When I Grow Up Part VII: Excavating!

Here it is!  It has taken a while coming.  The post it self has been written for ages but I needed to get comfortable sharing it.  Sit with the fears of what people might think…and befriend them also. It is the next step for me in reclaiming my own wholeness and embodying what I speak of or teach when I do workshops in Mindfulness.  We need to get comfortable with first of all learning to see all of ourselves…the parts that are hidden and most likely even outside of our own awareness for now. Eventually as we learn to see all of who we are, the acceptance will follow along and then we no longer need to hide anything to the world.  Our living our own truth with courage is inspiration enough!

What excavating have you done in your life?  What have you found? Send me your stories of courage!

“Encapsulated”!  This really is a great sounding word.  I heard it used last October when a reporter on CNN used it to describe the experience of the Chilean miners who were trapped underground for 69 days before being rescued.  Those of you who watched these events unfold will remember the care that was required in drilling a tunnel to reach the miners trapped more than 600 meters underground. Any false moves during this process could have resulted in a further disaster of the entire area perhaps collapsing on top of the trapped miners.  Excavation needed to happen carefully and precisely to prevent further damage.

I have found that it sort of works the same way when we are doing our own personal excavating of our own lives.  It really is a somewhat terrifying process to try to go back to the places that have been buried in our unconscious mind. Our most painful memories are in fact encapsulated to protect us.  This is what happened to me and I think I am finally ready to tell this story.

When I was little, I mean very little…maybe about only 2 years old it started.  I had parents whose intentions were always good…but good intentions aren’t always enough in situations involving others with ill intentions!  My parents trusted people easily and the people they trusted were not trustworthy.  They did not deserve the trust or the responsibility that was given to them and they, unbeknown to my parents took away a lot from me when they started to sexually abuse me.  I can now recall that this went on for a number of years by a number of individuals. These memories were too traumatic for me to remember as a child …and so my body did what it needed to in order to survive. It buried these memories!  They became encapsulated and stored very deeply in places that were not accessible to me for a very long time.

In fact, growing up and even as an adult, even hearing of children being abused in such ways did not elicit any kind of unusual response from me. I would remember feeling badly for such children or whoever it was that was subject to what I now call this “soul numbing”, “life depleting” kind of personal violation.

It was the year 2007 and I was 31 years old when the untangling began.  In fact, the threads holding these memories likely started to lose their tight hold some time before…but who was paying attention back then? Certainly I was not!  I kept myself way too busy to notice anything.   I now believe that life unfolds exactly as it needs to help us continue to grow into ourselves and so… the next part of my growth came to me at exactly the right time.  Hindsight though is much more appealing because I definitely did not see it this way for a long time.  In fact, my reactions at the time went something like, why me, why now, poor me…and denial…a whole lot of denial.  It just didn’t make sense to me…I was finally in a great place in my family life…why couldn’t things stay as they were?

It had been a couple of years since my mother’s passing from leukemia and the stress and pain of the years preceding of living with the knowing that life was impermanent.  I had two wonderful children who were 4 and 2 years old, a career that was not only flexible in that it allowed me to work part of my week from home, it also was rewarding work that was starting to get even more interesting.  My “work” in the corporate world was starting to align with what I felt at the time to be my own internal purpose for being in this world.  And then a new teacher decided to announce their presence!  I got sick!

I can now see that illness did not appear overnight. It had been a slow unfolding also with many signposts and knocks along the way that I was oblivious to, wrapped up in the cozy and comfortable life I had created.  It started with tiredness that just never seemed to go away.  No amount of sleep would take away the sense of feeling depleted, or the impending sense of doom that sat so stubbornly at the pit of my stomach. Yet being the proficient multi-tasker that I was, I pushed myself to keep up working days and nights until one morning quite suddenly I could no longer even get up in the morning. I could neither get out of bed, nor get myself dressed. My body refused to cooperate. I was depressed. My body screamed out in pain at even the simplest of movements and then…the lesions appeared!  The skin on different parts of my body started to physically crack open no longer able to contain what had been held in for so long!

This is where I really got to experience our world of medicine and doctors from the front row of my life that was the unfolding horror movie!  In prior times, watching my mother get blood transfusions, worry about platelet counts, deal with the effects of chemotherapy or scream out in pain from the leukemia, I was an observer…caught in the web of suffering…but still very much from the sidelines!

Now a patient in front of experts, I was the one being poked, prodded to be diagnosed.   I will never forget those times of feeling entirely disempowered as if I knew nothing and all these people in white coats knew more than I.  What was tough to accept in all of this is that everything that they knew made no sense to me internally!  Sure…there were a lot of labels.  I was told I had Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, even depression!  Yet all these experts could not tell me why I got sick? There was no answer that made sense.  No one knows why these things happen is what I was told! I was offered some pills to lift up my mood, some to control the pain and advice to accept that this was life going forward!

I did accept these messages for a while.  I withdrew from the world, from family, friends, work because it was too tiring to explain to others what made little sense to me!  These labels or diagnoses I was given…in the world we live in, they are referred to as “invisible illnesses” because that is just what they are.  On the outside one looks perhaps the same, a little tired, maybe less polished than usual but “normal”. Isn’t everyone tired?  So, what I found was that the world did and does not know what to do with people like me.  There are even some experts out there who go so far as to deny the existence of such ailments.

In the waiting room of doctor’s offices I met many who had been, “existing” with these labels for 5, 10, 15 and even 20 or more years.  It terrified me to see that this could be me.  I am still not sure where I found the energy to have this drive…but I decided that I wanted answers! I wanted to know why I got sick.  I soon realized that our traditional system of health care does not know how to answer this question of “WHY”!  Rather, what I discovered was that the system attempts to offer solutions aimed at containing, controlling, perhaps even curing without too much inquiry as understanding why something came to be in the first place.  This method does work for certain things…like a broken bone, a cut that needs to be stitched etc.  But, for many other things, it doesn’t work quite so well.

My answers came in bits and pieces.   They came when I finally learnt how to pay attention.  By learning to meditate and practising mindfulness, I learnt how to pay attention. I learnt to re-connect with my body an­­d understand its own unique language and the wisdom that had been there all along.  That is when my real answers came.  The experts agreed at this point and gave me a new label to add to my collection. I had PTSD…Post Traumatic Stress Disorder!

When I started opening up to this information of understanding the answers to my many “why’s”, the teachers appeared in the form of therapists, healers, music, movements, books and even things in nature to help me begin the journey towards healing.

So what did I find when I stared excavating? I started to get bits and pieces of memories of this abuse, of pain, anger, fear and a multitude of emotions that did not get expressed all those years ago.  They all now called for my attention.  Pain can only hold onto itself for so long before its own weight starts to eat into it.   Things do not stay encapsulated forever.  At some point, life will get tired of waiting for us to notice and the calls will get louder and more demanding for us to let go of our insulation that gave us our sense of safety.  It perhaps too had a purpose to serve during times when we needed that extra bit of padding to just survive.  But, the padding and the cushioning do get worn out and whatever has been repressed looks to get expressed.  Integration is the ultimate goal!  Integration of all the hidden and buried parts of ourselves, which are looking for our acceptance in order to begin healing.

If the time has come for you to do some of your own excavating, I wish you much courage on this journey. While your travel inwards will be yours and quite different from mine, what I can tell you is that at the root of all illness are unexpressed emotions!

It will take every bit of strength you have got to look past the labels you may have been given.  Just like with the miners story we started with, when you know you need to go deep, do proceed slowly and unearth with only kindness and care and especially with the reinforcements provided by trained professionals…preferably those oriented to seeing the whole picture and a dedication to working holistically!   This process is not easy and many around you will not understand your need to do it.  Only you will know that everything depends on it!  That in order to be free and whole, you at times do need to dig deep with care and let the light of the sun and the freshness of the air clean out and heal these old wounds.

I have found that in sitting with the questions, I leave an open door inviting the answers…they will come…they are already here just waiting to be revealed.

Stay tuned for When I Grow Up Part VIII!