I M Perfect lady

Tag: expressions

  • Holding it all Inside.

    I didn't catch the speakers name, but heard her on Sirius radio say, "trauma is experienced in the right brain and stays there until you express it.  The left brain categorizes our experiences and it needs to be expressed or it gets left on the right with no way out."

    I had never heard trauma explained quite this way.  I had looked at trauma being felt in the body, but I hadn't considered the brain, except to note that my category lady was filing things in a haphazard way.  And actually, she was doing a fairly good job without the experiences noted of abuse.

    When you connect the trauma and file them in correct categories, you then get a complete picture of reality. 

    As a child, my trauma was not allowed to be expressed or let out of the right brain…so there was a divide between what the left brain was saying and what the right brain was holding on to.

    I believe that while the right brain is holding on to trauma, it leave little room for creative tasks, or space for love, peace or joy. The overall humming of trauma, the screaming fear muffles out the music of our souls.

    When my niece spoke up, she opened a pathway to my left brain, allowing the trauma to escape my right brain. It started as a small trickle, but a waterfall of expressions flowed forth.  In a short amount of time, my trauma which had been stuffed in my right brain for 40 years finally made connections with my left brain.

    It is quite incredible how the two sides are designed to work together and when the right side holds back expressions how frozen you become or numb and unexpressive in all areas.

    When Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor spoke of the right and left brains, she wasn't speaking of childhood sexual abuse, so I failed to understand the meaning of what happens when traumatic emotions get lodged inside and have no way out.

    Dr. Jill did say that the duties of the left brain is to weave the most plausible story with the least amount of information.  What I hadn't considered is how a story is written minus expressed emotions.

    It was shocking to be me as the first trickles of traumatic expression flowed forth, for it was very alarming in the velocity and strength, the years seemed to have added volume and force…or perhaps it was exactly as a 6 or 7 year old would have felt it at the time of the original event.

    Incredibly horrific and wildly freeing at the same time.  Like riding a wild horse yet fully in control.  Experiencing traumatic emotions, riding their waves to freedom…expressing and releasing myself from the years of holding it all inside. 

     

     

  • Hold Our Stories

    Before I discovered that my father was a pedophile, I had night terrors, where I would wake up FROZEN in terror.  I literally could not move my arms, or even one finger tip, I was flattened onto the bed, exposed, heart racing and almost unable to breathe, there seemed to be a heavy air in the room permeated with fear.

     

    These occurred regularly, but not nightly, and I had no idea what made them happen.

     

    When I was awoken in this state of terror, I knew if I could move one arm or finger and touch my husbands back, I would be okay, but I was literally paralyzed.

     

    It was in the middle of the night, that suddenly I was wide awake, on very high alert, frozen in terror, not knowing if ‘something’ was in the room to fear, or was it dream.  It would catch me unaware.

     

    Maybe it was my body showing me what lay underneath, how it feels to lose the options of fight or flight.

     

    What I find really fascinating is that these night terrors have literally disappeared, I have not had one single one since the day I discovered that the fear I had of my father was justified.

     

    How utterly remarkable the body is in how it maintains this information and how it expresses it perfectly until you get it.

     

    Until you fully understand the journey you both have been on.  For up and until then, my body was the only one who knew, my awareness understood terror, I just didn’t understand the source.

     

    I am in great awe of the wonderful tool we all have to use to navigate our journey of life.

     

    Our bodies hold our stories.

  • Your Diet Today

    As I did yoga today I was reminded of where all the unexpressed emotions lay, the container that holds them when I lived a short distance from my body, is my body.

     

    What has always been true and will always remain true, is even if you mind doesn’t allow you to stay in reality, we haven’t found a way to take our bodies out of it.

     

    Our heads only live in denial; it is like the phrase, ‘get your head out of the clouds’.

     

    I am reading “The Joy Diet” by Martha Beck.

     

    Her book contains instructions for a different kind of “diet,” one designed not for the body but for the soul.

     

    “When the word diet first entered the English Language, back in 1656 when I was a little girl, it didn’t refer to food intake.  It meant “a way of living or thinking.”  A few decades later, diet also came to mean “a day’s journey.”

     

    Her first technique is to do 15 minutes of day of nothing. 

     

    The second one is to be truthful.  Imagine this is the chapter I read last night.

     

    “The practice of telling ourselves the truth is so simple and so freeing that you’d think we’d all do it constantly. The fact is, however, that most of the people tell themselves the truth only in selected areas, and many of us lie to ourselves and others about practically everything we experience.  Why? Because living behind a pane of glass, numbing and empty though it is, also feels safe.

     

    …in 1992 and the years that followed, I realized that the simple, small truths of my real thoughts and experiences were the keys that unlocked the dungeon doors for my true self.  Trying to stop telling them would have been like trying to give up oxygen.

     

    This was an almost inexpressibly painful period of my life, but as it drew on, I began to feel intensely, vividly alive.  Prior to that time, I ‘d had no idea so much joy was even possible.  I’ve watched in pain and pride and dozens of my clients have taken the same kind of plunge, determining to tell themselves the truth, no matter what, then opening up secret after secret, breaking through lie by lie, until they find their hearts.  I only recommend that they go for one Moment of Truth a day, but the effect is the same whether you go for broke, as I did, or proceed gradually, as I suggest.  As far as I can tell, this process is always hard, always painful, always so, so worth it.

     

    If you did nothing but pursue the truth about yourself for the rest of your life, you would never run out of fresh discoveries. Every day brings you new experiences, changing you, bringing new aspects of your true self into expression.  There are many layers of thoughts and perceptions in your mind, so many interactive connections that have been developing from infancy on, that the largest part of you will always be an undiscovered country.  As you tell fewer fibs and keep fewer secrets in your inner world, you’ll find energy you once spent on denial turns outward in a kind of creative bloom.  Fascinating ideas, compassionate actions, unheard-of adventures will bubble up from the inexhaustible well of your unique personality during your Moment of Truth.”  Martha Beck

     

    This is the perfect book at the perfect time to help me articulate the ways of living outside of the bubble or as she says, behind the pane of glass.

     

    I love that diet is a day’s journey!

     

    What will you do on your diet today?