"Crazy feelings of love can make you wobbly, out of balance, and finally ill if you don't listen to the stars that shine from within." Marta Luzim
I believe life is a series of trapeze swings. What happens when you let go of one trapeze bar and you are left flying in mid-air? This is where I found myself six years ago when my mother and sister died four months apart. My mother passed away in a psychiatric ward, unconscious on a feeding tube because she refused to eat. Her heart couldn't take the strain. My sister chose a long suicide of breast cancer. She made the decision following her diagnosis to simply die, no treatment. Eight years prior, her husband had succumbed to leukemia and at that time my sister attempted suicide and failed. When she discovered the lump, she found her way out without any intervention. My sister kept her diagnosis secret for two years, until the week of her death.
The moment after her funeral ended, I began to relentlessly regurgitate. This was the beginning of a chronic condition that caused me to vomit without provocation, sometimes leaving me incapacitated for hours. After two years of misdiagnosis, I found myself in a hospital with a rare digestive disorder called Gastroparesis ---a partial paralysis of digestion. I had lost the beats in my stomach that allowed food to move down ---anything I tried to ingest - even water - got stuck and came back up. To make matters more difficult, I was told that this condition is most commonly found in diabetics, which I am not. The ailment I had is called idiopathic gastroparesis, meaning the cause of my symptoms are not known beyond that is it associated with severe trauma. I called it a broken stomach heart lined with terror and grief.
As a healer experiencing this agonizing setback, I knew I had to rise like the proverbial phoenix from my own ashes. My story has everything: grief, remorse, guilt, anger, death and reincarnation. Not the reincarnation of the dead, but reincarnation of my inner self that I had lost through irrational, routine rhythms of life.
Until this illness occurred I had no clue I was living a gerbil life----24/7 work, competing, negating the natural life cycles and not forgiving. My mother and sister's deaths tore my insides into panic and despair. But the threads of depression fueled my hunger to feel passion in a new way, a quieter way, a humbler way, and share with others that life indeed is worth living, even when it made no sense---that ultimately I had no control.
It took me two years of adamant searching to find a doctor who could diagnose my medical problem. Even then, the doctors did not have much to offer besides medication that helped keep down small quantities of food. I tried using herbs, acupuncture, hypnosis - any and almost every healing and shamanic remedy - my progress was that of a turtle waddling to the other side of the street, hoping I'd move fast enough so I wouldn't be splattered by a car.
However, I was surprised when a commonality emerged from both allopathic and integrative/holistic practitioners. They emphasized in their diagnosis that my mental/emotional state was out of balance with my physical ability to digest food; that I had post -traumatic syndrome and as a result the communication between my stomach and brain was disconnected. In addition, after each doctor reviewed my personal family history and discovered I was physically abused by my mother in which she frequently threatened suicide in front of me and my sister, beat us randomly and threatened our lives. It was clear that I indeed suffered from unhealed trauma. With these facts, the doctors were definite that an energetic bomb exploded in my brain and cellular memory when my mother and sister died. The traumatic deaths unconsciously set off a series of breakdowns and miscommunication between my brain and digestive tract in reaction to food, abuse and death. I needed to re-train my mind, emotional and physical body to talk to each other in loving and non-stressful ways. My body was a tangled mess and I had to learn to eat as if I were a newborn.
After years of worshiping the body as the vehicle of love that channeled The Shekinah, the feminine aspect of Judaism and the Queen of Heaven, I was terrified and angry that SHE had left me to retch up my guts without a cure in sight. However, even in my blackest moments, I knew deep in the thick of my soul that the Shekinah was trying to wake me up through this horrid condition. That there was something deeper, something mysterious, and something I was in denial of. I had to find an answer and I began with deep, unending prayer.
Dr. Ilana Rubenfeld the "grande dame" of body-oriented psychology, coined this limbo place the "fertile void." Rubenfeld, creator of the "Rubenfeld Synergy (movement) Method" and author of The Listening Hand, says the fertile void is when, "old ways do not work and you don't (yet) have new ways of coping." She goes on to say, "For proactive women, the response to being stuck is to expend more energy, make more lists, go to more seminars try to muster more will power and make more decisions. But the result, she often finds, is just spinning her wheels."
According to Suzanne Braun Levine, author of Inventing the Rest of our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood and former editor of Ms. Magazine, "The cure for stuck is still." But why did the simplicity of being with no destination produce acute anxiety for me? For years, I ran after my mother's and sister's love, only to be left with their harrowing deaths. My basket was empty, and I had no place to go. That is what the "Fertile Void" offered me; an opportunity to surrender and become whole.
Stuck-ness can lead me to a quiet inner wildness. I began to realize that somehow I had lost my connection to faith and therefore lost my communion with my soul. I saw that over the last several years I had become an overworked caretaker and resented my life. I had given myself little time to stop and reflect, to dream, to wander off into creative, intuitive and spiritual realms and to heal my aching heart. In spite of my doctors and healers' advice to take a break, I kept going. I continued to work, held back the wail of grief. I had forgotten, even felt unworthy of, loving kindness, time and space. I believed that I had somehow failed my mother, sister and myself. I had survivor's guilt. Why was I alive? I had to keep moving, although my body was screaming at me to STOP!
Then, the inevitable happened: one day during filming of a client's session, I fainted. Immediately my husband rushed me to the hospital. I was malnourished, dehydrated and on the edge of disaster with my heart. Still, I fought it. I screamed at nurses, tried to pull intravenous feeding tubes out of my arms. What was I doing? I was going crazy. I was running from the pain, ditching the grief and ignoring my own emptiness. Why was I doing this to myself? I was living the exact opposite of what I taught. It made no sense.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
- Khalil Gibran on Love
After I was sent home, I was forced to stop working. This time it was "healer, heal thyself." I had to find how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
For a long time, the artist, the voice of the feminine, the intuitive self was calling to me to sit down to paint and write. My body now needed to follow my soul needs, not follow the "should and have-to" merry-go-round that drove me away from my true self. I had to walk my talk, slow down and listen to myself.
Finally, I wrote the novel that I had put off for ten years. Even started a second one and joined a writing group. I did yoga, prayed with friends, sat in silence, painted my emotions, danced in prayer. I turned to others for answers, handed my body/mind and soul over for them to heal. Slowly I realized that I lost my way from Mother Nature. I needed her arms to cry in, needed a mother to soothe me, I needed love----a love I had lost for myself.
Since that anguished time I buried my mother and sister, the winding road to balance has not been easy. I had to completely re-evaluate my passion for life, take a sabbatical and reinvent my relationships with my husband and daughter. I had lost friends from my own isolation. I prayed for friendship and the door opened and new people started to come into my life. I realized how much a song, a leaf, a walk meant to me.
Mostly I had to learn to forgive my sister for ultimately choosing death. I had to find peace with my mother for her abuse. I had to let go of the guilt of my choice to live and remember that I was a good and loving person, even though I couldn't save my family. I had to integrate my childhood, the younger woman and now surrender to the wise woman. I was resisting turning sixty and hammering at my regrets in life. What challenged me the most was forgiveness for me, accepting I was human and allowing others in to help me heal. I was afraid that if I showed my greatest vulnerabilities that I would lose everything and everyone. That I didn't have the right to heal others because I still had so much to heal. I ventured into the underworld where Isis had her soul stripped and hung on a rack. I returned to Earth fully aware of my choices. I started up a part-time practice, created new paintings and sought ways to publish my novel. I had to reacquaint myself with faith, confidence and love. I found without a doubt that facing death offered me the insight to my most profound wisdom and gifts.
"Am I growing up and being responsible for myself? What is and is not my responsibility? Am I willing to see a situation for what it really is?" - Marion Woodman, Pregnant Virgin
When my mother died I was asked to write the eulogy. My heart ached to find the words that would be the truth and set me free. At the time, I did not realize I was writing a letter of prophecy, forgiveness and love. The words I wrote were the seeds of my mythology, the resurrection of the flesh and soul of my female ancestors and the spirit of the Shekinah preparing me for the "dark night" journey of my soul to heal. When the time came for me to read I was afraid that I would be criticized. I rose on that hot July day and spoke my truth:
"My mother and grandmother died without me truly knowing them. Without me touching them, and without them knowing me. Chicken fat, potato latkes, and brisket runs through my veins and fills my thighs. I cry and hunger for their arms to hold me. My grandmother and mother are the ghosts that have shaped me, slapped my face and belly; babbled sounds, a wisp here, a puff there, a moaning cry. They are the ghosts that linger...on and on.
The two most powerful women in my life were my grandmother, Sarah and my mother, Ray, the two women I turned to for comfort and protection taught me survival, toughness and perseverance. Ray - Rachel, as my grandmother often called her - were born from a stock of Russian-Polish immigrants.
My grandmother crossed the Atlantic alone and carried to America her silent fear of Jewish pogroms. My mother's father, Charles, died when she was four, which left my mother lost and broken. My grandmother and mother never spoke in detail of the family that was left behind, or of my grandfather; and so there is an empty and longing place in my heart for them.
It was never easy talking to my mother. She was a small and delicate woman, physically strong, stubborn and proud. My mother denied how many hearts she had broken and scarred. Most people cannot understand the conflict and torment of loving a mother for her beauty, creativity and drive and hating her for her cruelty and cold heart.
Her daughters hungered for her love, her touch and whatever kind words they could get from her. My mother hungered for the same thing from her mother. My grandmother raised her children with loyalty, rigidity and an iron hand, which she passed on to my mother. Tragically, my mother never used her power to heal, transform or sustain what she dreamt of having. She wanted her life to be a Hollywood movie and for a brief moment of time my father and my mother created an illusion of living of a rich and famous life. From the outside they were a typical American family living the American dream. They drove pink Cadilla's and my mother dyed her hair Platinum blonde, tinted with pink highlights. She was a fashion plate, loved traveling and loved the exciting life my father offered her with Vegas gambling trips, cross country vacations and expensive jewelry.
But, she wanted more...
Never satisfied with what she had for reasons only God knows, my mother's heart hurt and ached with such painstaking anger and terror that she could not give her family the love they yearned for, nor was she able to receive the love her family strove to give to her. My mother died two days before her 82nd birthday. I placed a rose on her cold body, held her hand and kissed her goodbye.
The sadness and grief I feel for her death is the same sadness and grief I have felt my entire life. My mother and grandmother's ghost lay in rest, haunting my life, playing my life with their memory. I see them hovering in my dreams, pointing at me, pulling at me and crying, leaving this earth and entering the next life. I pray as they knock on heaven's door. I pray they will heal the wounds and heartbreak of every mother and grandmother who pointed toward death and fear. I pray now that they can receive the light and love of eternity. And I can fill my longing with the mysterious wisdom that comes from the ache and joy of living
In spite of it all, I will miss you mom."
Afraid I had said too much, I searched the crowd of mourners and what I saw were tears of grace flowing from each person's eyes. "Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."
Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." - Khalil Gibran on Self-knowledge
So, where is home? Home is where a thought or feeling can be sustained without being interrupted because something else is demanding our time and attention. Home may be standing by the ocean's edge, in a lush green forest, under the covers drinking hot tea or riding a Harley with a bandanna tied around your head feeling the warm breeze stroke your face as the wind whips the tears through the air as a gift of grief to heaven.
"This is your body. Your greatest gift, pregnant with wisdom you do not hear, grief you thought was forgotten, and joy you have never known." - Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself.
Daily, we must find solitude and reconnect to our soul. Without this communion our soul- spirit will die and become trapped, holding tightly to the trapeze swing.
Now as I fly through the fertile void, my hair blowing in the wind, I listen carefully. I slip into my soul, swing from one trapeze bar to the next and surrender to the mystery of my body, which holds all wisdom and leads me home. The story of my life now has tolerance, temperance, endurance and finally, triumphs in the moment to moment choice to carry on and live.
