Soul Mosaic

“Your body is the place where heaven and earth meet.”
God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice, Jay Michaelson

For most of my life, my body was not a meeting place with the Universe but a despised battleground. I hated it. It had betrayed me by yielding to pleasure when he abused me. Failed me by fearing him and freezing up.

It had been his tool for his own gratification, so I loathed what he craved. And he had drilled into us that taking time for self-care was a waste of time. Whenever I got sick, right after I threw up, he would tell me to eat so I could hurry up and get better. Bottom line – the body was something to suck dry and make demands on, not take care of.

So for years I just worked it to death, gave it no quarter, and took from it. It didn’t deserve any better in my estimation. I refused to exercise or give it proper ease and care. I demanded that it deliver, be strong, and be there whenever I placed a demand on it. And I showed it no compassion or gentleness.

News flash: In case it isn’t obvious, that attitude has not served me well. I don’t recommend it.

Second news flash: True healing is not just emotional work. It’s body healing, too.

Because so much of the trauma is stored in the body tissues and nervous system, somatic, or body healing, is essential. Psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote the book The Body Keeps the Score, describes trauma and its connection to our bodies:

Painting “me”

Recently, I pulled this painted-up black piece of cardboard off my easel so I could place a new, clean one there. I use these backboards to catch excess paint when I am painting around the sides and bottom of the canvases. It keeps paint from getting all over the place.

As I pulled the board off the easel, my husband stopped me from throwing it away.

I know he has always honored my painting efforts and loves what I paint. And he says he loves watching me paint because when I am engaged in my art, I am in a totally different place emotionally.

So I appreciated his support of my work. But I had to ask him, “Why do you want this backboard?”

He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Of anything you’ve created, THIS one is most ‘you.’ It bears the paint of every single piece of artwork you’ve done, either for the book or to relax with. And so I want it. I don’t care about any of the other paintings. This one I am going to frame and keep.”

You never know how a piece of “art” will touch the soul of another.

To be the pipe

The same is true of this book. As much as I needed to do it to help me, I felt like this book was also the answer to my lifelong question: “Because of what happened, what do I do with it?” It was about something much bigger than just me.

I want to help others who may be in pain. I view this whole writing effort not only as a healing work for me, but as something the Universe was asking me to do for whoever out there needed it.

I like to think of it as if I am the “water pipe.” People need water to live. Without it, they won’t make it. But how do you get water from a lake to their homes? Pipes. Now, the pipe is important, yes, but only in the sense that the pipe makes it possible for the people to get what they need. If all they have is an empty pipe, that’s useless. Ultimately, it is the water that is key to their survival.

When memories and emotions finally decide to burst out from behind their walls of decades-long repression and silence, they aren’t timid or quiet. They scream. Rage and sorrow, heartbreak and despair, loss and trauma are not meek.

Faced with a flood of emotions and hundreds of memories all wanting to be captured on canvas at once, I didn’t try to stop them or direct them. I just got out of their way and listened. At that point, it was not a question of “if,” but “how” to give them their say. And even on that count, they drove the bus and dictated the style choices.

I could pretend that I sat down to purposely and strategically plan the “conceptual, aesthetic, and material choices” of the artistic approach for this book… but that would be a lie. I am the servant of those memories and emotions, and so I follow their directives for how to execute the art.

The decisions for how to do that were made quickly, intuitively, and from within. So let’s consider this post, the “Artist Statement,” for the true drivers of the work: Memory and Emotion.

Those recurring moments in time

The next step I need to make sense of my life is to look for things that “repeat” — objects, metaphors, themes, events. It’s one of the reasons I mind map and journal so much.

When I spread out items on a large sheet of paper and stand back, that’s when I start to notice that certain elements come up again and again. And I spot connections between them.

With regards to my journals, I write in Word docs so I can read my writing better. I keep them in binders by date, and for each entry, I put a sticky note at the top of the page that has a few key words as to the topic.

The other plus to storing my notes in Word is that I can then do a global search of the words on that list to see how many documents they show up in. That lets me see if there are changes in that issue over time, whether it’s progress, a relapse, or some new way they come out in my life.

Periodically, I will flip through my journals, scanning those sticky notes with the topics, and, without fail, I’ll start to see repeating topics and phrases. Then I’ll also go through any folders of scribbled notes I haven’t journaled about yet.

From all of these, I’ll just make a word list of the repeating topics I’ve observed. Those are the precious clues to a truth I haven’t yet figured out. They are pointers to places I need to dig deeper and think about more. The fact that they come up again and again tells me they are “unfinished.”

“Life presents you with a text, but it is your meditation upon that text which gives it meaning and relevance.”
2 Tishrei – Meaningful Meditation – 350 Healing Light Meditations book

The previous post was all about asking questions. Especially the ones that will help me understand, learn, and heal. If I am going to pose questions, there is a rule that has to go with that effort: Honest self-reflection.

Reflections in regular life

Now, before I get into self-reflection as it relates to abuse, let me speak of how I use it in the ordinary places of life. These are the places I look back to see what happened and what insights I can glean.

Reviewing past interactions, I ask myself things like:
What was my part in things?
What choices have I made in that situation, or repeatedly over the years?
Even if my intentions were good, did my actions result in harm?
What could I do differently or better the next time?

And as I look over the choices I’ve made or the decisions I tended to repeat even if they weren’t healthy, I look for:
Emotions I never felt or allowed before
Behavior patterns through life
My stress style when triggered
My thinking style and attitudes
How all of these have affected me…and others

I look hard now into my soul and try to observe everything now. Because there were so many small details about me that I refused to look at or accept. And when you deny a part of yourself, you deny that ultimate place of healing: INTEGRATION – the reuniting of all the broken pieces you lost along the way. How can you be whole if you wall off part of yourself? That is the ultimate self-hating act, and I’ve been guilty of it.

Now, this is not about self-flagellation or declaring me a horrible person. It’s also not about denial or refusing to look myself in the eye in the mirror when asking myself some direct questions. None of us is perfect in life, even when we set out to do the right thing.

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he’s one who asks the right questions.”
Claude Levi-Strauss

Questions, questions, questions….

When people hear of my background, the first and most common questions they ask are:
How did I survive it?
Why did I stay so long?
How did I finally get out?

For that matter, those are three of the big questions I’ve asked myself for years. And that second one in particular, I’ve used as a weapon.

I’ve bludgeoned myself with it, adding in judgment statements to go along with it like: How could I have been so stupid to believe that all his brainwashing was the truth? Or that our house was a loving, generally good one? Or, worst of all, “How could I have been so passive as to stay so long?”

These would then be garnished with another round of “How could I have been so stupid?” So, I doused myself in shame.

I know now that all of that bludgeoning was undeserved self-hate. But it took quite a while to realize that, and to start asking questions that took a hard look at all those years and the facts of how abusive households work.

Questions are key to healing. But it is not just about asking any old questions…but the RIGHT ones. And I’ve learned that the questions are even more important than the actual answers. They are the engines that push you to slog through the mud and fog to find understanding. The questions are the “meat of the work,” what you chew on to digest and get to the nutrition of answers. Before you extract insight, you have to wrestle.

Occasionally, there have been times I already knew the answer but had been either running from it or had just been blind to it. But then, pinned down by a finely focused question that wouldn’t let me off the hook, or one that swiped away the fog, I would finally come face to face with a truth I could no longer avoid.

For all of my life, aside from the above three questions, there has been one other unrelenting one. And no, it’s not: “Why me?” Frankly, that one has never haunted me. The real question dogging me all my life has been:

An escape hatch for trauma

One of the answers to “How did I survive?” was: Moment-to-moment. One second, by one minute, by one hour, by one day. Some days, it was all I could do to just make it to bedtime and have a break from the violence. Never, never, never did I look too far down the road. THAT would have crushed me.

The other crucial item I used during those trauma times was a mental force field that I call “Moments of Respite.” Moments of Respite  were for the many times when my world was being torn apart. They were the pain-relieving medicine that made enduring his torment possible. And they let me shield my nervous system by giving it a momentary distraction.

Moments of Respite were ALWAYS found in the details, whether sensory or physical. Details give the world its special beauty, and beauty is the perfect antidote to horror. Details are life’s adornments that bring order, calm, awe, mystery, and tranquility.

If you question whether overlooked tiny things have such power, consider this. You can draw a circle with a line sticking out of it and call it an apple with a stem. Or you can underpaint the circle with burnt umber, then add successive layers of cadmium red, cinnabar green, some titanium white, and Naples yellow. Suddenly, the depth, intensity, and richness explode on the page, and that image of the apple is like holding an entire world in the palm of your hand. I’ll expand on the apple example at the bottom of this post.

Suffice it to say that in the depths of my abandonment, all of those tiny aspects of life would call out to me. They were like friends racing up in a getaway car and yelling for me to jump in. They taught me to look for the beauty in the smallest of things and to see it no matter how bad the bigger picture was.

Even when I could count on no one or nothing else, the details in those Moments of Respite offered that intricate deeper dimension, right at my fingertips, always available…unlike the people in my life.

Moments of respite were my reminder that, even in the midst of chaos and horror, life possessed infinite little worlds of richness and beauty. They were my steadfast companions, offering sensory retreats — a “breath in between moments” — where my overwrought, throbbing, nervous system could escape and rest. If I focused on them, I could tune him out, even momentarily. And by doing that, I could withstand the next moment’s onslaught.

So, always, Moments of Respite, dosed moment-to-moment. And NEVER think further ahead than that.

What kinds of things am I talking about?