In the Cocoon (it's a long one, but worth it)

A caterpillar basically has to die before it can become a butterfly, right? It has to shut itself down, wrap itself in it’s own excretions and withdraw deeply within. When it emerges, its whole being is new, never before seen or felt or experienced. I feel a bit like I’m in one of these life transitions, and I’ve no idea what being is going to break forth. A part of me is hopeful, but having never before seen or felt or experienced this new being I am hoping to become, there is another part of me (currently a stronger part I think) that is incredulous. Some might say cynical, but I really think fearful and lost are more accurate words to describe this brand of hopelessness I’m finding myself engulfed in these days.

Here’s the progression. My personal work of seeking truth and meaning in my life has always included much reflection, and in a meditation workshop I did in February I spent 6 days doing just that - reflecting, feeling, and opening parts of myself that have long been hidden, stifled by the traumas of my childhood. I had many profound insights, seeing how my opinions or concepts of “how things should be” actually keep me stuck in the way things are, rather than allowing me to create something new or move on. I also saw how much I depend on the feedback and direction of others to make things happen in my life. I often won’t do things just for myself – what I do must be in service to those around me.

Don’t get me wrong – being in service to those around you can be quite a noble pre-occupation, if taken up consciously with purpose. But I was not being conscious about it. Rather, I was being “in service” to protect myself from getting in trouble for doing something for myself, and to protect myself from the risks of failure and making “wrong” choices. I think the official word for it is “co-dependent.”

It may seem silly to you, to fear “trouble” like it’s certain doom just for doing something for yourself, but when I was a young girl, making wrong choices was devastating, often resulting in physical violence, humiliation, forced isolation. In that unpredictable, volatile environment, I learned not to make choices for myself. I learned to spend every waking moment watching my step-father, trying to pre-empt the strike by cleaning up, hiding out, doing my homework. At that age, I was trapped in my house, and had no clue that I could do anything to escape. And that trapped feeling has prevailed throughout my life, showing up as self-sabotage, people-pleasing, denial and shame.

It’s lead me here – where I’m 35 and once again at a turning point, once again trying to find my life’s purpose, once again feeling that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that tells me I can never really accomplish what I want to accomplish – I’ll just have to do something so I don’t financially implode. I am a singer and a songwriter, with deeply hidden aspirations of rock-stardom (don’t tell anyone). I am a jewelry designer, hoping to make millions with my one-of-a-kind designs. I am a teacher, facilitator and speaker, wanting to change the world by helping it feel and release its traumas and teaching it to communicate openly with itself and others. I am actually quite talented and damn creative when you look in from the outside.

But from here inside my fuzzy, prickly caterpillar skin, I cannot see my way through to the end of any of these dreams. I sit down to work on something and my mind splinters in a hundred directions, freezes, and then some old protection mechanism firmly directs me to FaceBook, or YouTube, or online video games that take my attention and numb the dread that arises when no one is telling me what I should do. At the end of a day like this, I feel worse than before. I don’t want to tell anyone what I did all day, being ashamed of it, and I feel further isolated and powerless. It’s a spiral downward, a place I’ve been stuck for so many years I can’t even
remember not being here. I hate it.

It’s no longer a place I can tolerate without committing suicide, and in the last ten years, I’ve finally made myself comfortable enough to start dissembling this place head on. So, starting sometime last August, I began tackling this particular tendency, this part of myself that keeps me from realizing my wants and goals. I am determined to understand it, heal it and move forward – with colorful butterfly wings.

The journey to the center of the black hole is heating up, and last week, in a healing session with my friend Scot MacInis, I slowed down enough to realize some very important points. We were talking on the phone, and he was directing me to notice what sensations were occurring in my body. I noticed some deep tension in my shoulders and neck, and in my gluts (that’s my tush, in case you were wondering). As he began talking me deeper into relaxation, I noticed some tension releasing, and for a moment I had a pinging sensation in my heart, like excitement or joy that I was moving. Immediately following that ping, I felt a crushing disappointment and started to cry. Scot kindly listened, instructing me to just let those feelings be there, with no judgment.

As I cried, I thought, “what is this?” and my mind responded, “It’s either grief or fear.”

“Which one?” I demanded.

“Fear. Fear that the second I have a moment of joy, you’re going to take it away from me, or I’m going to be in trouble.”

I told Scot what my mind was saying.

“How old is that fear?” he asked me, meaning, how old was I when I first felt it?

“Seven or Eight.” Actually I was 4 when I first felt traumatic fear, but 7 or 8 when I began to understand that no matter what I did, my joy would be fleeting, and in no time I’d be back, bent over my step-dad’s knee or feeling his hot disgusting windrush of breath yelling in my face, or his brick-like fingers poking me in the breast-plate, or his open iron hand across my cheeks. I think it was at that point that I became conscious that I was truly trapped. No exit. Destined to die here with no help. Better use all my energy to placate. Better not rock the boat with any of my own ideas.

"Okay, just let that feeling be there. Look at it like it's the coolest fear you've ever had" he said.

So I continued to sit there, and then another feeling gripped me. Rage. I saw this part of myself that was so intensely angry that I had suffered all this abuse. This was no surprise. I’ve seen this part before. She rears up all the time, actually. I’ve been intimately acquainted with my rage since moving out of my step-dad’s house at 13. But what was surprising was what she seemed to yell out inside my mind.

“I am so ineffective!” What? I’d never heard that before. Angry? Yes. Outraged! Yes. But ineffective? Hmmm.

“How old is that part?” Scot asked.

“I don’t know. Much more current. Could be 30. I mean, it could be 13 for all I know, but it’s definitely some part of me that arose after I moved out. “

And in that moment I saw something I had never seen before. This raging part of me, which, if you didn’t know, is like the shadow side of power and accomplishment – if you don’t allow them both to exist, you cannot fully have either - was frozen in ineffectiveness. None of my rage makes any difference. The damage is already done. I can’t go back and protect myself now. It’s over. I lost. I’d better just shut up and watch for what people want me to do so that I don’t get in trouble now. Better not show any of my power.

With this insight came the momentary triumph of self-discovery, inevitably followed by the flood of feelings about the amount of time I’ve spent locked up in this pattern of hating myself for being ineffective, but surrendering to the powerlessness anyway for fear of annihilation.
The next day in meditation I sank further into the hole. All the feelings of hopelessness, the desire for suicide or some kind of final relief from all this suffering, the feelings of powerlessness, fatigue, and dread that I’ve experienced so many times over the years consumed me. For three hours I wept, hid my face, and endeavored to let these feelings go. At the end of my meditation, when I usually feel some lightness, some sense that I’ve moved through something, I couldn’t pull myself together. Even after all the participants of the meditation got into a circle and shared their inspiring insights, I could not shake the darkness.

Even through the weekend till today, I am still feeling the fear, feeling the frozen dark nature of it, longing to escape.

Alas, I am in the cocoon.

I cannot just move through thirty years of patterns, emotions and loss in one three-hour meditation. One set of insights is not enough to release me and land me squarely in the middle of redemption. I am sitting here in the darkness, letting this part of myself be exposed, to slowly shed itself and reveal what’s underneath.

I do not like the cocoon.

But being in here is different than anything I’ve experienced before. You see, I know I’m in the cocoon. I know inside that something is transforming, developing, opening. Even though I still feel like a caterpillar, even though some small part of me still doesn’t believe that transformation is possible having never experienced it fully myself, yet I seem to have this consciousness of where I am, and that one day, hopefully soon, I’ll emerge as a new being.

And another thing that’s different – I’m not here alone. I’ve got people guiding me, like my partner Ben, who is also on this journey, my friend Scot, my meditation teachers and all the other healers in my life. I only know to make the cocoon in the first place because I have seen you do it, or felt your gentle hands guiding me there. So I beg of you butterflies, stay near. Let me feel the brush of your wings on my shell and whisper to me that I am emerging. Lend me your strength so I can continue this excruciating process in the darkness. Thank you for going before me.




To contact healers that work powerfully with this kind of spiritual, emotional development, e-mail me from the blogspot, or check out the following peeps:

Edward Scot MacInnis 303-.875.9446

Center for 21st Century Transformation (meditations) 800-454-1224 www.thecentersf.org

Happily Ever After

I sat in the gymnasium at an Oakland elementary school this morning (btw, it’s now called a “multi-purpose room” – I said gymnasium to some kids last week and they looked at me like I was from Mars) and I listened to one hundred or so 3rd and 4th graders put on a play about their ancestors. Aside from two teachers, the project director and the theater director, I was the only white person in the room. The children walked on stage in groups of twenty and, three or four at a time, they acted out stories they had collected from their mothers, fathers, and grandparents, putting together a “Family Tree.”

The children were nervous and rambunctious and could hardly keep quiet for two minutes, but their stories were beautiful and heart-breaking, and showed me once again how powerful the human spirit truly is, and how bravely we all live our lives, though we show our courage in such different ways.

“I survived hurricanes and tornadoes.” “Crossing the American border – no food for six weeks.” “We loved our country, but had no money and no job. We had no shoes.” “Three hundred people in a truck with no ventilation or air conditioning and we immediately started to suffocate.” “You could smell the birds and the rain, and the wet ground and the sadness from leaving my country.” “I survived a gang shootout.” “I came to America because of war. I escaped from Laos to Thailand. I walked a long way to a refugee camp.” “I got caught by the cops and spent 8 days in jail, but I was in America. Thank God.” “My great-great-great grandma cleaned house for a white doctor in the South. This was in 1937 when whites and blacks were not equal. The doctor’s son knew that my great-great- grandmother was afraid of snakes, but he threw one on her. She got mad and beat the boy up. In those days blacks were killed for doing things like that. My great-great-great grandmother had to take her two children and catch a train to California at night to save her daughter’s life.”

Parents sat in the audience listening to these 8 and 9 year olds recount their traumas, their desperate experiences, their most challenging times. They sat proudly while their children wiggled and talked too fast and giggled at themselves and each other. As I watched, it struck me how little we often know about each other - how de-personalized our experience is in this country at this moment in time. We know what we see in our own community, sure, but beyond that, and even inside of that, we are often more familiar with what we see on TV, on the internet, on our Gameboys and PlayStations.

What would we do if we knew that our neighbor’s mother and father had spent six weeks without food, walking a thousand miles through coyote-infested deserts, raging rivers, crossing hostile borders just so they could have a 600 square foot house with running water for their family? What would we think about them then? What are we thinking about our own families? Have we lost sight of our own ancestors’ hardships?

I really want to forget the negative parts of our history. Our country is practically founded on forgetting. The Melting Pot. The American Dream. Come on over to the Promised Land where you can start anew, and anyone can become anything if they just work hard enough. I want to believe in the American ideal and focus on the future. But in forgetting those negative parts, many of which have not been gone that long (some would say they still aren’t gone at all), don’t we lose sight of each other’s courage? Don’t we miss out on huge parts of who we are, where we came from, how much valor exists in each one of us?

It’s hard to comprehend 6 billion stories of hardship and courage. It’s much easier to categorize people into several nice pat stereotypes and file them away in our internal warning systems – better watch out for those people –they’re dangerous! But maybe it’s not easier. I mean, it definitely is hard for us to imagine how brave people have to be, because it’s so overwhelming to the human spirit to think of how much pain we all live through. To feel that much empathy – well, it could drown us. It could make us feel hopeless about the odds of having a Happily Ever After, which after all, is what we secretly crave, isn’t it? So to not feel it – to deny the pain’s existence – feels easier.

But really – let’s look at that. To deny the existence of pain in the world, to deny the truth that every human heart is required to be brave at least some of the time, actually takes quite a bit of work. First we have to see the pain someone is experiencing and shut down our own feelings around it. This is a feat in and of itself. It takes emotional maneuvering – twisting what we see so we don’t have to bear the thought of such injustice or pain – it must be their fault, they must be lazy, they brought it on themselves. Once we’ve justified the story, and stuffed our feelings of sadness, outrage, and pain deep down inside, then we have to work constantly to keep the feelings from leaking out. So we overeat, we drink, we play video games and watch insane amounts of TV, we cruise the internet for hours. We argue over trivial little things so that the bigness of the world’s pain is kept at bay.

Wouldn’t it truly be easier to sigh a collective sad sigh, give each other a hug and move on? Wouldn’t it really honestly be easier to cry for a few minutes, an hour, whatever, and then help each other on down the road together?

It seems to me that hiding and denying and managing our feelings is far more work than just having them, as they are, in front of whoever’s watching, shame be damned. If we did, perhaps people would see our struggles and judge us less. Perhaps people would know the stories of our ancestors and ourselves for that matter because we wouldn’t need to keep such distance. Perhaps we’d be able to connect and honor each other and have world peace and all that good stuff. That’d be my Happily Ever After.