Fear This!

My friend Brenda and I remind each other from time to time to Fear Not! when there is something happening that's generating fear and anxiety in our lives. It's from a passage somewhere in the Bible, and while I don't ever remember where it actually is in the Bible, I do remember these words when called upon.

But today as I was out walking through the canyon, I stumbled upon this sticker on the back of a local's jeep which sparked some deep and powerful thought upon which I meditated as I walked through the lovely afternoon's rain, and I think I have found the next step beyond even the powerful words to Fear Not!

Fear This!

I once read a book called, Feel the Fear, and Do it Anyway!" which makes more sense to me than trying to make the fear go away. For me, trying to tell myself not to feel afraid is like trying to convince myself that I'm not hungry when my stomach is clearly growling. Something is happening that prompts the anxiety and fear, so the fear itself is real. I also believe that even if God or some kind of comforting presence is with me, the fear is still real, and still falls within my realm of responsibility to do something about.

So the next time I find myself feeling anxious or feeling afraid I'm going to just turn around and stand up straight in the middle of my fear and tell those negative forces that are inviting me to feel afraid, "Oh, yeah? Well, Fear This!" Then do something, anything, that contradicts whatever it is that I'm feeling afraid of in the first place.

The Canyon's Story

Walking along the rim this afternoon I continued to think about the Canyon's story. I went to a resource update training earlier where the presenter talked about "keeping it wild," a training provided for NPS interpretive rangers and tour-bus guides who tell the story about the canyon every day. What struck me as I walked along the rim was the interesting dichotomy between the stories we tell about the Grand Canyon, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Tour guides and interpretive rangers tell the story of the canyon every single day. But it's a violent story, a story with great geologic trauma along the way. Plates colide. . . .rivers change direction. . . .winds and rain erode away that which makes the canyon whole and complete.

This is the story of the canyon.

But the canyon herself, she's not ashamed of her story. . . .she doesn't shrink away when people talk about her story. . . .her self esteem doesn't erode away like sediments and sand. . . .and she isn't concerned about moving on, either. She simply is what she is, filled with a magnificent beauty that is the result of this grand story of great violence and spirit altering geologic upheaval.

Human beings are very different, of course. . . .we hide our stories of violent upheavals of spirit.

The canyon wasn't always thought of as a grand place, though. Many of the first visitors saw it as nothing more than a vast wasteland, devoid of value and meaningful resources, a place where no one in their right mind would ever visit by choice. Many people still can't see the beauty of the canyon, calling it "the great big hole in the ground." But things change. . . .and people do begin to look beyond their initial conceptions to see the beauty that emerges out of violent upheavals and erosion.

There is much that the canyon has to teach about living life on life's terms.

I can't change anything about the way the forces of life and circumstance collided with the plates of my spirit and eroded away the sediments that remain from landscapes embedded with the layers of a life that are no longer vibrant and alive. But these forces create nothing more than the story of me. . . .the story that helped to shape this amazing woman I have become. . . .a story ever in process of the erosion of change . . . .and  I look to the canyon each day for guidance on how to simply be what I am regardless of what the onlookers and observers have to say about what they see. . . .even if all they can see is a great big hole in the ground.

Peace by Piece

This may seem odd coming from me on a day when I can not get to sleep to save my life, but I have been feeling like the pieces of my life are slowly starting to come together. Not in a great big loud and obvious way, but rather like how sand settles to the bottom of the ocean when the currents are subsiding. I don't think everything is going to be roses and sunshine any time soon, but I absolutely feel like the pieces are forming into something lovely and longer lasting.

I think it's all about acceptance. . . .accepting things just as they are, without hoping for things to change. I know that also sounds anti-me. . . .lol. . . .coming from the queen of personal growth and self-improvement, but there is a change that can only happen with the acceptance that nothing may ever change.

Life is paradox.

I continue to process through the archetypal psychology book, and this month's archetype of focus is "The Caregiver." It's the last of the first four archetypes that make up the "ego" set of archetypes. The Caregiver as archetype is that ideal perfect parent who loves and guides unconditionally and creates the safe environment where we feel loved, valued, and appreciated.

Of course the perfect parent does not exist, so we grow up with "gaps" in our development that help to shape and create the uniqueness of who we grow into. And the beauty of it all is that even if two people have exactly the same gaps, they still "fill them in" with their own unique ways, so our spirits are birthed like mosaic art created out of shards and scraps that might not otherwise have found their own creative voice.

It's all about how we fill in the gaps. . . .

We each fill the gaps in our own ways, and I suppose there can ultimately be no judgment in how each of us completes our life mosaic. I'm slowly learning how to let go of the fear and shame of my gaps. . . .they are what they are. . . .and I am what I am because of and in spite of them.

As for me, it is my "inner caregiver" who fills in my gaps, that part of me that acknowledges and comforts when I feel bruised by the choice or circumstance of life. There is great peace in accepting life on life's terms, even if we will never agree with the terms themselves. In that way, Acceptance is a lot like Forgiveness. . . .it can still love the broken pieces even when the random acts that shattered them remain forever unacceptable and unforgiven.

It's not the act itself that's accepted or forgiven, but rather how that act has left its mark upon a life forever changed.

So for me, it's more about mosaics than about moving on. . . .about filling the gaps and creating beauty out of pieces that no longer belong to one another. . . and about finding peace amidst the chaos that remains.

The God of Surprises

I am thinking this day about a retreat I created back when I was in grad school at a Catholic seminary in Santa Barbara. It was my second year into the family therapy program, so I had been seeing clients through my first clinical placement for only about six months, and I was experiencing a great deal of conflict because I didn't really know what to do to help these people in great turmoil, and boy, did I felt the pressure to do something to help!

So there I was. . . in this place of great conflict. . . .in search of peace. . . .so I decided I needed a spiritual retreat.

The Catholic seminary was built up on top of the mountains surrounding Santa Barbara, so it was both beautiful and peaceful just by its geographical nature. But there was also this wonderful part of the seminary that caught my attention, a quarter mile path that started just outside of the seminary at the top of the mountain and wound its way down through an outdoor Stations of the Cross, which was comprised of these 14 different "stations" (pieces of the story of Jesus's crucifiction) along this quarter mile path weaving through the grass and trees. I had never heard of this before (the Stations of the Cross), so I found the path to be lovely and wonderful way to "read" this story of Jesus.

I had created this retreat the week before Christmas, so the priest thought it was odd that I would spend so much time out on this Stations of the Cross path (which was about the death of Jesus), when he thought I should be spending time with the story about his birth. He was probably right, of course, but the birth stories weren't the stories that were resonating with my spirit in conflict, and I thought I needed to understand his death in order to appreciate his birth. . . .so I continued to spend time periodically out walking along this beautiful path in search of the peace my conflicted spirit so desperately was in search of.

My room was in a long quiet wing all to its self, a fact that was actually kind of eery at night, with the Santa Barbara winds blowing atop this isolated mountain, but there was also a wonderful library that I spent a great deal of time in. I found a tape series on Forgiveness that was wonderful (and very much needed at the time), but the best source I found that week was a small book called, The God of Surprises, written by a Catholic priest who had lost his faith, and this book was the story about his very long journey back to God.

He wrote about this process called contemplative imagination that he used when he started to reread the Bible. He described how when he would read a story (as that's what the Bible is, a wonderful collection of stories), he would imagine that he was physically present in the story, and not just reading about it. He found himself engaging in dialogue with the characters of the story, and more importantly, that the characters in the story were engaging back in dialogue with him in return. So his faith was renewed through this long journey made possible by this intriguing process of contemplative imagination that breathed life back into stories that now had depth and personal meaning for him.

So I thought I would try this contemplative imagination for myself. . . .

Armed with this unexplored new tool, I ventured back out to the path of the Stations of the Cross. I felt a little bit silly, of course, standing there in the middle of the trees outside of the seminary where I was certain the priest was keeping an eye on this odd woman talking to herself. . . .lol. . . .but I wanted to see for myself how this process worked, and I had this wonderful full-life version of the Bible story at my unlimited use, and so began my journey.

The Stations of the Cross is the journey of Jesus on his way to the cross, of course, and I had became one of the witnesses along that path (through the use of the contemplative imagination). But as I walked along that path from one station to another, I began to experience great anxiety, and I found myself in a dialogue that essentially amounted to me trying to talk Jesus out of continuing on. I knew what lay ahead along this path, and I was doing everything I could to stop what was happening!

So I begged and pleaded Jesus to stop, to do something different, to say something different, but he didn't. . . .he just continued on along that path to his certain death with a purpose and determination that I just couldn't understand. And since I was "pretending" to be a living particpant of that story in real life (which was the purpose of the contemplative imagination process), I was also experiencing real and genuine emotional responses, so to say that I was anxious and frustrated would be a mild understatement.

As I approached the fifth station, I couldn't continue. I was doing everything I could to stop what was going to happen, but I couldn't, so in my utter despair of not knowing how to stop this, I had to walk away, to get off of that path, because there was no way that I could continue on if that meant I had to witness the brutality that was about to unfold! So I looked over and saw a bench just over about 20 feet placed in a patch of amazing green grass along the dusty path, a bench that looked out across the pastoral valley below.

The irony in that moment was that I had taken this retreat because I was in such great personal conflict and I was in search of inner peace to end the conflict, yet here I was, out in the back mountains of Santa Barbara at this isolated seminary amidst the greatest conflict of all, as I had just walked away from the path of Jesus on the way to his brutal death at the cross. And as I sat down on that bench in the full force of frustration and angst of not knowing how to stop what was about to happen, I looked out across this valley to find a large green barn with the word PEACE painted in huge white letters across the side of the barn facing the hill of the seminary's path.

There are moments in life that are larger than life, moments that are so infused with an emotional experience that we never forget them. . . .and this was once such moment.

When I looked across that valley to find the word PEACE staring back at me as I sat on that bench, something opened up inside of my heart and I just started sobbing deep and hard, because I finally understood what the source of my conflict was with my clients, because I was doing exactly the same thing with them that I was doing with Jesus. My conflict was nothing more than the fact that I was trying to stop something over which I had no control, instead of just walking with them along whatever path their journey was supposed to be.

PEACE.

It was not the peace that I thought I was looking for that I found along the path with Jesus that day, but it was exactly the peace that I needed. And I returned from that retreat with a renewed sense of purpose and perspective of what my role as a family therapist was supposed to be, a clarity that changed the way I walk with everyone I come in contact with, because Jesus taught me how to walk with others along whatever life path they may find themselves upon. . . .and that blessing has changed me from my spirit up. . . .which is why I am not afraid of walking along the dark paths anymore.

People may not always understand me or the path my own spirit walks upon, either, but that's ok. I remember how Moises used to tell me all of the time that he was praying for me, praying that my anger would be removed from my suffering. ( I was very angry during my grad school years. . . .lol.) I always accepted his prayers, but they were more about him than about me, because I never prayed myself for God to remove my anger, as I embraced that as one of my greatest strengths at that time. I needed that anger to rise up out of the stories that had been imposed upon my life by people who also knew not what they did, so I wasn't going to pray the anger away.

So I have learned to walk my path of suffering, just like I watched Jesus walk his. And I have learned to let people walk away from my path when they no longer understand why I would choose my own journey of suffering, just the way Jesus let me walk away when I was overcome with angst and frustration of trying to stop what I could not understand as I walked along his journey with him. And I may not have grown up with God as a young person the way that other people did, but I have a very real relationship with Jesus, even if the way that I walk that path with him is not as easily recognized by others.

As for the Stations of the Cross, it took me a while to sort through the emotion released by the lancing of my conflict in that moment of finding Peace in the most unsuspecting of places, but I had found the peace I needed to walk that Stations of the Cross path to its bitter end, and I became a better therapist and person because of it.

Who knew that a quarter of a mile could be such a long and painful distance. . . .

As for me, I certainly didn't expect to find Jesus in those back country mountains of Santa Barbara on that personal retreat I created for myself back in 1997 , but that is where I found him. . . .and where I found the amazing God of Surprises.

Oh, What a Tangled Web

Something snapped in me this morning. . . .or, more accurately, something finally snapped into clarity to such a degree that I am no longer even able to pretend that I don't see it.

There is a dark side to everything, both good and bad. There is no judgment in this fact, only truth that no matter which coin is flipped, there is always an opposite side that both balances and betrays.

My journey is about to become unbearably difficult.

The trouble with growing up feeling inherently unloveable and unwanted is that the desire to be loved and wanted doesn't ever go away. Hence, a corollary development is the process of invisibly figuring out what to do in order to be accepted and belong within the family, group, organization, team, squad, relationship we desire to feel a part of.

We've all done it. . . .changed ourselves in some way so that the cool guy will like us. . . .kept quiet about something happening so that we don't rock to boat and upset our place in it. . . .hidden some dark truth about our selves so that other people will like us and accept us a part of their own. But the problem is that when this is the invisible way that a person moves through their entire life, they wake up fifty years later to find that they are living a lie of the worst kind. . . .the lie that they have become. . . . and they realize that they have been walking around their whole life with an empty love bucket, selling off pieces of their soul in hope that someone else might fill it.

I feel as if I am sitting in the middle of a storm that has instantly fallen silent and windless, but the debris still floats wildly around me.

I am not honest with people, or myself. I dance around my self and the things that need to be said so that I am not cast out into the cold of the winter's night. What do you want to eat? It doesn't matter. . . .whatever you want is fine. (Except that it's not, because I really want Thai.) What movie do you want to see? It doesn't matter. (Except that it does, because I really want to see the latest chick flick.) I weave a version of deception around me to the point that I no longer even know who I am. . . .except that I do. We don't ever really escape the truth of who we are, do we? No, we don't. . . .as I know every lie and every deception I have ever woven, and could very easily sit down right here, right now, and make a list specific to each and every person or circumstance across my entire life of how I have twisted and contorted the beautiful truth of who I am in exchange for being like, or loved, and wanted.

No more.

This is what Jesus meant when he talked about leaving our mother and our father, our brothers and our sisters, in order to live a life aligned and congruent with God. I understand this now. If who I am is so loathsome to another person that they can neither like nor want me, then that is their right to do so. . . .but to twist and contort the truth of who I am just so that I can feel included? Just to feel liked and accepted and feel like I belong? I can't do that any more. And if that means that the only way that I can walk with integrity of who God made me to be is to walk alone in this life time, then that is going to have to be my fate, because I am no longer going to weave this internal deception as attempt to "soften" the truth of my beautiful spirit. . . .not for anyone.

There are many lies that can be told. . . .but the greatest lie truly is the lie that we become. No, we don't live in a perfect world. And yes, we have all been wounded by the flaws and imperfections of this world. But the task of the Warrior is to live within a harmful environment without becoming like it. . . . .to live in the world, but not of  the world. . . .no matter how badly the Exiles and Orphans may want to feel like they belong.

I may not ever understand why God created me the way that I am, but my journey is about to get very difficult, indeed. . . .

And in this moment I finally understand: The real problem is not that I am inherently unloveable or unwanted because of who I am. . . .the real problem is that because of who I am inherently, I do not love or want to be a part of this crazy messed up world. And this is the truth that changes everything. . . .

The Story of Clothes

I've been eating ghetto chocolate all day, anxiously sorting through the clothes in my closet and purging what no longer "fits," which is less about the size, and more about the style. Funny how the clothes we wear are a lot like the stories we tell about ourselves. . . .

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of "moving on". . . .mostly because I'm not really sure what it means. I know what is meant when we think or tell someone they need to "move on," but what does it really mean to move on? And who gets to decide when, where, or how this outgrowing process is supposed to happen?

I have these cassette tapes that my mom sent to me when I was stationed in Germany. Denny had bought a pair of cassette tape recorder/players so that we could send correspondence back and forth via sound, so I have all of these tapes of her voice from before she died. I don't even have a way of playing them any more, but I keep them. . . .move them with me from place to place. . . .pay for space to store them, year after year. Some days I even wonder What's the point? in keeping them, but I do.

I actually have mixed feelings about these tapes, as there are multiple layers of emotion were I to listen to them, so complex and unfinished was my relationship with my mother. But I still can't imagine getting rid of them, as they hold the last tangible connection to something real and wonderful about this woman who died holding on to so many secret truths. Am I supposed to "move on" from the loss of my mom by "letting go" of these tapes recorded with layers of mixed and complex emotional content?  Would I honestly feel her loss any less if I were to some how "move on" from these tapes?

The bottom line is that human beings hold on to "things" that hold some kind of emotional meaning for them, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?  I'm sure the most common answer would be something to the effect that if there is a "positive" connection to it, then that is a good thing, but if there is a "negative" connection, then that is a bad thing, and the "best" course of action is to then "move on" from the thing that's causing so much negative emotion, right?

I don't think life is that black and white, or human experience that simple.

When I was in grad school, I once reflected with great warmth some stories from my military days with one of my cohorts, stories that I cherish dearly. She was not a veteran, so perhaps she just couldn't understand how these stories of belonging and instant comraderie could fill a person with such depth of warm emotion, but when I had finished telling my story, she made several comments about how I was obviously living in the "glory days," with much implication that my reverie was not healthy, and I should somehow "move on" from the telling of these outdated relic stories of my military days gone by. I was stunned.

It's not just the "negative" stories in our lives that people think we should move on from, but why is it that we're supposed to to move on from them at all?

I feel myself grow large and fierce inside of myself, fierce and protective, because I know all too well the answer to this question. But the cold hard truth is simply this: we are told to "move on" from stories that other people don't want to hear, that other people feel uncomfortable with, not because of some inherent need within ourselves to do so.

If I were to tell stories of a childhood filled with stuffed bears and cotton candy and the joys of life in the here or there of narrative landscapes falling within the boundaries of comfortable emotion, then I am not told implicitly or otherwise to move on from these stories. But stories that make other people uncomfortable? Aye, these are the stories that I am not supposed to tell, which (ironically) is the crux of the problem from the story's inception.

Aye, this is the crux of the point, indeed.

What makes an event traumatic is not the event itself, but rather the loss of a context where we can tell the story, the truth of what was real for us in the experience of the event. Human beings come through difficult events relatively unscathed all of the time, so it's not the event itself that creates the trauma. In my own experience, it was the lack of context for my stories that created the trauma for me, personally, because I wasn't able to talk about what was happening, so it remained locked up inside, like raw and corrosive poison. I learned very quickly what stories I wasn't supposed to tell, so I never told them. . . .in part because no one in my young world wanted to hear them. . . .but mostly it was because there was no one who could have helped me to process them, even if I had told them.

Keeping stories silent is not the same thing as moving on from them, nor should it ever be. . . .and thank god for people like Oprah who make it ok for people to finally tell their stories.

One of my favorite films is an animated film called Howl's Moving Castle, and one of the important characters in the film is this magical castle thing that moves around from place to place, a castle built up out of junk and debris collected along the journey, which is such a beautiful metaphor of human experience. The junk's not always beautiful, or even very useful, but it's the junk that makes us who we are. . . .for better, or for worse.

Inside of Howl's castle is a magic portal that grants access to whichever world is selected by the portal's device, with each portal connecting to a world with completely different emotional experiences. Again, such a wonderful metaphor of the complexity of human experience, how the same "door" to an experience can open up to different perspectives of a world, each with its own emotional experience. Do we choose which portal we enter? Absolutely. But is one portal inherently better than the other? On this, I'm not so certain.

There is still so much I feel mulling through me about this idea of "moving on," but the answer (in my opinion) is never a moving on from the emotional experiences of our lives, but rather an embracing and accepting of these stories as nothing more than pages within our larger story ever changing and in the process of editing and revision. Maybe some of these stories are laden with difficult emotions, but so what. . . .the emotion itself is not what creates the trauma. . . it's how other people respond to the emotion that creates the trauma. . . .especially as children, because children have not yet learned how to separate their identify from the stories they tell about ourselves, or the stories that other people tell about them.

Oprah once said, "Everything has a story." I love that. . . . everything has a story. And we do, of course, move on from the stories of our lives, just like we move on from the styles of clothes that no longer fit the character we are choosing to be. Today I packed up a very large bag of outdated clothes because they no longer fit who I am, but not because someone thought I needed to, or because someone told me that I should. I simply woke up this day feeling ready to wear a different style of clothes . . . .and so I move on.

The Warrior's End

Tonight is the end of The Warrior.

Not the end of the warrior within me, but the end of this month's study of the archetypal warrior. April is the month to study The Caregiver.

A boring post. . . .lol. . . .but it's all the energy I can muster tonight. . . . just needed to honor this month's focus on the warrior within :)