Week 81 - Sitting in the Power

What a Journey!

I am unraveling years and years of fear, anger, trauma and pain! These words are not only an oral representation of huge changes happening within me, they are emotive images, memories, boxed up energy, tornados of loss and pain. I am truly unraveling, and what is reappearing, I trust, is who I really am. I am letting myself out and it is terrifying.

I spent a night listening to sleep story after sleep story, gentle words and images to keep my freaked out brain occupied. It is not terror that keeps me awake. It is body discomfort roiling under my skin because I am allowing myself to feel the rage that I have hidden for years. It is not pleasant.

I have pulled back from so many responsibilities to give myself time to journey on this unraveling path. I make no excuses except that. I need time. I have never heard anyone else taking a journey such as mine, but isn’t what I am doing what usually happens when the passages of years go by and one moves from infancy to toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, adolescence, early adulthood to middle/late adulthood.

In other words, I am claiming my myself, cracking open the stagnated parts of me that were gagged, oppressed, bound by fear and practiced into submission, and breaking out into a discovery of who I am.

It’s astounding. As I reprocess my neural pathways, I am witnessing my coming out in so many ways.  My brain is reclaiming its original neural pathways that I was born with while at the same time releasing the neural pathways that were a reaction to the wounded learnings taught to me by the wounded adults in my life. I am still figuring it out. I am still figuring. I am.

I remember, I need to be gentle with myself. Love my woundedness. Love my rebellious teen. Love my oppressed young adult. Love my anger. Love my confusion. Love my journey. I am still me. I did not disappear. I just waited until the time I was ready to come out.

BE GENTLE WITH YOURSELF by Suzanna de Baca

Be gentle

With yourself

As with a newborn.

Cradle your fragile soul

In your arms

Until you are stronger.

Be gentle

With yourself

As with an egg.

Cup the warm round shell

Of your heart

In the palms of your hands.

While you transport it reverently

To a place of safety.

There is never just one loss.

Despair inhabits the body.

Like being slammed against a wall

Or held under water,

Grief grips you in a chokehold.

Oh, the world may see you as

Invincible

Even brave or fearless or daring.

But there is sorrow so deep

So nameless

It’s shocking that it does not show

On your face

In your gaze

In your gait.

Pain so pervasive

You can smell the pungent

Odor on your own skin.

The delicate and fleeting objects among us

Are often the most beautiful.

They are so easily broken

That attention is demanded.

An iridescent bubble floating in the air

A gossamer spider web stretching between leaves

The vulnerable peony’s

Fragrant and flushed petals

Here and gone

In the blink of an eye

The icy snowflake melting

Like a cool tear on your cheek

The flutter of a butterfly

A floating ash

Be gentle

With yourself.

Rock yourself slowly.

Let the wind come and sooth you

Let the sun warm your face

Until you are stronger.