How you goin’ to get free this time?
Fallin’ into a blue-sky-mind.
Came to me in that song my friend,
I just wanna go back again.
Mother standin’ right next to me
showin’ me what I need to see
Rain is fallin’ into my mouth
Flowers blooming all up and down
I’ve found:
in and through the body
it’s in and through the body
(repeat last two lines…to fade silent)
Oh how this song tugs at me today, deep in my belly (Trevor Hall pictured here, song is ‘blue sky mind’ 2 mins listen). I find myself returned to an ancient-yet-familiar storyline I’ve worked with for nearly three decades.
And now I’ve been held with spirit-friends beautifully in these last three days, so much so it is clear I am to re-enter once again. One reminded me to stay gentle with myself (in my frustration for not being healed or complete in this yet). Another circle has created space for me to see the seeds (once again) for sacred task(s) unfolding within and around me, delving into forgiveness (and how little white congregational Christian community knows about it). Spirit-friends this morning held space while it bubbled up again, some of the elemental stories in my innocence, earliest days of life. And my own beloved is checking in on me daily, concerned for this heaviness he has always known in me, aware of it once again in our (conscious) midst in these last three days.
It’s always with us, because it’s embedded so deeply within me that I live with it all the time, in my cells. Mostly free of it, after decades of work and gifts of healing in women’s community. Except then I’m not free of it again. Something finds me, with a gentle nudge to return to this side of the mountain once again.
So I will write once again to grieve what is yet unresolved, unspoken, or unreceived, perhaps, which the above song touched in me.
It’s not the storyline pieces themselves, of course, because c’mon, three decades I’ve been telling this story in spaces I knew were safe. THE OLD STORYLINE:
I injured my toe when I was just over 6 years old, losing my big toenail. So painful, achy for weeks. Then itchy, as it healed. We had gotten a dog earlier that year “so Lisa would learn to show emotion.” Sitting around the family room one night, the dog kept licking my toes. It relieved the itch. Family was laughing and paying little attention. Without any context for what my body would do, I experienced such pleasure in my body, between my legs, that for an instant, I froze. I had no idea feet could connect to other parts of my body, nor that pleasure was what pleasure could be. Bodies were disciplined and cleaned in my Puritan-esque family. They were dirty and to be untouched, especially where I felt pleasure that night. I just knew that what happened to me, in the presence of everyone, was bad, something to be ashamed of. I hid all sign of it, covering it up with laughter with my family. Laughing from being tickled was okay. What this was, surely was not. So I never told a soul…some part of me was wise enough to know that much…(which my parents confirmed about 5 years ago, in an oblique reference to this they knew nothing about. Dad said, "Yeah, I'd not have known how to care for you in that (sexual awakening), at that age.")
…but the proverbial door had opened. Experimentation(s) began, irrepressible and growing stronger and stronger. I found more ways to find release into pleasure–by myself–than you could possibly imagine. I was clever, after all. And it was early enough that by the time adolescence arrived in full, I was practiced at self-isolation such that I did not experiment with anyone. I could imagine this intensive drive pushing me into anything with anyone, but I was practiced at isolating by the time others my age were entering into body-awakenings. I had learned to keep my own secrets, to the grave I had figured.
Finally, at age 17, an unaware but proto-feminist, I crafted my own body-dissociation ritual, tearing all sensation from my mind. All instruments of self-pleasuring, into the Miami River with appropriate vow to quiet, split, leave it all behind. And it mostly worked until I got into Clinical Pastoral Education, when I was 28. Ages 17-28, I numbed, chastising myself for lapses with the occasional proactive boy/young man. One year of dating in college began some reknitting of my body and spirit, with the gentlest, softest-eyed, patient and romantic soul I’d ever met (which is probably why I married him ten years later). Back then, when he got too close, I made sure my irritation moved us both to call “us” off. For eleven years, I insured that any pleasure my body felt kept as discrete and as unconscious a distance from my awareness as possible.
The body secrecies in my family of origin traumatized all of us…beginning well before my parents’ generation, let alone mine. [I’ve oft-said lately that my mother is a survivor, though she’s never spoken of all that she survived. I did ask her this once, bluntly, and she nodded that the description rang true to her. And then she said no more.] For me, my most formative influences: All this is white, Pennsylvania-Dutch/German-American disregard of body, emotions, feeling. Disconnected hearts from bodies, even though I cherish how we are also a deeply faithful and loving people, persistently unconscious, avoidant, repressive.
Still today, there are shame-flashes of almost getting caught, or getting caught, pleasuring myself. Of enjoying physical pleasure with willing partners, because my own body was so shameful. I was terrified of accusations of bestiality, of perversion, worse. As I grew into my own virgin-self–a woman whole and complete unto herself–I then began to rail at Godde. What kind of benevolent god wakes a little girl up to sexuality, sensuality, at 6 fucking years of age, through her feet with a dog? In a family completely unable to hold space for her to hold it, receive its gifts, cherish its holy purposes?
How you goin’ to get free this time?
Fallin' into a blue-sky-mind...
I just wanna go back again.
Mother standin’ right next to me,
showin’ me what I need to see.
That was never going to be my pathway, nor was it my mother's. Mother standin' right next to me, showin me what I need to see. My heart aches for the little one within me, the unfurling one in her teens. Oh how I wanted someone who could connect me to body, my mothers, my own. But neither my mom nor I had the parents or the environments in which to know our bodies as utter gift. Every one doin' the best they knew how, with what they'd inherited in love, in good intention (with violence and dysfunction too, but all of it...). Families struggling under poverty, ancestral traumas of generations, dissociation from vulnerability and human feeling, dressed up in Christian tradition with words like original sin, sinfulness, flesh, uncleanliness, ungodliness…gaslighting actual experiences with societally-normed ones...painting on women's bodies with shame and contortions of "beauty", inflicting men's bodies with disconnection/dissociation from their own feelings/language/tears.
So what do I grieve now...?
I grieve my mother’s childhood, her fear, her own family that created the necessity in her to dissociate from her own body. I grieve that my journey was never going to be hers, that she could never seem to find a different pathway for herself. I grieve that she’s never had a place to really be seen in that story, to find out what the gifts of that story could have been. Which means, of course, that I grieve the lack of a mother who was enough in touch with her own body that she could be connected with me in mine, connect me to mine. I grieve that my body shape is so like hers, because she for years said how much she dislikes her body. I learned self-loathing indirectly, passive-aggressively, never realizing what I was ingesting. I grieve that I was weaned so early "because I was too aggressive as an infant" (WTF?), and I grieve that my mother had to navigate living in a foreign country with two small children, traveling internationally, "unable to nurse" or choosing not to continue nursing. I grieve that our family's capacity for knowing our bodies, loving emotion, honoring deep feeling without rationalization is so completely underdeveloped. I grieve that all of us learned that we were to perform to belong, to be loved. I grieve that we cannot speak openly about any of this today, that my family of origin's journeys are nothing like my own.
I wish that little white girls could be born into families of origin, healed ancestral lines, completely reconnected to their own bodies and to the Earth. Bodies that can feel and speak vulnerably about their feelings, loving them for just what they are–signals, learnings, gifts of connection. I grieve growing up in a church community that persistently, unconsciously, poured shame onto women’s bodies, particularly the mysteries only women know–our moon flow, our intuition accessible in that week of bleeding, our gifts of connection and imagination beyond some patriarchal savior, taking away all agency for us to learn-in-connection with one another. I grieve my participation for decades in my own silencing. I grieve my own collaborations with this purity-system of establishment religion, even though I celebrate how I also never quite lost connection with my trickster-embodied self, waiting until I was just strong enough to be found again, to come back into conscious strivings leading me right here.
I grieve (and celebrate) the lengths to which Spirit had to go/went in my two decades of feminine awakening, so to even recognize what griefs are unresolved in me. When I consider the persons Spirit brought into my life, precisely in the moments I needed them, barely on the cusp of strong enough to withstand the rejections and refusals that would come? My anam cara and I joke about this: you can't make this shit up. It's too synchronized, too perfect, too grace-filled and healing. You know it by its Fruit.
Godde does what only Godde can do. It’s a stunning story that I recognize is not over yet…and yet I have little idea how to really tell it, free of imposed or ingested shames, flashes of panic, unhealed family traumas...
As my beloved named to me this morning… You’re the only one holding onto this. Do you feel me shaming you, judging you? (No.) Does it matter what your family thinks anymore? Their journeys are their own and you are not responsible for them or their own healings amidst their body secrecies. So you experimented. Welcome to the human race. It’s how we learn.
I have “let this go” so many times, though, it seems to me. Three decades. What else is there to let go? How do we let go of disconnected hearts from bodies, even though I cherish how Christian tradition(s) offer pathways for deeply faithful and loving people…now in Christian denominations fragmenting under the inabilities and incapacities to cherish the human body as a pathway to Godde, where Godde already is…waiting for us all. It's so viscerally clear to me now, and I have no idea how to communicate any of this without triggering those I love, those who choose not to travel these paths...
Maybe it's not to be let go of at all...but to be reknit, always a part of me, just seeds of the new story that always beckons! Reconnection with the Earth, with creation, with one another, begun in one's willingness to receive, to Love, to be Loved. Self-acceptance, yes, but the theological language needs to change. Capacity to receive...to receive... Perceived impotence, so to receive... Showing up, not knowing why.
I know the new storyline will include self-forgiveness, even though I resist the way my tradition(s) have bastardized forgiveness away from the body, only onto the body of a savior, "out there" in blood-atonement. NO. I refuse. I've learned to live beyond this splinter, beautifully and richly. I love my life and feel deeply. I experience my own body deeply in CrossFit, in relationships, in rest and play and work. I admit I don't really know what self-forgiveness looks or feels like, particularly as I'm learning what I need to to forgive the divine for centuries of patriarchy (and for the abandonment of a little girl into this old storyline, of course). At some level, even my capacity to connect--to network, to create bridges between people Spirit is trying to weave together, hence gift--has become a way to deflect receiving for myself. When I get close to receiving anything I yearn for deeply, I am immediately inundated with awareness of all the others who might also love this (practice, idea, image, etc.). I learned so very early on that if I connected or buffered, I would belong. So now, receiving requires me to let go of all others, repatterning the embedded, embodied-visceral sensation that I am never enough, that I do not deserve what I have received...into my heart's desire being met, knowing I am enough.
I know the new storyline also celebrates the early initiation I experienced, the steadiness with which I stewarded it, and the inner wisdom I had to find the safe spaces that would allow me to heal, reconnect, reknit myself--or be reknitted by others--back together inside and within a web of relationship, community. All this is no longer a matter of self-love in the least. I'm absolutely in love with who I am today, who I get to be today, all whom I get to be with today.
I know this is also a pathway of body reconciliation, which means reconciliation(s) in the multiple vectors that our society speaks to these things--race, gender, orientation, etc., but which are also categories created by consumerist-capitalist-market systems, political fragmentations. I prefer: Radical covenantal companionship. Devotion in conscious love. The intellectual, but more importantly, the visceral and practiced experience of this reconciliation. Living, loving, learning. As Trevor Hall croons, almost like a lullaby...
It's in and through the body, I've found. In and through the body.
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