Category: Reflections

Inner Visions | February 4, 2021

EleanorLeave a comment

Journal Date: February 4th, 2021

I had another reiki session with Angelic yesterday.

As usual, it was a good experience. I feel like it was very healing.

This time I also had very interesting and intense visions while she was doing the energy healing.

It began as it usually does.

At first, I didn’t see very much at all. 

Then, shifting colors began appearing in my field of inner vision.

After a few more minutes, a more definite image began to emerge.

It took me by surprise.

The first image that appeared was a crocodile. 

It was not what I expected.

But I decided to just stay with it, allow it, follow it and see where it took me.

I followed it down the banks of the Nile River and ended up in Ancient Egypt. I saw the great civilization, and all of the magic that went on there. I could see the great cities, and the temples lit up at night.

And I tried to look for myself, to see if I was there, how I fit into all this.

And with that, I found myself somewhere else.

This time, it was morning, and I was in a garden, somewhere in or near Mexico City.

I was wearing a flowing white knee length dress and gold sandals, and my dog Beso was there with me, with a white and gold collar and leash set.

We walked together along a garden path until we reached an elegant temple in the middle of the tropical garden we were in.

Together, we walked up the stairs and stepped inside.

The inside of this temple was dazzlingly beautiful, and with its high vaulted ceilings and long expanses of glass windows stretching up towards the sky, had the look and feel of a renaissance cathedral.

I walked, with Beso beside me on his leash, down the long aisle towards the beautifully decorated altar.

Once we arrived at the front of the cathedral, I noticed another section of this temple which had caught my attention. I turned to my left and began walking in this direction.

This section of the temple appeared to be a museum, and it was much darker here than the rest of the space, the only light coming from the glass box display cases.

Stepping inside, I realized that this museum was dedicated to me.

Looking closer, I could see, yes, each display case held items or photographs of events from my past. It was arranged chronologically, starting at birth.

My first thought on seeing this was, “Oh no… I can’t go through this again.”

I heard a voice (which would later speak to me at similar critical times) answer, “Yes, you can. You can do this. It’s safe to see what there is to be seen here.”

So I took a step forward, and I continued.

It was difficult to go back through this reliquary containing my past. 

So much suffering was contained within these displays.

But there was beauty, and there were tender moments, some measure of sweetness, and little bit of joy, as well.

As I walked, there were moments that overwhelmed me, and I felt that I could not go on.

But as before, a voice from beyond encouraged me. “Keep going. You can. There is nothing for you to fear within these walls.”

So I did.

I walked and I looked and I took the time to feel for everything that came up.

I cried, very often. So many tears had to be shed.

But this time, they were tears of compassion, sympathy and love, filled with sadness for the girl and the woman I’d once been (rather than of shame and bitterness, as they had often come before).

I won’t spend much time now on the specifics of what I saw there–it’s nothing new, nothing I haven’t known about or written extensively on before by now.

What is important here is the journey I made through this memorial of my self, and how I felt and reacted to what was there.

After maybe 20 minutes in this process, I finally made it to the last display case, to the present moment and the end of the museum.

When I had arrived at the end of the final exhibit, all of a sudden the dark wing of the temple containing this museum lit up, and was now brightly lit with hundreds of candles and torches illuminating the beautifully decorated walls.

And now I could see up to the ceiling of this cathedral, where uncovered windows showed the brilliant, burning stars shining down into my corner of the cosmos.

It was very late, maybe 4 or 5am – an entire night had passed during my descent into my own personal underworld.

It felt like a signal that my descent was over. And I felt I was being honored with this beautiful display for having made it through.

I knew that soon, the sun would be rising outside, and that my time in this temple of the past was near its end. I felt I was being asked, “Do you have anything you would like to say before you leave here?”

And before I could think twice, I heard myself answer, “Thank you.”

And then immediately, another part of me responded with something like, “Really?? Thank you? Are you kidding me?”

“Well, yeah…” I shyly responded. Then, a little more surely, “I guess I am grateful – it got me here, didn’t it? It made me who I am. And I’m proud of that.”

Though I was still tearful as I lay there on the table in Angelic’s office (the “real,” physical me) had to smile a little: it was true. I was grateful. And yes, I was proud. I had made it. I had made it through to the other side of all that.

And though it seemed enough to simply have survived, what’s more, I knew that one day, I would say that I had triumphed.

At that point, I looked down at my wrist, and I saw some markings appear there.

They were the two tattoos that I have wanted to get, the infinity symbol on my left wrist, and a small black skull on my right, both drawn in the style of the Smith-Waite tarot.

And I remembered what I had recently heard Clarissa Pinkola Estés say about the scars that people like me carried:

“It’s never going to look like you never suffered. Although I say, be proud of your scars. It has everything to do with your strength and what you’ve endured. It’s a map, so to speak, a treasure map to the self, the deepest self.”

And then I heard a voice say, “You have nothing to be ashamed of anymore. You can leave all of that behind. It was never truly yours to carry in the first place.”

I acknowledged this was true. This is a major part of what the inner work of the last year has shown me: most of the shame I carried came from things which had been done to me, not by me. 

I carried the shame of my abusers, of my attackers, and those who had committed crimes against me.

I carried the burden of guilt that properly belong to those who had hurt me, the mother who hated me, the father who had refused to protect me from harm. 

I had created this structure of lies about myself and my life, all resting upon this false foundation: “It’s because you deserved it. If you had simply been better, they wouldn’t have ‘had’ to…”

Well, now I know better. Now I knew that the failings were not mine. I did not bear the responsibility, and I could not account for these sins of theirs.

The voice spoke again.

“There is nothing to fear here. You don’t have to be afraid any longer. You may return whenever you want to, and you will find only peace here.”

And with that, I was ready.

With little Beso next to me, I stepped outside the temple door into the early morning light.

The sun had not come fully over the horizon yet, but the sky was becoming lighter with each passing second.

Beso and I walked down the rear temple stairs, both of us now dressed in new clothes: he was in an adorable little white doggie tuxedo with a gold leash, while I now stood in a flowing floor length chiffon gown with a light white cape, all with gold details, as well as a golden necklace decorated with pearls, and similarly made matching earrings.

After walking down the stars, we stepped onto a garden path that first led to a fountain filled with flowing water.

I walked to it, and dipped my hands into the running water and brought it to my face, and with a white towel, cleansed myself before continuing down the garden trail.

It was here that I stepped onto what was now a grass-covered path with my bare feet. The sun was shining down on the earth, and the grass felt both warmed by the sun while retaining a certain earthy coolness belonging to the morning.

From there on, I walked barefoot on the grass with little Beso by my side until I reached a throne, also gold and ivory and decorated with pearls to match the clothes I was already wearing.

I sat down, and it was here that my gold and white crown appeared on my head.

I had made it.

I was now sovereign, ruler of my own kingdom.

I had learned how to belong to myself, discovered my own agency, and the right and ability to make decisions that would serve me and all that I oversaw.

Once I had been crowned and was comfortably seated on my throne, people began to arrive.

They were all dressed mostly in white, along with the addition of one bright primary color as an accessory (like a royal blue belt or a red scarf).

When all of the guests had arrived for the celebration we were to have, it made for a very vibrantly colorful and energetic garden party.

As they arrived, the guests spoke to me.

They welcome me to my kingdom.

They told me, “You made it.”

“We’ve been waiting for you.”

“We’re so glad you’re finally here.”

They were all so happy to see me.

And it turns out they had expected me, had wanted to spend time with me, had been waiting just for me.

So when everyone arrived, we had our celebration.

It was a very peaceful, calm and relaxed garden lunch. We sat at a table set in the grass, covered in white linen with gold place settings, and ate healthy fruit and salads, drinking only water, juice and green tea.

The conversation lasted long into the afternoon, and nothing very much in particular happened. We just laughed and smiled and talked and enjoyed each other’s company.

Around this point, I left the perspective of being in my own body within the vision, and the scene seemed to zoom out until I could see the entire globe, spinning slowly in the void of space. 

As it spun, day shifted into night and then again to day and back again, and the people continued on, with no interruption to the rhythm of their peaceful daily happenings. All was calm, all continued with grace, and a gentle and reassuring order prevailed.

I saw myself again (this time, in a new change of clothes–a white button down shirt and pants) go on to interact with new people, and take on the role of a healer and helper.

And this, too, like day and night, alternated in a graceful rhythm, becoming part of the pattern of a new life of purpose and contentment.

Personal Mythology: Beauty and the Beast

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Journal Date: February 2, 2021

In contrast to the first myth I wrote about, my second (and earlier one) is much more fun. 

As a little girl, my favorite movie was Beauty and the Beast. I was literally obsessed with Belle (though I wouldn’t call her my favorite princess– for the purpose of this exercise, let’s say favorite Disney “archetype”).

To go back and look at this story and the character of Belle is both endearing and amusing to me.

I hadn’t thought about this movie or how much I loved it in years, maybe decades, even.

So it was pretty amazing to me to discover that my adult self had turned out to be so similar to this character I’d admired so much as a child.

Here are some examples of the similarities that I had a good laugh about while I listened to the song called Belle from the original movie:

LYRICSCOMMENTARY
[BELLE]
There goes the baker with his tray, like always
The same old bread and rolls to sell
Every morning just the same
Since the morning that we came
To this poor provincial town		Me complaining about living in Eastvale, or about “normal” day-to-day life in general.
[TOWNSFOLK]
Look there she goes, that girl is strange, no question
Dazed and distracted, can’t you tell?
Never part of any crowd’
Cause her head’s up on some cloud
No denying she’s a funny girl, that Belle		Accurate. This is how I live my life, with my head in a book.
Look there she goes, that girl is so peculiar
I wonder if she’s feeling well
With a dreamy, far-off look
And her nose stuck in a book
What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle		How often have I heard people wonder why I’m so different from everyone else?
Now it’s no wonder that her name means “Beauty”
Her looks have got no parallel
But behind that fair façade
I’m afraid she’s rather odd
Very diff’rent from the rest of us is Belle		It’s true. People usually do seem to perceive me this way.
Look there she goes
The girl is strange but special
A most peculiar mademoiselle!
It’s a pity and a sin
She doesn’t quite fit in
‘Cause she really is a funny girl
A beauty but a funny girl
She really is a funny girl
That Belle!		Seems to be the general consensus about me…

It might seem a little silly at first, but I think there’s something to this idea of having a personal myth that your soul wants to follow. 

I’m tempted to say that the movie had a big influence on me, but in reality, I think it may have been the other way around. I think I was so drawn to it because there was something in me that recognized itself this story.

“Stories like that are the stories that lead us to developing our intuition, and using it, and saying, ‘This is right, this is my life, this is the way it should be,” Estés says. “Think of the story or movie or book or dream that you’re really taken with: it’s because it resonates to the deepest symbols within your own psyche.”

So maybe this is it. Maybe I don’t need to go back and make all these revisions to the later myths of mine, because I had it right with the first and original one I chose as a little girl to begin with.

And believe it or not, Belle does share some essential characteristics with characters like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.

At the root of their personalities is the tendency to be a dreamer, and a certain dissatisfaction with living a quotidian existence they are told they are supposed to want.

They all dare to go against conventions and imagine something more for themselves.

Maybe the only difference is, Belle stays true to herself, and true to her integrity. She’s different in that she has faith that she can have what she desires without violating her principles. 

Her compassionate and loving nature does not become a liability, but is in fact the essential key to achieving her dreams.

Most importantly, she belongs to herself. She honors herself and makes choices for herself that reflect that.

As an example, she doesn’t give in and marry Gaston, no matter what a prize he seems to be in the eyes of the townspeople. 

She doesn’t back down and diminish who she is or compromise her values, no matter how weird or strange anyone else thinks she is.

Her peculiarities do, in fact, make her ill-suited to achieving the kind of success the townspeople would recognize.

However, it is these very same qualities that make her the only one who is capable of lifting the curse put on the prince by the witch and restoring harmony and beauty to the castle. 

It is through her stubborn desires and continued capacity to dream and love that she is able to achieve her dreams and bring healing to where it is needed most.

So that’s it.

That’s the new ending to my story.

This is how I will reclaim my original guiding mythology.

May I find that I too be able to live like Belle, may I always remember it is truly possible to create what I dream of.

And the best part?

I don’t have to change or alter anything about me.

I just have to let the true self emerge.

That is enough.

Maybe it always has been.

Personal Mythology: Tragic Women in Literature

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Journal Date: February 2, 2021

The second practice Estés recommends in Warming the Stone Child is this:

“Remember back to childhood, your favorite fairytale, and consider that that fairytale actually became your myth, the guiding light of your life. And if that fairytale had a really rotten negative ending on the end of it, then you may wish to choose a new ending. You may wish to actually sit down and write, to play, to act, to mask-make, to dance a new ending to that fairytale. If the fairytale had a positive ending, then see what you can do to live that out. See what you can do to make that true in your own life.”

When I heard this, I didn’t have to think twice, I knew immediately exactly what my two myths were.

I’ll start with the more difficult of the two first.

When I was in high school, I loved literature about tragic women.

The stories I loved were always about women who dared to resist the rules and limitations placed upon them. They were women who paid dearly for it, each of them ultimately paying the greatest price of all in the end. 

Yes, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Edna (from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening) all paid for the price of their liberation with their lives. Sadly, each one committed suicide before the novel was over. 

Each had left their stifled, boring and restrictive roles as wives and mothers, left to look for true love and sincere pleasure. 

And each of them was punished greatly for it. There could be no other ending for any of them, it seems.

I, too, felt myself involved in a struggle for my own life.

I, too, wanted to reclaim my existence for myself, to wrench my destiny out of the hands of society, and claim myself for me.

Clearly, I identified with these women who felt trapped in their given roles.

What I failed to see was the moral lesson these stories now seem intended to impart.

I’d always thought the authors had portrayed these women sympathetically.

And yet, each of them had sentenced their protagonists to an early death.

Each died by her own hand for having disobeyed the laws of the land, the unwritten laws that required women to be docile, submissive, and in never-ending servitude to children and to men.

It seems to me now that these were in fact cautionary tales. While they depicted an alternative route a woman could take, it warned us all that it was only a dangerous dead end to be avoided. 

They seemed to say, “Don’t ask questions. Don’t get any ideas. Don’t stray, or else.”

It took me years to realize I’d internalized these stories about women and what we deserved.

And to recognize that I had been living them out myself, in my own way.

I too felt that I had strayed. That I had chosen myself and my own desires over what men or the world wanted for me as a woman.

And I could, even now, feel the specter of death lingering near me. 

For so many years, I suffered under the weight of feeling I had gone too far, that all hope was gone, and that death, yes, my own death, by my own hand, was the only “honorable” and “right” resolution to this story I was living.

Now that I see this, I’m ready to let it go. 

Now I am willing to release this internalized demand for punishment, this death wish that exists for women who dare to belong to themselves.

In all honesty, I struggle even now to imagine a different outcome for any of the women from these novels of the 19th century. I don’t know if much else would have been possible, at least, without having these women face some other equally awful consequence.

But I don’t need to redeem them.

It is me, a woman living right now, that requires redemption.

And not through punishment or penitence.

No, the way I will tell my story from now on, those things aren’t required.

So what happens at the end of this story?

In this version, the woman realizes she had the right idea.

She has not only a right, but a responsibility, to belong to herself. To live her own life, for herself, as she sees fit.

This doesn’t have to mean choosing one of the two standard options offered to us. There are more choices to be had than blind submission or careless rebellion.

I can choose instead to live with integrity, to honor myself without putting myself in dangerous situations. 

I can now choose a life that truly benefits me, because I finally believe that I have a right to.

Inner Beso Dream

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Journal Date: February 2, 2021

At the end of the collection of short stories in Warming the Stone Child, Clarissa Pinkola Estés offers a couple tips for continuing the healing journey on your own.

The first one is this: “Pay attention to your dreams. Your dreams will tell you everything. In terms of injured instinct, dreams that are about animals that are injured or not acting properly are very good clues to what is hurt or what is injured in the deep unconscious.”

It’s funny, because just days before I heard this in this book, I had a very intense dream which fits what Estés is describing here perfectly.

From what I can remember, I had been struggling inside of this dream for a while before the parts that I became more directly conscious of occurred.

I remember that in this dream, I had been at a party for quite some time, feeling more and more frustrated as it went on.

Both my best friend and my ex-boyfriend were there. In this dream, we were still dating, but I could tell that he was losing interest, and not wanting to be with me.

Then my best friend showed up, and somehow it became known that she intended to sleep with him.

I tried to convince her not to do that, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job, because that’s exactly what happened next.

And in the dream, I just could not get over it.

I held on to that so tightly, with so much resentment and bitterness. I just couldn’t let it go. I told everyone I met. It was the only thing I wanted to talk about in my dream, really.

It just went on and on like that, endlessly, without reprieve.

It was like I had to convince anybody who would come near me how wrong it was. How it was something which could never be forgiven, which I had to hold onto forever.

This went on for a frustratingly long amount of time.

Until suddenly, I found that I was no longer at the party, but back on the streets of Whittier, making my way back towards my childhood home on Friends Ave.

And I had a little baby Beso in a wrinkled up, used and old plastic bag inside of my black backpack, just like the one I had in middle school.

Baby Beso was very sick.

I had fed him something toxic without knowing it was poisonous to him.

And so now I was trying to make my way back to this house, thinking that it was here that I would be able to take Beso out of the old bag in the backpack. 

I knew that he was suffering in there, it was dark and poorly ventilated, and I could only rarely look inside to check on him and see if he was even still alive.

And on top of this, I kept getting distracted, caught up again and again in telling everyone I encountered what a victim I was, and how I would never forgive them for what they had done to me.

This went on until I found myself on a street near Uptown Whittier, one which was on the other side of the alley where I had often walked through on my way to another friend’s house.

I took one last look inside of my backpack to check on baby Beso–and he was not doing well.

His eyes were red, deeply irritated all around the edges, and it was clear that he was suffering, struggling and very much in pain.

I was worried that he may not make it all the way to my mother’s house.

But I was convinced, for some reason, that there was nothing I could do until I reached this place, so I put him in my backpack again, and kept on walking.

And then I woke up.

I thought about that dream quite a bit that day. Clearly, there seemed to be a significant connection between what went on in my dream and in my world.

I remembered how my therapist has started calling the part of me that still needs mothering, the child within that requires loving attention and care, my “Inner Beso.”

I think it’s because I talk about my dog all the time, and how much I love being his “mom,” and how much I’ve learned from caring for him. I think he keeps saying that to encourage me to do the same for myself, to transfer my Beso-mothering skills into inner child, self-mothering skills.

What I got from analyzing my dream was this:

Maybe the bitterness and resentment I’ve been feeling towards my family aren’t serving a purpose anymore.

Maybe they are poisonous, maybe they are the toxic food that I have unknowingly been feeding my “inner Beso.”

And maybe I’m just going in the wrong direction entirely.

Why go revisit that old place in Whittier? 

Why go “home”?

There was nothing nourishing in that place to begin with. To keep returning there no longer makes any sense to me.

Maybe it’s just a distraction, a dangerous lie putting my inner child at further risk of being harmed.

Maybe the thing to do is attend to my “inner Beso” now, right where I’m at, as imperfect as that may be.

And please, take him out of that dirty old bag in your backpack immediately!

There is no reason to hide him away anymore.

All of this is to say, I need to turn and start heading in the other direction now.

This return to the childhood home, the return to the past, has served its purpose and outlived its usefulness. 

I’ve learned what I came to learn. Now is the time to move beyond it.

And I don’t need to wait to start caring for myself. I can start feeding my “inner Beso” healthy, nourishing food. 

I can give myself experiences that fill me up and nourish my soul.

I don’t have to wait anymore.

Entering the Hermes Field

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Journal Date: Saturday, January 2, 2021

I remember early on into the first month or so of quarantine– I was reading a book on alchemy, and it was describing the process of “entering the Hermes field,” and how to use this in your own spiritual development and awakening.

In the book, the author creatively describes a meeting with Hermes, and suggests that you can also directly communicate with him, and ask for guidance.

So I decided to try it.

“Hermes, I’m ready– show me my shadow. I’m ready to see the truth.”

I was answered almost immediately, that same night.

It was a lot– it felt very intense. So much so that I had to modify my request a little bit: “I’m ready, but please just show me what I can handle right now. Not more, and not less, just exactly what I am capable of handling at any given moment.”

Honestly, I was scared.

I was coming up against things I’d been running from for a lifetime.

And it hurt. It was painful to see what was there to be seen.

—

Painful, but not exactly surprising.

I already knew I was pretty messed up.

The surprise came just a few months into it, though, when the things I was seeing shifted from how I was wrong, and started to reveal to me how others needed to be held accountable.

This was where it started to get really difficult. 

I was used to being the one to blame. My inner critic was so easy to activate, it was already so natural for me to punish myself.

But what do I do when I have to hold other people accountable?

That was beyond terrifying to me.

How could I begin to come to terms with the vast amount of mistreatment from all those people I felt so powerless with?

This was the hardest thing: to come to terms with my family and how they had treated me.

I’d never really allowed myself to consider this.

I’d rather throw myself under the bus, and punish myself, than face the truth of what my family was.

I resisted.

But it soon became undeniable.

There was something deeply wrong with the narrative I’d been sold about who I was, and why they acted as they did toward me.

The narrative was coming undone, even though I’d done my best for 32 years to hold the bundles of lies and patchwork logic together.

I’d changed myself to fit their demands.

I’d sinned just to earn a place in their hell.

And it was all starting to unravel itself before my eyes.

There was nothing I could do to stop it now.

I could look away, but the thread had been pulled loose, and was now coming undone through a life of its own.

This Train is Leaving the Station

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Journal Date: May 5, 2020

I woke up early this morning to take my little puppy Beso outside before the sun rose.

Coming back inside, I gave him a snack and lay down to rest more on the living room couch while he played with his toys.

Soon, I found myself in the middle of a terrible dream.

In this dream, I was being rejected, shamed and abandoned by everyone in my life. I felt wildly out of control, unable to control my body or my reactions to anything around me. I was sure that I had been drugged, I had a vague memory of taking a pill I had been offered earlier in the dream by my mother.

I tried to tell the others in my dream it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t control my self, it was this drug I had taken that was making me act intoxicated, that the way they saw me wasn’t reflective of who I really was, but no one believed me, and left me alone with my shame anyway.

Soon I came to realize I was on a train, which continually traveled between two stations, an old station and a more modern one in a new town. Sometimes I would get off the train and explore the land surrounding each station, but inevitably I would find myself back on the train as it continued its ceaseless journey from one point to the other.

On one trip back to the old town station, I saw a hospital emergency room. I wanted to rush off the train and see if they could give me a drug test or something to prove the cause of my condition. But I could never stay off the train long enough, I always came back sooner than I would have wished to commence a new cycle of pain and confusion.

Once back on the train, I re-experienced each abandonment anew. Most times, it was one of my parents which were leaving me after delivering their cold, unequivocal judgements on how I was not worth the trouble to be around. But there were times when even my puppy Beso was taken away from me. It may not seem like much, but each time it happened, I felt my heart implode like a massive black hole in my chest, and I heard myself scream out loud.

This lasted until I was woken up on the couch by my mom. “Are you okay?” she asked. She had heard me scream again and again in my sleep, and was afraid something was wrong.

I finally got up and she brought me water and some aspirin to help with the headache I had woken up with.

“Look at Beso,” she said, pointing to my dog laying under the couch beneath me. “Even though you were making so much noise he never left you. He’s so loyal.”

I avoided thinking about the dream until later in the afternoon. I had fallen asleep again for a nap, and on waking up, the meaning of the earlier dream came to me all at once.

The drug I had been given was my trauma, my childhood experience and conditioning which told me I was and would never be good enough.

Being high (or in this case, low) on this drug had me acting in ways I felt I couldn’t control. I was reactive, reckless, hurting myself and others, watching this bitter pill create the wreckage of my life I knew, feared, and experienced over and over again.

There was still that part of me that wanted to get off at the old train station, to go back further into my past, to find some authority that would look at me and give me a diagnosis that would shift the blame onto anything outside of me. I wanted someone to say to me, “It’s the drugs talking. It’s this tough pill of trauma you’ve been hooked on for so long. We understand it’s not your fault.”

But no doctor could ever give me that script. Even if they did, few would believe me and even less would care.

I could feel all of the shame and fear and sense of “stuckness” rising up within me as I reflected on the dream and what it could mean for me.

Then I remembered, the train always kept moving. The train was always taking me forward, trying to open its doors for me onto new frontiers, but I had such a hard time feeling ready to make roots in this foreign territory, I was obsessed with proving something about who I was and who should be held responsible for all the consequences that came of that that I found myself again and again on that same train “home”.

Now I could see that when those doors opened again, I needed to plant my flag in that new space and declare the future my true home.

The past is a desolate place, a withered landscape, a war-torn country I could never trust as my own. In some ways I think that maybe I never had a home, I felt as if I’d been born at sea, a small ship at sail in dangerous waters. 

I know I can’t go back to where I was, but now I’m prepared to get off this train and build my own home, create my own safe harbor from a pattern I am putting together as I go along. I’m ready to go home, to the future, and leave that train of sadness behind for good.

The Little Match Girl

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A sad little girl with black hair holding matches out in the snow

Journal Date: November 28, 2020

This morning, I was trying to keep reading. I didn’t know what else to do.

So I picked up Women who Run with the Wolves again, and opened it where I’d left off at Chapter 10.

This turned out to be a chapter that had more than one story in it.

So I finished the first part, with the story of “La Llorona,” and kept reading into the next one.

This one was called “The Little Match Girl.”

It was not what I expected it would be.

I’d heard of it, and even read it once before (as part of an assignment Mama Gena had included as part of our homework in GPS).

But this time, it shocked me. Because I saw that this story was about me.

It told of a poor little girl who lived alone in a dark forest. She had no mother and no father. She had no money or possessions, either, except for a few matches that she bought for half a penny and sold for one.

Winter came, and the cold weather, and she tried to go sell the matches in the nearby town. 

“She wandered the streets and begged strangers, would they please buy matches from her? But no one stopped and paid her any attention.”

One night, suffering from the cold, she decided to light her matches to warm herself, though she had no wood and no kindling.

Every time she lit a match, she found herself immersed in some fantasy, only to awaken again colder than ever.

She struck the third and final match, and in her fantasy her grandmother appeared, “so warm and so kind, and the child felt so happy to see her…” But then the grandmother began to fade, as the little match girl felt herself rise up into heaven.

The story ends sadly, with the little match girl found cold and dead between the houses the next morning.

It wasn’t this telling of the story that resonated with me so much as the commentary that followed.

Here is the first paragraph of interpretation after the story:

“This chid lives in an environ where people do not care. If you are in one of these, get out.”

Hm. Well, that was pretty direct. 

She continues: “This child is in a milieu where what she has, little fires on sticks–the beginnings of all creative possibilities–are not valued. If you are in this predicament, turn your back and walk away.”

Estes seems to feel pretty strongly about this. She goes on to say, “This child is in a psychic situation in which there are few options. She has resigned herself to her ‘place’ in life. If this has happened to you, unresign yourself and come out kicking ass.”

I feel that this has been where I have been most of my life. I had resigned myself to place for so long. I had come to believe that there was no other way for me.

“She cannot awaken to a life with a future because her wretched life is like a hook upon which she hangs daily. In initiations, spending a significant amount of time under difficult conditions is part of a dismemberment that severs one from ease and complacency. As an initiatory passage, it will come to a conclusion, and the newly ‘sanded down’ woman will commence a refreshed and enwisened spiritual and creative life. 

However, women in the Match Girl condition could be said to be involved in an initiation that has gone awry. The hostile conditions do not serve to deepen, only to decimate. Another venue, another environ, with different supports and guides, must be chosen.”

I think this is why I have been so focused on wanting to move to Mexico City. I have intuited the fact that this is not an environment where I will ever be able to grow. I’m 32, and it still seems impossible. I don’t think the conditions around me will ever change. So I’ve decided I must go somewhere else.

“The Match Girl wanders the streets and she begs strangers to buy matches from her. This scene shows one of the most disconcerting things about injured instinct in women, the giving of light for little price… Bad lovers, rotten bosses, exploitative situations, wily complexes of all sorts tempt a woman to these choices.”

This has been true about me. It has been the saddest thing about me, about my life: my willingness to lower the price, to just give myself away to anyone, to beg them to accept me. 

But how was I supposed to know better? I was always taught (by words and by force) that this was the only way.

“The Match Girl lights more matches. Each fantasy burns out, and again the child is in the snow and freezing. When the psyche freezes, a woman is turned toward herself and no one else.”

And it was all for no use. Every shitty boss, emotionally abusive partner, it all ended the same. With me left even more out in the cold, again. Everything I did to hold on to the fantasy ensured my own future end.

“It is a psychic fact that when libido or energy wanes to the point where its breath no longer shows on the mirror, some representation of the Life/Death/Life nature shows up, here portrayed by the grandmother. It is her work to arrive at the death of something, to incubate the soul that has left its husk behind, and to care for the soul till it can be born anew.”

I’m at that point now. I’ve spent this past year in surrender, dying to everything I’ve ever known or believed to be true. 

I’m ready to move forward. I’m dying to be reborn.

A sad little girl with black hair out in the snow

“And that is the blessedness of everyone’s psyche. Even in the event of such a painful ending as the Match Girl’s, there is a ray of light. When enough time, discontent, and pressure have been brought to bear, the Wild Woman of the psyche will hurl new life into a woman’s mind, giving her opportunity to act in her own behalf once more. As we can see from the suffering involved, it is far better to heal one’s addiction to fantasy than wait around wishing and hoping to be raised from the dead.”

When We Dead Awaken: Part 3

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If I’m ever going to create my future, I’m going to have to come to terms with my past.

I’ve been trying to avoid it, deny it, explain it away, make excuses for it, compensate for it, erase it, and so much more.

I’ve struggled to accept that this is the truth of my life. That this isn’t “just a phase.” It isn’t just going to disappear one day like it never happened.

I think I may have (unconsciously) thought that if I worked hard enough I would be “cured,” I’d become 100% “better”, and it would all be as if nothing had ever happened. That there would be some kind of “redemption” where I would be saved from my own damn self.

In practice what this meant was that I was working toward a model, a “goal” identity, that was completely inappropriate for me.

I wanted so badly to be normal. I would have done anything to not be so “complicated.”

The ideal future self I had in mind was so boring, so basic. So unthreatening. She was some happy, carefree, extraverted, easy going, and very chill girl (that’s why they said they wanted from me, right?).

I thought I could nip and tuck and edit away all of my humanity, become acceptable to the greater mass of society, and call it a success. 

I would know I had “made it” when I was deemed normal by everyone and no one ever said anything bad about me ever again.

That was my vision for health: to completely erase myself, and finally just be what everyone else wanted me to be. 

My vision now is this: I will not deny my past, I will not erase this self. I will not even try to compensate for the suffering I’ve had with some grandiose and misguided attempt to “make it all worth it.”

I will integrate my past. I will honor myself.

I will acknowledge all of the places and the people I have been, regardless of how strange or scary others find them to be.

I will speak to the truth of who I was, and how it was that I became who I am today.

When We Dead Awaken: Part 2

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One of the biggest limiting beliefs that I’ve had is the idea that I should rely on the outer environment to define me.

The idea of defining myself, for myself, has seemed an impossibility for me. 

Maybe the logic was, “I can’t trust myself. My opinion is meaningless, especially when it comes to my own self.”

I felt I could only rely on other people, or on the outside world in general, as an accurate and meaningful measure of my worth.

So I spent my life running around trying to satisfy everybody else’s ideas of who I was supposed to be.

Which was an impossible task–everyone had a different plan for me, and satisfying one would inevitably upset another.

I came to understand that on some level, but I still felt compelled to keep going with it anyway (only now feeling trapped and full of despair).

Every comment, criticism or offhand remark was seized upon and picked apart for clues to my identity.

“Am I in here somewhere?” I wondered as I ruminated on every word.

“Am I okay yet?” was the even more desperate and tragic subtext below it all.

“Am I a worthwhile human being yet? Do I deserve to exist now? How about now? Now??”

—

It breaks my heart to look at this, and admit how I have been.

It truly is sad that I was living like this for so long.

It’s no wonder I was so miserable. Of course. Anyone would be.

I also have compassion for myself. I see exactly how I came to be this way, and I understand.

The abuse within my family was so relentless, severe and specifically targeted to keep me from having any sense of self. 

Especially when younger, it was safer to remain amorphous, to just not have a self, to be mutable enough to quickly contort myself into whatever anyone else demanded. 

The sooner I abandoned myself, the sooner the shame and humiliation would subside. Just give in, agree–it’s much easier that way.

I still remember the words. “Oh, well! Look at you!” and then as an aside to another family member, ”Who does she think she is??”

There were plenty of punishments for when I was bad, but the worst were the humiliations for being “too good.”

Like when my mom would hear all the good reports about me at parent-teacher conferences, she would attack, and accuse, and humiliate me.

She would say say the teacher must be stupid, because you’re fooling her… or, that it was just more evidence of my guilt; I’m lying to this poor woman, trying to fool her into believing I’m something I’m not. 

“If only she knew what you were really like at home–you’re like the devil!”

This created a horrifying double bind by which I had to live: I had to be good, I had to try to be perfect to be acceptable and redeem myself; but I could NOT be good, as it then became proof of my badness, showing how manipulative and deceptive I truly was.

Any action or inaction on my part became proof of my inherent unworthiness. It was all proof of how I was undeserving, bad, a lost cause, the devil. 

When We Dead Awaken: Part 1

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Journal Date: November 28, 2020

I wanted to pick up where I left off before, writing in response to what I had learned from my B.O.T.A. lessons the night before.

There was one idea in particular that captured my attention, and I think it is worth repeating here:

“So long as we ascribe power, wisdom, supply or anything else of worth to external conditions, just so long we are dreaming. The sources of life and power are within us. Human personality is like a projection machine. Human environment is like a screen. Our mental imagery (inside us) makes the pictures, and the words of our mouths incite the reactions we experience. But the light which projects the pictures is an inner light… the light of the One Self.

When we awake we come to ourselves as did the Prodigal. We stop dreaming. We are freed from the nightmare terrors besetting those who dwell in dust. Then we find the Creative Word in our mouths and in our hearts. We learn that our “speech,” that is, our mental definitions of ourselves and our relations to our circumstances, never return to us void. If our definitions be wrong, because we are deluded by appearances, the appearances grow worse and worse. When we awake and come to ourselves, a new set of pictures is projected on the screen of our environment.”

–TF 36, “The Tower”

—

Before I get too far into the details, I wanted to mention this little synchronicity: I read a very similar concept earlier in the afternoon yesterday, only in my psychology textbook.

The chapter was about worry and anxiety, and how these mental and emotional conditions can lead directly to physical health problems.

It basically described the Law of Attraction, only in the book they called it “the Law of Expectation,” and they had a very different explanation for how it all worked than B.O.T.A. It was rooted in physical causation, in contrast to B.O.T.A.’s assertion of spiritual/energetic causes, but the process was essentially the same. 

They cautioned against worrying (as it “creates stress”, “rehearses failure”, releases harmful biochemicals, etc.), promoted the practice of visualization for success, and even suggested a focus on the sense of touch being included in visualization practices (just like B.O.T.A. did).

They described essentially the same tools, the same processes, the only difference being the causal mechanisms attributed to each.

I thought this was an interesting coincidence (or synchronicity). I was impressed to see the same content and concepts appearing in these two different areas of life at exactly the same time.

I feel that now I’m on the right track. Clearly, there’s something to all of this.

And this is just one of many little meaningful coincidences that have cropped up repeatedly over the past week or so… 

I like where I’m heading.