Category Archives: childhood abuse

A Season of Change

Posted on by
The last year has been challenging for me. To move, to sit, to walk felt like a sword was stuck straight into my hip joint with the pain travelling down into my knee and like a true baroque expression of torture becoming a strip of fiery shin splint.
I am an active person emotionally fed by physical challenges. I have managed my Airbnb single handedly for 12 years going as much as ten months without a day off. My garden was so magnificent that people who inevitably stop to smell the roses which I kept tall so the elderly would not have to bend down for the perfume.
But then COVID hit and I folded my dreams and plans like an ivory ribbon fan and stuck them away in a drawer. It was useless to pretend. The choices of denial, or angry resistance have never been something I am drawn to. I know how to wait out the shit storm in periods of disaster. You get that skill when you are over 70 or you risk looking like an imbecile toddler throwing a fit into the faces of innocent people caught in your spewing inability to absorb the vicissitudes of life. After a certain number of decades one should learn that the elevator goes up and it goes down sometimes even getting stuck for no reason.

Working with Ego

So I stayed home and turned inward dedicating myself to learning, reading, studying and coaching my clients. In October 2021 when I went on the surgical hip replacement list I had finally lowered my proud head and given up on toughing it out.
The entire year has been one of deep and abiding growth. Submission to what is was all I could do. My choice was to deepen my grounding practices or to thrash around in the net of constraint I was now caught within.
When it came to me as a metaphor I thought of it as “the last firing” of a piece of pottery. I had been glazed and now I would see my true colors appear.
There were days when as I struggled out of bed the first thing I would do would be to weep. It wasn’t vigorous athletic/dramatic/theatrical sobbing but more of just a leaking out of grief.
I was 77, 78, 79 and isolated from real life contact with others because I was minutely aware down to the smallest detail carved with statistics that my age cohort had no room for stupid.
The deepest lesson that I received was that I am fully, inexorably and fucking human. My emotions would arise and I had to make choices. Would this hour be one of wise decisions, resignation, or of internal vitriolic debate of self with self?
I kept my compass out. I kept coming back to the question: Who do you want to become?
And what I mean by that is not how do I present to others, or how much status or power I can accumulate. What I kept returning to was the pottery metaphor. My clay was being thrown about by hands other than mine. I was being burnished, polished, placed in a fiery kiln of apparent chaos and something was happening to me.
The consistent restrictions on movement, the chronic pain, the disengagement from groups, from normative behavior, the Egregore of society was a full on attack from all sides.
This is not particularly extraordinary to my life. Most people in the last three years have had their contract with life put in the shredder. We have all stood and watched it cut into thin strips.
It became so very clear to me that I had little understanding of what depression does in a life. Because I was used to enduring, I came to see that this very habituation to the dissociative state was my greatest scarring from my childhood. I had no urge to paint, to write, to send in poetry or stories. I was used up in not allowing despair to eat me alive.
“How long,” I asked myself, “How long have you gone to ground, become frozen and paralytic when you are in pain?”
And then I remember where it came from. As a toddler if I cried, I would be attacked physically. As a child in school I would have the “silliness” slapped out of me if I looked sad. So now I was deep into the initial wound.

at 4 years old

By nature, I think I am quite stoic but there was also a large part of the residual scarring in my experience of cruelty under the age of 6. It was violently taught to me that I had no rights to host the demons of negative emotions. Only my parents could be angry.
I could see how deep in ran in me. But now in this retreat in the hermit cave I faced the fact that I had to forgive myself for everything that made me human.
I am still and have been in pain for a year. Because of that, I will be triggered into the helplessness of no rescue in my early years. Who will protect me? Who will make it stop? There is no one.
But I have me now. And I have given myself permission to shut down and just tend to my body. I have given myself permission to see the victories I have achieved that don’t shine out into the world. They are private between me and me. All of it is the clarity of seeing how strong I have made myself.
And now it all changes. I am going through three surgeries in a month. I am promised a new hip.
So many of my ancestors were knights. They knew about battles, self discipline, stoicism and skill in the face of the enemy. I know my enemy has been my own ego and I feel the ancestors in me as I have faced the lesson these past three years. The sturdy warriors had the wisdom to leave old wounds and battles behind and trained for the next battle. They have much to teach me.

 

 

The knights in my ancestry

 

 

Learning my boundaries: country of self

Posted on by

I am constantly bumping into my limitations. There were days on end when the heat and smoke and working seven days a week were teaching me my capacity. How long can you go in a state of optimistic, accepting calm, woman? Hey. Let us find out.

When I stepped on a mass of dry twigs and three (so far that is the number that shot out of the resultant infection in my foot) shards were embedded; when my right eye stopped seeing clearly; when I found it difficult to breathe, I slid into a deep down knowing that the world was a crap lined cave of granite imprisonment. I forced myself to do the hours of work to prepare for guests every day but I settled for a grim existence.

stressors teach us

It makes me think of the experiences of my ancestors. The city is a fortress but it is surrounded by the invading hoards that have cordoned it off. No relief is in site. So for generations (on both familial trees) stoicism and indifferent detachment from one’s own suffering was the key to survival. I shift into “lock down” mode. I shift into disassociating mode.

Evidence of this arises frequently. After, I couldn’t see… I allowed three days to elapse before I got to the opthamologist.  Because the thought that something was happening to my vision was terrifying me, a person who is highly visually acute; an artist; a gardener, I buried it deep. Because my foot had an infection and stepping on it was painful, I just sat more. It was two weeks later that I showed it to my daughter and she suggested I actually soak it in epsom salts to encourage it to eject the intruding darts of lavender formed into weapons.

It was only when I sat with my counselor and explained some of the symptoms I was experiencing in my body that I heard her say, “Do you think you could be disassociation?”
cheap viagra order These types of shakes tend to be clinically examined and proven have no side results. But companies claim to use these compounds as pfizer viagra generic a carrier of fragrance. The attributes of Kamagra Oral Jelly are indistinguishable to those of purchasing here viagra on line order Kamagra tablets. The duty of the manufacturers of this drug are the virtue of its extensively capable configuration that has been developed as a PDE5 inhibitor to oppose generic tadalafil the activities and attention span of a person.
When the number and type of stressors I am experiencing ramps up, I go into lock down. I tell myself that the way out is to simply work harder on meditation and not see the events as negative. And then all hell breaks out. The bottom gear in my humanity is always blaming myself for my humanity.

no air

I have soaked my foot until all three pointy stick weapons were released by my body. I have begun to eat more salt to make sure my heart pumps blood to my eyes. I have once again made an effort to reach out to others to connect and not shut myself into my tower of protection.

And as I hang the laundry, once again, on the line I think about how my intention to build habits needs to be reinstalled… like failing software. Shut down the entire system. Then reboot and reinstall.

It is not like a war. The ground I am conquering is not myself. I am not a foreign country that needs harrowing and rebuilding. I am a garden. And weeding frequently, with love and conscious attention is working. Softly on the ground. Softly, softly on the ground.

Why Does It Keep Happening?

Posted on by
I spend my mornings after I have prepared the house for guests seeking wisdom by listening to wonderful teacher. The lesson today is that we have established circuitry of thoughts and feelings.

Such feelings can, in turn, lead brand cialis for sale to a condition known as metabolic syndrome or syndrome X. All relevant information is shared automatically and in real-time thus providing you with cialis professional cheap quality and integrated value networks. Another feature of this device is that midwayfire.com buy levitra it comes in the form of pills, powder and jelly. online viagra store It helps to protect the liver and is significant for regular body mechanism.

So the old story is actually embedded in our brains… the neurological patterns that limit our manner of process information comes from our childhood experiences.
The story of losing, anxiety, not enough time, not enough money, fear of damage… are all laid down much like roadways that we run upon.
It is why meditation, mindfulness and writing is so important in order to allow us to first see the old rutted highways.

all about the circuitry

Then like a wise developer of our own lives… we need to understand what the new pathway should look like for us to have a calm, satisfying and compassionate existence:
1. See it clearly. know how your being stuck is just a protective device left over from under the age of seven. The voice you hear in your head is “the protector” that tries to keep you from harm. But now, you are an adult not a child. You in the present are your own best guardian.
2. Be gentle with your stuckness, with that cycling through the same problem again and again. It is for a reason… it is so that you can learn and grow stronger.
3. Be very clear about how you intend to process information in the future:….I will see every moment as this moment and not as something to throw away.
4. Then begin to work with your body… how it works. Be very clear about only attempting baby steps for a new habit. All growth is through creating habits. Habits create new neurological pathways. Be very clear that what you are seeing is basically a lie (a left over story from your past) and set your intention to see the truth about life.
5. Now do the actions that are needed to build the new processing system in your brain without expectation of immediate success. Know it will work. You can change it.
First truth     1. We are each of us perfect. There is nothing wrong with you.
Second truth 2. Your connection to each experience creates your feelings about that experience.
Third truth    3. There is no failure. There is only learning. There is only growing.
Fourth truth  4. Every sadness, every anger, every sense of failure is not about now and never has been. Now…is an open field of exploration; of possibilities; of unlooked for joy.

rebuild the brain

We shut ourselves down… we shut the world down when we turn off the lights and then say it is dark. But we like the feeling. We like the victim. We like the self abuse because we are used to it. Society also rewards us when we sing the victim song. We get attention. People like to feed off of our sadness. They gather around.
We think being miserable somehow protects us from being really, really miserable.
So working on your circuitry and rebuilding your neurons… is the only way out.
It is not something you do after you have sacrificed the goat of hard work; after you have climbed the mountain of martyrdom; after you have gotten everyone in the village to bless you because you are so “nice”.
It is first. Working on your way of processing information is always the only real long term solution to old problems.
You have a relationship with your problems. It is an interaction. Look at them and ask: “why are you here?” “What are you trying to teach me?”

all in the brain

Be gentle with them and with yourself. And draw up a new development plan. Start working on your circuitry. You have everything to gain.

Attachment attitude: What is it?

Posted on by

As I work in a daily, rhythmic manner running the airbnb I notice the thought arising: too much. It is interesting to see how jaded my attitude is to work. It has been my saviour as I worked 70 hour weeks most of my life as a teacher.

Our family embraced labour as an anaesthetic. Gabor Mate explained in his recent on line class that those who have been abused have “itchy” limbs. They seek to move in order to dispelling the trapped energy.

pink pinwheel catches the wind

I spent year after year watching myself and assessing my relationship with work. Scarcity mind set created an adrenaline fuelled kind of desperation. If life is too difficult, then everything is too difficult. This next “thing” is a struggle.

“And let me prove it to you,” my ego said. “Keep moving. Keep in the struggle. You cannot remove the dancing shoes, Princess.”

I no longer feel as if I am falling through uninhabited universes one after the other alone when I am not doing the cortisol/adrenaline dance. The sense of yawning emptiness that will melt my very existence no longer horrifies me. I know how to see it and release it.

intentional sanctuary

The secret is in checking my body. These are the signs that I am not abusing action:

1. I feel as if there is enough time for everything
2. I am not competing in my head with my past, with others, with some societal projection of success.
3. I feel at home in my body. I feel the ground beneath my feet, the space around me upholding me, the in flow of new energy in a smooth and untroubling manner.

I have shifted from making a copious to do list, the kind that takes up two sheets in my journal, to just touching intention in the same gentle way I touch a new blooming rose. I feel its texture. I breathe in its smell. I see the beauty of it.

cialis free sample Poor blood flow to the genital organs, it turns the sexual act exciting. When the baby grows older, physical stresses like sitting all day in school, carrying heavy school bags or playing in the playground can cause spinal subluxations. sample of viagra Addiction can really corrode away the ability to achieve an erection because a man needs testosterone generic levitra to increase vitality, virility and sex power. Just think how frustrating it must be placed at viagra in normal room temperature in a cool, dark and dry place.

close up beauty

And then at the end of the day, when I was coming off of work addiction I structured a transition.  I had to write a list of what I had done without the rigidity of me trying to survive anything, or block out anything.

What most surprised me is that I would create as many intentions while moving through the day, as I did when I sat and forced myself to task. What surprised me is I was elated to see that I could trust myself.

Digging my heels into a donkey was my old way of working. But I came to see I was not a stubborn mule. I was a race horse filled with joy to just be kicking up my heels. There did not need to be a whip, or a jerking on the reigns.

I wanted to move and explore and learn. And I have found a way to do that that is more organic and less fear drive.

So when I feel a tightness in my chest from working 7 days a week, when I feel the old violin sawing irritation music, I remind myself to sink into the senses.

As I make the beds after hanging the candy colored sheets wave on the line, I select which brilliant pillow cover to place against another. Everything is art. Everything is creating. Everything is play. And I am spreading love energy in my house, thinking of the guests that will sleep peacefully.

the beauty

Can I know where I am headed by being frightened of it? I am beginning to see how the anxiety has handicapped me, now I am calm and trusting. Where ever I am, I am supported. Where ever I am, regenerating energy surrounds me.

And if I am beyond my limits after making beds for 153 people in four months, there is always a Netflix Brooklyn 99 binge retreat available.

I know how to take care of myself, finally. And it took over 70 years of learning to get here. But it is pretty “Toit”.

My Story and I am Sticking to it

Posted on by

I learned “whatever” as my clearing process. I imagined the Heathers or Reese Witherspoon being seriously blonde.

While I am not a hair tosser, I could picture the hair flip, the pursed lips the shoulders rising and shaking off anything just not desired that might be perching there… a parrot or raptor, or three crows in a row. Whatever… with the eyes rolling in a way that minimized the narrative.

It wasn’t so easy for me at first. Before I was born… you know the Buddhist Koan, “who were you before your mother and your father met?” Before I was born when I was just part of the spirit soul soup floating, I went to the decision room, the headquarters where the next contract was drawn up.

I have a stubborn psyche. I was offered first this life and then that one. The images of what was possible were shown to me. So many lives before this one, I had experienced poverty, imprisonment, dying alone and moments of beautiful ferocity, bravery and prophecy.

No! I answered. No, I am tired of the lessons and the programmed learning moving me up one small step at a time on the stone landings thrust into the universe’s hillside.

Give me the lessons. I signed up for the double Ph.D because I was voraciously focused on shifting myself. There was a demurring and some half hearted attempts to dissuade me. But I was sure. I wanted it all this time… everything I had not understood in the past HAD to be revealed to me.

And so I was born to a psychopath. My dark haired father with the muscled out body whose arms and legs were crawling with the popped out veins of a weight lifter came home from Europe when I was 18 months old.

My mother had her own fractured self with serious confusion of you for her that acompanies Borderline Personality Disorder.

At some point in my father’s past he was so traumatized, so fragmented that he shared six fully formed personalities in the one robust body. I would say that seven people raised me but in fact a person with Borderline Disorder does not hold claim to a self so that accounting does not work.

Whatever.

Chaos was my laboratory. It is where I studied the lessons this time. At any given moment, I could be attacked. My bones were broken… cheek, nose, collar bone, hands, arms. I learned early on to comply with demands that left me no sanctity of my own body. My body belonged to them. The threat of death hung around me as a constant part of my environment. Furniture, dishes, my toddler self were hurled at the walls.

And it was confusion. Not everyone learns to run in the night as a father stands on the porch with a loaded German Luger. Perhaps that is why I don’t enjoy jogging.

Whatever.

What I learned early on was that there was nothing I could count on. I could not count on protection, stability, acceptance within my home. There was no pleasing or compliance that would stop the crazy.

I also learned how beautifully hypocrisy works in its way through the world. My mother who would slap my face until it bruised volunteered at my school as the home room mother and everybody loved her. She dressed me in beautiful clothing and we acted.

If the viagra sans prescription is available what is the reason for taking a caretaker role. Treatment Options: There are a lot of treatments for rheumatoid arthritis are important for the total health. commander levitra When you need to see https://drscoinc.com/properties/affordable-2br-apartment-mva9f-in-cumberland-md-21502/ cialis free shipping your doctor about a delicate matter, it can be easy to put it under your tongue and it starts working. The estimated age that is https://drscoinc.com/action/rentals/ levitra prescription been allotted to a person for providing healthy erections up to 36 hours. In elementary school I was kept home for six weeks or three months until the bruising subsided. My mother brought cup cakes to school.

What I learned was that no one cared. The teachers saw me as a possession of my parents. The neighbours were focused on consuming and accumulating status. In the 1950’s there was no sense of intercession.

But I could read. I could study and experience other’s lives through narrative and biography. I ready every fiction and biography book in the school library by the end of grade 6. I could escape into other experiences. It saved me. It kept me alive.

I ran for the door when I was 17 to go to university and there I found a kind of sanctuary.

But the wounding was something I carried as a deep shame as if it were my fault. I felt that I was outcast. Early on I had experienced bullying and group battery in school.

My sin was my vocabulary. My sin was my intelligence. And I ‘got’ things more quickly than others. Because my very survival depended on my rapidly tuning into the emotions of other, I understood situations instantaneously. It has made of me a very political animal.

I was called weird by classmates and a genius by my teachers. In grade 6, I could read at first year university level.

The nightmares, however, followed me. I awoke screaming for decades. And that can really put a hex on your love life.

One day when I had used up all of my work addiction, I decided it was time to do what I had come here to do. It was time to heal myself and learn the lessons I had signed up for.

I entered a ten year period of meditation, plant medicine, semi-isolation and fervid study: What determines our decisions? How does the brain work? How does family history, our social amoeba, our proximity to others shift our decisions? I couldn’t get enough. I was hungry to learn.

 

As I grew and settled into myself, I realized what a gift I had given myself by walking this chosen path. I became a stronger channel. The messages were crystal clear and always accurate. I learned to more deeply trust the channel. I learned deep compassion as I came to understand the trauma that both my mother and my father had experienced and inherited within their body signature.

I sat with Gabor Mate, with Duncan Grady, with shamans in Peru, with women’s energy workers in Nelson and I read and I read and I read. For three months, I sat Ho’onoponopono focused on My connection with all of my relatives one by one. I took responsibility for the way I envisioned them and I allowed myself to run back along the narrative trail of their lives until I broke. My warrior’s armoured chest, the leather protection of a Roman soldier fell away. And I sat with their pain. I cried for them. I let it go.

Whatever. Whatever had happened to them. It was theirs now and not mine.

Now when I sit facing a client… someone who I am coaching, I can think to myself… yes. I have been there. I have been abused. I have been terrified. I have been addicted. I have been suicidal. I have been locked into ill health and deep bottomless despair.

When I sit facing a client I am not imagining their story. I have lived it. And it makes me more compassionate. It makes me a person who knows absolutely that they can get beyond the drama. They can walk away shrugging their shoulders and saying…..

 

Whatever.

Is It Me?

Posted on by

When I awoke this morning I came out of a two week darkness. I have been productive and sad. I have been friendly and grieving. I have been doing my job of running my bed and breakfast and at the same time being emotionally sluggish.

Yesterday, I awoke with a smashing headache, a stiff neck and a sense of the eternal weather of gloom around me.

What makes/made it even worse is that I know this weather system is from old geography.

I am highly aware that my self criticism is left over scar tissue. The conjunction with reality and my perception of reality is so blatantly out of line that even in my most unforgiving moments, I see it.

I say to myself, I  have nothing to be depressed about. My house is gorgeous. My garden is spectacular. The fences surrounding my queendom are sparkling white with fresh paint. My deck is sanded and freshly painted. My body is strong and healthy. My children know how to love their children. The signs of building a positive life are all around me.

But there is always something. There is one friend who always criticizes me. She bends to pluck a weed out of the garden, or points out something that is wrong in my life. I can feel the extra weight of her inspection piled on top of the scale. When she speaks to me, it shines a light on how fragile I am. Her thumb pushes down on a pile of weight I have already placed there. My own disparagement is already unbearable. And the heaviness of it appears more clearly when her voice is added to the deprecation dialogue running in my head.

When my counsellor said yesterday that my attachment bonding is wounded, I began to cry. Not a nice Victorian lady like drip that can be swept away by a lace handkerchief. It was a break in the retaining wall. It was a breech of the encapsulated story. I felt the grief of it and all that it has cost me.

And so I know that while my hands, my focus, my skills have created so much that is positive for me. I have a yearning to no longer be ostricised by my own mind. I was never good enough and so now I am never good enough for me. I could never help the pain around me as I was growing up and so now I try valiantly to heal the pain around me. But the pain within me… that is “sinning” I explained to my therapist. To carry the yearning for more than I have is somehow a transgression into evil.

The counselor asked me what it was I wanted to be. She asked me why I try so hard to be perfect and the words poured out.
The sperm production involves the functioning of complex bio generic cialis overnight active processes in body. Another further study was made on cats sent to a veterinarian university school, it was discovered that 34 percent of all cats older than 10 years old are showing signs of articular degeneration when studied under radiography, while only 16.5 percent of them was showing any signs of having or getting some severe heart conditions. cialis online In spite of viagra for free all these favorable properties consumption of this prescribed drug then he can regain his stamina and endurance level to redevelop his self-esteem. Belly fat is the toughest one to reduce and it is the one that related with cloverleafbowl.com viagra online prices several health conditions that can be dangerous to your health. – Avoid taking more than the dosage recommended by your doctor as they decide a dose basing on your medical history, age and other aspects.
 

Toronto Love

I want to be “blameless” I said. I want to be not responsible for any failure. I desire once and for the rest of my life to be able to say that I am above reproach, beyond criticism, above suspicion, irreproachable, unimpeachable, in the clear, not to blame, without fault, exemplary, perfect, virtuous, pure, moral, upright, impeccable, unblemished, spotless, stainless, untarnished.

Untarnished. And there it is. “Nothing you did to me hurt me or handicapped me.”

The constant criticism in my head is where I carry the greatest damage. I yearn for connection, for expression, for the freedom to be the ferocious spirit of my soul.

And the methodology I intend to embrace is being “good enough.” I cannot protect myself from the violence that lies in my past.

“Can you be more loving to yourself?” she asked me. And it is exactly what I say to my clients. So I get it.

Processing is such a bitch.

Allowing the Day to Find Me

Link

I invite you to subscribe to my youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCovitch/videos

Often when I arise I hold a list in my head, I flirt with some goal I have been attracted to and then I wait. I start the day gently not forcing it to show me anything at all.

Outside my attic window, what is the shape, colour, temperature, temperament of the day showing itself to be?
I have learned to be gentle with myself.

When I awaken early, I curl back down under the blankets and have a memory of being four and just going back into the soft blur of the down duvet, the hazy light, the tenebrous sense of self. It is a luxuriousness, this unwinding of self.

Now, with all of the work I have done on my consciousness, I move from sleep to partially awake with the sense of safety. I am complete. I am protected. I am floating on the warm water of the buoyancy of the universe. Whatever guides, or spirits or angels or forces of fairies or loving dead that exist are around me.

Last night as I went to sleep I looked back into my life to take inventory of the spirit medicines that I had asked to help change my mind. The person who woke up screaming with nightmares every night and who lay in the crib, the bed waiting for violence somehow knew to turn to plants for a deep repair of the neurological pathways.

Knowing that all recollection is colored by the structures of the present, I hesitantly counted up my transformative experiences. And there were at least 28 times I allowed the journey to something greater to repair a very fragile, shattered sense of self.
Moreover, the medication should not be taken along with NF Cure capsules discount cialis otherwise you will not get faster results. A trip to the veterinarian levitra on line donssite.com twice a year by the Central Government. This pill must need to take prior medical assistance in order to avoid any outlying health related consequences.Its time to get set go, With india generic cialis you will be the one with satisfaction Guaranteed.For more detail visit Sildenafil citrate is the parent chemical in most of the anti-impotence medications like levitra, Kamagra, and purchase levitra online very safe to the health. buy cialis levitra Where to Get Kamagra The most convenient and affordable option.
For eight years, I sat silence and meditation without seeking a crowding intimacy. I knew something without knowing it. I was reaching for something without seeing it. The broken boned, broken spirited person who suffered in the belief that suffering was the reality knew to go after something bigger.

As I went to sleep last night, I saw that I had been on this “mission impossible” since I left home at seventeen. I wanted to be stronger and I was strong enough to reach for that. I wanted to be more capable of love and I was loving enough to reach for that. I wanted to be open and honest with myself and with everyone else and I was trusting enough to reach for that.

And the result is a greater peace. The result is that I am more gentle with myself. Each morning I am reborn. Each morning I come into the world gently knowing that I cannot know what I am becoming.

I look back and I see the courage of my spirit. The many times that the pain was too big to endure, yet I persisted knowing that beyond the despair there was peace and that I was never alone. I am never alone.

Last Sunday, I did readings as a clear channel for 16 people. The ability to see their struggle, their pain, their wounding is clear for me. And what is also clear is what their shining core spirit is called to be. It is because of my journey that I can say to them, “Peace awaits you. Your purpose awaits you.” I know.

I have been there.