control

Wow, a big week for releasing. So much still coming up to be cleared including some major beliefs like; you have to have a good education to have a good life and if you don't finish your homework, you could die. Crazy!! I still continue to be astonished, despite doing this cellular release process processionally for years, how deeply our conditioning rules us and how unconscious it can be. The one about homework has been running me for over a year and still I didn't get it until this week when a huge incident brought it to the surface. It is all still percolating so keep me in your good thoughts. thanks savannah

This poem explores my belief about homework, how it got planted in me, how it is playing out decades later and how I am releasing it.

My father- center of the Universe
All entities revolve around him
Nothing occurs without his permission
No one speaks if he wants silence
Children must tiptoe
Even the dog will only lift her paw to hover
Over the living room carpet
Never letting her foot actually touch the plush blue

His voice frequently heard across five counties
Shouting commands to the prisoners
All must obey

Now my daughter has pages of homework
Can't get it all done
I panic
Can't breath
My spine tightens liked poured cement
In between terror and confusion
I push push we must finish
My voice escalates

She resist, doodles
Won't add 2 + 2
Flash-fire rage
I storm off

Years of training
meditation
Vipasana,
therapy
workshops
yoga
Something is off kilter
Must be them
If only....
Maybe I could breath
Play the blame game
Boomerangs

Hidden under decades of dust
The conditioning operates on remote
Self at seven pulling the levers
The picture clears
See the puppeteer, yet still a marionette
Husband insist on helping
Panicking
Must leave the house
Convinced danger is imminent
Must be sure homework done
Terror rises choking
I must I must I must
The only way to safety control
help help help
Not safe not safe

Daughter resist nazi tactics
Can't she see the peril?
Mind in lala land
Body screams DANGERRRRRRRRRRR

Feel paralyzed - I can't touch
Fight monsters - I can't see
Behind bars - I erect

Years as healer
Explorer of inner spaces
Can't find my way out of this web
Until I climb into my body
Investigate murky crawl spaces shut off for decades
Allow my throat to close
Begin to hyperventilate
Cry decades of tears
Allow witnesses to swim in my grief
Find my father looming
Realization shatters me
my child self believes
I will die if I don't finish my homework
My father will kill

Fog clears
Throat opens
Breath

Family of man

Beloveds,

I was considering stopping this blog as my intention had been to have a conversation about how we can best restore ourselves to our essence as love yet only one person ever comments here. I felt like I was talking to empty space. Now my friend showed me how to discover how many people look at the blog and where they are from. I found out that people from around the world are reading this. I am so excited to know this! I want to welcome each of you and tell you I hold you in my heart. Friends are joining us from Austria, Canada, France, Malaysia, Denmark, China, Germany, Slovenia, Russia and the United States. I am so thrilled! Please feel free to add your experience, comments, questions, hopes, dreams. I would love to hear from you.
I am chewing on a big issue that has surfaced over the last days. I will check back in when my heart clears. I send you love!!!!

Next

Okay, that was fun while it lasted.  Within hours of my last posting there was another big drama and I got pulled in as deep as ever. I was ENRAGED. The difference is that I didn't buy it hook, line and sinker as I would in the past. There was a spaciousness around it and a deep commitment to make another choice and find another way to look at the situation. I don't understand why I was so triggered over such trivia yet somehow two of us were going at it over homework. Foaming at the mouth, going at it. Yet I allowed the deep level of upset in my body and immediately sought a way to release and shift my perception. So back to the drawing board- allowing, surrendering, staying on the target- unconditional love. Wish me luck!

hallelujah!

A year ago today was one of the most difficult days of my life. My belief that I was not loved hit maximum velocity and sent me reeling into a storm. Without volition, I was consumed by an avalanche of unowned grief over  a profound absence of a felt sense of being loved as a child. The agony I felt in my body was a new frontier. Below is a poem I wrote in an attempt to describe the experience.

I can hardly believe how differently I feel today. I was at a dinner yesterday to honor the woman who helped my teacher launch his now best selling book. I had helped edit the book and wanted to meet her during her visit from her home base in England. My experience at the dinner is still a wonder to me. I felt so at ease, talked to numerous people in a profoundly intimate way, enjoyed myself throughly and without any interior commentary about what I was or wasn’t doing/saying. I was myself and I hardly recognized me, as for so many years I have shown up in such a shadowed way. I always felt such separation yet have only recently become aware of how self generated it was. I would hide in a corner and hardly speak and then question why no one wanted to interact with me. How blind I was. 

I have had more social activities since the new year then in almost the whole last year combined. Yet the most significant difference is how I feel. I feel peace, belonging, even joy!!!! Can you possibly image what a shift this is? Most of my life I had glimmers, hours, even days of joy yet it was always resting on a foundation of struggle and strife. Now it is the opposite. I have hours or moments of upset with days of peace. Truly, it has been through allowing myself to be vulnerable, to be honest, to allow gut ripping grief, molten rage that this shift seems to have occurred. Whatever it takes. All I can say is hallelujah!

grief

words turn guts to quicksand

Arctic flowing veins

no car key

hurtling down the driveway

shrieks fissure earth

howling yelps’ doppler 

primitive grunts shatter eardrums

sounding depths 

hunched over

arms  

shield belly

careen down gravel road

fields rolling emptiness

wind smashed leaves batter chest

rain baptizes bared head

thunder unheard

stumbling

saturated clay

rough bark scrapes cheek

moss cuddles ear 

body melts

trunk cradles 

soil sky

arms

wrap

ancestral mourning

plaintive chorus branches

eons twisted agony

flowing sap carries

earth sky receives

crawling ant announces

arrival

river flowing veins

dissolving

flooded storm ditch

a symphony

frogs crock welcome

rain a benediction

each step an altar

beyond mystery

Freeing the snow cage

I wrote this poem a few days ago for a group writing a poem a day for the month. It summarizes what it is I have been focused on healing most of my life. I'd like to share it here.


In your silence
I bury myself under the cold snow
Forget the warmth I grappled my way back to
Climbing over generations of bodies
Frozen
Their lips unmoving
Hands uselessly at their side
Unable to feel the heat of human touch
Emotions in solitary confinement
A million rejections pile together until
I too
Consider the tundra
Allow myself to give into to the cold
First a toe disappears, then a finger, a bit of my heart
Lost to the ice
My hand unmet
After a lifetime of trying to keep myself safe
Freeze the pain
Lop off frostbitten body parts
I recognize
The only way for me to stay safe is to say
No
to safety
To swim through the icy snow
To claw push shove grapple my way to the surface
To watch my mind like a caged beast
Refusing to let it pull me back into the prison
Over and over
To put my hand out
My heart unguarded
To say yes to silence to cold to avalanches
Whatever it takes
I turn from the frozen wilderness of german irish blood
Stiff upper lip east coast control
I spit scrape defecate
Bloodied and bruised again again again
Let the pain dance the tango
Bare my chest
Taunting
Give it your best shoot
I will not give in
I will love again

rainbow serpent

Beloveds,

I wish you much joy for the new year. I don't know about you but for me, it feels like there has been a huge energy shift and things are looking up. I feel a lightness, a joy, a sense of happiness and deep love welling up inside me. My ego is now longer trashing me and having me act out as evil incarnate. Since the solstice, I have a much greater sense of ease and vast abundance. Now given the firestorm of 2010, this is indeed welcome.

I just read that 2010 was the year of the phoenix rising. Believe me, I am still getting the ashes out of my hair. What a ride!!! There was a short passage where I was ready to just give up and take the next space ship out of here but it was sold out. Then there were the days when I thought the inner pressure of so much emotional turbulence was going to exceed design parameters and I would be torn limb from limb and be smashed into a billion shards of glass. Now I read 2011 is the year of the rainbow serpent. I feel a new sense of lightness and rainbow color. What a relief.

My qualities last year were wholeness and joy. One of my symbols was a genie lamp. This year is inner marriage and adore. I am choosing to put my relationship to myself first and to use the energy of adoration as a door (get it- adore) to enter a new territory where I pass through all obstacle to love and reside in agape. I am enveloping all of it in a clock of luscious sensuality. My symbol is the dragonfly which has ideal qualities for what I intend. I intend to embody love, extend it outward and have it return to me. I intend to be a vehicle for divine love. O.K., I can feel I am losing you by being a little too new age yet these words are alive for me so I have to risk it. Beloveds, in this moment I feel so connected to the unity of all beings and a wave of love washes over me and extends to infinity. May you feel it sparkle within you.

Is love safe?

As I review my year, I recognize that my challenges this last year have all been around the theme of love, which is clearly my central issue. I came across this posting I had made elsewhere and I bleed for the woman I was as I faced these questions about love. I had no idea the firestorm I was entering and the deep, gut wrenching anguish I would experience. Yet I am so much closer to true freedom, to an inner marriage, to the sense of love inside that is safe because it is myself. I awoke today afraid. My new challenge seems to be to face an inner emptiness and lack of clarity about what I am meant to be doing, to hold the new aspect of the wound with an open heart. Part of me wants to scream, "ENOUGH" and retreat into a cuddled ball. Another part of me is truly excited by the adventure and is totally jazzed to be playing the freedom game. I am allowing the discomfort to run down my spine, the coldness in my hands, the uncertainty as my mind races for answers. I feel deeply joined in this human dilemma, knowing we are all playing versions of this same game. I am embracing and cherishing myself as the emptiness gaps at my feet. Yet despite all the growth, all the courage I have shown, all the amazing discoveries, I still yearn for some one to embrace, adore, and cherish me, put their arms around me and whisper that they love me. This too is so human and so I whisper to you, "you are loved!!!!" May the new year brings us all ever closer to the absolute certainty of these words.


1/8/10 The universe has been kindly supporting me in uncovering my core issues lately. I have been observing and investigating what triggers me deeply and have rediscovered the core belief that love is not safe. It is very clear how I came to that belief as I experienced my father as a terrorist. While I feel free of this belief intellectually, my behavior shows me that emotionally I am still imprisoned by it. I finding writing and sharing brings me clarity and perhaps this question will speak to someone else.

Lately two incidents deeply triggered this belief. I perceived a love one as not caring about my feelings and needs. After the first incident, I clearly stated my feelings and needs, yet the behavior was repeated. While I had conversations to resolve it on the relational level, I am more interested in my reactivity which was not proportional to the situation. I found myself returning to a frozen state where my feelings become muted and dead. I felt the armoring return. Underneath I am discovering that old belief flying in full regalia. I know it is my perception that is hurting me yet my FEELINGS scream to me that I am right, that I am being hurt. I end up feeling like my old two year old self-she truly was powerless and at the affect of others; I am not. My question to myself and to the universe is perhaps more of an intention. I intend to finally free myself of this old wound that has cut me off from so much life and joy and deeply blocks me from my life's purpose to embody and extend love, to be a teacher and student of love. I send this into the ethers with the intention of freeing all of us from this belief. I see so many of us reacting when we perceived ourselves as unloved, perceive that no one cherishes us. I am learning not to belief that false perception, regardles of what my feelings tell me. Yet it is still a struggle. Below is something I wrote when the first incident occur. I welcome any comments. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings know they are loved!

What it felt like Tuesday was that I had TO TRULY FACE the inadequacy and imperfection of human love. This is something I have been unable to truly be with until now. I think in many ways my whole life has been an avoidance of and a hiding from this fact. I think it is the reason of my weight, both physically and emotionally. I see how my parents' love was so harmful in so many ways, despite whatever their intentions may have been, I see that despite Herculean efforts my love for my daughter is still often not enough to stop me from harming her. I see the million ways I have caused my husband pain. I see how I have not been able to be available sometimes in my friendships. I see that now matter how much love I have to offer, no matter if I correct every "mistake" in my life -clean up, be organized, lose weight, be kind and generous, be thoughtful and considerate, use only ownership language, take personal responsibility, love myself etc., etc. from a genuine place of desiring the changes- I end up in the same painful place- where there is no guarantee, no certainty, no real protection from the fact that my love may not be treasured and cherished; that my needs, even if understood, may not be met. To truly face this without flinching, without turning away, without denying or hiding literally felt unbearable to me the other day. Today is another day and today I feel strong yet sad. Today I can hold that weight. Today I can embrace the knife and see it cut me deeply, see the fresh, red blood spurt, imagine that if it cuts deep enough it may, seemingly will cut me open to joy, to nonattachement, to freedom even to bliss and certainly to love. The pain and the joy and possibility of joy seem to be almost equally weighted. Some days one has the upper hand and I feel myself retreat. But then again and again, I find there is nowhere to hide. And yet, and yet and yet-what choice is there. Again and again I have considered true retreat from this arena of human pain. Unfortunately (not really) I am not the solitary type and I see for me it would hold an emptiness that would be genuinely unbearable. I see again and again that my true treasures always lay with love. I see that I must commit, again and again to allowing myself to profoundly experience the joy and sorrow and that for now they go hand in hand. I see that the pain I am experiencing on this journey is MY pain - I see that it is the way to break open. I stand naked in front of the truth-there are no guarantees love is returned no matter what I do including back flips, I see that even if that love is returned, there will always be gaps of misunderstanding or needs at cross purposes, I see that even if that love is returned and the gaps are few, one day one of the Beloveds must die. To stand rooted to the ground as that truth howls around me with gale force winds, to let the tears flow as they appear, to hold, to hold, to hold without looking away is perhaps to open to something not yet seen but perhaps, heard, perhaps heard in the sound of trickling stream and the croak of a frog. Perhaps heard in the joyous laughter of friendship; perhaps touched by a gentle breeze, perhaps rooted in the hug of the beloved child, perhaps held by a weekly cappuccino cup, perhaps a word from someone who knows, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps ... .......

As I read these words now I know the truth that human love can never hold me, that it is only my True self, the Self tied to Universal flow that is encompassing enough to create the vastness I need to live life in love, joy and freedom. May we all find that place within and life the lives of our destiny!!! with love savannah