In the previous post, I spoke of the tools from Buddhism for a proper mindset for this work. I want to elaborate a bit about one of them: “Right attitude.”
The blue breaking through the storm
“I deliberately stress the word “survive” in relation to the stages of recovery. For me, personally, the greatest “Ah-HA!” of the book came in the section where Jen, walking on a beach alone, deals with the possibility that she, herself, is not broken, as she has defined herself throughout her healing practice. ‘Not broken or unbroken: rather, intact and imperfect. Wounded, sore, struggling, scared, funny, hopeful.’“
Jen Cross, from Writing Ourselves Whole
I LOVED this passage when I read it. Her description of herself: HOPEFUL….FUNNY…INTACT AND IMPERFECT….NOT BROKEN. What a powerfully refreshing new view of oneself after trauma.
So many of us view ourselves as broken, dirty, useless, and worthless because of the things that were done to us. We blame, denigrate, and loathe ourselves. And as the final icing on the cake, we see ourselves as broken. That makes it sound like there is no help, no hope, and no point in even trying. Just hang a sign that says, “Damaged beyond repair.”
Yet her statement totally changes the emotional colors of that picture! Instead of a black sky with no crack of light or any hope of a brighter horizon, her description is like those streaks of bright blue peaking out amidst the storm clouds. No, we’re not perfect. But then who is? And maybe we still have so much that is worthwhile. I just love it.
Such a powerful mindset to place in one’s brain when preparing for a difficult journey.
The Nature of Stepping into the Underworld
There is no question that descending into the unfamiliar and uncertain is scary. Who knows what you might find? Just like stepping into a dark, nighttime, dense forest. At any moment, some wild animal may charge before you even see it, and then what do you do?
You use the Right Mind tools you brought with you – focused, calm attention – to react well. The very prize I seek in my own process is hidden in those barely visible paths, and those riches are the very things that I think will help me be reborn when the time is right.
“This is a call to step out into the night, to embrace the winter, to listen closely to the wild silence shimmering through the darkness and see what new things we hear when we release our need to have everything figured out….“
Christine Valters Painter from A Midwinter God
So how does this apply to lowly, human, hurting me?
No question, this all sounds very high-minded, especially when pain is swamping every body fiber. But for me, it was that very pain, pain I could no longer run from, ignore, or wait for it to go away on its own, that brought me to my knees. It was exactly that overwhelming pain that made me willing to let go and try something totally different.
For me, when the emotional pain became that bad, life had a way of stripping away any other tools I would think to try, leaving me only with the ones deepest in my own heart. It’s that moment of, I surrender. I can’t stand it anymore, so do with me what you will and show me what it is I haven’t been seeing. When I’ve tried everything else I can think of, and it’s not working, I finally just shut up, sit down, and listen.
Painter adds:
“By staying present to the discomfort of life, we grow in our resilience and our ability to recover from the deep wounds that life will offer us again and again. We grow in our compassion for ourselves as we learn to embrace all of the vulnerable places within.”
Self-compassion was NEVER something I gave to myself. I didn’t think I deserved it.
And embracing vulnerability? I would rather have taken poison. Growing up in my house, the last thing I’d ever risk was “being vulnerable.” And besides, I would have been mocked as weak if I did that. But now, this far into my therapy work, I was ready. It was the “Right Time.”
The God of wildness
Now I can’t promise that any of this will work for anyone else. And for sure, I would strongly recommend doing this work with a therapist or skilled spiritual counselor. It is an intense path.
But, at least for me, these instructions resonated with something inside of me. So I kept going. It was like I heard the call of some previous traveler on this path, urging me to hang on, and strangely, it gave me hope.
Painter spoke of a “God of wildness who calls us beyond our edges to a landscape where we might discover a passion and vitality we never knew we could experience…” In that imagery, she had me.
I am a bit of a dreamer and a gambler in life. If something looks like a reasonable risk, I will consider it. And her metaphor seemed exactly right. When you decide to stop “forcing your control on things” and let go to a higher, unseen power, it feels like you are “going wild.” But sometimes, stepping into that seemingly impenetrable, nighttime forest is exactly what is needed to find your way.
“When we try to change or control what is happening, we are sidestepping the transformation that is possible…we must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer.” (Painter X)
It was TIME
So, when I read her passage, I thought, Well. I’m not doing so well on my own. What have I got to lose by trying? I went to my counselor and said…“Remember that EMDR tool we tried to use eight years ago, and I reacted so badly to it, too? I want to try it again.”
She was cautious. It is a powerful tool. She asked me why and what I thought it might accomplish. But she didn’t stop me. She honored my gut sense in this, and she also knew I had made a lot of progress over those years.
So we made plans to begin deeper work using EMDR, and approached it very slowly and carefully. I knew we could stop it at any point, but I had a sense this time, it was exactly the right thing. And I’d had enough of sitting in the pain. I wanted to try a new way.
I will write more soon about my experiences with that and the other therapy tools we used during this time. For now, I’ll just say that, yes, I was scared. But I trusted both my therapist and myself, and the timing…and I wasn’t wrong.
The tonic of the wilderness…
When I read Painter’s words about that God of wildness, part of me wondered if they were a message from the Universe. They reminded me of an essay hanging on my wall, written by Henry David Thoreau. He was a 19th-century writer who spent a year living alone in a forest cabin, writing his book, Walden. I always fantasized about living that kind of life myself.
Anyway, I have always found walks in nature to be soothing and helpful when I need new insights — nature, another way of stepping into that “wildness.” Interesting how the wildness outside can help tap into the “wildness within.”
So, this essay from the book, called “The Wilderness,” just seemed to match what Painter wrote and what I needed to hear:
“We need the tonic of the wildness, to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features….We need to witness our own limits transgressed and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”
So, I will trust the God of wildness. I know I need my limits transgressed by something or someone more wise and powerful than me.
It’s like the Greek word, hupomone, which basically tells us to stay with whatever is happening….
On to the other tools for entering the Underworld.
Soul Mosaic 
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