Carnality

I am becoming more and more aware of the physicality of myself and the importance of movement as I also realize my life style puts me on my back side way more than it should.

I, like so many others, feel compelled to write bits of “my story.”  You see, regarding the “body” -- It was taught to me that carnality was wicked, the body was not to be trusted…  basically a fair amount of disrespect for the body along with conflicting statements that our bodies were the temples of the spirit.  This just meant that we were to deny it carnal pleasure because the spirit was superior.

Well, this attitude hasn’t served me well, and maybe you had similar teachings too that haven’t served you well.  Because of my dissociative identity disorder, and having been on antidepressants for 21 years, I didn't feel like I was really IN my body for much of my life.  Since I didn't know what it felt like to be “in” my body I didn’t understand any difference.  When I started going through therapy and had visualizations I suspected that something wasn’t right when I visualized myself as someone “out there” like on a TV screen.  I somehow knew that the visualizations I was to go through should be more physically direct to me.   I told my therapist about it and she was intrigued and told me that, “no, that wasn't how the visualization should happen.” 

I also didn’t move “spontaneously” throughout the course of my earlier life as even basic movements were pre-meditated.  Other than sneezes and coughs, motions were pre-thought.  Even bringing my hands to my mouth to hold a cough were.  I belly-danced and even those were pre-thought before they became dance form.  At a medicine woman retreat when I was in my early 30’s, I finally found what it was like to move my body without thought.  It was beautiful, liberating, and empowering.  I finally found spontaneity. 

As the antidepressants moved their way out of my body I became more solid with what I felt in my body and it was at times over-whelming to the point of experiencing dizziness.  I remember walking on the campus of the University of Arizona with my sweetheart and I felt like I was actually inside of my body.  It was a glorious experience.  The mindfulness of moving within my body is sacred and holy.

My personal spiritual development has taught me that although we are souls living physical experience, we are also souls incarnate and that our physical manifestations are our stewardship.  Our bodies are not only our temples, but our tools with which to experience the glorious existence of our physical universe.  We should celebrate them, play in them, move, rejoice, dance, enjoy physical pleasures responsibly, and care for them health wise.

I've spent a lot of time struggling with my body.  Telling it rotten things about its inferiority, its lack of beauty and all it has done in return is continue to serve me and get me around.  Going to the gym to get it in to shape, I bullied my body by overworking it.  I love my body.  It has been so forgiving and loving to its host.  No, I’m not a dualist, I just recognize that the life force is a continuum through energy patterns from the deep levels of consciousness on up through coarser physicality.  Like buds on trees, our life force sap from light flows through and likes movement and gets ill with blockages.

True, Samadhi is an ecstatic state, but we are physical and can’t stay in Samadhi all the time while still alive.  I believe that Satori (awakening) needs to happen as we manifest our light from source through the body and the world and back again in healing circular flow.

To do this, we need to not only meditate; we need to take care of our bodies.  My physical health is my top priority this year.  I have been too heavy for too long and the results of that are that I don’t have the energy I want, I have more headaches than I should, and I border on blood sugar issues and hypertension.

If you have issues like this, let’s do it together!  Let’s get physically healthy.  I am so honored to know so many people making positive changes in their lives and I get inspired by such good and encouraging friends who are compassionate at the same time.  It isn't easy, but it is necessary if we want the full and joyful lives we so deserve together.

Remembering and forgetting

This post is mostly a questioning one because I’m trying to find what works regarding what to remember and what to forget.  I suppose the universe in everyone’s earthly mind needs to find its most productive space in what to remember and what to forget.

Since being off of 21 years of antidepressants since 2009 I have been remembering a lot of stuff that I didn’t have access to before.  Some of it has been pretty icky, but most of it has been pretty nice.  The largest benefit is that I feel more integrated as a person now than when I was living in a superficial brain state with lots of extra serotonin and norepinephrine floating around.  I’ve also been learning how my brain decided to forget things by association.  If something was a trigger, I would lock that event away too because of any closeness of association.  I have forgotten things that I want to treasure.  I have no memories of my mother reading to me, no memories of some parties I had in my youth, and very few memories of tender touching moments between my parents and myself as a young girl. I want those memories back.  I had forgotten them because of association.   At my age I want to have a more solid and effective brain with better learning powers.  It is important to me to not throw away new information just because of a negative association it may elicit.  I want to resolve and put to peace the negativity by understanding it and loving it, and continue to learn.

This last week a friend delivered a trigger and a complication arose in which I wanted to completely have nothing to do with that friend.  For many reasons he needed to not be a house guest any more.  However, I needed him out of my space and I know that my hyper strong reaction had a lot to do with the trigger.  I still needed relapse time and time to recover from the delivered trigger.

A good friend of mine reminds me that with brains, that which “fires together wires together.”  She is right.  She says that this is the reason why it is important to forget traumatic events.  It is not good to relive them over and over again.  She is right.  However, I want to know just how much I need to know.  As I write this, it occurs to me that this is where the power of the subconscious just might help.  It’s going to work anyway especially as we sleep.  We might as well give it good direction.

I am blessed with a loving partner who has such a deep capacity for love.  It seems sometimes that his love falls to the lowest of us – those who need the most compassion.  His powers of forgetting are staggering and have served him well.  He doesn’t know resentment.  It doesn’t work for him.   If it arises, he finds ways to shuttle it away because it is just not an effective state of mind.  He is a good example for me.

I, on the other hand, have had a tendency to give things a negative skew.  I have had to learn to remember so that I could understand why I have done this.  Now that I am learning why and how I have been doing this, I want to delete the icky stuff.

It occurs to me that when we were babies crawling around and learning how to walk, we stumbled along and fell down a lot.  We probably had temper tantrums and cried a lot about the “failures,” but then apparently we did get up again and go forth.  I think about consciousness in the context of a continuum from personal mind to universal mind and think sometimes as we echo forth we need to prune away the non-essential – much as our brains prune away in learning and plasticity.  Since the microcosm is found in the macrocosm, and I believe we are of a fractal nature in physicality and energy.   I believe that once the task is accomplished, we can forget the pain and agony of the learning experience.

Sometimes I suppose I wish I’d be able to just get up and walk on!  Arrgh.  What are your thoughts?