to the idea of trying to see the voice in my head as an observer, rather than a judge. To notice things rather than proclaim what each thing meant. My time with her was profound and helpful and, as I know now, just the beginning.

New Year

The day before New Year's Eve, December 30, 2017, I fell deep into a hole. I couldn't stop crying. Crying hasn't been a big part of my life over the past decade or so--I unlearned the habit after years in my youth when any intense emotion would have me bursting into tears. Now the tears are coming back and it still makes me deeply uncomfortable, even as it feels like a relief.

It wasn't a physical hole--it was the emotional hole I'd been circling for months, afraid to get too close exactly because I didn't want to fall in. Even though I knew I needed to fall in. Knew I couldn't avoid it. Knew it would be in my path no matter which route I tried to take.

I felt desperate. With loneliness. With fear. With mental illness. With self-loathing. Just this deep sense of being so goddamn tired of being this person that I still am. The person who thinks too much about everything and can't relax and beats myself up and can't appreciate what I have. The pain was so intense. The fear was so intense. The fear that I would never get out of this sad place, this longing place, this feeling broken place. And even though some far corner of my mind knew that this would only be temporary, that I'd been here before and I would pass through it somehow, I felt trapped in myself and all I wanted to do was get away. Numb. Run. Hide.

There have been things going on in my life, difficult things, that I don't want to write about here. That's one of the reasons it has been hard to show up on this page, hard to find a way to share myself when so much of what I've been doing and thinking about and working on has not been for public consumption. 2017 was a hard and painful year for so many of us, for so many reasons. Me too.

I am working really hard, even as some of that hard work is in learning how to be softer. Softer on myself. More forgiving. More loving of this wild, imperfect woman that I am blessed and sometimes cursed to be. I am getting help from many wise people. I am surrounded by love. I am known. And I know for certain that I am on the right track just as I know for certain that the part of the track I've been travelling has been and will continue to be devastating. There is all this inner work going on and I still have four little kids who need to be loved and driven to school and taken to the doctor. There are still friendships, old and new. There are still people hurting and struggling and working all around me.

In the few weeks leading up to New Year's Eve I kept asking myself how I wanted to celebrate. Ceremony is important to me and it's always mattered to me to mark the passing from one year into the next. It's always been a funny day, often not living up to the hype, easy to end up somewhere you don't really want to be especially if, like me, you're someone who hasn't given much thought to where I truly want to be. I wondered whether I wanted to ring in the new year with my littles or whether it was a better year to go into the city and party, dance all night and let my body feel young and free and fun. I thought about hosting a party but that felt hard. I thought about going to spend the night on a beach somewhere with my journal, to be quiet with myself but that sounded way too hard and scary. The day got closer and no plans were made.

On the 30th I felt achy and drained. I felt sad. The tears started pouring out, my mind got desperate, I went into hermit mode and didn't want to talk to anyone or see anyone. I knew I needed to reach out to someone and I didn't want to. At all. I did not want to pick up the 10,000 pound phone.

I texted with my brother and sister to say "I'm struggling. I am so sad. I don't want to talk but I want you to know." They loved me from afar and told me they were there to talk when I was ready. They tried to reassure me.

I texted my sponsor and said "I'm struggling. I am so sad. I don't want to talk but it feels so hard to even reach out to you to say this much that I knew I needed to do it." She said she was sorry I was struggling, she sent me some slogans and suggested I pick one to focus on. That helped a little.

I cried. I tried to get out of my head. I thought of different ways I could escape myself and chose not to take any of them.

I texted my wise friend Liz and said "Oh friend. I'm in the dark and I feel afraid here. How do I not fight it?"

Liz is writing a book about the Divine Feminine and the Goddess traditions. She is a fierce feminist, a yogi, a mama, a soul sister. She is one of my teachers in this life. She has written before about how we can all be so afraid of the dark but that the darkness is a necessary part of us. Diving Into Darkness

She wrote me "Breathe. You were born in the dark, love. You ARE the dark. She's waiting for you there. Ask Her for help. She will hold you."

Then she wrote "Get your feet on the ground. Bare feet on the dirt. Let the sun hit your face. Breathe. You've got this."

Ok, I wrote. Feet in the dirt. Thank you. And I took myself outside into the backyard and did what she said.

Then she wrote "Lay in the dirt if you need to. Feel Her holding you. You are not alone. Never have been, never will be."

So I lay in the grass and dirt of my backyard and I wept. I closed my eyes and I begged "Help me. I need help. This year is ending, a new one is beginning. I don't know where I'm going. I'm so afraid."

The acuity of the desperation passed shortly after that. I got back in bed and hid there, wrapped in blankets. Kid bedtime happened and I got back in bed. Not long after that I started shaking, my whole body shivering without cease, for thirty minutes. Rigors.

Oh! I thought. There is something really wrong with me. Physiologically wrong with me. And even though I felt shitty, I felt such great relief. Because I know what to do when something needs to be healed in my body. But I get so afraid when I lose control of my mind.

I celebrated New Year's Eve in a hospital bed, alone, after an ambulance ride into the city to take me to my special hospital where they know me and know how to take care of me. I had pylonephritis, a kidney infection. It wasn't a party and it wasn't at all what I pictured when I tried to imagine how to mark the passage of another year but it felt deeply right. That was where I needed to be and it fit as an end to 2017--a year of learning to focus anew on my physical health.

After Liz told me I wasn't alone I wrote her back to say "That helped. I do feel so alone. And so tired of myself and this journey of learning that is so hard."

"You're ready, friend," Liz wrote to me. "You're on the cusp of huge change."
'I imagine it hurts like hell. But you can do it."

We can do it. Happy New Year. I wish you all more of the power of the Divine Feminine in your lives. I wish you good, true friends and helpers when you ask for them. I wish you care for your minds, bodies and spirits. And I wish you tenderness as you journey to wherever it is you need to go.