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The tiny piece of green sea glass had floated between continents tumbling on to vast and different shores across the globe. With each beach landing she became more and more polished and transparent. She enjoyed each beach for the duration of her stay, following the currents of wind and water that shaped her continuous journey. Occasionally her moves were determined by a person that had picked her up and thrown her, willy-nilly, back into the sea.
One day, at the mercy of the weather, she landed on a tiny island that seemed to promise long, sunny days with few people roaming the beaches. She realized that she did not want to risk floating aimlessly between seashore settings anymore, living with the fear that she might be displaced as a memento or placed in a piece of art! She was excellently practiced at hiding in plain sight which always took some work because of her brilliance and stunning color. It dawned on her that if she were to stay on this tiny island, she would rather come out of hiding to really enjoy the sun and shine with new friends. This seemed paradoxically exciting and frightening all at the same time. She would need trust and a healthy dose of willingness to seek out a potential beaching spot. And this would require agency and choice, two things she knew very little of. She had grown to dislike the subservience to elements that had consummated her insecurity, especially since she longed for the confidence to acknowledge her new longings. She sought counsel with others like her asking how they thought that she could conjure up such courage, but no one had the answer, for they too were exclusively at the whimsy of life. And she worried that any decision made for her own benefit might backfire and in turn come to haunt her for reasons she knew not. But fate and grace had landed her on this beautiful sand spot with the possibility of being gloriously out in the open! She did not know how many days she had left before she was washed down to a sizeable nothing, so she dared to reveal her beautiful green and relaxed; finally, and totally relaxed, napping in the sunshine. She embraced her destiny with no harm done, taking refuge in the equality of her choice intertwined with the mystery of fate.
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Have you ever met a problem detector; someone who can see everything that is potentially wrong in any situation? This wee girl learned to be this way as she grew up during the war that devastated her country, her neighborhood, her family, and her life as a teenager. She felt like a huge, disorganized cloud of fury and chaos, not able to breathe while averting panic with every step.
Her job was to stay uber-attentive, trying to sense, see, and hear what might be happening next. Outside, inside, anywhere, everywhere, she was figuring out how to be okay with chaos in her family and her country, but the pressure was insurmountable. She was full of ideas about how and what to do, but sharing was pointless. She swallowed her words and became a handful for her parents who had essentially given up in the face of terror and uncertainty. This girl became a highly educated woman who fled her country through marriage. She became very successful, and professional, raising her child with perfection. But her second husband and his son were chaotic, troublesome, and desperate. She recognized these feelings as if she had grown up drinking a measly broth of them every single day, and she hated it. She had so many ideas on how to fix her husband and stepsons relational dilemma. She spied on them from the next room over in their upscale home preparing to fix them with her expertise. She was prepared. Ready. Precise. But they would not listen to her. The innocent arrogance that she had developed growing up shaped her sense of self so thoroughly that she could not, would not, let go, and it threatened her marriage and peace. She had it all and her problem detector protector part was still vigilant. She lost sleep, was giving up, and more, began to disrespect her beloved husband. The desperateness in her saw the desperateness in him. That is the rule of thumb: What I don’t like in you, I don’t like in myself, and what I like in you, is what I like in myself. Whoa – a mirror! The desperate feelings of her youth crawled out of the depths of her deep, deep belly and sat right in her chest. Feelings of loss, being panic stricken, not belonging, and especially, loneliness. These feelings were as big as the fancy living room she sat in, filling her heart and home with agony. But now she could at least feel, sense, and see them herself. She felt them for her teenage part since she masterfully hid them beneath her problem detection systems. She breathed easier, releasing years of denial that softened the way she saw her husband at war with his son, and herself at war with her husband and original family too. She felt a soft empathy rising and a sense of belonging that reminded her that she has always known that angels were listening to her deepest desires. She sensed their grace now opening the channels of her heart, inviting her to relax into the life of her dreams. L – living in between two known ways of being I – immediate anxiety M- meeting old fears B- becoming a new dragon O- opportunity After 25 years of stasis, the warrior dragon found himself in limbo. He so disliked this horrendous, in-between state of unknowns and uncertainty. His greatest fear was not leaving the known but encountering himself in the middle terrain of dread. He knew what this could mean; loneliness, regret, could haves and would haves, and worse, those really bad habits. It would be easier to run to the next secure state no matter how disruptive, but he promised himself to resist temptation and hold steady. Staying steady while experiencing shame and self -medicating patterns was just impossible so he sought a different way to cope. And he clearly did not want to be told to breathe, pray, and meditate, as he taught other dragons how to do this and it simply was not working. He had already begun to sense that raw, niggly feeling of loneliness blended with a fear of being left behind. The little dragon had been a bastard child kept on the fringe of the family as a sad, bad, reminder of what was. It felt like a nauseating black hole of an existence that made his need for security quite clear. He knew that leaving the known meant that the feeling of not being cherished, much less wanted, would return as a gripping despair, one that he felt in his mother’s womb. “Oh, what to do,” he asked, wringing his front claws. The dragon had shown up with a picture of himself as a hatchling, white and pure. I could smell the distinct scent of innocence just by looking at that picture, no matter the atmosphere of guilt that he was born from and in to. We admired this about his little self. Exempt from guilt and accusations he was innocent, even in his unwelcomed arrival, he was innocent. He had been indoctrinated into the realm of guilt and inconvenience and taken it in to be his truth. His head drooped and his voice became meek. Opportunity was the word that kept repeating in his head. He had interpreted this as a new way of being, a new life, and a new relationship, but he began to see that the opportunity was to integrate old, old feelings of being unwanted and disregarded. True to his dragon nature, he beckoned courage, trust, and willingness as his allies and met the baby dragon within, the one he saw in that photo. And he loved, loved, loved that baby, so much. This time his head bowed to the child within instead of drooped, and his voice quieted rather than being meek, and he spoke as a mighty father would, welcoming his child-self into his heart. He realized that he had rejected this part of himself just as his parents had. Rather than waiting for his parents’ approval, he gave it to himself and the freeze of shame within began to melt. This was his new limbo state, a time of welcoming and softening. This time he wiped tears from his face very gently, sharing that he usually wipes his tears away with hate and haste. What a difference; a newfound gentleness that he had time to integrate too. No hurry. He felt ready to linger in limbo, as long as it took, without a need to escape grief or hide from his hatchling history anymore. He felt like a true dragon now, strong, secure, and mature! The kid was bullied so many times as a seventh grader and up, that he crouched, cowered, and shut down in defeat. His parents tried to help by placing him in a 2-year program at a local school for the deaf; a pilot program for all kinds of ‘misfits’ as he called them. He eventually found it easier to be a misfit then to fit in at ‘regular’ school, although his math and sciences ‘tanked.’ When the two years came to pass, he dreaded the impending return to regular school, experiencing panic attacks and sleepless nights as he recognized that lingering feeling of helplessness. The bullying picked right back up and he regressed to an all too familiar state of weakness and rejection.
Years later as a married man he often felt assaulted when his wife expressed her emotions in what he called’ a more dramatic way.’ He had a more subtle emotional experience that was quite different from hers. In fact, her behavior caused him to feel impatient along with an urgency to be right, while also feeling unseen and disrespected. He could not witness his woman feeling and expressing, as her behavior seemed to rob him of a sense of order while unleashing an ancient rage. All his spiritual training reminded him that this unruly rage was inappropriate, but his body begged to differ as he efforted to maintain control. This rage felt self-centered and arrogant, and so strong that he felt ready to fight, to destroy! So, he plotted and planned, but never dared to take action. He was trapped, feeling an empty void in his upper belly like a hidden sensitivity filled with the agony of being overlooked. He questioned how to deal with this inner chaos and loss of freedom. His quest led him to Peru where he was fortuitously taken in by a Peruvian family. They gave him a plot of land so he could grow food and participate in weekly ceremonies with their family’s lineage of making ayahuascua. For this young man seeking peace, these ceremonies paradoxically offered him opportunities to meet the destroyer energy within. This archetype embodies repressed rage about structures and experiences that no longer serve life. And he was forced to meet his inner structure of rage and hurt created by the ignorance of kindness around him. The young man was led to offer space for this inner structure of sensitivity, tender and hollow. With no bypassing or hiding, this sensation had plenty to say. The strength of his quiet words was saturated with self-worthiness and the need for respect. This truth was intermingled with hurt and the full feeling of retribution, the longing for justice and the need to feel safe and treated fairly. And this allowed his whole inner structure to soften, the feeling of dominance dissipating in the energetic reality of wholeness. He could now imagine his wife expressing her own inner chaos without it triggering his own inner defense. It took welcoming, allowing, and integrating this energy fully to reconfigure the inner networking. God knows he had tried to override this in so many ways, mostly positive, just incomplete. In retrospect he remembered that his mother was a warrior, dominant, controlling, sensitive and reactive while his father was submissive, often retreating into his art. He could see that he was called to find a different way than his father had demonstrated by honoring both the helplessness and the power within. And that this pattern fully played out for resolution in the consciousness of his evolving family lineage. He could see the bigger picture and how these bullies had helped him evolve out of retreating and into the authenticity of warriorship and authority. He also understood that none of these stories were real for his true Self. That the living energetic structure of his past made living this truth challenging. He was truly intent on healing since he was often hijacked by this perception of being attacked, even when it did not exist. In truth, he understood the value of ‘waking down,’ the awakened journey into the knots and lessons of life. He was not only awake, but a hero and a warrior in his individual story here on Earth. * I offer virtual one-on-one sessions anywhere in the world. You can contact me at amulya@thebreathingspace.org The trailer was tucked in, way down and back in a holler just east of the Piney River in middle Tennessee. There were several generations of relations living in surrounding trailers that were too close for her comfort. At night the little girl would go to bed and the yelling would begin. Momma started the nightly confrontations, standing up to be seen and heard and felt and understood. And damn, it never worked, so she kept pleading, her passion mixed with a strong set of country lungs. The little girl could hear other noises too that were sharp, loud and unrecognizable.
During the day, in her best efforts, Momma was strict, religious, and full of a guilt that she spread throughout the household to maintain a sense of control and structure. In response the little girl’s body tightened into a fiery ball of tension right in the middle of her little chest. She absorbed the circulating rage in the rooms of her home with her own rage and fear, making her even more quiet and mild mannered. She never understood exactly what was happening but, as it goes, rage became her nemesis. At first, she tried yelling at her parents to stop. As you might imagine, that did not have an effect at all as Momma would shout, “stop being ugly” and “go back to bed.” The little girl fumed knowing how ugly her Momma was being. She became rebellious, especially after her Poppa left, abandoning the family when she was only eight years old. She did not know that her Poppa was an addict, that he went to jail, and that she had half sisters and brothers in the next holler over. The little girl grew into an avid fighter, happy to reveal her anger at the hint of the slightest confrontation, especially with her now ex-husband and countless other romantic partners. This landed her in jail too, one time too many, so after being released the last time she was mandated to attend an anger management class. The auto-correct she learned in that class shut down the anger in her completely. She became meek and mild once again, unable to recognize even the slightest of frustrations, secretly wishing these feelings never existed. One spring day the neighbors’ dogs escaped their fence and began to dig into her front garden. Listen, this was the one nice thing she had worked so hard to make, a nice garden. She so wanted just one nice thing to cherish. She could not have this with her own children or grandchildren, her life, her health, her work situation, so that garden was everything. She ran out the front door and started yelling. The words and intensity escaped like a bat out of hell, and she let it rip. Those dogs ran for their life, and she smiled watching them high tail it back to their own territory. It worked, but she hoped the neighbors had not seen or heard. At work, her manager forbids her to speak at the weekly meetings, mostly to protect her from the ten other men that she works with. They all ignore her, and she hates this, by God, as she has to funnel her complaints through the manager who would address the group for her. He was really trying to keep her out of trouble, but the price felt high. Quieted again. Unheard. Unseen. Unappreciated. Outraged. In the end, all she wanted was to enjoy the moment with some peace and quiet. She learned that this was only achievable if she were on her own with no one to have a confrontation with. Not a boyfriend or a housemate or her children. So, she spent her evenings making music and reading books that her children recommended, books about trauma, CPTSD, and parts work. By the time I met her she had a working vocabulary for her predicament, but still felt so trapped and doomed to live alone. Our first conversations were about how frustration can lead to anger and then to rage if unaddressed or misunderstood. Could she allow the feeling of frustration without fearing jail-time or destruction? This would take time, and skill, something she was ready for. She had never related her rage to her childhood or addressed how she must have felt as a child. But when talked about the tears began to flow. At first, she tried to suppress these as much as she did the anger, so it was a slow process toward vulnerability and learning to be gentle with her own body’s sensations and feelings. New territory. Like those dogs she would have rather yelled to keep the tears away, but she is ready to try something different. She does not think that she will ever meet a man that is kind in confrontation. But for now, she is content with figuring out that same part of herself, way down there in the hills of middle Tennessee. You may not know this, but most people have been shaken to their core. More than once. And each time this happens there is a deep freeze effect in the breathing diaphragm, muscles, and breath. This freeze causes us to think critically about what frightened us and why, often in lieu of feeling the response to the event. So, processing mentally can be a first step to healing, but is just that, only a first step. We must include the body to heal our heart.
When something happens in our life that elicits a feeling of sadness for example, and we are not comfortable with this emotion, then the effort to keep it from expressing causes a state of depression. This massive effort then creates a ripple of stress throughout the whole body. So, where does one begin? Years ago, eighteen to be exact, I had a cat named Lilla. She was only a year old when I found out that her liver was failing. I was naïve about spending money to save her life and so I paid for surgery and procedures to save her little life, but to no avail. My little Lilla had no positive prognosis, and I was sent home to be with her in the time she had left. I decided to clear my calendar for a week so that I could have time to mourn her impending death. The sadness I felt was enormous, and frankly a bit confusing, so this seemed like an interesting remedy. It started with mourning her loss and then immediately the sadness for the divorce I was going through at that time, and with each day that passed there many more un-felt losses from years past. They were very personal at first, and after these cleared there were the losses that I felt for family, humanity, women, the earth, and it just kept going. At this point I realized that I was in a relationship with sadness, not that which caused the sadness. So, I dropped all the stories and felt fully, awareness and sensation, rather than feeling and thinking about these stories which only seemed to make the stories bigger and more powerful. Sadness experienced is felt as a series of sensations in the body, so I allowed the tears, tension, warmth, and heaviness with gentle and spacious welcoming. ‘Turning toward’ I called it, a neck down exploration into the depths of sadness. After seven days of surrendering to the stored-up tank of grief, I woke up and realized that I felt empty and complete. My dear Lilla passed that day and I could grieve her with sadness and joy in my heart, a true state of remembrance. Upon reflection I also realized that my body knows exactly how to grieve. It was my mind filled with the myths of feeling that blocked this very natural process. Myths like if I feel I will be depressed, or unable to work, or lazy. But it is quite the opposite. Upon feeling, that is letting emotion, or energy-in-motion, move, I felt relief and peace. In fact, when sadness rose what I could feel best is how my body had learned to shut the grief down. A tight jaw and belly, legs pulling in, and breath held were what I could focus on to relax the effort of shutting down. From there the body is fine. Later I learned that when an emotion moves through the body in this way, it takes 90 seconds, one minute and a half, and it is complete. No emotional hangovers, or processing needed. And I could sense that in allowing this movement there were other messages to be recognized. For example, sadness is intertwined with love, anger is mixed with need, and fear can be coupled with compassion. Living from the body as the energetic constellation and system that it is naturally allows for integration and expansion - if allowed. I am so grateful to Lilla for the lessons of letting go. She gave me the opportunity for a life changing experience that I still share with people when helping them learn how to feel and integrate loss. Many, many years ago there was a large group of people that survived sieges in an underground city called Ozkonak. It exists in the volcanic granite mountains northeast of Avanos in the central region of Turkey. There were tunnels, halls, stables, a winery, churches, chambers for sleeping, kitchens, and even ventilation in every room. Ozkonak could accommodate 60,000 villagers at a time, many of whom were related and included their horses, dogs, and carts. They were close in blood and proximity sealed beneath their above ground city for up to three months a t a time. Out of necessity they shared this living space made up of ten underground floors. It was always exciting and frightening both, with sheer adrenaline forging their paths downward for sacred safety. But as time marched on, tempers began to fly.
One of the village members was a teen named Emine. She had lived her entire life moving in and out of this underground structure, knowing the miles of deep-down territory by heart. She observed how her family handled stress while sharing close quarters during these attacks, taking it in as a personal code of resiliency. There were no external influences to suggest anything different from the conditioning she was so utterly immersed in. That was what being a family meant – to think, feel, and act the same. Now Emine was also sensitive, internalizing the unspoken words and unfelt stress and emotions of her family in the tight, small atmosphere of underground living. In response, there developed a phenomenon in her mind called the inner critic. The voice of the inner bully that exceeded normalcy attacking relentlessly with the goal of making herself better, right, and more acceptable. Only the critic was never satisfied becoming so unbearably loud that young Emine began to present visible symptoms of her suffering. In response to this energetic perpetrating part Emine would drop easily into self-pity which in turn created a global weakness in her whole body. She victimized herself into smallness, often hiding while diminishing her brightness with excuses and apologies. The tyrant and the victim parts of her own inner family were ruthless, and she was in desperate need of help. But there was no help to be found in the outside world of her family so to save herself, she developed a third supportive part, the savior. The savior sounded a lot like a cheer leader, prompting her out of her collapsed energy into a more lifted, buoyant energy by offering affirmations of greatness. ‘You’ve got this,’ and ‘don’t give up,’ and ‘believe in yourself,’ and ‘keep going.’ These statements, while well intended, did not address the other two parts that were part of this triangle and so the cheerleader failed, returning time and time again as the bully was right behind the savior and the cycle would begin again repeating itself within minutes, days, and weeks. Sometimes Emine’s unconscious mind would project these three parts onto people and even animals around her. Emine criticized others with her strong judgments, commiserated with those who felt victimized, and shouted words of encouragement at her friends. These three interconnected parts created a cyclic body of pain inside and out and no one noticed because everyone was participating. This dynamic was part of everyone’s inner life as their inner world began to mirror the outer world of their underground life: Attack, retreat, and save. Repeat. Now when the sieges were over, the villagers would gratefully return above ground to their respective homes. With relief they could step out of attack and defend mode, breathing more easily, even as they knew that another underground escape would be necessary sooner rather than later. The inner triangle, however, continued in the above ground living room of relationships creating problems during times of peace. This dynamic was dramatic, often dangerous, and manifested differently in those who were more feminine than masculine in essence. Like Emine, the more feminine in nature, no matter the gender, would attack inwardly. When the inner critic annihilated her sense of worth, the pain became too much. So, to take this pain away they would cut, become anorexic or bulimic, or scar. They would not dream of hurting another but would have no problem trying to control pain by hurting themselves. The more masculine in nature would attack outwardly. They could easily harm other people, or even animals, finding it easy and legitimate to project the inner bully with a wide range of expressions from a word of frustration to outright violence. Once this happened to Emine, she felt completely disconnected from her heart, drowning in the pain of her struggle. Not even being above ground helped at this point. But she was sharp enough to at least notice the timing of this pattern and how she acted, spoke, behaved, and felt while in each of the three parts of this cycle. She knew that she needed a way out, but truly knew not how as not one person around her seemed to have figured this out. One evening, feeling disillusioned, Emine walked about the sacred land of their home, gazing at the beautiful mountains and dusk sky. She felt welcomed and received in nature’s embrace sensing her pure power, beauty, and peace. This in turn awakened those very same qualities within her; an impersonal flow of powerful sensation and ‘knowing.’ She sat down to listen, feel, and closed her eyes realizing that the key was in her heart. Yes, she could step out of the pattern by tuning into the warmth of her heart and the qualities of pure power, beauty, and peace. The inner critic quickly offered whole sentences filled with doubt, but she shewed them off with a wave of her hand and relaxed more deeply. And she shewed away the voice of the inner victim and even the savior, letting them float away and dissolve without an ounce of her attention. She relaxed into clear seeing, a gift of nature and the spirit that fills her land. She saw that she lived in a land of fear where people commonly reacted with aggression. She recognized that her own family members reacted differently to fear; some with religion, some through addiction, and others with violence or creativity. She felt so grateful to have recovered her heart connection for it gave her a sense of hope. Nature was now her mirror. And so, she promised herself then and there that she would keep half her attention anchored in her heart while giving the other half of her attention to the world around her. She knew that this way she could perceive from the warmth of her heart rather than using her physical eyes to interpret the world with fear. Her longing was to stay connected with her presence so that it would be possible to stay real, conscious, and happy rather than reacting from stress. Emine was so wise for her age and over the years of above and below ground living her sage ways rippled through many generations of family members. She created a trailhead home to the heart eventually leading countless others who sought the same refuge. The kid was bullied so many times as a seventh grader and up, that he crouched, cowered, and shut down in defeat. His parents tried to save him by placing him in a 2-year program at a local school for the deaf. A pilot program for all kinds of ‘misfits’ as he called them. He eventually found it easier to be a misfit then to fit in at ‘regular’ school. When the two years came to pass, he dreaded his impending return to regular school, developing panic attacks and sleepless nights. The bullying picked right back up and he regressed to an all too familiar state of weakness and rejection.
As a married man he often felt assaulted when his wife expressed her emotions in what he called’ a more dramatic way.’ He had a more subtle emotional experience that was quite different from hers. In fact, her behavior caused him to feel impatient along with an urgency to be right, while feeling unseen and disrespected. He could not simply witness his woman feeling and expressing, instead her behavior seemed to rob him of a sense of order while unleashing an ancient rage. All his spiritual training reminded him that this unruly rage was inappropriate, but his body begged to differ. This rage felt self-centered and arrogant, and so strong that he felt ready to fight. So, he plotted and planned, but never dared to take any action. He was trapped, feeling an empty void in his upper belly like a hidden sensitivity filled with the agony of being overlooked. He questioned how to deal with this inner chaos and loss of freedom. His quest led him to Peru where he was fortuitously taken in by a Peruvian family. They gave him a plot of land so he could grow food and participate in weekly ceremonies with their family’s lineage of making ayahuascua. For this young man seeking peace, these ceremonies paradoxically offered him opportunities to meet the destroyer energy within. This archetype embodies repressed rage about structures and experiences that no longer serve life. And he was forced to meet this inner structure of rage and hurt created by the ignorance of kindness around him. The young man was led to offer space for this inner structure of sensitivity, tender and hollow. With no bypassing or hiding, this sensation had plenty to say. The strength of his quiet words was saturated with self-worthiness and the need for respect. This truth was intermingled with hurt and the full feeling of retribution, the longing for justice and the need to feel safe and treated fairly. And this allowed his whole inner structure to soften, the feeling of dominance dissipating in the energetic reality of wholeness. He could now imagine his wife expressing her own inner chaos without it triggering the inner energetic defense of his heart. It took meeting and integrating this energy fully to reconfigure the inner networking. God knows he had tried to override this in so many ways, mostly positive, just incomplete. In retrospect he remembered that his mother was a warrior, dominant, controlling, sensitive and reactive while his father was submissive, often retreating into his art. He could see that he was called to find a different way than his father had demonstrated by honoring both the helplessness and the power within. And that this pattern fully played out for resolution in the consciousness of his evolving family lineage. He could see the bigger picture and how these bullies had helped him evolve out of retreating and into the authenticity of warriorship. He also understood that none of these stories were real for his true Self. That the living energetic structure of his past made living this truth challenging. He was truly intent on healing since he was often highjacked by this perception of being attacked, even when it did not really exist. In truth, he understood the value of ‘waking down,’ the awakened journey into the knots and lessons of life. He was not only awake, but a hero and a warrior in his individual story here on Earth. |
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