Rooting Shen ....24 March 2012

Light of Heaven ....post Rooting Shen

                                                


A  week ago at this moment...6:40....I entered the treatment shed in Whitefield, Maine to begin my fifth Rooting Shen treatment.  My dear friend, Lark, had driven me over to the coast of Maine on Friday and we stayed in a B& B run by two women in Waldoboro for the night and the next day. Then  Lark drove me to Whitefield on Saturday afternoon for my treatment and left me there for the night.

 I still don't have many words for what transpired but it was  transforming on a very deep level.  I had brought my dream of being imprisoned for a lie and wanting to be a queen and the theme of the treatment was about finding this queen self in it's true manifestation.  It was not about being the queen with the man...it was about being the queen with the Divine....and what that really means to me. The music took me to places that had been hidden to me all these many years and at one point I was down on my knees feeling humility and sadness for all the times that I have turned away from my divine self.  I had brought my collage of "being the queen" to the treatment as a source of inspiration and in this new place of being broken I asked for the collage to be thrown on the fire that was burning outside the shed.  I felt the shallowness of living from this place of needing "the man" to dictate  the way for me and it was a relief to have that old way of relating be burned to ashes in the fire. Rising from the ashes I was greeted to my new self by  Handel's Halleluiah Chorus and my whole being was filled with  clarity and joy.  There will be more to share as I continue to sit and embrace this newfound sense of my queen-ness  and I look forward to what continues to unfold.

Breaking out of prison to become the queen......

Being the Queen

                 

This is my work now ....to leave the prison of my pathologic attachments...and to become the Queen with the Animus, the King.  And  to also be the girl who can fly skiing down the hill feeling absolutely free and full of energy and joy.  Both dreams showing me the promise of what life could be if I can face the pain of loss and to look at the stark reality of what the inside of my prison is really like.  Any sane person would have no trouble with this choice.  Who would choose to stay locked in a dark, empty cell with no light, no air, no love...or....to have a loving partner who is totally devoted to me and who treats me the like the Queen that I am? But the former state is the choice that I have been making....by staying tied to someone who is nothing but a mirage of my own mind.

In a moment of clarity and willingness to face my fear of pain, I finally cut the tie to this attachment and started on the road to embracing this new state of being.  I immediately felt a sense of freedom and excitment and my next dreams showed the Animus coming to me with all his love and attention as an affirmation of this decision.  But the days are long, and it is still hard, hard work to stay with this knowing that I did the right thing.  The pathology keeps wanting me to turn back...it plagues my mind with memories of the past...of what could have been, what could be.  I feel the pain of loss a hundred times a day.  I grieve for a lost friend.  I am not free of this torment and heartache....yet.  The other night I watched the movie....Young Victoria...and it was such a beautiful story of true love and of a man who could stand outside the limelight and support his beloved to be all that she could be.  It was so inspiring and so helpful in steering me back to the right path.  It showed me that this is what I want...this is what I need.....on the inside and the outside.  I need the Animus to be my inner anchor and I need a partner who can help me be who all that I can be....the Queen of England and the girl with a heart full of love and joy.  Step by step I am now on the road to this.

And so tomorrow I leave for Maine and my Rooting Shen treatment....Sweeping the Starry Skies of Heaven.
A way out of my entrappment that I hope will sweep away all of these old patterns and all of this physical and mental misery.  Wish me luck .....
love,
Kate

The blessing of being disabled....

A week ago last Saturday, I awoke to shooting knife like pain in my right arm...starting at the shoulder and going down into my right bicep and down the forearm.  What the heck!  I tried to think of what I did the day before to set this off?  Whatever the reason, there I was with this new pain and absolutely no use of my right arm.  I struggled to dress myself...had to eat with my left hand ...and try to do all my usual chores with just one hand.  I felt vulnerable and helpless and resigned myself to laying low for the rest of the weekend.  It hurt to even lay down and sleep was almost impossible.  I hoped that with time it would just go away and that this was just another weird side effect of this dreadful Lyme disease.
On Monday I had an appointment with my naturopath and she was also perplexed about the severity of the pain and the incredible swelling in the right shoulder.  She gave me some anti-inflammatory remedies and told me to continue with ice and rest.  I managed to drive myself there and back using my left hand to shift gears but I knew that I was going to need help in my life if this continued.  At this point I was still trying to "go it alone" but by the next day I had to start asking for some help from my workers and students. I had another appointment for acupuncture with Taylore on Tuesday and on the drive into town I cried and cried from this feeling of being so totally helpless.  Taylore had to undress me for the treatment and it was like being tended by a kind mother to a small child.  Something so out of my realm of experience.  Her assessment of my situation was "trauma" of a physical kind but I knew that somehow this was all related to the bigger trauma that I had been working on all winter.  Some pain that was stuck in my body and now in the process of letting go.  Taylore suggested a session with a bodyworker...one of my dreamwork colleagues...and miraculously she had an opening that afternoon.  I cried once again on the drive into town and I began to realize that this was all part of something much larger then just some pain in my shoulder.  When Cathy saw me in the waiting room with my arm gripped tight to my chest she also sensed some kind of holding related to my inner work.  Holding tight to my baby in that fiery church perhaps???   Her medical opinion was that a tendon had twisted around the shoulder blade and that once the inflammation was reduced, she could work it back into place.  In the meantime I needed to stay with these feelings of helpless vulnerability and savor this time to delve deeper into my heart pain.
It was actually the best medicine for me at this point.  Not being able to draw, or write, or create collages, or house clean or work gave me the time to focus on collecting music for my upcoming Rooting Shen treatment.  I could lay back and listen....find the songs that moved my heart and take some refuge in the music.  Taylore had lent me her Ipod with 934 Rooting Shen songs and at first I was overwhelmed by the sheer number.  How would I ever get through them all plus find new songs of my own??  And in only two weeks!
Slowly, patiently...with the Ipod on shuffle...I am making my way through them.  Finding ones that resonate and skipping over ones that don't.  My arm has healed a little bit to the point where I can now feed myself with my right hand and type on a computer keyboard but I still can't manage much else.  I am asking for help...crying alot...and finding my way through this healing by taking tiny steps.
And being filled by music.

Songs that sing me back to my Heart.....

I have been working daily at listening to any and all music to fill up my suggested requirement for my Starry Skies Rooting Shen treatment ...and it turns out that it is 13 CD's worth, not just 13 songs!  Which is actually a relief because I am finding that it would have been extremely difficult to pick just 13.   Another added bonus to this "homework" is that I have been enlisting the help of friends in this endeavor and there is a whole new bond of connecting as I accept their music gifts.  Hearing their particular songs will remind me of all the love and support that I have in this world and that my healing will really be a group effort.

In my last body work session with Isabelle, the music piece was especially poignant and heart opening.  In this treatment we were also working with the dream of my being trapped in the burning church and the moment of giving up my child who most certainly died a horrible death.  When I shared with her my terrible guilt and shame over this, she was moved to focus on the child herself...the angel child, she called her.  Stopped as I was by my "false guilt", I was unable to see and feel around that to the place where the child had actually ascended to God in heaven and was beyond all earthly pain and misery.  She was just fine....it was me who was left to suffer.  At that point Isabelle guided me into a reuniting with this angel child and the other three angel babies who had been destined to be my children in this lifetime who I choose to abort.  Here was another place that I had shut down from all those years ago, locked the door and thrown away the key.  A deep, dark secret that very few people in my life knew about and that I had never even remotely felt the pain of.  As Isabelle spoke of these children and their destiny, she encouraged me to speak to them of my locked away grief and pain.  But the wall was already down and firmly in place.  I felt nothing...all was.blankness.....complete numbness.  With my mind I could register relief that all these angel children were loved and taken care of...but I could feel nothing of my pain or regret.  Then Isabelle put on a CD by Shaina Noll called "Song for the Inner Child.  At that moment I didn't know the artist or the name of the CD but almost immediately the music pierced through my wall of nihilism and I could feel the first twinges of regret.  I could say...I am so, so sorry.  And then the tears and sobs came and Isabelle held me and I could finally break through to the pain.  The CD played for the rest of the treatment and each song brought a new feeling to the surface while Isabelle worked with releasing the tension from my body.  It was an incredibly powerful gift.

And then yesterday I heard from Taylore that there is an opening for me to come to the actual training session of Starry Skies with the whole group in Maine on the 24th of March.  Three weeks from now....not two months away.  I fear the fear of ...oh, my God....it's too soon...it's too big...it's so far away.  But I said "Yes'...
I will do it!  I'm not going to worry about how I am going to drive there ....or where I'm going to stay...or any of those logistical details.  I have said yes and the big hand that is making all of this happen will work on that part too.  Now all I need to do is to keep opening up to music!

Jumping in the Water.....

                                                           Jumping in the Water


A few days ago I had this dream....

I am married to the Duke of York (Colin Firth in the King's Speech) and he has just been made King George VI and therefore I am now his Queen.  I am so excited about this and can't wait to really step into this new relationship with him.  Then someone informs on me about telling a lie and I am sent to prison.  I am completely distraught and not sure if I will be there for a month or a year.  Christa then comes to visit me and I tell her the story of lying to the man who came to repossess Peter's van and how badly I feel about doing that.  My loyalty to Peter over-rode my conscience and I did what I did for fear of his being upset with me.  Outside of the cell, Marc in on the phone doing a session berating the person on the line for not turning to the Animus in all things.  I feel that he is really speaking to me.

When I woke from this dream I reflected back on the situation that this dream was addressing...my lying about Peter's van.  For the record....I have kept Peter's van hidden in my barn here at Lone Rock while he is in France.  He had stopped making payments on it before he left and wasn't sure what to do with it.  We did discuss the possibility that the Bank might come and try to repossess it but we/I would cross that bridge when or if the time came.  I also expected that Peter would be back in mid March to rid me of this responsibility.  A few weeks ago though, when I cam home from work there was a man waiting in my driveway with a big truck and trailer looking for Peter Fischer and a Ford van.  I must have lied convincingly because he finally left empty handed and a bit befuddled.  As I watched him go, my heart was pounding in my chest, I was drenched in sweat and my legs trembling so hard that I could hardly walk.  I know now that I was deep in my trauma in that moment   And the moments before when I put aside my conscience and tried to do the "right thing" for Peter so that I would not have to feel his rejection of me if I let the man take his van away.  That was a moment where I could have felt my fear of rejection and jumped in the water.

It is stupid really, because I know that Peter wouldn't even think of finding fault with me for doing this but because I'm still stuck in this prison of fear of rejection I can't see or feel the truth.  As I sat with this dream, the morning after, I felt the fear of that old wound and the tears came in waves of sorrow for a long time.  I have been so, so scared of that old hurt.  The feeling of rejection has been engrained in every cell and it rules almost everything that I do.  But now....

I am sick to death of being in this prison!!
I want to be the queen with my beloved King George VI.
I want to let my tears wash away this old hurt and pain.

Rooting Shen Treatment #5

This past Thursday I had my fifth Rooting Shen treatment and I brought with me my dream of being trapped in the burning church, giving up my child and the debilitating nihilism that has plagued me all winter.  Also the ever present pain in my body, migraines, loss of appetite, difficulty breathing, profound loneliness and hanging on to life by the merest thread.  Laura's response to this was... "Oh, Damn".  She counseled the other practionners, as they came forward to take my pulses, to approach with extreme gentleness, to take off their shoes (metaphorically) and to treat this fragile soul on the table with great care.  A soul very much in turmoil and very much in need.  The needles went in and they - Laura, Taylore, Deb, Noah and Meg - all tried to get a read on where I was and where I needed to go.  The main theme of "entrappment" seemed to be the focus and as I talked about the darkness and terror that haunts my days and nights Laura wondered if I had ever encountered in my life a strong "teacher" figure that may have gotten the upper hand on my psyche.  Nothing rang a bell but there is something inside of me that keeps all this work that I do on the inner level and the outer from taking hold.  I've called it pathology, Lyme spirochetes, Epstein Barr virus and nihilism.  And I have battled with all the tools available to me to try and get out from under it....but to no avail.
Laura then proposed that this coming April I come back for another long treatment called the "12 Points Shining Bright as the Starry Skies". It is a treatment that she, Taylore, Deb, Noah, Meg and the rest of their support team will be working on this March and hopefully can bring some light into what has kept my soul entrapped.  She gave me homework to do during these next two months....to fill my life with flowers and to find 13 songs that resonate with me to bring to the treatment.  I need to get myself a CD player or Ipod and listen to as much music as possible.  Now for me, this will be a shift because I don't listen to music, I don't own a CD player, I don't have scads of CD's to choose from and I only have ancient Ipod that belonged to Peter.  I am pretty inept when it comes to this new technology of itunes, etc but Taylore and Deb are willing to help me with music from their collections and I will go out and try to find some on my own.  I grasped hold of this new directive wholeheartedly as anything that I can do to find a secure lifeline to lifting myself out of the darkness is a welcome diversion.
So...I am counting down the days...57 more to go...and as very little gives me hope these days, I count each day that I make it one step closer to some kind of release. Yesterday I borrowed a CD player and I rummaged through the collection of music at work and found my old copy of Gounod's Faust.  This morning while I was eating breakfast I put on the disc for the final two acts and almost immediately the music found a weak spot in my heart and I started to sob.  These sobs come from deep down inside my chest and are different then anything I have experienced in the past.  Since the breaking open from my dream with Peter jumping in the water I am not just crying but am actually sobbing.  It's more then just tears running from my eyes....it is a heart wrenching, full body experience.  I closed my eyes and just let that glorious music and the passion of the singers reach down into my soul and fill it with something new.

So...I have found song # 1.....the duet between Faust and Marguerite as she ascends to heaven.

Coming back to life.....

On Monday at work I was triggered back into the trauma by something very tiny and it seems that since I have agreed to "go all the way" this winter, my nerves are so raw and exposed that the slightest event can send me plummeting.  Which is a good thing actually but in the moment it still feels like torture.  In this instance the trigger was about me feeling inadequate and not good enough and was quickly accompanied by not being able to breath and a pain in my chest.   And then this overwhelming feeling of heaviness that made it such an effort to be present and engaged.  My familiar nihilistic friend    I got through the rest of the work day and when I got home the physical symptoms still continued so I just went to bed.  Through the body tremors and ragged breaths I went down in again and found a place of pain that was where I took on enormous guilt and shame for having made a made decision...doing a bad thing.  Maybe I was even shunned or cast out by my community....who knows...but in any event I was hard enough on myself that what others thought didn't even matter.  I felt this poor stricken soul who made a grievous mistake and who has never been atoned or forgiven....mostly by herself.  This was the message from my last Rooting Shen treatment which had so eluded me.....atonement and forgiveness.  So simple but not so simple.  I have carried this guilt as my penance through all of this lifetime and who knows how many others.  I go out of my way to make sure people like me and do not shun me because the pain would be unbearable.  The pain was unbearable.
I finally found a homework connection that allowed me to fall asleep but I prayed for help and forgiveness fervently before drifting off.  And then I was given this dream....

I am walking with Peter in a wood and when we come to this body of water he strips off his clothes and jumps in for a swim.  I long to go in the water as well but it is deep and dark and cold and I am afraid.  I await at the edge with a towel for him when he comes out.

When I woke in the morning with this dream in my head I decided to go out for a walk to reflect on its message.  As I crossed over the snowy field I realized that Peter was coming as the Animus to show me how to do this next step....feel the fear and go into the water. No pondering, no dithering, no hesitation.  Just do it.  That it was Peter coming to help me just broke my heart open and the long awaited sobs came at last.  The Archetypes knew the one soft spot, the one hidden chink in my armor where they could shoot the arrow that would blow the chains apart.  My love for Peter.  And it was in this place of unguarded vulnerability that I could feel the spark of love that would raise me from the dead. As I circled the Moon field I cried and cried and at home in the shower and in private moments at work.  I thanked God for the beauty of such a simple dream that was finally thawing the ice around my frozen heart.   The energy of life returned as the nihilism retreated in the face of my true feelings.  What an incredible relief  that was! I had a session with Christa that afternoon and I was able to open even further and start to understand more of where I have been and now where I am going.  The triggers will still come, and no doubt the moments of darkness and despair....but now I have a powerful, wonderful homework of following Peter into the water.  Feeling my fear and jumping into the mysterious water where I will unite with my soul again in the glorious underworld of feelings.