A Tale of Two Places

With you, I can leave that other place,

Those winter trees that branch in my brain.

At least I’m not waiting now for some old leaves

To fall-as if waiting for the other shoe to drop—

I don’t feel it in my gut, or see only those blind spots

Hanging in the foreground against the sky,

Hanging like my mother dying

From cancer, her wasted limbs and a frame

Not much larger than my own amygdala,

Frozen in time. It has been hard to keep things

Separated from the touchstone, where I offered a gift

To cure my mommy’s sadness when I was five.

I knocked on the front door with my not quite flowers

(just a handful of twigs from the dog berry bush

In the yard). She was so angry!  (Maybe tired?)

I was afraid of a rage that left me stuck

On the doorstep. For years afterwards,

Women showed up at the threshold just to remind me

How unlovable I am. But, then, of course,

This was not about love, and not about them,

Because this was never about anyone else.

 

The Child’s Mindfulness & Loving-Playfulness

Creates the Capacity for Dual Awareness

 Selflove, Vitality, Mischievous

     We all need to feel safe in the arms of another appropriate mammal.

                                                                                           Steven Porges

Even before her birth, the Child needs to be supported and protected. Eventually, as a teenager she will benefit from more active preparation to take on adult tasks. But at the beginning, she is absorbing Love and relishing Playful travels in the new woods.

Mother warmly mirrors her, responds, and murmurs to her daughter about Beauty all around until Loving-Playfulness becomes a secure felt-sense in the Child’s physical being. In this energy, she is learning in her own unique way how to be with herself, sensually taking in the inner textures, and shades and colors, to be with the unpleasant bumps and aches, the internal distress, and joys. Freedom and challenge.

To flower, she needs to be watched and kept safe, and so the Guardians must stand ready to stop any who would overwhelm her.

Why this painting? 

In Awakened Child energies of Loving-Playfulness and in her Inspired State of Mindfulness, she develops the capacity for Dual Awareness. Informed by both hemispheres of the brain, but particularly noticing the wisdom of the right hemisphere experience, she is here yet she is there. She tolerates paradox, which allows for greater freedom as she searches for the path. She feels vital, mischievous and begins to recognize something important is happening beneath the surface.

Many of us have an inner Child who is wounded, burdened, an Outcast because our mother (or first caregiver) was unable to attune to us, likely because our nurturing figure did not have the Guardians she required, and so she was too unsure, too much in survival, too emotionally young or raw and unsupported. This painting asks us to consider the Ideal mother, but not to blame anyone. To discern what has happened to us, not to judge, we need to perceive with compassion what our tiny mammalian bodies require.

Inside-out

If you have lost connection with your inner Child, now might be the time to remember her needs.

Of course, she is not a real child, but an imagined inner character representing youthful energies and times when you have been able to embody her freedom. When she walks on our imaginative stage, she is an invention of our Inspired Self.

When we’re in this Child, we are Awakened to a Loving connection to each moment, present and vulnerable. Honest and direct, aware of what is authentic, she speaks openly. She calls out the dishonest not to injure but because of a devotion to what is real. She courageously names what is in front of her in the interest of clarity and recognition.

You will benefit from embracing the Child in her fullest emotions, even her tantrums. When fearful, anxious, panicked, or angry, become the mother who supports and protects. Your inner Child longs for a response that’s accepting, curious, opening a path to a deeply intimate co-created terrain.

Upside down:

In a society filled with the wounded, many people have not done sufficient Work to deal with emotional injuries and so they have paradoxically become restrained and leashed to them. Many have not had the time to heal because they are trying to survive or do not know what they need. Of course, we all can find ourselves drowning in misery at times, trying to talk our way into a better state while expending a lot of psychic energy to avoid, repress, lock Pain and Self-deception outside the house like abandoned dogs. In such a psychic state, we WITHER, grow exhausted; meanwhile, the left-brained Apparently Normal Persona, in Abnormal energies, like a delusional cheerleader, tells us stories about a wonderful childhood.

Though we can all relate, none of us can afford to surround ourselves with diminished people who have blocked Loving-playfulness and/or embraced defensive lies. And don’t let such characters off the hook, imagining their invalidation of your spontaneity is just a sign they are having a bad day. Especially in the Upside down, be cautious when you want to give your heart to someone. Notice how they respond to your childhood Pain. I don’t understand. I can’t relate because my family was so loving. This may not be a red flag, but it sure is pink. They may have been one of the lucky ones, but it is more likely they are trying to delude themselves. If they have just closed the blinds and dulled their hearts in denial, wounded parts are still pumping cortisol and will continue to howl and scratch relentlessly at the door, and maybe prone to biting; or they will escape the relationship in some startling completely unexpected way.

In the Upside-down, not everyone possesses dual awareness (which allows for what we call insight). It’s prudent not to trust more than you know to be true. And knowing takes time and a lot of inquiries.

Beyond Dual Awareness

Image 22. Dancing Foxes

Integration

Harmony, Balance, Guidance

 

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.    Eugene T. Gendlin ^[i]

 

Bathed in with Mindful light, this lively woman becomes a witness to all the animals that inhabit her inner wilderness. She recognizes the presences of different ego-states or inner personalities. This is her capacity for Dual Awareness: to be present without getting lost in the inner dramas. By standing outside the inner action, from this differentiated vantage point, she can hear the soliloquies of her thoughts and feelings as if they are characters on a spacious stage; she can notice the sensation in their bodies and their actions and learn their history, their individual memories, and concerns, hopes and dreams.

In response to her devoted attention, the foxes can witness her as an Inspired Self, gaining some sense of order by simply knowing she is ever there. And in this clearing, vibrant in the mindful energy, they may be willing and able to speak at length to her about themselves or about other characters.

Beyond Dual Awareness, she is bringing forth the capacity we call Integration.

Why this painting?

With awareness of her own patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, the Awakened Child finds peaceful stillness more often than not; and from this inner depth she makes conscious choices, pulling forth the resources to guide and influence the inner characters, calming the nervous ones, encouraging flexibility to the rigid, helping them release their Pain, improving their communications and their relationships, to set them free to dance according to her loving intention.

In this compassionate awareness, the Child in us senses a potential for harmony, balance, growth, and feels guided by an unseen presence (Inspiration). This is the Awakening that has been so elusive for most of us, those of us who have been lost in our trauma adaptations. When we can again live in the Child, what had seemed fragmented, confusing, even polarized, and pointless reshapes into an experience that is more flexible, connected intuitively.

As Loving-Playfulness becomes a secure felt-sense in our physical being, we can experiment with the lightness, spontaneity and creativity of a Child and find in our own unique way how to be with all our parts and contradictions, sensually taking in the inner textures, and shades and colors, to be with the unpleasant bumps and aches, the internal distress, and joys. Freedom and challenge.

We notice the putting together of things to see if they fit. Or to see if they don’t.  It is an experimenting expressing our innate desire to build, but not rigidly from the detail plans of others. We change things up out of curiosity, to play with available materials, explore spaces we have never been, in our drawings to merge animal features—dogs that fly, bears with horns, or birds and flowers—mixing it together, juxtaposed in amusing or disturbing fantasies, a preschooler expressing without constraint.

We play with all of our different powers, to laugh, and to grow, to explore emerging abilities, to say to ourselves “no” and to be distraught as well as to claim a joyful “yes,” to move our bodies and feel the physiology of it. To think through something, to love to read and learn, to play with our likes and dislikes, to find out what is funny and so try out laughter, and twirl for the dizziness of it. Our inner world becomes a laboratory where we bring things to together, or where we learn how to move between the parts of us.

Secure enough, our Awakened Child can fearlessly ask the question: Who Am I?

Inside out:

It has been revolutionary for many people to consider the best way to grow and heal is to engage rather than to fight inner resistance. However, on the other hand, we cannot simply accommodate or let sabotaging parts off the hook. As I mean it, Integration, then, is a form of inner discernment and the courage to stay engaged with all our dimensions. To know which parts to encourage to the front of the stage, which characters to step back from, which ones to block from directing the action. This is radiant wisdom that attunes all our inner parts and holds them safe in the arms of Playful-Lovingness.

Upside down:

Without Mindful Dual Awareness, the energies of Loving-playfulness, and some movement toward Integration (we don’t have to be perfect, just better), we remain fragmented in “parts.” We may have little or no awareness that some segment of our psyche (the squeakiest wheel) is not the whole of us. We may suddenly wake up in the voice of a callous judging father, in the helplessness of a self-erased mother or stuck in an ancient Child that is crying out. Or we may experience a type of long slow flashback, as old voices speak in our heads and trigger emotional circuits, flooding our body with panic, grief, rage or fear. Metacognition allows us to step back.

Similarly, in the Upside-down, without Dual Awareness and some movement toward our own Integration, we will fail to recognize that people in our lives also can be embodied by some unconscious piece of our psyche, invaded like an Alien movie, or influenced by some devilish figure on their shoulder. Or they seem sucked into a battle of some kind.

But when we feel integrated enough to consider and begin to answer the question of who we are (though describing our authentic self will always inevitably be beyond language), we are less reactive, less willing to meet another’s activation with our own. Self-knowledge minimizes the likelihood of an abrupt survival response to the worst of the worst characters in the Upside-down.