Author: Holly Mae Haddock

Categories
Creativity Corner

Growing a Thicker Skin: Art Therapy for Boundaries

Art as Medicine

As the inspiring author Shaun McNiff explores in his work, art has the potential to create energetic medicine

Within our own psyches, we can find, dream up, and fashion antidotes for what has stung us. No matter what the poison, we are capable of finding a personal, home-made cure, that starts in our imaginations and then comes into “the real world”, where we need the cure.

Art Therapy for Boundaries: Create A Skin for Your Soul

Today we’re going to play with how to create an energetic medicinal for the topic of “holding”, which relates to our struggles with boundaries. This technique is offered in answer to the question, “How we can have a strong, resilient identity in the world?” Through better boundaries!

The goal of any human being is to be our true Core Essence in this world. That means expressing the beautiful specificities of who we are, sharing our love with others, and having transformational experiences in this physical world.

To be able to do this, we need to have a strong enough “container” for our Core Essence. Container is just what it sounds like, a place for our Core Essence to be. A good container keeps wanted stuff in and keeps unwanted stuff out. Our Core Essence ideally has something to hold and protect it – an energetic boundary. 

It’s Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood

In best case scenarios, babies are given time to develop their psychological skin in part through being held, which gives the somatic experience of being contained in a safe way.

“Held in a safe way” means receiving attuned warmth, comfort, nurturing and togetherness, but not being intruded upon or used by another. It also means being appropriately protected from threats to our being.

Appropriate holding is an essential experience that many of us did not quite have, and our core wounding will match what we experienced as babies. Perhaps we were not nourished and held enough, or perhaps we were intruded upon and hurt (and often it’s both).

The Art Therapy Medicinal To Help Hold Your Core Essence

The Art Cure for holding/boundaries trouble is to draw Core Essence being held within a larger, positive container, so that we are discretely contained in big, beautiful, loving, safe, soothing energies.

Materials: 

  • Colored Pencils or Markers
  • Paper of any size 

Three Steps to a Cure: Draw Your Energy Being Held

  1. Draw a large oval shape that fills up most of your paper. This large oval is your personal bubble, your auric egg, your kinesphere, or your human bioenergetic field – however you like to think of it. It maps to the space immediately around you, within a couple of feet in any direction of your physical body.
  2. Draw a smaller sketch of your physical body, fully inside the oval. Pay attention to how you feel while you’re doing this, and make sure that the size relationship between the smaller body and the larger egg feels generally right to you. Allow yourself to change or redraw your egg until you feel satisfied and safe when you look at it.
  3. Color the larger oval shape in with nice colors and patterns, only good things. Allow yourself to free-draw, using qualities, shapes and expressive lines that feel soothing and nice to you. 
  4. Spend some time defining the shell of the egg itself. What colors are there? What kind of materials does the shell boundary want to be made of? Is it thin and gauzy, or perhaps thick and gold-plated? You can make it be however feels right for today.
  5. Finally, if you want to, identify a few things that belong outside of your egg shell. For example, you might write things down like “other people’s judgements of who I am” or “work stress” – anything that you would like to decide does not belong inside your personal being at this time.  

You may experience first that you don’t like how it looks – the eggshell is too thin, too dark & heavy, lopsided or the wrong shape. If you sense that, fantastic! 

That dissatisfaction is your psyche telling you something about what happened to you, and I promise, whatever it is, it’s common enough. The picture of what was wrong is also the seed of what the solution is, so use the wonky egg you drew first as a reference to make a second, better egg that shows what you actually want and need to feel good. 

The process of caring and investigating in this way is important in and of itself. This way you say, Hi soul, I know you needed to be held and contained in a loving way, and I can do that now. 

May it be healing & helpful.

Categories
Modern Love Letters to the 12 Steps

Dear Surrender: A Modern Love Letter to the Third Step

This post is part of a series of modern love letters to the 12 Steps. To start at the very beginning, read To Whom We Owe Our Recovery: Modern Love Letters to the Twelve Steps.

In Step One we acknowledge our powerlessness over addiction. In Step Two we find hope of a cure in a loving, personal relationship with a Higher Power. 

But the Steps don’t leave us there, so close to the bottom of the stairway to heaven! This is just the beginning. Onward, dear friends, to Step Three, in which we recover the right to surrender.

Surrender is a Decision

Dear Step Three, you read as follows: 

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God”. 

Step Three, my friend, you are a daily practice. You are a relief, a perennial, a returning. A vow to renew and refresh every day. An orientation, a way of approaching life. 

Step Three, you are a voluntary decision, a free will choice. You are the determination that in any given matter, God will be the ultimate decider. 

My Life will be Directed by Source

Yes, that’s right. God, aka Source, Spirit, the Universe, Higher Power, All That Is, the Benevolent Heart of Creation, will decide. God is my authority, to whom I defer. 

Regardless of the wild chaos of desires, conflicts, pain, and confusion that may bloom inside my heartspace on any given day, through the cacophony, I will hold out for the clean clear tones of Your music.   

Healing the Power of Will

Step Three, you teach us to turn two things over to the Highest and Best within us. The first is our broken, ineffective willpower. 

Like dropping our willpower off at the emergency room of spirit, Step Three, with you we say Ok, God, I don’t know what to do to cure and fix this hurting, aching will. Please take it out of my hands, repair and restore it.

The second thing you teach us to turn over, dear Step Three, is our lives themselves. What they look like from the outside, and what they feel like from the inside.

Step Three and Manifestation

The word will is related to an older version of the word, equivalent to the meaning currently mapped to the word want. Our will represents our desire, what we’re after, what we’re trying to experience. And it is a predictive statement – declaring intentions for what our future will be.  

What does it mean when we acknowledge that addiction captivated our will? That our willpower was no longer free and clear from a negative, controlling influence? 

It means that the very machinery of manifestation, the way we out-pictured our lives, was in the hands of something that was not on our side. 

Addiction only ever serves itself, as everyone knows.

Surrender is a Practical Practice

When our will isn’t free, we are not successful at manifestation. Our will must be solidly, securely surrendered into the hands of our Highest Self, for it to work in a way that co-creates what we actually, deeply wish to experience in the out-there world. 

It follows naturally, therefore, Step Three, that we surrender also the results of our lives. Who we are, how we are, what other people think of us, what our work in the world will ultimately be, the highest path and purpose of us, how we embody and inhabit this earthly plane – all of this belongs to God, when we insist that it does. 

Step Three, thank you for assisting with this process, for helping to lay the groundwork of a deep and practical form of surrender, in which we rise each day to receive direction from that which is best within and around us. 

Taking Our Will Back during Times of Forgetting

Step Three, you know as well as I do that the call of self-will can come knocking on any given day. It is triggered any time I meet suffering, and my trust in God isn’t robust enough. 

When I go into that fear and doubt, that maybe there is no God, or maybe God is there but doesn’t care about me personally, or God doesn’t love me, (otherwise why all this pain?)… Another round on the wheel of samsara.

In these ways, Step Three, it is my weakness to map onto God those other authorities whom I met in my early childhood. I confuse Source with parents, teachers, bosses who at different stages in my life, seemed to have a superior understanding, control, and power to impact the circumstances of my life. 

Hence the need to decide, again and again. To remember who Source really is, which face of God I am choosing to serve and receive love from. I choose the unconditional, loving, wonderful Source, the deep Who, full of heart, heavenliness and power.

A Determination of How Life will Be

Step Three, you dispel the lie that all we can do is be alone and unloved, that our abuse patterns are all we can ask or hope for in this life. What makes that no longer true, anymore, is this instantaneous, daily, forever-now, always fresh decision. 

To say, what has come before will not once again come to pass, because this time, I will be with God, and my life will be the proof of that difference. 

Much love, 

Me 

Categories
Creativity Corner

Gratitude Cornucopia: Art Therapy for Feeling Plentiful

The Attitude that Shifts Our Mood

Gratitude famously changes our mood in an instant. When we’re able to allow ourselves to recognize what we already have that we dearly appreciate, something opens up in us. The body relaxes, the heart blooms, and good feelings flow. 

It really is that simple – that’s why an Attitude of Gratitude is good for recovery, not because being grateful makes us a better person than someone who isn’t grateful, but because gratitude feels good from the inside. 

Gratitude lists are among the top tools for people in recovery for a reason. But why stop at lists? There are many ways to spend extra time experiencing the benefits of gratitude. We can make music, draw pictures, express our gratitude out loud to ourselves and to each other, in the moment. We can make gratitude deeper and richer by deliberately spending more time in that space. 

Receiving Graciously

I have a friend who loves to eat a good meal, and it is a pleasure to make him dinner, for that reason. Since he enjoys being fed, I feed him more. I believe Spirit works the same way – if we enjoy the gifts that Spirit sends us, then Spirit will be pleased and send us even more gifts, because it feels good to give when someone lets you give to them. 

The recognition of receiving the gift requires awareness of it – that somebody or something is right here with us, giving us a gift, be that gift physical health in the body, a breath of fresh air, the gift of attention, or a little bit of beauty. 

How might we be better receivers of what Spirit wants to give us? Through recognition and attention of all the ways that spirit is trying to gift us! We need, essentially, to say thank you. 

Gratitude Season

As Thanksgiving draws near, we have the invitation to explore feelings of gratitude. One symbol of plenty is the Cornucopia, also known as the Horn of Plenty. In antiquity, the horn of plenty of represented connection to the divine, through which abundance can always reach us. 

Rather than sealed off in our own world, untouched by the divinity from which we originally sprang, we always have openings and connection points where abundance can bubble up from what lies underneath us all. 

Express Your Thanks By Visualizing Your Abundance: Gratitude Cornucopia

This art therapy exercise is a way to play creatively with your feelings of gratitude and abundance. You will draw a cornucopia to hold all that you are grateful for. 

Materials: 

Paper (the larger the better) & something to draw with. This exercise will work with just a pencil, but will probably be more fun with some colors, so see what you have that you can bring in. Alternatively, you can do this exercise as a collage if you have access to some inspiring images you can cut up (from a magazine or printed off the web).  

Step One: Writing Exercise Warm Up

Brainstorm on the following questions. The suggestion is 12 answers to each of the following prompts. I like the number 12 in part because it is big enough that we may get stumped part way through, and have to push ourselves to think of something out of that void of stuckness, and then we’re pleasantly surprised. 

What comes after the blankness of I don’t know what to say now is often the most interesting thing of all, because it is something fresh and unconsidered (until now). So don’t worry if there are some pauses or feelings of temporary nothingness in your process. From that place of pause, the next thing will be summoned up and will arrive on cue. 

Good Things In My Life Inventory

Find 12 answers to each of the following prompts. 

I have enough…

I have plenty of…

I have a glorious abundance of…

I am undeniably rich in…

Step Two: Draw A Cornucopia

Draw at least one (but make as many as you like) cornucopias, then fill them with symbols, representations, and/or words naming all the things you have, referring to your lists for inspiration. 

If you don’t want to use the horn shape, you can also draw a basket or Thanksgiving table instead. The more important part of the exercise is to take time to represent all the good things you have enough of. 

Step 3: Look at it Daily 

Place your image somewhere visible and look at it throughout the month of November, to remind yourself of all that you already have. 

Blessings & have fun!

Categories
Creativity Corner

Music Therapy for Manifestation: Wouldn’t It Be Nice?

Wishes are Seeds

While they don’t always come true in the timeline we might prefer, our wishes for a better life and a better world are important pieces of our true life direction. They’re clues to who we are in our deepest nature, as well as what our gifts and struggles are.

Each wish is a fertile seed that could someday grow into a fully flowered living manifestation if it is truly in alignment with life and if circumstances are supportive for this particular wish to grow. Wishes are sacred material.

Try Wishing and See What Happens

There’s only one way to find out whether our wishes will make it in this world, and that is to try planting them and see what happens! By planting them, I mean give them a chance, nurture them and do our best to help them succeed. 

As someone who knows a lot about protecting my heart for fear of further disappointment and pain, I know how hard this is! It can sometimes seem easier to hide our wishes away.

It’s not an easy ask, to fully commit to help a wish on its way, knowing there’s no guaranteed outcome, only a journey. 

But it is, also, in all honesty, fun to wish. So even if that’s all it is, a little fun making up wishes…it’s worth a go! How about we try it and see what happens?

This exercise plays with the wonderful Beach Boys song, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”

Write Your Own Version of Wouldn’t It Be Nice by the Beach Boys

Step One: Gather Your Wishes

Set a timer for 7 minutes and start journaling in a freewrite style, starting every sentence with “Wouldn’t It Be Nice if…”

Like this:

Wouldn’t it be nice if I owned my own house. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if I had a nice stand-up bass guitar. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could go to New Zealand.

Step Two: Identify Why You Want those Things

In the original song, Brian Wilson sings, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older? Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long.” So he expresses his wish as well as why exactly he wants that wish to be true. 

So with your wishes, the second step is to add a follow up line that explains the payoff. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if I lived out in the country? Then I could wake up each day listening to nature’s sounds, like the sound of wind rustling in pines. 

Use lots of sensory details to make your wishes rich and juicy!

Step Three: Turn Your Wishes into Lyrics

Looking over what you write, highlight and underline any lines you particularly like for any reason, that seem like they might be fun to play around with as song lyrics.

Now take a look at the structure of the original song now, begin to rewrite it for yourself, to express your own dreamy wishes. 

Follow the rhythm and format of the language as much or as little as you choose, and do not force yourself to rhyme unless you enjoy rhyming. If on the other hand you do enjoy rhyming, you might want to avail yourself of a rhyming dictionary such as this one: https://www.rhymezone.com/

Here are the original lyrics for you to change up. 

Wouldn’t It Be Nice
by The Beach Boys

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long 

And wouldn’t it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong

You know it’s gonna make it that much better
When we can say goodnight and stay together

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wake up
In the morning when the day is new?
And after having spent the day together
Hold each other close the whole night through

Happy times together we’ve been spending
I wish that every kiss was never ending
Wouldn’t it be nice?

Maybe if we think, and wish, and hope, and pray
It might come true
Baby, then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do
We could be married
And then we’d be happy 

Wouldn’t it be nice?

You know it seems the more we talk about it
It only makes it worse to live without it
But let’s talk about it
Wouldn’t it be nice?

Good night my baby
Sleep tight my baby 

Step Four: Sing Your Wishes!

Now that you have your lyrics, sing your version of the song. Singing your wishes is a powerful way to make them more likely to come true for you, as you flesh them out with breath, consciousness, and aliveness! Wishes, just like babies, love music and singing.

There are several ways to sing your song, depending how deep you want to go. One way is to just sing it a cappella, (without any musical accompaniment). 

Another way is to sing it along to a karaoke backing track, such as this one: 

https://open.spotify.com/track/0HRwuSDDmxTwXOHjiHX0aN?si=96354ac4a9f44b5d

Maybe you’d even like to learn the song, if you play an instrument. 

Here are the guitar chords and tab:

https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/the-beach-boys/wouldnt-it-be-nice-chords-16805

There are many piano sheet music versions available online, as well as video tutorials. 

Finally, the Beach Boys are known for their amazing harmonies – maybe you even want to try multitrack recording and making harmonies of your own? 

Whichever way you choose, sing your wishes song, and remember, since this song is now yours, there’s really no wrong way to sing it. You get to make it all up, changing even the melody and the chords if you so choose. Songwriters reinterpret each other’s songs all the time, sometimes almost unrecognizably changing them. You are, in other words, free to do whatever you want to do here.  

Happy singing and happy wishing!

Categories
Trauma

Recognizing when Your Trauma is Triggered (And What to Do About It)!

Recognizing the Trauma Response

For those of us with trauma baked into our life experiences, it can be an accomplishment in and of itself just to learn to recognize when our trauma is triggered, and when it’s not.

It’s important to learn to recognize both states and the transitions between them, as this will gradually teach us how to more consciously choose which state to be in. 

Basic Bodily Happiness

When not currently in an emergency, our bodies will orient naturally towards feeling good (relaxed, comfortable, alert).

When I say our bodies feel good, I don’t mean high or with activated, intense sensations of pleasure, per se, as we might be used to from our addiction patterns, but something more like the pleasant neutrality. 

The body is basically happy to be alive, unless we’re currently in an emergency OR thinking over past events in such a way that it feels like that emergency is still happening now, even though it’s actually over. 

This is a clue to check with your body – if you’re starting to feel bad in your body, it might be your trauma. But let’s start with focusing on feeling good in our bodies.

Basic Bodily Happiness

The following exercise can help you explore how much basic happiness exists in your body in the times in between trauma-reactivation episodes.

Journal: 12 Tiny Body Happinesses

Identify 12 subtle tactile, physical body sensations that are neutral or mildly pleasurable at the body level, that you have enjoyed recently. Spend a little time describing each one.

Here’s one from me:

  1. This morning I woke up early and noticed that I felt a little chilly, and then I pulled the covers over my shoulders, which felt comforting and good. I felt warm and safe.

Look for easy wins: when you’re in the shower, when you drank your morning coffee, or when you splashed your face with pleasantly cool water. It’s the little things! It can be helpful to go through each of the 5 senses and identify pleasant things in each category. 

My body likes the sound of rain on the roof. My body likes the scent of new marigolds.

Feeling Bad is a Clue

Unless you are currently in a life-threatening emergency your body “should” not be responding to life as though you are. If, technically speaking, your life is not at stake, but any of the following apply, you may be re-experiencing your trauma energies that actually belong to a previous event, but are coming up for witness now:

  1. You feel very, very bad, such that you feel like you have to change something right away or else it feels you’ll die
  2. Body is having a strong physical reaction, such as not being able to breathe, feeling mobilized like you need to move physically OR that you’re feeling numb and shut down (a little like a sort of quicksandy feeling)
  3. Your thoughts are noticeably activated, perhaps speedy or especially negative, it’s hard to think clearly, or suddenly especially foggy

Trauma is basically leftover physical body reactions from past situations that we did in fact survive, but we didn’t have a chance to fully process. If you’re not dying but you feel like you are or you might if you don’t take immediate action, that’s most likely your trauma. 

What to Do if Triggered: Help the Body Return to Safety (without Substances)

If you recognize that your trauma is triggered, do your very best, with a lot of compassion and gentleness, to help your body return to feelings of safety. Do this by creating mild, neutral, pleasant feelings in the body (such as by deliberately creating some of the sensations on your Basic Bodily Happiness list).

It can be helpful to think about babies and what they need when they’re upset. They need to be responded to, held, soothed, sometimes rocked. Body needs the same thing and will respond to such things. 

Practice These Tools

  1. Hold Yourself and use the Mantra “I Am Safe”

Create a strong embrace around your torso, by lifting your left arm up, placing your right hand on your left rib cage, folding your left arm back over that right hand, and then letting your left hand cross to the right side of your body where it can fall comfortably on your right arm below your right shoulder. 

This is a lot like crossing your arms, except your right hand is directly on your ribs close to your heart on the left side. 

Adjust for comfort, but you should feel firmly held. While hugging yourself this way, repeat out loud or in your head, “One, I-am-safe, Two, I-am-Safe, Three I-am-Safe”…all the way to the number sixty. Breathe and let yourself feel your own hug.

  1. Hold Each Finger One by One

In this technique, you hold each of your ten fingers one by one, this time taking three breaths with each finger. 

Wrap the fingers of the right hand over the left thumb and feel what that’s like, breathe slowly and as naturally as possible, but with zero judgment about the quality of those breaths, three times, then move on to your left index finger, and so on. When you get to the right hand, you’ll use your left hand to hold your fingers. 

  1. Lay Hands on Your Activated Body Sections

Finally, you can try placing your hands over places where you notice sensations of activation. These tend to be head, chest, heart, neck, and belly, but can sometimes include legs and back too. Wherever you’re feeling the discomfort, place your hands there and just keep them still, allowing warmth and sensation to seep into the part of your body that’s unhappy right now. 

If you do these three exercises repeatedly, your trauma activation will have a good chance of exiting your body system. But even if you aren’t fully successful in soothing yourself in the moment, you can trust that sooner or later your body will return to a non-traumatized state, so it’s mostly about getting through the activated episode somehow, someway, without using. You can do it, sister. 

Categories
Recovery

Falcon Perspective: Watching Thoughts

The Power of Working with Thought

On the variable, exciting terrain of the recovery journey, it is often helpful to address the role of thoughts in our addiction. 

As the AA term “stinkin’ thinkin’” acknowledges, thoughts are deeply involved in why we used substances in the first place and are connected to both relapse and recovery. Thoughts are also thoroughly enmeshed with the profound psychological and existential pain that, until healed, sets us up to desperately seek relief in something outside of ourselves. 

That’s why Villa Kali Ma practitioners help recovering women integrate tools, insight and wisdom from therapeutic modalities like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. These effective therapeutic approaches are resources for addressing the way that thoughts impact us for good and for ill as we make our way along our hero’s journey. 

Do You Agree with Your Thoughts?

We have millions of pain-creating thoughts on any given day. Most of them are not originally ours. 

The reason these thoughts are echoing around our psyche’s innermost caves, creating pain and misery for us and others, is not because we ourselves forged those thoughts from insight and experience, as fresh conclusions of our own. 

Rather, they are usually inherited or learned, absorbed from the environment and programmed by culture. We are not born with a lot of negativity. We have to be taught to think bad things about ourselves and our world. 

When we realize that we have some choice in the matter, of which of all those thoughts we choose to now endorse and approve of, which ones we agree to, things can change quite a bit for us. 

We might not be able to instantly clear our heads, but we can at least say “I see you, thought, but I do not actually agree with this line of thinking.” This little bit of disagreement makes all the difference in the world.

The Falcon’s Perspective

Imagine a beautiful, benevolent, protective falcon who is your spirit friend, perched on the highest branch of a very tall tree, comfortably looking down on you in your world. Take a few minutes to picture this handsome bird in all its splendor. 

Now try on your falcon friend’s perspective, imagining all that can be seen down below. See your current self down there on the ground, in whatever your present circumstances are. 

What do you notice? What is it like to see your world from above? 

Shifting Focus

Now practice shifting back and forth from the two perspectives – first yours, on the ground, in the midst of it all, now the falcon’s. 

Falcons have magnificent eyesight, made for detecting the tiniest of movements. They can see all the sorrows and joys of life with exquisite detail. Without being involved in the scene, they can wait patiently, wings folded, simply observing.

What if you could take your falcon friend’s view of your own daily troubles and struggles more often? Could you take a more neutral, balanced, precise, kind, accurate, and discerning higher view? What if you could wait unhurriedly, absorbing all the facts and information needed to fully understand and assess, before deciding on what it all means in the bigger picture of your life?

Seeing a Bigger Picture

Journal time! To try out the friendly falcon’s perspective a bit further right now, think of a situation in your life that you are having painful thoughts and feelings about. Perhaps this situation causes you some turmoil and tumult, or is making you feel down on yourself. 

Taking your falcon friend’s view, ask yourself the following questions:

What are all the factors are contributing to this situation being in my life right now?
What hidden explanations, or wider deeper contexts could be the case, and I wouldn’t know just because of my current vantage point?
What wonderful surprises could be revealed in due time?
What is the meaning am I giving to this situation?
Do I like that interpretation?
Is that meaning a fact or more like a feeling or opinion?
What is the benefit to me of looking at the situation that way?
How might others see the same situation?
Is there another way of framing this that I like better?
What would a happy-go-lucky person make of this same situation?
How important is this situation?
How important  or will it be a few months from now?
What about a year from now? Three years? Ten years?
Is there anything I could do or focus my energy on right now, that would feel like a positive shift away from this trouble zone? 

Categories
Spirituality

3 Tips for Experiencing the Gifts of Surrender

The One thing We Have to do to Recover

There is only one thing we have to do to recover – develop a loving, personal, close relationship with our Higher Power. 

On the strength of our relationship with our Higher Power, we can do the impossible. Our Higher Power can always intercede on our behalf, often bringing quite creative, elegant solutions to our problems. 

We can’t avoid the human tasks we have in front of us – to grow up, to face our pain, to embody who we’re here to be – but God can help us every step of the way.

What’s in a Name?

If the word God doesn’t sit well, that’s ok. Trust that. There are good reasons for the struggles we have with that word. 

Still, per Shakespeare, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name will smell as sweet.” 

Our recovery is not in our relationship to a word, but in our relationship to the ineffable, huge, loving, humorous, creative, sweet, incandescent, indescribable Presence that lives within us all, which this word, “God,” tries to encapsulate. 

We can call God something else, whatever helps us best summon up our own Wonderful, Loving, Everywhere-All-At-Once Beingness. 

Why Go to Rehab?

If all we need is God, why go to rehab and therapy? In a nutshell, it’s because surrendering to the divinity inside of us, simple as it sounds, is really hard to do for many of us. 

We have been trained since birth to clench up, resist, avoid, and fight. We’ve been shown through experience and social programming that this is a dog-eat-dog world, where we must exert our will, often over others, or else we’ll be hurt.

Our Higher Power will not hurt us like the wounded humans around us do. But it can take a while to learn how to relate to anybody without the expectation that we will be abused if we let them in.  

On the flip side we have been encouraged by our backwards society to surrender to pleasure, to satiation, to materiality, to distraction. 

We very much have not been encouraged to find the place in between, where we are present and conscious of our pain, but also connected to support. 

The Benefits of Rehab on the Path to Surrender

We go to rehab and we get help from practitioners, guides, experiencers, and professionals because clearing the obstacles, traumas, and complications that make such an undertaking the hardest thing in the world takes all the help we can get. 

Learning to surrender means unlearning everything else we’ve been taught to do, which is to block out God and instead live by our fear of death, in a perennial search for lower-needs gratification.

We get help from rehab and therapists so that we can be restored to our true nature, scrape away and purge out all that’s falsely corrupted inside of us, and get to at last be the original, divine child we were born to be. 

3 Tips for Surrendering

If you’re in the situation where you need to surrender your will and your life to God, somehow some way, because your recovery is on the line, the following 3 Tips might be helpful for you.

  1. Personalize Your Higher Power

It’s important to know that God has infinite faces, and doesn’t mind if you call God a he or a she, think of it as a receptive force like the Tao or an active force like the Sun, as the Egyptians did. However you think of Higher Power, it will not be Higher Power’s totality anyway. So don’t worry about getting it all right, it’s impossible for us to know all of Higher Power. Whichever face of God makes you feel like you can relax, feel safe, and believe in goodness and a plan for your life, is the right one for you.

  1. Tell Your Higher Power All About It

Start telling your Higher Power about everything you’re experiencing, good bad and ugly. Unlike many of our wounded brother and sister humans, God is completely ok hearing the entire spectrum and intensity of human experiences, including rage, complaining, victim feelings, outrage, devastation, and so on. This is the start of the dialogue. When you talk truthfully about what you’re feeling, God listens (and eventually answers, too). But for now, just talk. Do this either out loud or in written form.

  1. Experiment with Surrender Little By Little

When you’re ready, start giving topics to God, telling God, “Ok, God, you’ve got that topic.” Trust in this matter is built over time, as you will learn that God has your back, understands the problem, and is coming up with a solution that will arrive in the exact right moment, when we actually need the solution. Before we see through our own experiences that our Higher Power is indeed trustworthy, there will be many false starts and times of confusion and disappointment, but we should keep going. Because at some point we will benefit from all the time and energy we put into this relationship, at which point it will become a truly helpful aspect of our lives. 

Categories
Therapy

Parts Work and Psyche: Giving Voice to Pieces of the Oneness

A Path to Inner Unity

Internal Family Systems, also known as Parts Work, is a notably effective approach for dealing with addiction and trauma, that’s why Villa Kali Ma has embraced it to help women recover.

The overall effect of Parts Work is to unify our insides, so that all the various sides of us feel welcomed and loved. This state of inner self-reunion causes the need for addiction as a pain-modulator to go away. 

Collective Psyche

Psyche is our aliveness, what inside of us feels, wants and imagines. Our psyche gives life flavor, depth, intensity, and is what makes life worth living. 

To psychologists, psyche is transcendent – it infuses absolutely everything in this world, not only our insides but also what we experience “out there”. Everything within us is mirrored outside of us, and everything outside of us also reflects and corresponds to something inside.  

The Broken Teapot

If you imagine that in our original nature we were once whole, all unified and aware of that, then we can see that psyche has been shattered or fragmented, much like a teapot that fell to the ground. We want to gather up all the pieces, and not throw any of them away, because we need everything for putting psyche back together again.   

In Parts Work all sides of psyche, inside or outside of us, are recognized and included as family members. Loved for who they are, embraced, listened to, valued and honored as important. 

Dignity is granted to Parts who have lived long in the shadows, those aspects of our nature that have been devalued by ourselves and others. There is, therefore, a huge work of redeeming, reclaiming, recognizing, retrieving, and repairing. 

Understanding Shadow Pieces

Parts Work assumes that each Part has good intentions, and that even the worst of our bad behavior makes sense when seen with compassion and understanding for what that lonely fragment of psyche is trying to do. 

If a Part is doing something that we find strange or extreme, then we must look to what it is that  piece of psyche is trying to accomplish, as well as what exactly it has to work around.

If we look with compassion and a readiness to validate the legitimacy of the barriers, that there must be a restriction or a blockage or an entanglement or entrapment going on, if psyche is not healthy or balanced, and we intend to help unblock psyche’s path, much can be accomplished as we assist psyche to succeed. 

Broken and Whole at the Same Time

One thing that people sometimes wonder, is whether the brokenness of psyche is good or bad. It is certainly painful, especially when Parts are severely disconnected inside and outside of us. 

But our individuation is also what gives rise to the diversity of our perspectives, so it is very enriching for psyche, too. Even though the eventual goal is reunification, we should not think of the brokenness as only bad. 

Just as when you close your eyes to listen to music, restrictions can be enriching. They often lead to greater creativity in our responses. 

Psyche will grow and develop based on these many different points of view, and undergo many transformations. She will synthesize her experiences, and then forge new points of view based on that synthesis. For all of these curiosities, being separated is temporarily helpful. 

We are both broken and whole at the same time. Rather than trying to sidestep the existential fact of psyche’s brokenness, we can learn to be both the differentiated droplet and the ocean water too. 

Journal Prompt: Give Parts A Voice

One thing we know for sure is that each Part has a story to tell. Each Part longs, like any other human, to be recognized, loved, known, and acknowledged for their hard work. They will welcome any attention and time we can give them. 

Next time you’re aware of a Part, of yourself, another person, or your world, ask it to tell you its story. If you’re willing to listen curiously and compassionately, it will have a lot to say!

Hi dear Part, I see you and I am curious about you. I wonder if you would like to tell me about yourself? 

Suggestions for Parts to dialogue with: 

-A Part of nature, such as Rain

-A Part of your personal psyche, such as Your Creativity

-A little object in your world that you like, such as Half-Eroded Seashell I Found

May your explorations be satisfying!

Categories
Recovery

Easy (not Ego) Does It

Ego is A Bit Extra

The AA slogan Easy Does It is one of my favorites. For those of us used to the forceful, bombastic energies of life under addiction, the entire concept of ease-centered daily little actions can be utterly foreign at first.  

In essence, Easy Does It reminds us that most of the time, less is more. When it comes to the application of personal willpower to some situation we’re facing, that is almost certainly the case. 

If we’re feeling all fired up with an urgent desire to act, it’s a good idea to stop and check with Higher Power, because urgency and intensity might be a sign that it’s not God’s action we’re considering, but perhaps our ego’s. 

That’s because it’s a signature energy of ego, especially with addiction powering up the engine, to overdo things. Ego is, as the young folks say, “a bit extra”.  

Have A Lighter Hand

In normal parlance, Easy Does It means have a light hand. Don’t push, don’t shoehorn. Don’t come at your recovery with mega intense energy. Try to be light, to relax. Approach with softness and ease. 

I had to be taught not to bang loudly and obnoxiously at my recovery, and to understand that recovery and psyche need sensitivity and lightness.

I was with my toddler nephew recently, trying to show him how to touch a guitar, since his go-to instinct was to pull at the strings, tweak the pegs and thump on it. I found myself saying “Easy, honey, easy, be soft, be gentle” and trying to show him what a feathery, light touch is. 

Some of us, like me, need to learn to how to touch our recovery like it’s a delicate, precious instrument which, if treated well, will help us make beauty in our lives.

Touch Your Recovery With a Feather

The late Chogyam Trungpa is credited with saying that when sitting in meditation, you should acknowledge your thoughts with the gentleness of a feather touching a bubble. This is a lovely image of the attitude to have towards recovery, too. 

Could we be that soft, that attuned, that patient and quiet as we orient ourselves towards healing? 

Easy Does It also tells us to focus on what feels easy enough that we can actually do it right now, versus getting all tied up in emotional knots about what’s momentarily unapproachable. 

Easy Accomplishes It

There are definitely times when we have to take courageous action, but on the other hand many of us have been trained to think that what works is pushing, insisting, powering through, overriding, and paddling upstream. Almost as though, if it doesn’t drain our vital forces, it’s not worth doing. 

In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about Easy Does It and says that it also means quite literally, that “Easy accomplishes it”. Easy gets it done. We would get much further by daily, small acts than coming with enormous strain and effort to get it all done in one fell swoop.

Learning Not to Strain

I was programmed to believe that if I’m not straining, it means I’m not doing it right. If I’m not pushing it beyond what’s natural and comfortable, then maybe I’m lazy, not putting the work in. 

For some people, it is very important to learn how to be active, to choose, and to do, and to initiate. There is a role for that in recovery too, as many slogans reflect. This slogan is about understanding that sometimes, not doing is far better than doing. 

Why? In the past, most of our action was hijacked by ego and addiction, so that our will and our behavior did not serve God, or even us, but rather the rapacious addiction. 

So in recovery, we learn to be ginger in our doing, allowing more room for God to show us,  in that stiller, quieter way that God tends to speak.

Easy Does It, not Ego Does It

This shift in attitude, that it is not my job to wrestle life down to the ground, and defeat it once and for all, but rather to float in its larger womby pools knowing I’ll be taken care of no matter what, was an important change for me personally and something to return to each day. 

Certainly I can say that my life offers me many opportunities to see, once again, if I needed a refresher, that the slogan is Easy Does It, not Ego Does It. 

 

Categories
General

Dear Hope: A Modern Love Letter to the Second Step

This post is part of a series of modern love letters to the 12 Steps. To start at the very beginning, read To Whom We Owe Our Recovery: Modern Love Letters to the Twelve Steps. 

In Step One we acknowledge our powerlessness over addiction. But the steps don’t leave us there, at the bottom of the stairway to heaven! This is just the beginning. Onward, dear friends, to Step Two, in which we recover hope.

Dear Step Two, 

You read as follows: “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

Step Two, my dear friend, I will always love you deeply. You bloomed out of a tender, aching spot, and I still feel soft where you bloomed. Through the delicate, exquisite portal of vulnerability you come riding in. A rainbow energy, a pleasant field of light, a fragrance, a radiance. 

Step Two, with you I relax into a longing I’ve always had, which is to believe, on a very profound level, that everything is ok, including me. You come into this world through the defeat of the ego, that armor against love, and you surround us with peace, you gather us up into your warmth.

Step Two says, it’s going to be OK. There is a solution. There is a cure. We will have to learn to collaborate with this cure. We will need to learn respect and humility as we relate to what is fathomless and beautiful within us. We will need to change our perceptions, our understanding, to contain a new paradigm, in which there is a benevolent force who can extinguish the fires of our personal hells, if only we are willing to turn to it. 

Every day across every platform, the world is pumped full of fear and judgment. We are taught so many things to be afraid of. Whether we fear what lurks within ourselves, or experience our terrors as coming at us from “out there”, we are encouraged to live our earthly lives as though fear is king. Fear, we are taught, will keep us safe. 

Never mind that fear also makes live in a degraded state, as a little, faint shadow of our human potential. Never mind that fear got us where we are now, which is powerless over a cunning, baffling, and powerful disease that corrodes mind, body and soul. 

Step Two, you are the beginning of the end of fear. The entire notion of “a power greater than ourselves” tells us, maybe this endless management project, of trying to be different from what we actually are in our innermost nature, or else we will suffer terrible consequences, doesn’t need to be undergone at all. 

Through you, dear Step Two, I can glimpse the land beyond.

In Step One we were forced to surrender. Yes, against our will. The ego, like a bankrobber, surrounded at last, with his back against a cliff, said “Ok, it’s true, I can’t manage my addiction, I have lost control, I admit it.” 

And in the willingness to give up addiction and all its pleasures – at last seen for what they are – diminishing highs followed by increasingly deadly lows – we are released into a spiritual life. 

My beloved Step Two, right after these dramatic events, these defeats, the phantom death of a phantom self, you are right there to offer a hand, to bring a warm blanket, to lay a fever-drawing hand on our foreheads, to draw out the poisons. 

Thank you God that my Self is not all there is. That there is an infinity beyond me, a freshness and a source that knows no death, is not confined or contained in that which I know. Thank you God that I can always open up the hatch on the roof of my universe, and find your loving face right there, ready to respond to anything I might ask. 

Thank you that you are gigantic, and that therefore it is ok that I am so small in this big world. Thank you that belief, in and of itself, has its purpose and meaning. Beliefs are powerful, and world-building, life-creating. If I believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity, then this is possible. If I do not believe it is possible, it might still be possible outside of my universe, but it will have a hard time reaching me.  

So thank you, Step Two, for making this bridge, this opening, this spaciousness. For reminding me that when I look left, right, front and back and see no possibilities, I can always look up. Or look inside, where the source of everything is. 

Much love, 

Me

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