THRiViNG! Life Maps

The conversation with myself

Me: That stupid dream that I realize I now hate. How dare it…

Me: Oh sweetie hate is such a strong and unwieldy word, maybe you only don’t like it because it feels so real, inside the dream?

Me: It feels real in me. I don’t like that. It’s supposed to only be the REM sleep kind of dream, not the “I have to do this because my heart and soul will cease the desire to be if I don’t” kind of dream. And it’s that kind of dream too.

Me: Yes sweetie is it that kind of dream too. Show up. Stay. Finish.

Me: Hmpf. Pfft. Sigh …  Sigh …

The REM sleep Dream that makes me believe it’s a Real Dream

I’m in a tower.

(Unnecessary and unwanted visual imagery, mental commentary to myself:  No don’t do it. Do. Not. Think. It. I am not Rapunzel. I am not trapped there. I am in a tower on purpose, for a purpose. I chose to be in the tower. )

The tower has a 360 degree view of a sea or an ocean.

Tall rock formations meet sandy beaches under a slightly overcast sky.

It is cool. My husband is wearing an eggshell cable knit sweater and khaki cords. He is walking on the beach.

Only one of the dogs is with him. I wonder where the other dog is.

A woman appears from the other side of the tall rocks, walking towards my husband. I see the other dog. The dogs greet each other.

My husband perks up when he sees her.

The dogs leave the frame beyond the tall rocks.

My husband walks toward her. They both stop in greeting. She turns and they begin walking in the direction she came from.

They are almost to the edge of the frame. I’ll lose visual in mere seconds.

Just before they reach the edge of the frame, they link arms, laughing merrily, lovingly looking at each other. His left hand reaches for hers. Their arms remain locked. She has all of him. He has all of her.

I know this. I sense it in my core.

I am devastated. I am sitting in my tower, where I am supposed to be, chose to be, writing and I am crushed.

I am crying. A deluge of tears cuts down my face. Sobs wrack my body. I can’t believe this. I wish that were his mother. I pray, hope, plead with the dream world that it is wrong.

I moan.  I write this and right it.

I sit in my tower, alone, crying, wanting it to be different. Knowing it’s a dream and yet it feels so very real. Much too real to be a dream.

He has a mistress. He used to look at me and laugh with me that way. She has stolen him. He allowed himself to leave. Did I push him away? These thoughts occur to me as I am waking from the dream.

I wake up and notice  my pillow is soaked with tears. I am again myself. I again believe.

Gah this dream.

What made this feel so real?

First in these moments of the present, there is no husband. There is no 360 degree tower.

And this “supposed to be writing” thing, locked inside a tower. I keep asking myself what this is about.

Oh, it’s the writing of what I see that I’ve locked away.

Then I realize, the dream has rubbed raw, my fear of abandonment.

If I pursue what I want, I will lose those I love. If I don’t pursue it, I will lose myself. Either way I will be locked in a tower of my own making.

Or it could be some premonition for a life yet to reveal itself. There may be a husband on the beach who lights up when he sees me because I am the woman he loves. Or worse there may be a me, watching my husband on the beach light up at the sight of a new woman he loves who is not me.

What, though, if it is me, meeting a part of myself, one I obviously love, while I also view the meeting from above.

Is there another story to be told from the dream scene, a perspective I am overlooking?

Possibly, yet the meeting of self feels like home and like the story I much prefer. Which provides me with the Heart. Faith. Love. Trust. Belief. Acceptance. Acknowledgment I need.

What about the tears?

I realize the tears aren’t tears of sorrow or abandonment in the story I’m taking as my own. They are tears of understanding, release, a coming back to wholeness. Yes there is pain. Pain and grief over the time spent separated from these parts of myself.

They are also tears of joy to have found each other again.

My heart sits in my throat as I write those words.

What realities are your dreams revealing? And what stories are you believing, which just aren’t your truth?

It’s been a rough month. And within it I’ve had to have some very hard conversations, with myself.

Those seem, to me, to be the worst kind. They are the easiest and most desirable to avoid. It’s also easy to assume that I already know what I’m going to say to myself and whether or not I agree, giving me yet another excuse to avoid the conversation.

Yeah.

I had to tell myself I was wrong.

I apologized to myself for steering me in the wrong direction.

I forgave myself am working on forgiving myself for not listening to my own quiet voice.

I’m sitting on my thoughts monitoring them for sneaky licks at my burgeoning self-esteem.

I haven’t been sharing. I apologize to you too. Me being off in the wrong direction has allowed me to distract myself from what I really want to be doing here in this space, with this life.

When I originally conceived of Get Caught Thriving, it was to talk about my struggles with being a victim and a survivor. Secretly it was to write a book. (Shhh)

We’ve all survived something, lifes’ little ups and downs, something much more tragic or traumatic, love, death, birth [our own specifically] – the list goes on and on.

After the first year or so, I realized I wasn’t interested in talking about the struggle so much as I was wanted to keep a record of my movement through the struggle.

Depression, shame, suicidal thoughts, disgust, anger, neediness, fear, hiding … all of those are normal parts of my life.

Also part of the movement are joy, curiosity, love, trust, faith, responsibility, truth, spaciousness, forgiveness, worthiness, belief.

I was always afraid to say what I thought and what I felt and what I believed about myself, about what happened to me.

Initially, I believed having a full complement of emotions that appear to cancel each other out, would at least leave me with some space, possibly even a little happiness. Nature abhors a vacuum.

What I’ve come to understand is that each emotion holds parts of who I am, a sensitive, caring human being who bleeds, cries, hopes, wants and changes daily.

When those emotions were stuffed down years and years ago, so were embers from the fire of me.

I couldn’t didn’t want to admit that I didn’t want myself.

I didn’t want to know I was responsible for the choices and their inherently pesky consequences. I didn’t want to stop laying blame as a sacrifice at the foot of victim hood.

All the things I didn’t want and putting all my attention on avoiding, helped me be sure to see exactly those things, as they popped up.

What I want. I just want to make my life, My. Life.

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Maitri Meditation

May I live in safety. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease.
Knowing how my personal pain shackles me, knowing what if feels like to cry, to rage, to doubt myself …

Knowing you want happiness and freedom just as I do, I say with all my heart …

May you live in safety. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you live with ease.

(Thank you Mahala Mazerov from Luminous Heart)

I use poetry to avoid the shit and it’s written.

I don’t want to write and I have to.

Collapsing under the strain of age and lack of maintenance
trapped in sewer drains defacing man made lead pipes

every body poops and the words become manure
after the words are looked at, ingested
the meanings change after the words are written

misread, misquoted, misunderstood
the words long gone from my fingers
not fear it but feel it in my bones

I have to write and it scares me, makes me feel failure.
I have to write and I don’t want to do it.

****

This was originally written backwards and I didn’t like it.

I was inspired to rewrite it based on a story from the TED talk with Elizabeth Gilbert about her meeting with American Poet, Ruth Stone.

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

My poem isn’t rewritten from the last word to the first but it works for me now and it accomplishes what I need it to accomplish.

Do you have a story, poem, situation or circumstance if rewritten from end to beginning, would work better for you?