Written on December 4, 2011 by matt.
feeling grateful and gracious today. i don’t have much to say but i want to say it anyhow. had another good meditation today, not like yesterday, but it helped us be present to our headache. which doesn’t sound fun, it didn’t decrease the pain (in fact our awareness of the pain is greater) but we feel so much more okay with it. and we felt a really cool sense of faith in ourselves. to ourselves. none of this language is quite right. a sense of being on ground, of being on a path, of pride in ourselves and peace. not overwhelmingly, but the feelings are there. and it is a relief.
we have been trying to listen more without shooting down ideas about what people want to eat. which we did try to do before, so i don’t know what shifted, but we realized that people just wanted corn chips yesterday and so we got some, and some salsa. today we are drinking pumpkin eggnog and eating cinnamon-bread toast.
Written on December 3, 2011 by beth and matt.
i did three guided meditation tracks this morning. i find myself struggling with how to talk about it and realizing how much shame i have over various things to do with it. but anyway, i am trying to follow the program week by week in this book, “the mindful way through depression.” i feel so stupid talking about it, even to my therapist. but what is really wrong with it? so after the short standing yoga meditation and the longer sitting meditation, i felt unhurried in my path back to ‘ordinary’ consciousness. i stretched a very little, and had feelings of great compassion. a sense of being okay the way we are. not that we are totally okay with ourselves but that it could be a possibility. like giving ourselves permission to be okay with ourselves could happen in this lifetime.
with the compassion around, i felt moved to hold, touch, and otherwise be aware of my little statue of kwan yin that i keep just under my monitor. i keep a few stones and crystals there too. it’s a super mini altar that would fit in the palm of my hand. it just occurred to me that i have three green stones – i have always felt affiliated with green rock. and that reminds me of the three treasures from the tao – mercy, moderation, and modesty, as ursula leguin puts them; kindness, restraint, and balance, you could say, though that last is really just my interpretation. anyway i could go on about my interpretation but that’s not what i was trying to talk about!
being in touch with kwan yin, different people in our system felt united (i could crudely say ‘the taoists and the pagans’ but of course that is a strange separation and oversimplification) in the bath of compassion. we had a young one come out in therapy on thursday, who had a memory from about 4 of being tied and left alone in a cold barn with a collar and leash; and we have been trying to hold them in awareness and send them warmth and company as best we can. so we felt like going down to the place under the well and just doing the best we could do be with the compassion and with the insider both at the same time. and we cried a little. then i felt i had to write it down, to acknowledge it or cement it or something.
this memory is a hard one. i think it pre-dates the cages; i think the idea for the cages grew out of the being tied. and our impulse is of course towards denial and minimization. but we can tell from many little things that it is real. it is hard to say that or believe that, but we have been as best we can. and then, somehow we are also not so inclined to minimize it this time. there is deep shame, it is hard to talk about; but there is also a huge grief for the tiny, confused, abandoned, chilled-to-the-bone child that we were.
this is very hard to say and we are hurting, so we will stop.
