The secret ones

Tags

belly-dancer, betrayal, chronic insecurity, dis-ease, disorder, disturbance, dysfunction, Essential Nature, Healing, imbalance, infection, infinitesimal heart fractures, inner light, Kinesiology, repressed emotions, thyroid, unconditional love

I’m not sure where in the world-wide-web the above image comes from, except that a friend sent it to me to share a little love from the other side of the world. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Life is quite weird right now. I pretty much need all the love I can muster because I’m losing my bearings a little. But in a good way.

Thanks to the kinesiology work I’m doing (first with Kerry, then Amanda), I feel like there’s an awful lot of stuff shifting but it’s hard to explain exactly what that means. In fact, Kerry and I swapped a few messages on Twitter about just this topic today:

Svasti: Getting in ever deeper with the kinesiology work and the words don’t come as easily to explain.

Kerry: Sometimes you don’t know consciously what is shifting with the kinesiology. But shift things do!

Svasti: Oh. My. Word. Yes, they do!

Kerry: One client told me she doesn’t believe you can really know the true outcome of a session – more far reaching than you can tell.

Yep.

This fairly accurately sums up what’s going on, in that I’ve truly no idea. Well, except that “stuff” is being moved around and healed and released and so on…

Right now, we’re ostensibly focusing on healing my thyroid. But what’s coming up in my sessions is a LOT of stuff I thought I’d dealt with already and then things I didn’t even know about. Stuff within the depths of my hidden memories of childhood – you see, until I was about nine or ten, I don’t have many clear memories at all.

All of what’s coming up however, is emotional. Even/especially the stuff I don’t remember. Which is both not surprising and also blindingly “doh”!

For years, I’ve been talking about how repressed emotions cause dis-ease. It’s something I knew intuitively but I didn’t expect it would happen to me – until it did. After all, I live life with my heart on my sleeve like nobody’s business!

But it’s the secret ones – those terribly hurtful and painful stories we tell ourselves about life and our interpretations of the actions of others – those are the ones we furtively sequester and barely even admit to ourselves as thoughts, ideas or feelings that cause dozens of infinitesimal fractures in our heart.

Over the years those stories build and are built upon. They take on form and meaning that deeply wounds our Essential Nature. But because we swallowed these tiny poisonous arrows whole, we’ve never seen them for what they are. So they become infected and take down our mind and body; into imbalance, infection, disturbance, disorder, dysfunction and dis-ease.

Let me try to illustrate what I mean with one of my own stories.

Shall we being with my chronic insecurity? Born of growing up with totally dissociated/emotionally neglectful parents and a physically/verbally abusive brother. Lots of shit went down before I even turned twenty-one. Enough for a lifetime of healing. But by my mid-to-late twenties, I’d convinced myself I was done with all of that stuff! I was over it (yeah right!) and moving on. I was in the beginning of my “spiritual search” phase and I was all god-realmy with a “nothing can touch me” attitude.

Everything looked good on the surface until things started falling apart with the guy I was engaged to.

Here’s what came up in my kinesiology session – betrayal. The specific incident* was this:

From before I met my then-fiancé, I was performing as a professional belly-dancer every weekend and dancing several nights a week. Then I was injured and had to stop dancing for a while, which meant I put on a little weight. My fiancé had a real problem with this, despite the fact that he wasn’t in the best physical shape himself. When we met, he had a pot belly which he kept for our entire relationship (and beyond). I loved him anyway for his inner light, for who he was. But when I was the one putting on weight, he freaked just a little too much. In fact, one day a mutual friend of ours was visiting and while she was there he very bluntly told me that I needed to lose weight. I was humiliated and breathlessly angry. So was our friend.

Like I’ve said before, it’s a good thing I didn’t marry this charmer, eh?

The story isn’t exactly a nice one, but the thing is that it goes deeper than that. My fiancé’s words were an explosive missile direct-hit to the part of me that was – and perhaps still is to a much lesser degree – deeply insecure.

The story that’d been going around and around in my mind and body for years was this:

No one loves me for who I really am.

(Gimme a moment here folks… writing that just now had a HUGE cost attached…)

And here was solid gold “proof”: even my fiancé, the guy I thought of as my soul mate and who’d flown me halfway around the world to propose to me… even he didn’t love me for who I was. It wasn’t unconditional love. His feelings towards me began to change just because I put on a little weight!

This was the man I’d planned a thousand dreams with – our wedding, babies, our lives. How and where we’d bring up our children. The studies I’d do while I was at home with the babies. And so on.

I was confused, upset and sad. But most of all, I felt utterly betrayed. Even if I didn’t admit it to myself back then.

That hidden fissure in my heart (chronic insecurity) was put under immense pressure by this event. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was both the beginning of the end of my engagement, and the point from which I was doomed to make increasingly bad choices about men in the future.

The ultimate bad choice in men led to being assaulted – and the rest of that story is where this blog began.

And this, folks, is what I’m unearthing in my kinesiology sessions. The deepest, darkest stories I’ve told myself about myself. Stories that cause illness of body and mind.

These secret ones.

For it’s not our easily revealed wounds that cause the most grievous injuries, but the ones we hold onto for dear life because we sincerely believe them to be true based on “evidence”.

There’s dozens of tiny stories like this that come out during each and every kinesiology session. Sometimes, I’ve no idea what they’re about – the above is just a more lucid example that I can kinda wrap my brain around. But the work is all like this…

~ / \ ~

* It’s too complicated to explain to y’all how this information is plucked from my mind and body in a kinesiology session as being THE thing to work on. But trust me, it isn’t random and it’s always spot on.

~Svasti

Betrayal and brimming bagfuls of possibility – part 1

Tags

awry, betrayal, biatch, blue eyes, brimming bagfuls of possibility, cacophony, death knell, droid, heat pack of fortitude, love-in, mocking, monsoon, possibility, pranayama, R2D2, remedial massage, Star Wars, superstitious, wry, wry neck

Sounds a little dramatic, doesn’t it? Don’t worry though, nothing’s as bad as you might imagine. And I’d be sorry about causing you any alarm, ‘cept I’m always a sucker for a catchy headline. Also, I’m a sucker for tall men with broad shoulders, dark hair, blue eyes and an accent. In case you were wondering.

So hold the panic because really I’m just talking about being betrayed by my otherwise healthy body with this… well apparently the technical term is “wry neck”.

Wry. My neck is wry.

Or perhaps awry?

One of those. It’s basically being a total biatch and causing the rest of my being (physical and otherwise) untold misery. It’s that special sort of pain that’s so pointy and stabby that even a 10ml dosage of it forces you to breathe in tiny pitiful gasps. And that ain’t no pranayama, folks!

Woke up this morning and while that un-delectable haze of being stoned on pain-killers/muscle relaxants (I’d actually forgotten what it’s like to get high, it’s been sooooo long!) had worn off, my neck had not relented overnight.

See? Betrayal right there, everybody!

Although still rather snoozy from a lack of restful-type sleep, I honourably attempted to hustle myself into a fit state for my day job. Only to discover that it actually wasn’t possible. I basically felt (‘scuse the language) royally fucked – although without any of the fun parts (and now that I mention it, if you’d like to make an advance birthday wish for me and on my behalf, I wouldn’t mind being royally fucked in the whoo-hoo-oh-yeah kinda way as well. *ahem*).

Betrayed by my body. Gah! And we’ve become such good friends lately. All this yoga-ing and teaching yoga etc has been such a love-in for my body and I. So this is…unsettling. Although it was clear to me this was a muscle thing and not a bones or joints thing. And I needed some help. Quick.

Did the ring around and eventually snagged myself a remedial massage appointment for 11am. Of course, Melbourne’s tropical downpours continued today (our second day of Summer, dammit) but my choices were to venture out anyway, or remain lying supine and most pathetically on the floor of my apartment for who knows how long.

I had to go.

Massage helped a whole lot, although it was no magic tonic for dissolving the freak-out attack my neck and upper back muscles appear to be engaged in. But I think I regained about 10-15% range of motion back. Which is like, hey, time for a party. Right? Okay, maybe not…

And then I might’ve gone into work after that because perhaps there was a meeting I really wanted to have at that particular time. And people there – my comrades in the day job – might’ve ever-so-slightly mocked me with the nickname R2D2 (referring to that droid’s inability to move it’s head separately from it’s neck, get it?).

But I did do those things (otherwise I might’ve been extremely bored hanging out at home, just me and my wry neck) and I survived the very monsoon-like conditions and am now resting (?at my writing desk?) with the Heat Pack of Fortitude draped over my shoulders.

The point in telling you all of this wasn’t just to whinge about my sad and sorry (but ultimately impermanent) condition. It’s more about the fact that despite all of the madness, temporary (legal) drug use and ridiculous impersonations of robots from Star Wars… in that cacophony my mind somehow managed to convey some useful stuff.

That would be the brimming bagfuls of possibility. There’s two brimming bagfuls, actually.

Of course, these ideas have been banging around various corners of my noggin for a while now. I keep wanting to talk about them and then I get all superstitious and tell myself that doing so might just be the death knell for those bagfuls. Which is of course, quite ridiculous.

But hey, fear knows how to play dirty.

Brimming bagful #1

Ever since my appointment with Kerry, I’m painfully aware that I’ve avoided doing anything about getting my writing out there a little more. Kerry suggested that it might be helpful if I had a plan. A plan, you say? Well… thinking about having a plan is about as much as I’ve done to-date.

It’s so very easy to find excuses, or even to just let the excuses find me. Too busy. Oh look, I have another yoga class to plan. Feeling pretty exhausted right now. Oh look, the bathroom needs cleaning. That cat of mine needs some grooming…

I don’t need to explain this to anyone who’s ever avoided doing their homework, am I right?

Perhaps this is why my conscious mind needed to be assaulted with intensive pain in order for other parts of my being to get a word in. Or perhaps it was just about timing, and skipping through enough blogs written by others so that tiny fractions of seedlings might hover together closely enough that a more obvious idea could emerge?

And it has. I’m yet to decide if I’ll write under my Svasti pseudonym or my real name or something else entirely. No matter. I’ve got some research to do and some articles to plan and then write, but I suspect I might be onto something. I’ll let you know as and when.

What’s enabled me to plan even this much however, is that I’ve taken the concept of playful exploration (I wrote about it in another post) off the yoga mat and into other areas of my life. Imagine… being playful instead of angsty about my writing? Imagine just trying to get published in a few different places, just giving it a shot to see what happens (and who cares if it actually happens or not)? Imagine putting myself out there in a much more public format than my very private little blog niche here?

Imagine that. Imagine putting some of the oomph and dedication I give my yoga practice into my life as a writer? Ha. Well, imagine that…

[to be continued…]

~Svasti