Dream: I am in my house and a polar bear crashes through the kitchen window. I run upstairs to get a good view of the outside and there are about 200 bears in my yard. I feel as though they have come for me and I go outside.
I wander amongst the bears in my yard. I lie down with them. I can feel the softness of their fur through my thin nightgown. I watch them. I smell their strong smell. I am not relaxed with them even though I am welcome. I sense their natural unpredictability. This enters me and teaches me. It is exciting... forceful.... anything can happen.
The Deal I made with my parents:
I eavesdrop on their fights.... sitting on the stairs I learn to be very still... hardly breathing while they slog away at each other. I teach myself to turn off my need for them.... I learn their script so I know what is coming. Numbing. I learn predictability..... in me and in them... if I can predict it, I will be safe. I turn what they are doing to each other into predictable. I turn myself into predictable. I have learned to be still and not know my own need. I become lost and frozen and it seems normal.
My mother slaps me and says “You are disgusting.”
I do not know what this means, but I feel it in my stomach like throw up... like I am throw up. I vow to never let this show that I am disgusting wretched throw up.
As I go numb... going more deeply into hiding, I leave behind any evidence of true response. I learn to manage. I learn to control. The deal is miserable safety in exchange for my true self. I build as I go deeper... disappearing more... building what you will see when you see me.... building persona.... building the Utopian Church of my own ideals. good politics... good mother..... good friend. I care take the world so that you will never know how I hate myself. So that you will never rise up like the demon mother and crush me.
I learn pride in that vow to keep you away. I use it as my end run. I will use it to keep you away from knowing I am disgusting. The terrible shame of me. My pride diverts you. No, No, No my pride says. It's not that way It's this way.
I don't see it and it is subtle. It is my blind spot.
I am a seeker but, I bury all this and go merrily along facing my fear, learning to love God... growing and learning and feeling. I don't see that I am not feeling to the bottom.
Dream: I am watching a wounded bear in my lower field. It is walking with great difficulty and bleeding from many wounds. There is one big wound that goes to the bone. It is white with no blood. There is an opportunistic animal like a hyena walking behind Him.
This is the wound to my potency. The bear is my potency and He is wounded.
I feel the fear of knowing I am walking towards something I have not felt. I don't know what it is .
I stumble as a teacher in this work that I love ... the work that has taught me how to fill the hole in me with God. I stumble and don't see it. I project my scary mother onto a person in my group and get lost while working with her. I get caught in managing to make things safe and alright and I fight it and don't want to know. I feel outrageous shame and unimaginable pain. I have failed and my pride makes normal regular mistakes a catastrophe. I go global and into a shame that says everything I have done is wrong and more wrong. That I have hurt people. I lose sight. I fight as I am caught over and over in the defense of myself. It is a terrible feeling. I start to see it and catch it and up it comes again and then I see it and say it and feel it. I feel the disgusting feeling girl. I lay awake at night in terror and know that something really big is under there. I just feel my fear and my pain. I can't attach it to a story. I start to feel the baby .. she floats in the air untethered when I see her in my mind. She is alone. I remember that in her confusion from her own life and from own lack of mothering my mother confessed that she left me alone a lot after I was born. Tiny me crying for hours.
I cry and feel her. I feel the terror. I feel afraid all the time. I am in the good corridor of feeling.
I am feeling her.... the child.... the baby.
Dream: I am marrying Sean Penn and a girl is taking me to Him.
I look seriously into how I can stand and marry this Animus. How I have jumped away from standing in equal space with this kind of powerful love... with this potency. What kind of vulnerability I must feel to really be with Him. Since I have married the Animus before, I ask Marc why do I get married to him more than once. He says, “Layers, Annie, layers.” I have been moving through more layers and I know there will be more to come.
Dream: I am 7 and driving a car with my friend Ellie who is also 7. We are racing around and having a blast. The night falls and I become so scared. The nice parents come and tell me they will help me.
I must just turn to them and accept their help.
Dream: I am very little.. maybe 2 or 3 and I am walking down a tree lined street in Brooklyn where I lived when I was this little girl. I reach my hand up to the pretty woman I am walking with and she takes it and holds it so strongly and softly. We walk along .... happy.
I am the girl and have asked the good mother for help. Halleluiah.
The Alchemy of My Death
Dream: I am standing in a white tee shirt. There is a hole in my chest. The front of my shirt is covered in blood. I am standing ..... waiting.
I know your hands are around my heart.
When I feel them they are like the undertaker hands being washed. Then wet, they come around my real heart from the top and encase it all around except in front with the thumbs coming forward and holding... like a cup while my heart beats and feels the slight pressure of the holding..... so warm, so soft.. completely perfect.
You come in through the hole in my chest where I am pierced. You made that hole on the day I was finally worn down... ready for surrender, but didn't know it. It was a surprise and the blood ran out and covered my shirt. The hole has a black crust around the edges. It does not hurt in that spot, but sometimes my chest is very heavy.
That Which Death Will Take Away
Dream: I am at a wedding party. There is a baby on the floor and when people walk by they kick the baby.. not even aware that they are doing it. I see the baby continuously being kicked and I don't go to pick it up.
Girl in her twenties....or me in my twenties?
yes yes yes I will have sex with you in all it's awkward and loveless ways. Yes I will have sex right now in this car on this floor on the ground on hthis couch in this bed. Yes I will ... maybe you are my loving father... mother... maybe you are a brother or the One... maybe you will up and materialize as the one.... even though all that is there right now is that you want me.
I will look for the way you suffer.. the way into your hurt and I will know how to soothe it... I will know how to make it better. I will help you and save you... I will be the one.
No matter that it is not me you really want... nor you I really want.
I will hope that it will cover my suffering.. hide it . Help me to never know or feel it. Let me stay busy fixing you and remain blind to my own....
Then I will turn on you because you have not fixed me. I have taught you too well that I don't need anyting. That, in fact, I am not even here.. really.. not in the equation.... still and quiet.and since I am nothing... not here even... you can turn from me and then I can hate you for leaving.
But I am beautiful to look at.. so will quickly find the next.
And maybe there will be a flutter of a fetus starting to divide cells and grow towards manifestation... soul searching for it's homebody... coming from all that sex... all that loveless sex. And I assure you I will not burden you with that very real evidence of our coupling... maybe the only real thing that has happened. I assure you I will take care of it .. i will take care of it. Maybe not even knowing how you feel. I will control it... I will go through it. five bhabies chopped and ripped from me.. the unfeeling me... by kind people like my sister.
Remembering the Girl Who Will Later Be Betrothed to Him
Dream: I am a young girl playing at the dead end of our street. I am in the tall grass and a large black snake comes toward me and lifts up to be as tall as I am. We stare at each other for a long time.
I stand here quiet... looking out really still. I run through the underbruxh feeling my girl body... it's perfection. I am 5... 6... 7... 8..... I live in the feeling of this body.
I am down by the water.. the dead end of the road where the water runs by and I am here often..... where it is wet and smells strong of earth and muddy wet.... The skiunk cabbages that get crushed while we play and smell their strong smell. I live here... here is my world. The man kinds of grasses that I stand in... how the rot of the forest floor the smell of death and rich life lives in me. I stand here and a snake lifts up out of the grasses and comes to face me... thick and black it slides forward to face me and we exchange a looking.. into... an understanding.
I am a girl here and feel myself, my body, my girl parts I feel no fear here and I am not alone.
I slide like the snake along the rotting leaves and smell that smell of rot and dirt ...all through me. I am a snake and a fish. I cover myself in the bushes and I am a small animal looking and still. I feel everything and smell everything. I know where everone lives and what every insect looks like. I perch on the rocks.. balance on one foot and wait. I am not alone.
I lie in the stream naked... the water rushing just over my body parts and I feel full and alive... All is tingling.. I am waiting.
September, 2007
My work at this time is about vulnerability and expectancy. This vulnerability is the feeling of being cracked open and softened. It is the feeling of bigness and smallness at once. It is the feeling of not being alone. It is a feeling of being surrounded by love and acceptance and not being alone. It is a feeling of my strengths and fear and how those two things live together.
The way pathology takes me out of this work is by telling me that when I feel fear that touches into my trauma I need to manage and control my inner life and my outer world experience .
Dream:
I am driving into town in a delapidated truck with pieces falling off. I pull up to a boy and tap him lightly with the front of the truck. He jumps in the passenger side and we drive out of town. Almost immediately we turn around , going back to town and I am now the boy in the drivers seat and pulling up to a place where there are all these beautiful men with plates of cookies. The biggest and handsomest of all takes all the plates and piles them together squashing all the cookies. We all laugh and eat pieces of cookies.
This is me driving the truck. It is me managing and controlling. In the session where I worked the dream I was asking too many questions. I wasn't just waiting for things to unfold. I was scared and trying to get information so I could manage the situation. When I am the Boy with Him, just eating the cookies, it doesn't matter a hoot who is in control or driving or managing. It is fun and funny and sensual. Things just unfold.
I like it when I am the Boy.
My mother is sick now. It seems she is in her final descent. In her fear of what is happening I can see that she is reacting all the time. It is so familiar. It is so how I know her and myself. I am remembering that as I grew up, the household was reacting almost all the time. Whether it was because of the kids behavior or the parents beliefs and behaviours it was a household of reaction. Heightened. Intense. Scarey as can be. I learned to project my fear onto the reactions of others and react myself and have folded that into my way of being, so seamlessly, that when I am shut down to feeling I can not even know this is going on. This is how that looks: Instead of just plain curiousity about someone being angry or sarcastic or mean or sad or happy even, I jump out of myself and lose the ability to just be in me and feeling what I feel. In the past I will offer to caretake them ... to help them not feel what they need to feel and certainly cap off any chance I might have to feel something.
As I step into the position of sheparding my mother in the time she has left, I am circling around the wisps of trauma that can still take me out. This is trauma that comes from my relationship with my mother.... I was taught not to ask for help... so when I am in my deepest need for help I don't ask. I have reenacted that with many of the relationships I have created in my life. When I am not in my connection to Him, I respond to the needs of others because of this trauma and jump away from my own needs. In this trauma I have trouble asking for help when I need it the most. When I don't ask for help or perspective or love when I need it I am in my shit. I aim to ask for help to the point of error.
Dream:
There is a large gold and starry crown in the sky. And some gold writing. I am just watching and waiting expectantly.
Dream:
I am standing in a white tee shirt. It is covered with blood over my heart. There is a hole in my heart. I am just standing and waiting expectantly. Pierced.
Now in my life, HE is with me, holding me, so obviously at times, as I navigate through deep feelings. I sometimes feel so vulnerable that it is as if I am skinless. I am learning to be in the world in this way. He has been teaching me this for a while now and I have come to know His closeness... His touch. His way of showing me things. I am not alone. He is my company. I am coming to trust in the ways my relationship with Him shows up, in the way He shows up. I am asking for this help
Today I am being asked to "turn before I am ready". I am being asked to accept strengths that I don't totally see or know much about. I am being asked to step in without knowing. To deny my strengths is surely to not have to own them. Denying them lets me step back from what I know is true. To put my sword down, so to speak. Knowing and owning that I have these strengths allows the uncertainty of the moment to be exciting. I can trust and be afraid. I can know He is there even if I forget. Today I am afraid, expectant, and waiting for orders.