I wish I had a better sense of humor about my life circumstance at the moment but I am about as mirthful as Dick Cheney. Maybe he is mirthful. Hell I don't know. Is the Grim Reaper joyful? He reminds me of The Dark Angel. I really don't like Dick Cheney. It's actually easier for me to focus on Dick Cheney at the moment than it is to focus on....anything.
Which is what I am so flipping mad about. My butterfly brain. Oh hell. It is a great brain. Intellectually I know this, but emotionally I do not have any faith in it's reliability. My brain has not been reliable. Smart, yes, creative, yes, curious, yes. But I have struggled mightily with translating those attributes into tangible outcomes over time in a consistent manner.
Okay, I gestated 3 children. But in retrospect, if my brain had been in charge not my body they might still be half completed around the five and a half month point on my drafting table in the basement along with some Christmas project I began in 1999. It is not that I don't have stick -to- it-iveness its just that I ........
Where was I going? Oh right. I just sort of fade away.
I exist in a land where I doubt that I can be repeatedly successful over time in whatever undertaking I pursue. I don't trust that I can show up every day. ( because I haven't) I don't trust that I will finish what I start. ( because I haven't) About the only thing that I am consistent in is doubt.
I am told that with support, medicine and effort I can change. But honestly, I am scared to death that I won't. Because I have exerted effort, scads of effort, and I do have some amazingly supportive people in my life. The only thing I have not had is medicine. What if medicine is not the missing puzzle piece?
What if it is? What will showing up consistently for myself be like? Sort of scary.
....Blogger insists that you sign in. Metamessage?
Thou hast not been bloggething much upon trifles.
So. Trifles. That. Well, beyond pondering Dooce's separation like all the other internets geeks out there in webbyland ( and I feel really sad for her and her husband btdubbs) my wonky brain has been on overdrive. Definitely not trifle-ing. My synapses are waving the white flag.
So. What else is new? Until very recently I had no idea that there was an alternative to wonky. My whole life I've understood that I have a slightly confoosed brain at times but I have made the best of it. I am nothing if not highly functioning, superlative at over compensating, and when I am assured that no one is watching a Napper Par Excellence.
The Napping Situation as I like to call it has always been a stick in my craw. At times it seems as if I expend a super human amount of energy at staying awake. When I consider the hours in my life that I have either spent asleep or fighting my need to nod off...well, it is a little demoralizing. But fight I have. I have pushed and hyper focused and pushed some more and then collapsed into even deeper levels of tiredness and overwhelmedness than I had before I ever started pushing in the first place.
Many times I have known that complete and utter exhaustion will be the end result of pushing myself so instead I opt to not do anything at all. In the land of wonky choices treading through jello has been better than swimming through mud. So I have lived in patterns of extremes my whole life, veering from paralysis to hyper exertion and back. Over and over. And throughout it all I am always tired. Sooooo tired.
But I finally get my brain now and it took my youngest kid to help me figure it out.( I knew I had her for a reason and it wasn't just to become an adept at interpreting banshi-like screams.) In the process of helping my kid figure out why she behaves as she does in school and out of school, so many of her behaviors and struggles reminded me of my own at her age. And so I started athinkin'. And athinkn'. And I saw plain as day that the Attention Deficit Disorder that she struggles with is the story of my life as well.
Finally. It all makes sense. I always knew there was a puzzle piece missing. I have been looking for it under furniture and in closets and in between car seats for 30 years. On the one hand, I am thrilled to have a solid grip on the elusive meanderings of my brain. On the other hand, I am so damn tired and more than a little mad that I have been pushing through glue for 44 years and it didn't have to be this way.
But it is what is is. I have some serious hope now where before all I had was internal whip lashing for some vague moral deficiency that kept me from ever finishing ( or even starting ) a damn thing. In some bizarre alternate universe sort of way it is great to know that the depression and anxiety that have overwhelmed me at times throughout my life are not the problem but rather symptoms of an underlying problem never properly identified before now.
But I think before I get some meds for this ole' brain, I'll take a nap and let it all sink in.
I've been thinking often lately about what my psychic experiences look like. This is a strange thing to explain. I mean how can I explain something that is just part of what I experience daily. It's not something other. It's just what I am or what I breathe. Kind of like oxygen. How do you explain why it is part of life? It just is.
That said I've begun to distinguish two separate aspects to how psi works for me. There is the daily run of the mill psi; the intuiting of unspoken feelings and reading of subtle gestures that provide me with oodles of information about another person. This skill is innate in all of us but the degree to which the ability is strengthened in an individual varies widely. Just like any ability really. Psi is a muscle. Use it or lose it.
For better or worse I learned my mundane psychic skills at my fathers knee. I always know when my father is about to contact me. It may be via phone, email, snailmail or through his wife. And it doesn't matter if I have had contact with him just two weeks earlier or not for the previous year. I always know. First I have the thought, " Oh Lord. What Now. " and then within 24 hours but most often with 3 hours I will hear from him.
This used to make me nuts. But its simply a fact of life and I became skilled at this with him in particular because knowing his moods as a child was essential to maintaining my safety. He entrusted me with his emotions and God forbid I did not massage his feelings or I would pay the price. So I learned to tune into him at the expense of paying attention to my own feelings.
It has taken years to learn how to pay attention to my own feelings but I will never be able to unlearn completely how to not be plugged into his psyche. Clearly I am hard wired to be intuitive but this relationship is a prime example of how such innate skills can be unwittingly perfected.
The aspect of psi that has proven to be less clear to me is the way in which I have frequent flashes of future information that I know will come to pass even though they have not at the time of seeing. Sometimes, these flashes have been sort of sad. As a 9 year old I saw a picture in my head of me living in house with exposed brick ( not my current home ) and I felt that my parents were split up.
I resisted that information at the time and told myself I was really just thinking about my friend Wendy whose parents were in the midst of a horrible divorce but deep down I knew it was my reality I was seeing. And a year later it did come to pass. Even the exposed brick part because my mother bought a major fixer upper house that we lived in during construction. Go figure.
At 11 I dreamt that my father told us he was selling his house. There was a red bike in the living room in my dream and I remember thinking what is that doing there? We don't have a red bike. And yet 4 days later the scene took place just as I saw it and the red bike was there too. My father had just bought it earlier that day. It was leaning against the staircase when he sat my brother and I down to tell us he was moving. Go figure.
Not all future scenes are sad sometimes they are benign or even wonderful. On my recent trip to Rome I flew courtesy of my incredibly generous friend in Business class. I was thrilled but not stunned because 2 months earlier I had had the thought that she was going to surprise me in this way. I also said to my husband three years go that whenever I next had the chance to fly across the Pond it was going to happen in business class. Go figure.
But what really has made this come togther for me is that two night ago my family and I were sitting around the dinner table discussing learning disabilities. ( long story ) and I glanced over at my youngest who is 10 and thought, " She is going to have a little girl one day who has down syndrome " WHA???? I know right? My emotional ego body freaked for about 30 seconds and then I felt completely calm.
I felt at peace because I saw in a blink that my child who admittedly drives me around the bend with her drama has one of the biggest hearts of any person I know. She would be an amazing parent to a special needs child. I would become a better person should this event come to pass. Now. I have no idea if this will all come true. If it does we are talking easily 25 years from now. And perhaps she will be a special needs teacher. There are lots of variables. Not to mention I may be flat out wrong.
However.
I am not a betting woman but I did write this vision down and put it in a safe where I keep a record. It felt that important. It felt just like all the other visions I have had for 44 years. And that is when it hit me. On every occasion when I have a vision or feeling, while I may feel a moment of temporary panic, within seconds the fear is always replaced by a sense of peace and calm. A knowing that everything will be okay but with a sense of egolessness.
The video below is a fascinating one that discusses how our human minds are connected. It is long but worth the time if you have it to spare.
Do I have anything worth writing about? Hmmm....well, yes I suppose I do, but for various reasons I haven't written a dang thing of late. Nothing worth posting anyway. Mostly, I have been holding my head. (Still trying to figure out exactly why it feels so heavy on my neck.) Fortunately, Craig Weiler of weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com has written and posted. So, I have shared his most recent thoughts which I definitely think are worth considering. Happy New Year! May everyone's head expand in consciousness not crap!
An Expanded Consciousness Model in Psychology: Systemic Constellations
What happens when the treatment method that works best makes no sense in traditional psychology? That is the dilemma of Systemic Constellations. It’s an interesting alternate treatment method based on the idea that consciousness can and should be treated at the group level. That is to say, individuals can be traumatized by events within their group even if they were not directly involved. Not only does this occur in real time, but it goes back into history. A person can even be personally affected by events that their ancestors experienced. From a practical standpoint, this means that individual and group stresses can be approached by looking at what happened within the group.
From a materialist viewpoint, where the brain creates the mind, this makes no sense of course, but if we look at consciousness as being a fundamental property of the universe then there is a real possibility that this has a scientific footing. It is entirely possible to transfer memories from the past into the future as witness with the peculiar phenomenon of Cellular Memory. (Some recipients of organ transplants acquire habits of their donors.)
I think that the idea has value. People don’t live in vacuums; we are all part of small communities which are part of larger communities and if we are going to assume that consciousness is fundamental, then we have to acknowledge the fact that consciousness forms entities within entities. Watch this short video of a white blood cell chasing a microbe to see what I mean:
It’s fairly obvious that both the white blood cell and the bacteria are behaving independently and with conscious intent. The white blood cell is a living part of our living body. Or to put it another way, it is a consciousness within a consciousness. It is both whole unto itself and part of a greater whole at the same time. This is a demonstration of the holographic nature of consciousness. All pieces, no matter how small are whole unto themselves and together create something more complex than the sum of the individual pieces. There is no reason for the grouping of consciousness to stop at a single living entity, such as a human, a bird or even an insect. The grouping of individual conscious entities into larger entities can easily be found in nature. (Skip to the 3:19 mark for the really cool stuff.)
There is an eerie similarity between the movement of a flock of starlings and the white blood cell. Each Starling has its white blood cells which are conscious within the starling which is conscious which is within a flock, which is conscious as well. We also see these traits within bugs, which, individually are conscious entities and can demonstrate some spectacular examples of systemic constellations in the form of termite mounds and leaf cutter ant colonies.
These are both two dimensional renderings of highly complex, site adapted colonies created by creatures about the size of your fingernail. These are individual creatures, acting as one to create a structure of immense complexity that no single bug could hope to accomplish. They have to work together in a way that is only possible if you accept the existence of systemic constellations.
On a much larger scale we have the parapsychological research of the Global Consciousness Project, where it is shown that large changes in human consciousness can affect random number generators.
There are also some interesting experiments and evidence coming from an unlikely source that hint at electromagnetically based entangled communication as the means of information transfer. The idea of systemic constellations is not at all foreign to current parapsychological experiments. There is even another theory that runs along the same lines. Rupert Sheldrake has coined the term Morphogenetic Fields.
Morphic fields in biology
Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields.
In other words it appears to be a property of consciousness to form conscious entities which combined form greater conscious entities which combined form greater conscious entities until it extends to the whole universe.
When this concept is applied to psychology it is used to help people see themselves and the problems they have as part of a greater whole. Somehow, this is quite helpful. Because of the successes that have come with this approach, this is a small but growing field of study in psychology. The International Systemic Constellation Association (ISCA) currently has 222 members spanning the globe and according to Wikipedia is being integrated by thousands of practitioners world wide. (No independent source is given for this claim.) This is a very small number of people; it is only slightly larger than the field of parapsychology. That is not surprising however, given the animosity that the field of clinical psychology has towards any theories that involve an expanded view of consciousness.
In the Systemic Constellation system, people are treated as members of larger groups and the impact of those groups on the individual is given significant importance in therapy. The groups may be as small as a family or as large as an entire nation. One area of focus with this system for example is the enduring effects of slavery on the psyche’s of men and women generations removed from this horror.
The human tendency to avoid reconnection with feelings regarding this long chapter in U.S. history is an aspect of trauma’s “freeze” response. This frozenness has kept us from recognizing slavery’s contribution to the American and global economy, and today we all pay the price for ignoring enslaved African Americans’ contributions. These unhealed, unacknowledged collective wounds of slavery’s landscape cuts us off from creating sustainable, just solutions for today’s economy. We deeply need one another to melt these frozen traumas.
Systemic constellations reveal and transform embedded patterns that are otherwise very challenging to understand and change. Intellectually, we may recognize patterns of negative behaviors and destructive relationships, but in practice it can be extremely difficult to free ourselves from the ones that feel most unwanted. Through this process we become aware of the complex web of interconnection reaching into our present from generations past. Experiencing this interconnectedness so directly has an amazingly freeing effect.
To put this in more pedestrian terms: Hey! It works! Do it again! The people who practice this technique do it for that one simple reason. I am all in favor of practicality in psychology. Personally, in my admittedly quick review of the literature, I find that the practitioners are very much moved by what they experience in healing their clients. There are several instances in the literature that I read where the language these practitioners use is almost poetic. What that says to me is that they have hit a well of emotional depth that they are bravely exploring; it seems to be very difficult for them to explain this in the dry, clinical terms that one so commonly finds in psychology research. Is this not more real than a list of pathologies and their symptoms? I think so.
This method is the antithesis of modern psychology. While most studies focus on breaking humans into their individual parts and classifying them, this method treats us not only as a whole, but as part of a greater whole. I would term this Holistic Psychology, which, like its Holistic medicine counterpart, seems to work better than classical models. Hmmm.
Have you seen it yet? That Christmas blues television news story? It is an annual tradition second only in popularity ( at least on the east coast of the U.S. ) to the October cranberry bog harvest report. You probably know what I'm talking about, right? This time of year all over the states local news outlets run at least one story on how the winter holidays are not all that wonderful for "some" people.
Implied in these stories of course, is that these poor non festive miserable souls are to be pitied as they hover in a corner of their living room staring into a artificial light box whilst throwing back SSRI's like M&M's. Not that I have any idea what that is like.
But what these self satisfied news blobs never really address is the why of it all? Oh sure. The darkening days, the forced family gatherings that you spend most of the year avoiding. Those things all factor in. But perhaps....just perhaps the dissatisfaction with all things holiday- ish has a tad to do with the competitive, consumer frenzy that is what now passes for holiday spirit across the land.
I mean really. This shit is bananas. Christmas retail started before Halloween in my local grocery store. My relentlessly competitive neighborhood started stringing Christmas lights two days before Thanksgiving. Black Friday is now practically a holiday. A good friend recently told me that someone wished her a " Happy Black Friday before she uttered Happy Thanksgiving. No Lie. This shit is bananas.
And what is worse? I fell for it all again. I got caught up in the feelings of Christmas inadequacy because I wasn't rushing to the mall or inflating higantic Santas on my front lawn. So, what did I do? I took myself to Homegoods. That netherworld of holiday landfill. I was determined to purchase some Christmas spirit. All the tv people said I could afterall. And I didn't want to be left out of the fun.
So, not being the nativity sort I settled on a pair of Christmas ducks. And I put all my holiday eggs in their ducky basket. These ducks were going to bring me joy dammit. They were going to be the jumping off point for a whole new outlook on the American material Christmas. And truth be told. These weird, pointless ducks were right up my alley.
I took them home. I displayed them next to a basket of some kind of fake Christmas berries and I was glad. Oh, so glad. So. Glad. I felt as if I had finally gained entry to the club. At least this year.
Then, filled with Christmas smugness, I went out to run some more errands. When I got home I found that my dog, Bodhi, had murdered eaten the leg of one of my ducks. I was bereft. Not only was Christmas ruined but my dog was a terrorist. I repaired the duck's leg. I mourned my failure to achieve Christmas perfection. I drank some a lot of wine. And then I saw what I had missed before. Once again my wise one, my Bodhisatva, had shown me my faulty thinking. He showed me through the gift of imperfection that my lame duck was the best reminder of what Christmas is about.
It is about valuing what has meaning for you. Not what a store says you should value. Not even what a well intentioned friend or relative says you should value. Just what holds a place in your own heart. For me, it is a crappy ass, lame duck. I may not even bother with outdoor lights next year ( don't warn my neighbors ), I might blast Adelle or The White Stripes and not Jingle bells on my ipod. I might even eat chinese on Christmas day. I do know that whatever I do it will be with my damn duck. I can use the splinters from his maimed leg as chop sticks.
Now I know why I am so crispy fried at the end of a holiday vacation day spent largely shoulder to shoulder with my youngest, aka Drama Queen. The following conversation took place as we drove south of the Mason-Dixon line, all 5 us us smooshed together, to spend Thanksgiving Day with the grandmother who considers observations about darkening days and out of state licence plates to be the pinnacle of civilized discourse.
I think this part anyway of youngest spawn's rant lasted about one minute, but my head actually melted and congealed somewhere on I-95 south so maybe it took longer. To be sure you would have to take testimony of the other witnesses present. But good luck with that because at last check they were scraping their own eyeballs off the macadam.
Drama Queen: Can you put on Adele?
Me: No. We are taking an Adele break.
DQ: MOM. Can you put on Adele? Just can we hear " Set Fire To The Rain?" MOOOOM. Oh GREAT! So what are we going to listen to now? BORING music? YOUR music? That is not even music. Dad can I use your iphone?
Smokin Biscuit: Yes. One Second.
DQ: How come we have to listen to stupid stuff? Do not put on "Pumped Up Kicks " Why do you do this to me? You know I hate that song. It is not even GOOD. Do you even know how to get to where we are going mom? I am not eating sweet potatoes. Or carrots. Do I have to eat the stuffing? Stuffing is GROSS. Is the gravy going to be on top? You know I don't like condiments. DAD! Can I use your cell phone?
SB: I said yes. One moment please.
DQ: What state are we in?
SB: Delaware.
DQ: Isn't that where all the weirdos live? I am NOT living in Delaware. Dad. DAAAAD? Can I use your cell phone?
SB : I said yes
DQ: No you didn't. Why can't I use your cell phone? This is so stupid. I don't even like condiments.
