Regression can be fun!

Case in point: Christmas 2011. The scene: my cousin's house. The generation: mine -- pushing fifty, sixty, and a little bit more. We are parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles several times over, and we are falling out of our chairs at dinner-table fart jokes. We are stealing the grandkids' presents -- this year it was a 'Spy Master' set that includes sunglasses with little rearview mirrors in the frame so you can see behind you. My cousin shoved a pair at me while I was walking through the kitchen; she said, 'Put these on and look behind you!' I did, and there she was, flipping me the bird and pretending to pick her nose. We fell over laughing. Nearby elders and elder siblings rolled or closed their eyes while snickering behind their hands; our children's generation either looked at us like we were nuts or loved us to pieces for being so bonkers, and the grandkids shrieked for more.

Our generation -- basically, the Boomers -- can be a blast at family gatherings. We not longer get roaring drunk -- just tipsy enough (on cocktails!) to get even more garrulous and silly than usual. One branch of my extended family hails from Newfoundland, another from Scotland, so the same stories and jokes get told over and over again -- Themes and Variations on hilarity. We get high on the little ones' joy ... and on dessert. I myself overdosed on shortbread cookies that were loaded with chocolate chips. (Butter and chocolate: two of our main food groups, right?)

(I dare you to look at this image and not drool.)

Those of us who survive our midlife crises start to regress into a second childhood and we no longer care that we look like fools. We wear battery-lit flashing Christmas-light necklaces and keep our cracker party hats on through the entire meal.

... Come to think of it, we didn't have crackers this year! This just struck me now. Somebody had a big brain fart and forgot the crackers (That would have been several of us, hee hee). No one complained, though ... because no one recalled that we had no Christmas crackers! No one brought a Whoopee cushion either. I will have to secure these items for next Christmas ...

(This makes me giggle...)

As I was saying about our generation ... I recall a conversation I had with one of my best friends over a decade ago. We were imagining decrepitude -- seeing ourselves reclined in La-Z-Boy wheelchairs, blissfully soused / stoned on warmed cognac / cannabis tea / chocolate croissants, ear-buds in place and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon cranked straight into our brains. What a way to ride into eternity! ... This beloved friend died nearly eight years ago (!!) and if there's any sort of afterlife, I want him to be my guide into it!

... Whoops, I digress. About regression: in trauma-talk, we tend to consider regression through a terrorized lens, and call it flashback or flipping out or dissociation. It is those things, sometimes. It also can be pure goofiness -- the fart jokes and spy glasses -- and it's good to remember that. Regression can be fun ... especially when it's shared with people you've known all your life ... people you've shared a childhood with.

(All images are linked directly to their sources.)

via Simply Isis

"If I understand it, I will heal it."

December 7, 2011:

Western medicine says Nada, 'til you're really sick. There's nothing we can do now.

I don't accept that response as final.


December 16, 2011:

Good thing I didn't! I received blood lab results yesterday that indicate a small turn for the better. I didn't wait with dread ... I simply waited. I didn't know what to expect ... so I expected nothing. What a refreshing, relieving place to be in!

What's the point of expecting anything? We simply cannot know with complete certainty that anyone or anything will do what we want them to do. Half the time, anyway, we're not sure of what it is we do want. We are paradoxical creatures ...

... but I did feel certain; a pure resolve arose in me last night while I stood at my kitchen counter, waiting for my tea to steep. For the first time in my adult life, I'd received hard biological evidence of a condition that could be fatal, and six weeks later, more hard biological evidence of  ... !! ... a change for the better. It is the most significant, positive medical news I've been given in nearly four years.

What have I done? -- It was that resolve. Four nights ago, while I was sitting at my desk, I despaired. I was still waiting for the lab results, and given the decline I've experienced over the last year, I wondered if it was all downhill from here on ... like an avalanche. Was my life on a threshold of irrevokable illness? My skin crawled with dread and I wondered if this Christmas, like my grandmother used to declare every December 25th from her place at the head of the table, might be my last.

I recall grabbing the edge of my desk, jutting my head to the left, and growling. Raw and low in my throat, thinking No. There is such seduction in a thought of suicide -- Rest, at last.

No. As I clutched, my heart did something it's never done before. It ... banged -- once -- with brutal force. I doubled over. I'm in my fifties now, so there's no fooling around with a banging heart.

Heart attack? Stroke? What -- I've laid both palms over my chest and I press -- inward -- holding it in ... holding my heart and saying Live. I Want To Live. My heart had sounded -- It was a jolt -- inward -- inward to out -- Listen up! -- like a great drum, struck next to the ear --

... It went like this: A moment before the banging heart, a swell of mourning blew up from the depths and I thought, God -- I feel like I've just begun to grieve ... Life, into the second year after a catastrophic loss, is a continual absorption of the way things are now ... Everything ... changed --

The phantom-pain of amputation comes on ... the very real pain of the phantom who was you, before the loss ...

No; no more of this -- Too much hurt -- urge to be done with it; to die -- no other way out of this kind of pain --

BANG!

The heart explodes ... remains intact. Body doubles over the chest; both hands press and press to the sternum and solar plexus.

The growl, from deep in the throat: feral, furious. A voice: I WANT TO LIVE!

Words, and deep, solemn breaths: I want to live. I want to live. I want to live -- 

Sylvia Plath comes to mind -- fragments of a poem -- I listened to the old brag of my heart / I am / I am / I am --

Then my voice again, or the voice of Life within me ... I have to cry -- I have to cry -- I have to cry -- I have to lie down -- Holy shit, that was my heart -- 

... but before I can lie down, there are things to be done. I have to pee (and I do so, later, twice) and that means getting the cat off my lap, and I have to clean the litter box and feed the cats ... get a glass of water -- and check the cats' water bowls ... bring some toilet paper into the bedroom for my cry --

I end up bringing the roll of TP to my bedside before I pee, so once I'm seated on the loo, I realize that I've got no TP here and now. Pants up, grab the roll, back to the loo. My cats come in and nag me for food, for pats, for me to stay alive. I give in to them, like I always do.

By the time I've done everything to ensure an uninterrupted cry, I no longer feel the need to mourn. I've become too engaged in other things, in the usual minutae that saves my life ... again.

I'm hungry ... so I eat. I lie down on my bed ... and one of my cats settles down on my chest. He kneads and purrs ... and I soften. We melt. I feel warmed, soothed, slowed, tended, quieted.

More words come to mind: Release my trapped heart, from a Christian psalm ... Cup your hands around my becoming, recalled and tweaked from Rainer Maria Rilke ... Anointing rhythms ... the warm palm of mercy ... gentle, gentle ... and suddenly, from I don't know where: We have an inner bell -- the tapping of the heart!

I turn onto my side, cradle my heart, and cry ... in release ... in resurgence.

Art credit: 'Fire heart' by arghus, via deviantart.com

More musings on mercy

Art: Lisa Ballard, 'Mercy and Me'

I keep arriving here: at the warm, open palm of mercy. Someone who once loved me gave me a directive that I've not heard before or since: 'To thine own self be merciful.'

That was a potent hit to the head of the existential nail, one of the sanest things anyone's ever said to me. To thine own self be merciful.

Is any work we can do more imperative? If we can't live in our own skin in a state of truce (at the very least), how can we live with one another?

No wonder mercy is such a visceral challenge. As a principle, mercy is often overlaid with religious overtones -- it's seen as a saintly state that few, if any, of us can attain for more than an instant at a time.

Is it a saintly state? Is mercy at all natural to our makeup? Are we 'hardwired' to salve, rather than savage, ourselves and other beings? (Are we hardwired to do both?) Can mercy occur independently of injury -- does an injury always have to be inflicted before mercy is bestowed?

Mercy makes me sweat. To thine own self be merciful ... I dare you. Mercy demands that we look long and deep into the mirror of every being we encounter ... beyond apparent appearances, into the depths of a life ...

Sometimes I think that mercy is the opposite of madness. Mercy is lucid -- lucid like the noon sun without the burn. Sees all; denies nothing. Sees into and through.

I wonder about mercy in relation with kindness, compassion, altruism ... and I hone in on what makes mercy mercy.

It's the quiet ... that warm, open palm. Whenever I imagine and recall my own experiences of mercy, I know touch. Skin meeting skin with loving intent ... and we soften. The whole body sighs ... We are safe; we surrender.

A warm, open palm ... a belly, a cheek, a shoulder ... a hug, a spoon, a palm spooning a face ... a nuzzle, a snuffle, a laying-on, a gentling, a rest.

Mercy reaches and receives the core ... and warms us there.

Mercy says, Been there, done that, lived it -- without the cynicism. And then: I dare you to be kind ... to yourself.

Realizations

One of the very few benefits of a 'mental illness' diagnosis is that medical practitioners tend to leave a person alone from the cranium on down. However ... can such a diagnosis be authentic if the body -- and the whole person -- is routinely ignored, or if embodied symptoms are judged as imagined, 'made up', supposed proof of a person's 'craziness'? Can such a diagnosis be true if a label is ascribed without the physical enquiries that accompany suspicion of a condition that can be affirmed through examining a person within -- blood tests, scans, biopsies, etc.?

I think, No. I've long known -- and finally, my sense of 'something more' is being validated through monthly blood scans and other concrete, examined evidence of bodily distress -- that the psychiatric diagnoses ascribed to my situation are at best incomplete, and at worst, false -- for they do not reflect my entire embodied experience.

One of the psychiatric labels adhered to my situation is 'major depression, recurrent.' Depression is considered a 'mood disorder' -- and I know it most deeply as a metabolic disorder. It's been said that the brain is our 'master gland' -- and if we suppose that 'mood disorders' are based in the brain, we might ask ourselves:

Where is this 'mentation' that is evidence of a mind ... and where is this mind that a diagnosis of 'mental illness' derives from?

In the brain. And what is the brain?

An organ.

Where does the brain reside?

In the body.

What does this 'master gland' do, all told?

It regulates ... everything.

I'm not a medical or scientific professional. I am a scholar and a person whose professional background is in the field of psychology and psychotherapy. I am also a person who knows in my bones that every diagnosis given to a person's condition reflects, in its part, a facet of one's entire embodied experience.

I think of diagnostic enquiry as a teasing-out of truth ... and the dear human body cannot tell a lie. Bless the body for the irrrefutable truths it reveals ...

During my own diagnostic journey, I've not wanted to pile 'wrong upon wrong' -- It is no joy to be confronted with grave medical facts, such as I have been given over the last several months. It is a relief to have my embodied experience and knowledge of same finally validated. New information gives me something concrete to work with ... and it raises the bar of the quality of medical care that my condition receives. I don't want to be known as a constellation of symptoms ... and those symptoms, once confirmed and validated, offer information to learn from and to work with in my everyday life.

The 'mental illness' recedes in importance. The brain, master regulator that it is, does not. The body -- this home in which my entire person resides, is the nexus of truth, and will not be ignored in the entire person's quest for understanding.

All images found at brainharmonycenter.com

An irrefutable truth

"Emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing."

~ Alice Miller

... and what is the truth to you, dear reader?

(Wordplay: The truth ... as contrasted with a truth ... my truth ... one truth ... or simply, truth ... )

I do know one thing, incontestably. I do know this to be true, and the truth:

Love keeps us alive. 

"Emotional access to the truth ..."

Not intellectual access, cognitive access, spiritual or even somatic access. 

Emotional access: pulses of truth in motion: feeling: felt sense.

Some thinkers have considered emotion as energy in motion. I add: energy in motion in us ... through us. Pulsing motion, pulsing truth embodied: heartbeat.

Love is hearts in sync.

"Love changes molecular structure." 

~ Jeanette Winterson

Whose molecular structure have you changed?

Who has changed yours?

Here's a Christmas / Solstice gift we all can give:

Change somebody's molecular structure.

Love someone, heart to heart.

(The image is that of a 'vibrant healthy cell.' I'm using it in my meditations ...)