Postcard From Prison!

This picture…one taken from a recent vacation is of the “Portara” meaning “the huge door” in Greek. It is what remains of a temple dedicated to the Sun God Apollo…you see just a brief glimpse of the sun in the middle of the door way before it set into the sea!  The doors “in or out” are right here, in this very moment!

Tonight I met one of my best friends for coffee and dessert. It was good for me to get out!  I don’t often do it.  Not because I can’t, because I can and am well able to. I have an extremely supportive partner who helps me honour this great latitude and freedom over “time” I have given myself.  So whatever it is I want to do with myself, my time, he is there for me 100 percent!  Without sounding overly cheesy, I recognize with gratitude all the ways that he is there for me!  This post though is about something else altogether!

So even with this freedom over my time, during this professional “time out” to recover from illness and time to be in stillness, why is it on most days I feel as empty and depleted and filled with dread…in my own magnificent self-made prison?  

The truth is I spend most of my time at home.  We have a beautiful home filled with lots of light, space and love…and yet on a daily basis, I don’t notice the light or the space and it takes rigorous effort to remind myself to feel and notice the love! If you read my other posts you will see that I refer to emotions such as dread, despair, anger as if they are persons, sometime masculine and sometimes feminine!  Perhaps it is my love of Rumi’s poetry that inspires me to address them this way…but that is how I see them.  To me these energies do have their own personas!  I do wake up with each morning being aware that as I wake up, dread and despair with their close cousin sadness waiting for me by my bedside! It is exactly as Rumi describes it in this poem “The Guesthouse”!  With awareness though, I am learning how to befriend them…a continual work in process! 

So, I wake up acutely aware of these visitors who have been there all along for most of my life. While I was growing up, struggling to find myself outside of my mother’s shadow, working full time to support myself through university, getting married and all of my life in the corporate world in a successful career, having my two children, with meaningful hobbies that included a part time business…it’s amazing to me now as to how I got through those years not noticing the void and myself in captivity! 

I realize that for some it might sound strange to have me refer to my home as a prison!  Really I have done enough work in therapy to know where the real prison is!  But, talking to my friend tonight and talking to others, I realize that this really this is not a well known thing!  In fact, the more I do “this work”, the more I realize that most of us are in our own unique prisons! Our lenses that we see the world with offer only a partial clouded view!  Our “traumas” (see note below) hold us hostage as prisoners in internal worlds that most of us would dare not venture into. Why would we? The realities of life, working…perhaps in jobs that maintain us vs. sustain us, paying the bills, raising children, staying in difficult relationships are challenging enough on their own without us having to go looking under old carpets and closed doors for answers! 

To some of us, places and things in our external worlds like our homes, jobs and relationships may help mirror the chaos and turmoil we live while stuck in our internal jail cells.  Yet this knowing does not come easy.  We were never taught to pay attention to the signs. Why would we see them as the reflections that they are…and that our worlds both external and internal are constantly at play…entangled…at work…working together…trying to get our attention! It`s much easier to point outwards…at people…places…things…the weather, the economy…that darned driver that cut us off this morning!

The challenge for all of us and me…to see the signposts…feel the feelings and to know each as an invitation!  A wake-up call, a desperate cry to notice, pay attention. Our happiness or lack of it has our very own curriculum with a precise set of lessons…just for us!

Lately, I sort of feel like the Gretel from the German fairytale Hansel and Gretel…following the bread crumbs of sadness…the yearning for happiness…along some long and winding paths to find my way back home…out of the dark woods that have been my home away from my real home for way too long!

Note:  When I use the word “trauma,” I use it generically understanding that experts in the field now believe that all of us have experienced some type of trauma(s) over our life consisting of “major trauma” to “minor trauma” and an entire range of spectrum in between!