"There is no pause because we are overwhelmed by the parts..."
Overwhelmed by the reactivity, by the flashbacks, the amnesia, overwhelmed by the listlessness of traumatic experiencing. Finding the edges of these stories, the interstitial moments, pauses, slownesses, spaces between. I don't know how I arrived at, or, perhaps, better yet, there are parts of me confused by, my present readiness to pause.
The fearlessness, the ease being new. As Clementine Morrigan writes in the title essay of her zine Love Without Emergency, "It's crazy. This breath, this steadiness. I actually am having a hard time adjusting to it, integrating it. Because I'm not used to it. I am used to love with emergency."
Integrating it. Integrating love without emergency.
Session with Todd this afternoon. Number three or four, I don't remember. Or am not pausing to remember. Just as I'm not pausing to know how I arrived at readiness to pause, here, now. Sub-scapula. Psoas. Massage. Release, contact. Contact. A returning to. A remembering that I've forgotten. Nothing new, simply 400 million years of evolution meant to heal even the most festering of heart wounds.
To see and feel and have reflected back the sharpness of pain I experience in my lower back – enough to put me on the floor for some portion of an hour, often. To see that sharpness reflected in my psoas was welcomed. To feel it in the cradle of Todd's holding. Encouraged and supported. Safe.
Integrating it.
Returning, remembering, being with.
Coming back into bodymind.
Pause. Stillpoint.
Folding back to the interstitial.
I can't help but think about my proclivity for filling time in the day with interaction so as to avoid being with self. Is it so much avoidance of self as it is a well trodden path of safety making? I can see the origins of that strategy – those parts – as rooted in avoidance of self. The environment, the ecosystem, relational frames felt unsafe enough that they needed to be escaped from. As part of that world I needed to be escaped from as well. And what a vessel for escape fragmentation of self is.
But, now, Today, is it still avoidance or is it more simply routine? Default mode network firing.
Slowing this week in my therapeutic contact has been an interesting exercise with self. I said to Dad this evening in the midst of a flowing abstracted conversation about (and exercise in) listening ... anyway, I said something along the lines of, "So much of the purpose of our being human, and the inherent production of safety by way of it, is to help others."
Helping others as a means of helping self. Though, here, I hesitate. The edge between helping others as self and helping others to get away from self still feels so tenuous.
Still feels so tenuous. Oozing, sticky.
My dear friend Thea's mother, Heather Catto Kohout, writes in her essay, "Take Me to the River," from a posthumous collection, The Shimmering Is All There Is, that "to live as one flesh within a single body – to be married to yourself and thus whole – is work that flows as endlessly as a river, but that allows those glancing moments of standing naked and unashamed."
Perhaps the tenuousness is just this, a discomfort with the newness of standing naked and unashamed. To feel as though I don't want to avoid myself.
What does that feel like?
What is it like to be me feeling unashamed?
The vacuousness of that experience is escaping the language here, my language. Slowing with it, the parts, the reactive parts of myself are retreating to their burrows. Retreating to their burrows but with curiosity. Heads turned back. Eyes poking out from bramble and hedge. What might that feel like? To be unburdened of shame.
To let go of patterning I didn't ask for. To let go of patterning that doesn't originate in me. To let go of patterning that came in the night so many years ago.
That came in the night so many years ago. Decades prior, generations falling back through time and space, too, even. Human patterning that I didn't ask for and needed to survive.
Warm. It feels warm to be unburdened of shame. Glowing. Radiant. Shimmering.
Terrifying in a new way. In a way that doesn't make me want to run, least of all away from myself, in a way that makes me curious, in a way that makes me love being alive, in a way that makes me love being me being alive.
And what greater joy exists than this?
As I returned to the room with Todd and paused to feel myself after our session, standing at the end of the table, I said to him that I feel longer and shorter at once. Somehow. He suggested that I might be experiencing myself in a way that "I feel both taller and closer to the ground." Taller and closer to the ground. Both, and, at least.
Taller and closer to the ground.
In a way that makes me love being me being alive.
Without emergency.