I write stories, in my head.  These stories are what will happen in my life.  I can’t remember when I started doing this, I was quite young I think.  It’s the meta-narrative of my life, the overarching plot.  In these stories this action will lead to that event and then x, y and z will be possible.  Experience, though, is showing me that my stories are not always true.  The first time I came up against an uncooperative plot line I re-wrote the narrative.  Instead of the heroine following this path, she finds her way blocked and, full of resourcefulness, negotiates the obstacle and triumphs!  Huzzah!

Only the more this happens, the harder it is to keep a sense of the narrative.  The obstacles come more quickly, the story becomes twisted and confusing.  It splits from reality and the story life becomes so disjointed from real life that it’s hard to match the two up anymore.

The epiphany comes when I realise I need to let all those stories go.  Because they aren’t the real story.  The real story is more gritty, more powerful, more surprising.  It moves at such a break-neck speed, shifting like sands.  It changes constantly.  Releasing the old stories frightens me.  What if I am going to drift, like a post-modern novel, through surreal landscapes to inconclusive endings? If I stop writing the story where do I go next.

Shifting my metaphor I become an explorer.  Rather than writing about my travels through life I will be living it, rather than thinking I will be feeling, rather than planning I would be doing. It moves moving from air to earth.  And fire.

Releasing the stories means letting go of an illusion of control, of a sense of mastery.  It was a fiction anyway, but a comfortable one.  Releasing the stories means that I step beyond words and into the depths of experience. Immersed.  I may get lost here.  I may not be able to see the path ahead.  Likely I never could.  I will only be able to take the next step. The next breath.  To trust in the unfolding, the becoming.

Change doesn’t come easily.  It can take me a while to catch up with reality sometimes.  In my head I had an idea of what was going to pan out, and sometimes that’s so powerful that it’s all I can see.  The story is more real than reality and releasing that can take time.

Today I’m feeling the loss of story.

It was keeping me safe, wrapping me up.  It had furnished me with a magical pot of paint and I could run around life and gild all the crappy stuff with a golden sheen. I somehow got the idea that this was what I needed to do.  At church I learned how to count my blessings, that God had a reason.  From new age spirituality I learned that there’s a lesson in there somewhere, and you’re never given more than you can handle.  Kind friends offer these sentiments.  I know they want to help.

But I’m calling bullshit.

Because sometimes it’s just crap.

I have been telling myself a story about my life.  In this story I overcome all adversities to achieve complete well being and fulfillment.  It’s the Western, modern myth, an update on the fifties version of the American Dream.  Nothing will stand in my way if I’m positive enough and just have sufficient faith.

There have been adversities.  The sudden and traumatic end of a marriage.  Personal health issues.  Concerns around children and their additional needs.  Extended family dramas.  At each moment I have strapped on my Jane Austen heroine and overcome adversity.

This time it’s different though.

My mum has Alzheimer’s.  We noticed that her memory seemed different several years ago, though we only had a diagnosis in 2015. I was aware it is a degenerative illness, I have read the websites, it is a grim story.  But a heroine is undaunted.  We can make this work, I thought.   I see her maybe once or twice a week. She has grown frailer over the past twelve months.  And her short-term memory has all but gone.  But I didn’t realise, that when I saw her she has been pulling out all the stops.   Dad has told me this but I didn’t see it.  She smiles and chats, she asks appropriate questions.  I have still been able to see her.

I have seen my folks three times in the past four days.  And I see that I haven’t had the full picture.  Mum was here.  But not here.  She forgot very quickly that we had made her a drink.  I needed to prompt her to eat  anything.  She had no appetite or interest in food, she was withdrawn.  She sat in the chair and forgot to unwrap the gift in her lap, staring out of the window, or returning repeatedly to read a gift tag.  The effort of keeping up appearances was exhausting.  And although she spoke about going for a walk, when I took them home she struggled to make it from the car to the front door.  Dad says that this is pretty normal.

I am shocked.  I am angry.  I don’t know what to do.

I’m good at plans, I’m good at coming up with answers, with solutions, with finding clever ways round problems.  I am an organiser extraordinaire.

But I got nothing.

It’s just crap.

And the Jane Austen happy ending feels hollow.

Waking up today was like being in a new world.  I can feel the hardness there.  The grit of reality.  The slow ache of grief. The stone in my metaphorical shoe that is stopping me from sleep walking my way through the days.  There is a burning in my soul, a deep keening.  To be witness to this slow unraveling.  To know that it won’t get better, that I can’t make it better. To know that across the world millions are in this place, for a thousand reasons.  That there is pain and sadness and loss and fear.

My gut is restless and my head keeps trying to pull away.  My eyelids want to close and shut it out.   To run back to the sleep world, the dream life.

But I am resolved.  To feel this.  To let it be.  To sit with it.  To look it in the face.  To keep my eyes open. To make myself look, not turn away.  To allow it.

The paint’s all dried up now.

It feels like the only things is to sit in the dark, holding hands, and sing the songs we love.

Heart to heart.

Scar to scar.

 

 

 

 

It begins each time like a quest.  The journey itself has taken on a symbolic feeling.  At first the roads are wide, a dual carriageway leading to country B roads, well made, clear, fast and free flowing.

Passing through villages there is a shift, a valley opens up, steep sided, cattle grazing the meadows, isolated farms.  The houses are scattered now and there is a little used sense in the road beneath me, rougher at the edges, potholes. 

I turn into the lane, it winds around crazy bends, hugging close to ancient cottages, twisting up steeply between high, tree clad banks.  There is no space here for passing.  This day, as I climb, the mist thickens until I’m driving through the low cloud which mantles the top of the downs.  Finally, a gate tucked in the hedge and arrival.

A journey into the wilderness, the unknown and hidden places.

I’ve been making this journey for a year and a half.  During this time, I have changed in ways I didn’t know possible, peeled back layers of life and history, of ancestor story, worked through healing in both mother and father lines. Today I’m fretting again about work.  This has been an irritant for decades.  What shall I do?  What am I here for?  I have tried to weave a career making sure of space for family, I have sought to be in service to others and brought myself to burn out in the attempt, I have wanted to create and build though what comes out is never quite what I had imagined.  And through it all a sense of restlessness.  An inability to stop.  Filling each day with activity.

Identity.

As I reel off the frantic mind-muddle of the past weeks the word comes as a question. Yes, I say, without a doubt.  Work is how I represent myself to the world.  It is how I find who I am. I don’t know who I am without it.

She asks me to sit with this.  She asks me to sit in my body and feel it.  Where is it, she asks, that feeling?

Everywhere.

What does it feel like?  Like I’m trapped, I want to escape, everything feels tight.

Allow it, she says, sit with it, if you’re ok.

Part of me wants to scream. To get up and drive away.  It is uncomfortable, my breath is stuck in my throat and my skin itches in response.

What is underneath that? She asks.  And where?

In my stomach, in my chest.

What does it feel like?

Anger.  Rage.  Fire.

Yes, she says, stay with it…. years of doing what’s expected….

I am crying now but it doesn’t seem to matter.  I allow the fire to burn inside me, a fire I have squashed for years.  I have tamped it down again and again because I don’t know what will happen if I let it burn, I don’t know how to live with the raw power, with the heat and the passion and the strength and the wildness.

It feels like a friend.  Here to warm and protect me, to light the way.

Time passes, I am sat deep inside myself, in the landscape of imagination.

What is behind that? She asks, can you feel it?

There is a space, behind the fire.  An opening.

What does that feel like?

It is elemental.  Forests and storms, oceans and mountains, free and strong and wild.

This is you.  The essence of you…

I have never been here before.

…..

I breathe differently now.

The things which have harried and preoccupied me for years seem less.  I can feel this elemental self, whispering in my soul.

 

She needs time to grow and strengthen, she needs to know she is safe to show herself.

But she is here.

I was about three.  It was at our playgroup, in Allhallows village hall.  I remember lying on my stomach and watching it move towards me, a long, brown, speckled line, maybe six feet long, tongue flickering.  I wasn’t scared.  Amazed maybe.  Interested.  Fascinated by the touch of its smooth, soft skin.

Since then though I have feared snakes.  Something made me shudder.  Maybe all that old Eden myth, the voice of temptation and disobedience.  I never learned that there is wisdom in the snake, and the lesson of constant rebirth, the old skin dying away and left, just a husk.

This is what brings me to snake medicine today.

About a week ago I read something which jolted me.  I don’t remember where now.  It said that the snake sheds it skin, and leaves it behind, it doesn’t go back to it.  So when a friend pulled this card from me from Ethony’s Awakened Soul Oracle it was timely.

I have been shedding my skin.  Actually literally shedding my skin through chronic eczema for the past four months. But also shedding my emotional – soul skin.  The ways of a lifetime do not work anymore, old patterns, ways of being.

It reminds me of Jesus’ parable of the wine skins, you don’t put new wine in old wine skins, they’ll burst.  You don’t put a newly reborn soul in an old soul skin, it won’t be able to hold it…it’s not the right skin to be in.

But I have been running back to it.  Picking up the translucent shell of my old self and trying to stitch something together from it, create some kind of patchwork self, afraid of letting it go, of leaving it. Of releasing.

I want to thank the old skin.  For the lesson.  For carrying me and holding me when I needed it.  For being my edges and my boundaries for a time.  For knowing when it was time to leave, even when I didn’t think I was ready.

It is dead now, brittle, only a wraith-like cocoon.  It was the space in which I grew for a while, the womb of my new self.  But it has served its purpose now.  It does not  mourn for itself.  It is not sorry.  This is what it was for.  And I no longer fit it.  It was too small.  Too tight.  Too restrictive.  So it died and I wriggled free.

To be free.

 

 

I recently read Brene Brown’s book Braving the Wilderness.  One of the key things that struck me early on in the book was the idea of permission.

Quite often, no, honestly, all the time, I am waiting for permission.  I give my “power” away and look to external authorities.  In one way or another this has been, and continues to be, parents and teachers.

In her book, Burning Woman, Lucy Pearce writes about the Good Girl:

“The Good Girl learned her lesson well: she knows that she must submit to survive…She looks outside herself – to parents, peers, and her bible of choice…to dictate how she should live, what she should wear, how she should speak, what is acceptable.” (page 126)

It is paralysing.  This need, deeply set in my mind.  A chain around my ankle.  Shackles. Quite often I come to a decision, feel that the time is right, and then I wait.  I talk to people about it.  I pull cards.  I talk about it some more.  I journal.  I read books.  I create vision boards to explore my idea further.  I speak to my mentors.  But I don’t act.  I do not trust myself to take that next step without someone telling me it is ok. I am looking for validation, for approval, for someone to sign the slip, that says I can.

I have done this for my entire life. I didn’t realise how powerful a habit it was and that I was still doing it until I read that section of  Brene Brown’s book.   She says that she started writing herself permission slips on post-it notes… right now I am still struggling with the fear of taking that step, what would that be worth? Who am I to say it’s ok?

Who else can though?

The journey I am on now is about reclaiming my own power and trusting in my own inner wisdom.

It doesn’t come easily.  I have a sense of being untied from the moorings and bobbing about in a vast ocean.  The obvious thing to do would be to pick up the oars and start rowing.  But somehow, I’m still sat in the stern looking around for the captain.

Increasingly though there is a sense of a hidden part of me yelling as loud as she can to get my attention. To break me from my stupor and shake me into action.  I have woken up, and stand here, still blurry with remembered dreams,  in the light of a different dawn.

I watched our priestess circle call yesterday.  Our teacher was talking about intentions and about our commitments.  She talked about her own experiences, and how there are some intentions that she continues to set every day.  For her this is part of committing to that intention and keeping it alive and present, as well as reminding herself it is something she is working on.

Then she spoke about commitments.

Now I have always thought of commitments as the things I do.  In the past, when I went to church, that was one of my commitments.  In the years when I served on various committees those were my commitments.  And I would say that I’m committed to my family.  They are important to me.  In this sense it’s about loyalty and showing up.

But she gave me a new way of looking at commitments.  She asked us to look at our lives and see, in real terms, what we were committed to.  She said that we manifest, make real, the things we are committed to.

So, I looked at my life.

Now, as prelude to this, I will share that I have set some intentions in the past few months, about the work I would like to do, and the direction I would like my life to take.  I’ve spent time journaling and visualising and creating rituals to set my intent.  I have taken some steps to make this real, setting up a business website, completing my 100 readings as part of my initiation as a tarot reader, taking a life coaching class…

But when I look at my life it isn’t that stuff that I’m committed to.  What I’m committed to, it would appear, is over work, being too busy, and being constantly tired.

Because that is what is here. And that is what I continue to create.   I say out loud that I want to have a different life.

But it scares me.

I keep the door to another life open.  Because I know it. And because in practical terms it pays the bills and provides for my family.

Now I’m not advocating throwing it all in and leaving my loved ones homeless and starving.  But.

Then, later in the circle, we made a journey together.  We went to visit our inner priestess who we’d encountered right at the start of the programme.  In the vision she showed me something I really didn’t expect.    I saw myself carefully moving obstacles into my own path.  I was shifting giant boxes so that the way ahead would be difficult to navigate or completely impassable. And I was doing it all very quietly and subtly so that my “waking” self wouldn’t see.

Sabotage!

It is both ridiculous and shocking.

I am left with a sense of having been woken from a dream, and also, utter bewilderment.  I can see now the pattern I’ve been creating and living and reliving.

The question remains, if that is not the “real deal” what is?  Is my new dream valid, or is it another impossible construct that will prove unobtainable as my inner self works to undermine?

Time is needed.  Have I got the courage to step into a new way of being, to unstick myself and be free?  What comes next is a mystery…

Sometime around 8 o’clock this morning it hit me.

I’ve been having counselling now for about a year and a half.  The other day I was thinking about endings and wondering when I will be ready to stop…

And it came to me, between drying dishes and sorting laundry.

When you believe you are ok.

When I believe that I’m ok as I am, when I can look in the mirror and think “yes, I like you, you I can live with.”

Then.

Because at that point all the other things that I wrestle with; over work, perfectionism, self-doubt, boundaries will fade away, because their roots lie in low self-worth.  And if I transform the roots, the other things will no longer have the food they need to live and will die away.

I’m not there yet.  But I will be.  I know this now.

This comes in part with owning my “shadow”, as I wrote the other week. Not so that I can bleach it into oblivion.  Not for spiritual jet washing through high vibration shenanigans.  I am not going to meditate myself out of my shadow.  I am going to see it and embrace it.

Because it is me.

It made me think of the moon.  When she is shining brightly on us it is her sunlit face we see.  Half of her is always in shadow, even when she is full.  Yet she is always whole.  If we got rid of her shadow side she would only be in part.  Like a paper disc, flattened.

If I scrub and clean with my spiritual tools until there is no trace of anger or jealousy or rage or passion what will become of me.  I will, for a start, be inhuman.  And only a paper person.  Two dimensional. 

This thought gives me such a feeling of joy.  That I can be good enough and that is ok. That I can stop reprimanding myself, that I can stop trying to bend my mind into saintliness, that I can start living without my internal headmistress constantly tutting at my imperfections.    I have shut her in her office and thrown away the key.  Better still sacked her and sent her far away to get some sun and perspective.  **Throws straw boater into air and cheers.**

I was sharing these thoughts with my dear friend and soul sister this morning; talking about agreeing to this process, about being open to it, because I can only sit within it and allow it, it cannot be forced, and she reminded me….

this is grace. That in my current state, holding both light and dark aspects of my character, I am a whole person; fully human.

And worthy.

 

I had an epiphany just now.  It’s worth sharing.

I was up at 3.30 am this morning.  There’s a lot going on in life at present (for you too, no doubt) and sometimes it’s the time I have to think about it.  I got up and made tea, trying to persuade the cats it wasn’t breakfast time yet.  I lit a candle and pondered a while.

It took me some time to get back to sleep but I think I managed about another hour.

Once I was up I had to get straight on with report work.  My muggle job is as a specialist assessor.  I assess children and adults for specific learning difficulties.  And write the reports.  So.  One left from last week to finish, before this week’s assessments kick off tomorrow. I worked on this for an hour finishing around 8.30 am.

Then straight into some chores, we were expecting a visitor for an official meeting and I still like to make sure the place looks passably tidy.

The visitor arrived and we had a meeting with my eldest son.  He has an autistic spectrum condition.  We needed to discuss his options. I was proud of him when he explained to the man who came that while he accepted he had a disability he didn’t see himself as disabled and he felt the new benefits on offer were for people in greater need than him.  He is opting to seek work.

Once the visitor left we got straight onto the government website to make an application and upload his CV.  Then I had some emails to deal with.  I rang my mum too.  She was feeling blue.  She has a whole heap of challenges to do with her health and with my dad out working today was feeling lonely.  I went over with some lunch and then we came back here for a coffee and some chats with my son. After I dropped her back at home and helped with a few small jobs I headed home again, the sun blazing through the dark clouds and burnishing the already golden leaves.

Now this is where the lesson comes.

I am taking a basic counseling skills course.  It’s proving hugely helpful in several areas of my work.  The class is three hours on a Tuesday evening.  So I was supposed to get ready and go out again.  Only I noticed something.

I noticed that I was struggling to coordinate my body.  That I felt nauseous and my head was tight.  That it was more difficult than it should be to see straight.

I have learned, over the past eighteen months, that these are signs that I’ve hit the red warning marker on my personal energy gas tank.  In the past I would have ignored this.  I would have drunk a jug of coffee, eaten some cake and gone anyway.  That’s how I got ill last year.

Today it was a different story.

I sent my apologies.

Then I went to look for some crystals.

I chose rose quartz for self-care, bloodstone for healing, clear quartz to clean my energy and obsidian for grounding.  I placed them all in a gauze pouch.  Then I ran a bath with olive oil and Epsom salts.  I added the pouch and some dried lavender from the garden.

Once soaked and feeling a little more stable I put on my super-cosy extra large Ravenclaw sweatshirt and made a fruit smoothie for a snack.

Bazinga!  Self-care baby.  I was so incredibly amazed at the change in my behaviour.  And so thankful.  I might not manage this everyday but today I did.

I am learning.  Slowly.

 

 

The shadow self.

It feels as though this is the key.  All the issues I’m facing seem to come from keeping it in check, pressed down and squashed.  I am concerned about the term itself, “shadow self”. It makes me think it is “other”, like an othering of myself.

When, in reality, it’s me.

I grew up believing that some feelings were wrong, unacceptable; jealousy, anger, spite, fear.  I spent a lot of time and energy trying to control them, the “sinful” nature.  Instead of owning it.

This is me.

It frightens me.  The possibility that I might not be able to keep it in check.  That it will burst out suddenly, pouring forth in a torrent of horror and darkness, that I will be all the worst elements of my character without filters or barriers.  That there will be no going back.

That would be a thing to behold.

I feel as though these parts of me ought to be beaten into submission.  New Age teachings encourage us to “raise our vibration”, dismiss the earthier impulses, control them, mantra them out of existence, light wash them away. I feel as if I am supposed to get them to conform, the wildness scrubbed clean, matted hair untangled, scar marked flesh covered.

Sit there and behave, like a good girl.

It isn’t working though.  Years of prayer, meditation, spiritual searching, service, seeking to be a better version of myself.  This “shadow” is still a part of myself.  It is the part that helps me to survive, that fights my corner, that lives on instinct and raw nerve.  It listens beyond words, feeling the vibrations of danger before they are visible.

And what a deal of work to keep that hidden! No wonder the façade eventually begins to crack, our bodies and minds rebelling. Breakdown.

Breakthrough.

I wonder if a gentler approach would be possible.  Kindness. Love. Soothing.  To welcome and own this aspect of my nature.

I do not know how to live in this place yet.  Neither do I know what will happen if I try.  I might end up friendless and alone, curled up in a shop doorway with a sheet of cardboard for a blanket.  Or pacing the sterilised floor of a locked psychiatric ward.  That is the fear.  Of becoming outcast, rejected, unclean.

I hope I will meet my wild self and learn to be free.  To flow with the seasons.  To walk barefoot in the woods. To breathe with the beat of ocean waves.  To rest under a starlit sky and finally know myself whole.

It sits at the back of the attic, covered in brown paper and wrapped with string.  Apart from this there is no other indication of what it contains.  Covered in cobwebs and the dust of the loft space she knocks it as she moves a pile of old books.   The box shivers, almost sighs.  She nudges it back into place with her elbow and turns, heading for the ladder with a sudden urgency for fresh air.

She has been trying to make it ok for a long time.  She has taken responsibility for her own healing.  She has written a version of her story which she can share without bitterness or anger, without tears or tantrums.  And she knows that there is a richness and freedom now which she couldn’t have imagined in the past.  Life moves on.  She is grateful.

She has new boxes to store in the attic now, full of bunting and table decorations from the wedding, or leaflets and tickets from day trips and holiday visits.  She stores there the spare plates and kitchenware which come from combining two households.  And the Christmas boxes with ornaments she has chosen with a new love.

The calendar flips in a movie-style montage and months, years pass.  Her hair begins to grey, lines crease at the corners of her eyes now.  Anniversaries come and go, for celebration and those she would rather forget.  The pain has shifted into regret, and a blurring of memory.  She knows it tore her life apart, but the emotion is washed out, faded from technicolour to sepia.

These last months though she can feel it calling.  A whisper each time she ventures into the roof space, a rustling at the edge of her dreams.  Something unvisited, unapproached, locked down.  For months she distracts herself, more work, more social calls, projects and plan, classes and crafts.  Because in the busy time she can ignore that murmur at the edge of thought, the nag in her gut, pulling her.

It is with a clear, blue flash, while hanging laundry, that she realises it is holding her, pulling her strings, that she is allowing it to manipulate her inner world.  The sensation is like the shock of cold water closing over your head as you plunge into an unheated pool, like the falling within that comes when you miss a step.  She pauses, hand on the line, looking into a clear autumn sky.

Leaving the laundry, she enters the house, jaw set, heart pounding.  It is time.  Because the story she has told is a version of events, one she has created to show and tell, where she is whole and happy, air brushed and suitable for family viewing.  The real story is tied in the box.  Unexamined.

She pulls down the ladder and climbs up, suddenly breathless, the dark space flickering into reality as the fluorescent tube winks into life.

There.  In the back corner, leaning against the chimney breast.  She crawls across the boards, reaching for the string binding and pulling it towards her.  Her hands are slick and sweaty now.  The knots resist and, for a moment, so does she.  She closes her eyes.  Slows her breathing. Loosens the knots gently, working them free, peels back the paper, removes the lid.

She takes out the items one by one, each memory held up to the light, some blurry and unclear now. She looks at the images, checking the back for dates to reconstruct a timeline.  It is incomplete, and the raw power that sat here once has faded with time. She sits, surrounded by the story, heart sore and raw again, tears flowing freely.  This was it.  The legacy of a great love.  A shared path laid out, the tangling of two lives, now unmeshed.

She pushes the attic window, and props it open, allowing a streak of blue to peep through into the harshly lit space.  Returning to her papers she gathers them into her hands, wondering at their frailty.  She holds them to her heart and whispers to them, her sorrow and regret, her gratitude, her love.  Taking them to the window she spreads her hands and watches each one as it grows wings and flutters into the fresh, cool air, mixing with the golden leaves that shower from the trees.