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Easter time in Vienna and other places and synchronicities….

Toko-pa Turner writes ‘Having walked a great distance from our initial estrangement into the orphaned depths of exile, we have learned the difference between fitting in and belonging. We now know belonging is a dynamic process, requiring alternating periods of togetherness and aloneness to remain vital. We are making friends with the often terrifying Otherness within, learning to make allies of even our most loathsome guests. And we have begun to follow our longing, which reaches to us through our ancestral lines, right from the soul of the world. We are coming into the great secret that belonging is really a skill, a set of competencies at which we must practice if we are to rise to the call of an aching heart and a fractured world……… Like any practice worth undertaking, belonging cannot be mastered overnight. Because it is a disappearing art, we might find ourselves going it alone for a while. We may find ourselves disappointed with a lack of response when we try to reach out, and the temptation to lose hope will be strong. But we must keep a vision of how we want our lives and the world to look, and work towards weaving those first threads together. Even when the garment of belonging seems flimsy and inadequate we must keep to the task until it substantiates’ (2018, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Her Own Room Press, Chapter 12).

I had always been sort of restless and staying in one place or house for too long would usually start to weigh upon me as if permancy were unsafe and as if past events and wounds and knowledge buried deep within me prevented me from growing roots. Part of my restlessness originated in childhood and part of it reflected discontent and non alignment with my truest longings and truths, and also, part of it was probably due to having moved around a bit, and finally, a lot of it had to do with repetitive unhealthy outer dynamics. My restlessness also reflected my intense curiosity and desire to travel and see new places. In Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis, writes: Read more

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Sharing…..

“The peace we desire is covered up by layers and layers of defenses against the original pain we experienced as children but couldn’t feel or process at the time. “ – Bethany Webster

Podcast by Bethany Webster, at http://www.faithshevlin.com/blog/030-healing-the-mother-wound-with-bethany-webster/?inf, whose work is focused on helping women heal the mother wound, since when we ignore it and because it is ‘the most primary and foundational relationships in our lives, we are missing a pivotal opportunity to discover the truth of who we are and to authentically and joyfully live that truth” (Bethany Webster). She discusses what the mother wound is and why healing empowers and liberates us; contextualizes it in broader settings and refers to its three aspects: the personal, the cultural and the spiritual; the ways we replicate our childhood dynamics in our current lives and how we develop a false or less authentic self as a survival strategy; the common painful themes that show up for women like people pleasing, scarcity, low self-worth, deprivation, struggle, guilt, over-doing, denying needs, parentification, playing small, etc; how the mother wound, spirituality, sense of belonging and becoming, as well as, food/body image are tightly interwoven, and finally, how to overcome resistance to looking at the mother wound, and how to begin healing one’s inner child that holds the wounds and the toxic or limiting messaging, the necessity for both internal and external work and the need for a relevant social discourse to be created to remove stigma and taboo  since the mother wound could be viewed as existing on a continuum and connected to patriarchal norms and values.

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‘To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution’ Jean Shinoda Bolen

Today’s my 57th birthday. One of the feelings that arose this morning was that of gratitude to have managed to make it thus far; to be alive and breathing despite it all. This post is a a thread of quotes that resonate with me in this moment, and a very brief recounting of a four and a half years journey, part of which has been reflected in the material posted on this site and the visual journal pages that often also made visible the inner processes and the wanderings around the maize.

For years I thought silence and soldiering on and doing the right thing and not being vulnerable would do the job, but as it turned out my silence neither kept me safe nor protected. Audre Lorde wrote ‘I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language’. She writes that she began to ask each time: ‘What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?’ Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, “disappeared” or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.  Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had……  And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.’    Read more