Strength of a rose[ie]

Lonely heart/pastel & paint on paper

Listen to post:

For days in yoga, I keep hearing a haunting song [see link below] as we’re ending practice and entering shavasana. It’s a real song the teacher spins on the dvd player.

These lines, in particular, echo deep within:

            “And it’s happening to me and you …
 

           … Where we’re bound nobody knows ..."

The subject is our wildness, to me, the terrain of the heart. It’s such a wonderful transition from the activity of poses to the coolness, winding down and turning inward of relaxation. And even though I have heard that song at least a dozen times, it always catches me … in knowing. It helped me remember something I wrote as a pre-teen, about the age of my youngest daughter. I penned these lines:

            “I am bound where no man goes.”

It was a somber piece about living in isolation, then I translated it as the Steppes of Siberia. I am coming to understand it was about my wrestling with growing up, keeping part of myself and letting others go.

A month ago, while deep in pastoral counseling, my shaman asked me to remember/visualize when I first felt less than. The image of a pre-teen girl in a fetal position immediately flashed in my mind. It quickly shifted from me to my youngest daughter and my heart sank. I know she is in the same place. Shunning the physical, psychological and emotional changes stirring. My heart aches for her as it does my inner pre-teen: the one lost, confused and feeling isolated.

This week in my monthly archetypal-astrology group, we discussed the drama of opposites with regard to astrological aspects, the angular relationships between the planets, and from a Jungian perspective. A handout carefully prepared by our teacher, discussed that “ego development requires that we reject even essential parts of what makes us whole; and this is what becomes the shadow … the road to wholeness is rough and bumpy … but we continually seek that which we have unconsciously discarded.”

I wonder what I discarded in that fetal position as a pre-teen and what my daughter intends to shed?

Two nights ago, I had an interesting dream; I haven’t remembered dreaming in months:

My twin sister and I are on a train. I fall asleep and awake in a car with her driving. I feel as if I have been drugged. She acts as if all is normal. We stop and I notice one of my daughters, some female cousins and nieces a half block behind us milling around another car. My sister directs me into a store, where we encounter my mother haggling with a woman about a cabin reservation. My mother insists she bought the cabin across the creek behind the store. The woman says she doesn’t even have a reservation.

When I first looked at this dream, I felt betrayed, as if my family tricked me into this journey. But when I explored it again, it seems as if this line of living women in my family is waiting to cross the creek into the cabin of the ancestral women who have come before. The ones waiting at the car are, well, waiting. My mother has tried and my sister has brought me here. I think it’s my turn, my work. I notice my other sister who has a son is absent as is my youngest. They aren’t part of this yet. I believe that my sleeping on the train is a key to how to get past the gatekeeper/shop owner, cross the creek and get us into the cabin.

To do so, I must traverse the terrain of the heart and retrieve my discarded parts. The song “Strength of a Rose” by Deva and Miten Premal describes that journey. Rose is my maiden name; Rosie is my nickname.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuoQQsHUmZE  

• How have I experienced the terrain of my heart?

• When have I felt isolated?

• What parts of myself have I discarded?

• When have I also felt connected?

• What is my current calling toward wholeness?

A lesson from the Grinch

I wonder if your heart can grow. I have this mental image of the Grinch’s heart in a Seussian x-ray machine busting outside the frame.

I seem to have these periods when all I can feel is my heart expanding or shifting or something. Once it drove me to get an EKG and all checked out normal. I figured if I could swim a half mile daily with no problem, probably my heart was ok.

It also coincided with my holding others' spiritual concerns, often centered around my faith community. Or my family or close friends.

Secularly, it would be labeled stress. And when that’s what I recognized it as, I became worse. Now, with the luxury of some experience and perspective, I see it as a change. Maybe a change of heart. Maybe holding someone else's. Could even be an expansion of sorts, like St. Teresa of Avila’s rooms of the Interior Castle. Has something become unlocked in me? It does seem my heart fills more of my chest.

The first time I noticed this was also the scariest and most severe [to get my attention?]. It focused on a spiritual group meeting for discernment and clearness for the larger body. In the initial session, I felt as if something had gripped my heart within my chest and said: “STOP. This is not the way.” I was forced to express that and, while perhaps not totally understood, was heard. The person next to me said she felt it as well ... although less powerfully and, yet, it rankled her, too. I am so grateful she told me. I was wondering if I had lost my marbles.

I had been excited to be in this group of people whom I admired. Then, right off the bat, I was forced to speak up without knowing what really had happened. My ideal mask of being the seasoned, reasonable one went right out the window. To some degree, later, I wondered what people thought. But in the moment, all I knew was what I was feeling and had to express it or I would have burst.

It, definitely, was a being present-in-the-moment experience.

Now that I think about, the interior of my chest has never felt the same. As if that gripping hand re-shaped my insides, stretching them a bit more, leaving room for something that had not been there before.


So, am I filling it correctly? Or merely stuffing things in?


• Has there been a time when a bodily experience has really touched or changed me? How?
• How do I know when I am living in the present?
• What happens when I do?
• Am I transformed by the experience and does it stay with me?
• Or do I continue on as before?



I have often asked
to be opened.
So why, when
it happens,
am I caught
off guard?

It is always so
very different
from what
I expect.

Maybe I need
to change
my prayer:

Spirit –
Open me
and
help me
accept
whatever
that
opening
may be