I've been thinking about this post for a long while. The things my mother taught me are both so simple and so formative. Most important things in life are. It isn't the big, huge once-in-a-lifetime things that make up the stuff of life, but the small every day things.
It's so cliche to say that she taught me to work hard. But she really, really did...from weeding the garden to shoveling snow, my mama did it all. She wasn't afraid to dive into a room that needed to be cleaned at school or a pile of paperwork in the office, either. She taught me to do what needs to be done, no complaining. I'm afraid I've moved away from that lesson as I've gotten older...being now somewhat more inclined to procrastination and whining.
My mother also taught me storage solutions for small houses and how to minimize clutter without throwing all the fun stuff away. She new how to keep games and craft projects and her favorite coffee mug without all the little stuff cluttering up the house. Maybe this is more about knowing what really matters and getting rid of the stuff that doesn't. But, you know, you can keep the favorite mug that you really don't need, if you keep it in the cake pan in the oven (where else would you store your cake pans? and your mugs?).
My mother taught me to keep my mouth shut when the conflict isn't really going to be beneficial. I don't think this is about avoiding conflict or sweeping things under the rug. She could confront when something needed to be said. But, it was more about extending some grace or having some patience to see how some things might pan out. It was about holding back the biting comment when someone was all sarcastic and crabby...to give them the opportunity to settle down themselves. Because, you know, most of us know when we're acting bad anyway. We seldom need someone to point it out to us.
My mama taught me to hunt for bargains, to substitute ingredients in recipes, to make do with what I have...to turn old things into new solutions. She taught me how to play rummy and make salsa and cook beans from scratch.
Sometimes I'm surprised by all the ways that I am like her because I've often thought myself so different from her in personality. When I surprise myself with a piece of her appearing in my own living, I am so proud.
Showing posts with label healing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healing. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Hope that Burns Us
I love, love, love the planning and preparing for this season of Advent and Chanukah. I love the strings of lights, the glittery reflections on window glass and ornaments. I love the feel of the words that surround this season...
hope,
peace,
love,
redemption,
Messiah,
Yeshua,
chanukiah,
shamash...
I want to wrap those words around myself like warm, downy blankets, their comforting sounds shushing the wails of grief, ever singing in my ears. Is it muffling grief? Is it balm to the wounds? I don't know. It helps. It eases the suffering.
A candle flickers in the Nativity scene in my entry room day and night. I light candles often in my house, for beauty, for remembrance, for prayers. I think of the seas of candles at candlelight vigils...at Christmas Eve church services...at Easter Eve at the Basilica. Especially, I think of the way we extinguish our candles at the Basilica when we hear of the death of Messiah and then we pound on the pews until one single light returns.
One single light.
The light of Yeshua. The one we Hope for this Advent. We are waiting for His return. When grief overflows in our hearts we beg.
Come, Yeshua. Come.
Come now.
Come save us.
We are done with this world. We pound on the pews. We stomp our feet. The noise builds to fill our ears. Darkness fills our eyes. Grief fills our throats.
Until that one tiny light returns. And gives light to the whole room. And our eyes flood with relief from the aching darkness. Our burning hands are still. Our tired feet can rest. Our cheeks are wet with the grief and the pain and the hope that burns us.
hope,
peace,
love,
redemption,
Messiah,
Yeshua,
chanukiah,
shamash...
I want to wrap those words around myself like warm, downy blankets, their comforting sounds shushing the wails of grief, ever singing in my ears. Is it muffling grief? Is it balm to the wounds? I don't know. It helps. It eases the suffering.
A candle flickers in the Nativity scene in my entry room day and night. I light candles often in my house, for beauty, for remembrance, for prayers. I think of the seas of candles at candlelight vigils...at Christmas Eve church services...at Easter Eve at the Basilica. Especially, I think of the way we extinguish our candles at the Basilica when we hear of the death of Messiah and then we pound on the pews until one single light returns.
One single light.
The light of Yeshua. The one we Hope for this Advent. We are waiting for His return. When grief overflows in our hearts we beg.
Come, Yeshua. Come.
Come now.
Come save us.
We are done with this world. We pound on the pews. We stomp our feet. The noise builds to fill our ears. Darkness fills our eyes. Grief fills our throats.
Until that one tiny light returns. And gives light to the whole room. And our eyes flood with relief from the aching darkness. Our burning hands are still. Our tired feet can rest. Our cheeks are wet with the grief and the pain and the hope that burns us.
"And he sang to them, now in the Elven tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness." (from Tolkien's The Return of the King)
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Multilayered
This post is part of the Creativity Boot Camp, Day 3.
***************************************
I've always said that healing is a spiral upwards. You keep climbing up, but the issues do come back around again. I wasn't the first person to say that. Those are just words I clung to when I was most looking for some thoughts on healing in my own life. I don't know who said them first. I've been repeating them ever since.
You cannot expect healing to be all done after your first go-round of the spiral. The first go-round is just the first layer...typically the one where you finally admit that you have a wound than needs healing and you're ready to finally face it. After that, there are many, many more layers stacked up in the spiral...like a slinky.
Hope is when you realize that the spiral is always going up. Each time you hit the same place on the loop, you're up another layer. You can't jump over that place on the loop because then the slinky and all its layers would fall apart. But, if you push through, you'll get to the other side...and be a little more healed because of it.
I'm not sure if the layers ever end, or if the slinky goes on for eternity...or, at least, until we die and meet Jesus and have our wounds healed by the Great Healer. In the meantime, each go-round of the spiral is its own new fresh layer...and also somewhat like the last go-round, like the seasons that are different every year but also somewhat the same. Each layer stacks up on the other, colorful slides of life, both the same and different each time. If you looked down through them you'd see who you once were and who you have become, all stacked one over the other...
...layer upon layer of the healing spiral carrying you ever upward.
You cannot expect healing to be all done after your first go-round of the spiral. The first go-round is just the first layer...typically the one where you finally admit that you have a wound than needs healing and you're ready to finally face it. After that, there are many, many more layers stacked up in the spiral...like a slinky.
Hope is when you realize that the spiral is always going up. Each time you hit the same place on the loop, you're up another layer. You can't jump over that place on the loop because then the slinky and all its layers would fall apart. But, if you push through, you'll get to the other side...and be a little more healed because of it.
I'm not sure if the layers ever end, or if the slinky goes on for eternity...or, at least, until we die and meet Jesus and have our wounds healed by the Great Healer. In the meantime, each go-round of the spiral is its own new fresh layer...and also somewhat like the last go-round, like the seasons that are different every year but also somewhat the same. Each layer stacks up on the other, colorful slides of life, both the same and different each time. If you looked down through them you'd see who you once were and who you have become, all stacked one over the other...
...layer upon layer of the healing spiral carrying you ever upward.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Would you, if you could?
If you could eliminate the emotional pain of a difficult or traumatic event in your past (without actually getting rid of the memory), would you do it? Think of the worst, most difficult, tragic, painful experience you've evre had and the ways in which it still affects you today. What if you could still remember but you could neutralize the emotions attached to the memory? You could get rid of the depression/anxiety/tears/pain/fear/embarrassment or whatever it is that comes with the memory. It seems so often that the emotions attached to traumatic or difficult experiences affect our ability to live a whole and healthy life. We make poor choices out of the woundedness and scars.
I'm reading a book called The Promise of Energy Psychology, which claims that through the stimulation of a sequence of accupressure points, the scenario I just described in the previous paragraph can happen - remember the trauma without the emotions. A person can eliminate phobias, anxiety and post traumatic stress by calling up the memory while interrupting the emotional response of the limbic system by massaging or tapping pressure points. Those with experience in this type of therapy say that the whole procedure takes only a few minutes and the effects are long lasting. People who have been through this type of therapy report that they are still free of their emotional distress even 2 years later.
At first, this seems entirely too good to be true. My first response was to say OF COURSE I want to get rid of the anxiety and depression I experience. OF COURSE, I want to stop feeling the upset whenever I recall particular instances of childhood trauma. I want to stop living with the drive to be perfect and the fear that I'm going to totally mess things up. I know that much of the fear is driven by painful life experiences. What if I could interrupt the emotional response and, thereby, the unhealthy behaviors?
The book gives examples of energy therapy working to relieve phobias. This seems pretty wise to me. And, yet, the book also mentions that people who have been treated for phobias often end up with even less of an emotional response to the object of the phobia than the general population. For example, a person with a fear of heights might eliminate their phobia and then some. Generally, people have some physiological response to heights, keeping them alert and cautious. The book says that the treated person with have less response then most of us but still have a healthy caution. This leads me to 2 questions. First, HOW does the treatment stop at a "healthy caution?" Who defines that? How do we know what degree of caution is healthy? And, second, what if the response of the average person is actually healthy and a certain degree of fear is necessary to keep us safe? Do we really want to deprogram our hard-earned responses that have taught us how to be safe? Of course, phobias are generally unhealthy, and we want a more balanced response, but can we garuntee that this type of therapy automatically stops at a good balance, a healthy place?
The book also gives an example of a woman who was raped by her stepfather at a young age. In one meeting with her energy therapist she went from shaking, flushed, crying, rapid breathing, and over-all very upset to calmly stating that the rape was a long time ago, it didn't have power over her any more, she is old enough to protect herself now, and she is able to protect her own children. Basically she went from very upset to telling herself and her therapist that there was really nothing to be upset about and she's over it now. Two years later the therapist followed up with her, and she still had no emotional response to recalling the rape. She had been able to "move on" with no depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress.
This last story seems ideal on the one hand and scares me to pieces on the other. It doesn't seem right somehow. It seems to take some of the humanity out of the person. We were made to feel. God created us with a limbic system, an emotional response system, with the capacity for love and joy...and pain and sadness. And feelings serve a purpose - to protect us, to teach us, to connect us to others. What happens to a person's compassion if they disconnect or neutralize their emotions related to pain or trauma? I'm entirely in favor a balance and learning to come to a balanced place with emotional responses. I do see how getting lost in the haze of our emotional over-response leads to unhealthy and even destructive choices sometimes. I get that there are sometimes reasons to take medication to balance emotional responses. I understand that brain chemistry is a powerful thing. I'm scared stiff by a therapy that ELIMINATES the negative emotions. How can it do that?
Even considering the possibility that this might be possible brought me to some conclusions that I feel somewhat ambivalent about. I've learned a lot. I guess it upsets me that I had to endure some kind of trauma to come to some profound realizations, but it seems to be the case. I've learned things about God and faith, life, community, families, and even my own capacity for love, joy and sacrifice through the really painful things in my life. And much of the learning has happened through actually feeling the pain. If I had done some energy work to change my emotional response, I'd feel fine, but I wouldn't be the same person I am today. I wouldn't think as hard about things. I wouldn't know the depth that's out there, that's available to me.
And there's something else, too. If I hadn't been wading my way through so many tough emotions, I wouldn't have experienced the love and compassion of my Mango in the same way. I wouldn't know the depth of his love for me. I wouldn't know about love so deep and fierce, so patient and gentle, so persistent and unwavering. I wouldn't know who he really is on the inside. Maybe he learned something, too, about his own capacity for love and sacrifice.
Yes, I think people were made to feel. And nothing about feeling is clean and neat or simple.
I still have a lot of questions. I mean, if God made us with pressure points that change the flow of energy in our bodies and neutralize emotional reactions, maybe there's something valuable to be had there. Maybe it's not so all or nothing as the vibe I'm getting from the book I'm reading. It probably isn't. It's been a journey for me to process this, though...to think about the role that broken and desperately painful emotions have played in my life. I know I haven't experienced the worst pain out there, either, and I wouldn't ever fault anyone for seeking salve for their wounds, balm for their bleeding emotions. Who could find fault with that? I can only say what I say here from the other side, for the most part. More days than not, I'm free from the emotional fallout of painful memories. What if I hadn't found the other side yet? What if no other side was in sight? Ultimately, I am left with more questions that answers.
What would you do?
I'm reading a book called The Promise of Energy Psychology, which claims that through the stimulation of a sequence of accupressure points, the scenario I just described in the previous paragraph can happen - remember the trauma without the emotions. A person can eliminate phobias, anxiety and post traumatic stress by calling up the memory while interrupting the emotional response of the limbic system by massaging or tapping pressure points. Those with experience in this type of therapy say that the whole procedure takes only a few minutes and the effects are long lasting. People who have been through this type of therapy report that they are still free of their emotional distress even 2 years later.
At first, this seems entirely too good to be true. My first response was to say OF COURSE I want to get rid of the anxiety and depression I experience. OF COURSE, I want to stop feeling the upset whenever I recall particular instances of childhood trauma. I want to stop living with the drive to be perfect and the fear that I'm going to totally mess things up. I know that much of the fear is driven by painful life experiences. What if I could interrupt the emotional response and, thereby, the unhealthy behaviors?
The book gives examples of energy therapy working to relieve phobias. This seems pretty wise to me. And, yet, the book also mentions that people who have been treated for phobias often end up with even less of an emotional response to the object of the phobia than the general population. For example, a person with a fear of heights might eliminate their phobia and then some. Generally, people have some physiological response to heights, keeping them alert and cautious. The book says that the treated person with have less response then most of us but still have a healthy caution. This leads me to 2 questions. First, HOW does the treatment stop at a "healthy caution?" Who defines that? How do we know what degree of caution is healthy? And, second, what if the response of the average person is actually healthy and a certain degree of fear is necessary to keep us safe? Do we really want to deprogram our hard-earned responses that have taught us how to be safe? Of course, phobias are generally unhealthy, and we want a more balanced response, but can we garuntee that this type of therapy automatically stops at a good balance, a healthy place?
The book also gives an example of a woman who was raped by her stepfather at a young age. In one meeting with her energy therapist she went from shaking, flushed, crying, rapid breathing, and over-all very upset to calmly stating that the rape was a long time ago, it didn't have power over her any more, she is old enough to protect herself now, and she is able to protect her own children. Basically she went from very upset to telling herself and her therapist that there was really nothing to be upset about and she's over it now. Two years later the therapist followed up with her, and she still had no emotional response to recalling the rape. She had been able to "move on" with no depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress.
This last story seems ideal on the one hand and scares me to pieces on the other. It doesn't seem right somehow. It seems to take some of the humanity out of the person. We were made to feel. God created us with a limbic system, an emotional response system, with the capacity for love and joy...and pain and sadness. And feelings serve a purpose - to protect us, to teach us, to connect us to others. What happens to a person's compassion if they disconnect or neutralize their emotions related to pain or trauma? I'm entirely in favor a balance and learning to come to a balanced place with emotional responses. I do see how getting lost in the haze of our emotional over-response leads to unhealthy and even destructive choices sometimes. I get that there are sometimes reasons to take medication to balance emotional responses. I understand that brain chemistry is a powerful thing. I'm scared stiff by a therapy that ELIMINATES the negative emotions. How can it do that?
Even considering the possibility that this might be possible brought me to some conclusions that I feel somewhat ambivalent about. I've learned a lot. I guess it upsets me that I had to endure some kind of trauma to come to some profound realizations, but it seems to be the case. I've learned things about God and faith, life, community, families, and even my own capacity for love, joy and sacrifice through the really painful things in my life. And much of the learning has happened through actually feeling the pain. If I had done some energy work to change my emotional response, I'd feel fine, but I wouldn't be the same person I am today. I wouldn't think as hard about things. I wouldn't know the depth that's out there, that's available to me.
And there's something else, too. If I hadn't been wading my way through so many tough emotions, I wouldn't have experienced the love and compassion of my Mango in the same way. I wouldn't know the depth of his love for me. I wouldn't know about love so deep and fierce, so patient and gentle, so persistent and unwavering. I wouldn't know who he really is on the inside. Maybe he learned something, too, about his own capacity for love and sacrifice.
Yes, I think people were made to feel. And nothing about feeling is clean and neat or simple.
I still have a lot of questions. I mean, if God made us with pressure points that change the flow of energy in our bodies and neutralize emotional reactions, maybe there's something valuable to be had there. Maybe it's not so all or nothing as the vibe I'm getting from the book I'm reading. It probably isn't. It's been a journey for me to process this, though...to think about the role that broken and desperately painful emotions have played in my life. I know I haven't experienced the worst pain out there, either, and I wouldn't ever fault anyone for seeking salve for their wounds, balm for their bleeding emotions. Who could find fault with that? I can only say what I say here from the other side, for the most part. More days than not, I'm free from the emotional fallout of painful memories. What if I hadn't found the other side yet? What if no other side was in sight? Ultimately, I am left with more questions that answers.
What would you do?
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