I M Perfect lady

Tag: Saints

  • Freedom

    Martha Beck writes in Leaving the Saints,

    "My defection from Mormonism changed me in the same way Adam's disability did: it became an open-ended tragedy that I wouldn't give up for anything in the universe. (not even my own planet) because it helps me let go of beliefs that had damaged my soul.  An erswhile friend of mine in the Oak Hills Forth Ward once said he thought the only prayer we offer spontaneously is "Why am I in pain?"  Knowing that I am considered wicked and perhaps insane by people that I love is so painful that it continually drives me to this prayer, drives me to seek sustenance even more stable and powerful than human acceptance and company.  Please, Please, Please, Please…"

    "When I persist in this prayer, sooner or later (the more I practice the more it becomes "sooner") something wonderful happens.  My status as an untouchable feels so terrible that something deep inside me finally lets go of it, of all identity, of all attempts to prove or please or control anyone.  At that moment, I rediscover the stillness in my own heart of hearts.  Then I feel its connection to the Stillness all around me, the gorgeous, blissful Stillness that holds every heart, every mind, every tree and rock in its infinitely loving embrace."

    "I am here. Always.  I am always right here."

    "And it is, it is, right here, nearer than near: connection, comfort, safety, belonging.  Home.  Lao-Tzu said, "The master can travel all day without ever leaving home," and while I'm no master, I have returned home frequently enough to know he was right.  I'm starting to believe that my homing instincts will guide me back anytime I consult it, from anywhere in creation.  I think that may be the reason for this whole terrifying excruciating mortal existence, to wander away from home, then find your way back, so many times we learn from our toes up that no matter how far afield we may stray, we can always, always, always get there from here."

    Martha and I both found that outside of the family and church community there lies a new home.  One that resides inside of us…without that I know I would have certainly died.

    She writes about her new path…"I was teaching career development, helping students create successful lives. But to me, that didn't neccessarily mean huge salaries and a Donald Trump social profile.  It meant learning to go home and stay there, in that place where joy is not dependent on wealth or image, and even the deepest sorrow is a guide toward healing and happiness.  During my years in Utah, through all those days of spiritual trial and effort, all those nights of psychological struggle, I'd developed a repertoire of techniques that helped me do this.  In Phoenix, I began teaching these techniques to my students."

    "You'll know when you're in the wrong job interview," I'd say during a lecture, "because the pit of your stomach will tell you to get out. Your first priority should be stillness, attention to what you really know and what your really feel.  Don't 'network' into meaningless relationshiops with colleagues who bore you; find the people who can make you laugh all night, turn on the lights of your heart and mind. Do whatever work feeds your true self, even if it's not a safe bet, even if it looks like a crazy risk, even if everyone in your life tells you you're wrong or bad or crazy."

    "What I was really tellng them was how to be a Leaf in the Stream, though of course I never  called it that.  Nor did I quote Jesus' question, "What profiteth it a man if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"  I rarely used Buddhist terms like awakening or right action. But all these concepts, all the things I'd learned in my search for God, drove every piece of advice I gave my students."

    "I also started writing books and articles, on many topics but with only one theme, Dante's theme: the journey through the inferno as the road to heaven.  Paradise lost and found."

    "In my case, the inferno-road led through Provo, Utah, the well-meaning bureaucracy of Mormonism, the community of Saints.  Yours probably passes through some other territory, but we all make the same trip.  We believe without question almost everything we learn as children, stumble into the many potholes and pitfalls that mar any human endeavor, stagger around blindly in pain and outrage, then slowly remember to pay attention, to listen for the Silence, look for the Light, feel for the tenderness that brings both vulnerability to wounds and communion with the force that heals them.  Don't worry about losing your way, I tell my clients.  If you do, pain will remind you to find your path again.  Joy will let you know when you are back on it."

    "I still make the journey every day, which is why I wrote this book. Many people, especially I myself, have asked me repeatedly why I'd do such a thing.  I hate conflict, have an enormous fear of being disbelieved, and remember just enough of the old-fashioned Morman temple ceremony to be paranoid about lethal reprisal from the lunatic fringe of my father's fan base ("and whether they will slay me, I know not…"). But much as I dread the consequences of openness, I know the consequences of secrecy are worse.  I've read research that indicates that people who hide a history of traumatic experience live shorter lives, less healthy, less happy lives than those who tell their stories. I know, at a much deeper level, what keeping secrets did to me, and even more to my father. He did more than die for is religion; he gave it his life.  He almost gave it mine.  The memory of that is awful it leads me down Dante's road many times every day and each time, the awfulness makes me keep going, all the way through hell and back to paradise."

    "Once I am home again, I know that my father's true self is not the same man who lied and covered up and sacrificed his children's happiness for his religion…"

    "Even if I never know the explanation behind what happened to me as a child, I do know this for sure; Whether my father had the freedom to choose his thoughts and actions, I do.  I am free, and always have been; free to accept my own reality, free to trust my perceptions,free to believe what makes me feel sane even if others call me crazy, free to disagree even if it means great loss,free to seek the way home until I find it."

    "All the great religions I have studied, including Mormonism, hold that this irrevocable soul-deep liberty is the key to the end of suffering and the beginning of joy.  The Buddha said that just as you can recognize seawater because it will always taste of salt, you can recognize enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom.  About a year after I discovered I'd become a life coach, I stumbled across a Buddhist prayer that felt so true to me it almost stopped my heart.  The last section goes like this:

    "As long as space endures,

    And as long as sentient

    beings exist,

    May I also abide,

    That I may heal my heart

    The miseries of the world."

    "Of course I am not saying I can fulfill the promise of the prayer, only that I want to die trying.  Maybe I already have died trying, once or twice."   Martha

     

    What I recognize most in the similarities between Martha and I, was the cost of speaking out and finding our own inner peace…and how we will repeatedly go back to the fire if we feel we can stop the misery in another, by speaking the truth.  We are willing to die again and again…in order to have freedom.

  • The Majority Vote.

    Martha Beck writes in "Leaving the Saints"….. After a family therapy session where Martha  remained the one lone family member willing to see abuse.." I could see that my siblings' truth, as well as that of all other Latter-Day Saints, would always be based on group consensus.  I read psychology tests about the effects of socialization on perception, pondered the famous experiments by Solomon Asch that demonstrated how subjects who didn't know they were being tested changed their perceptions in order to agree with other people. Shown two lines, one long, one short, in the company of people who all claimed that the lines were of equal length, the naive subjects almost always agreed with the majority, rather than the evidence of their own senses.  They not only said that the lines were equal; they often came to actually SEE them as being equal."
    What is alarming and comforting at the same time, is that my family isn't any different from the test folks, who automatically side with the majority. That very few will use the evidence of their senses and stand alone.
    She also wrote about losing her family, " It would have been less painful to lose my family to war or natural disaster; less shame, less confusion, less personalized energy.   I did lose them you see.  I've never really been back. Though there isn't an official "no contact" rule between us, my siblings and I stopped most communication after that bloody battle.  I hear from other relatives that I am the black sheep now, the traitor to our family's code, the enemy of every thing we once stood for together…."
    And the last few lines that caught my attention…"Sometimes I think there is not enough room in the Universe for the sorrow of that exile."
    Being exiled from your family for going against the majority vote.

  • What we endured.

    From Martha Beck's book, Leaving the Saints
    "All my life, I'd read and reread a thousand religious epigraphs to the effect that "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  I'd always been told this had to do with joining the true religion, learning the true description of the Holy Trinity, memorizing the true Commandments.  Now, with that gong like tone thrumming through me, it all seemed so much simpler.  The truth I needed to be free was simply the reality of my own life: This is what I feel.  This is what happened to me. To know these small truths was to know myself; to speak them was to connect with my real self, other human beings, and God."
    Martha was told by many people she was not allowed to tell her story of abuse, that the church's reputation was on the line, that her father needed to be held up as a pillar of its community, that many mormon spiritual lives depended upon her silence… except one woman came to her.
    "Martha…I don't believe God would ever ask anyone to endure that sort of thing without talking about it.  No one. No matter what."  Her voice when through me like an arrow, through all the pain and confusion and fear to something at my very center. My body filled up with a kind of resonance, like one of the huge gongs I'd seen in Shinto shrines that make the air throb when they ring.  It shattered my reserve, and as usual, I started crying.  Rosemary just sat there, not a shred of tension or resistance in her presence.  "Was it your father?" she asked, quietly.  I covered my face with my hands to keep myself from falling apart, but it was like trying to protect a sand castle from high tide. "I didn't tell you!" I gasped, when I could speak.  "Where did you hear that?"  She shrugged and tapped her chest. I felt that sense of resonance again, crumbling all the barriers of my mind.
     "You can't tell anyone!" I whispered.  "And I can't tell anyone! Ever! I can't!"  
    "Martha, listen to me."  Rosemary's voice was no louder, but it had taken on a peculiar intensity.  I remember thinking that I should pay close attention. I was right. The next three words Rosemary Douglas spoke changed my life forever.  The moment she said them, I knew that this was the stable patch of earth in the landslide, the single great spiritual truth upon which I could build my life now that all other foundations had proven frail and uncertain. The words weren't God loves you, or Jesus is Lord, or Keep the faith.
    Rosemary put her hand on mine, looked right in my soggy eyes and said, "You are Free."
    We are not free until we can speak our story, to tell of our experiences…and sadly we wait for the permission of those who hurt us.  What a great gift this woman gave her, to say, "I don't believe God would ever ask anyone to endure that sort of thing without talking about it.  No one. No matter what."
    At times this blog feels as if I don't have the right.  But I agree with Rosemary, we must talk about what we endured.

  • Coming From Whence We Came…

    Our book club is reading the book, "leaving the Saints" by Martha Beck…this section was particularly affirming to me when I first read her book about five years ago.
    She recounts how her life began to make sense after getting the first waves of memories…
    Her memory " I am five years old, my hands are tied, and my father is doing something that feels as though it's ripping me in two.  I am stretched on my back, legs spread like a frog on a dissecting table, unable to see or understand what is happening, focusing as hard as I can on the cord around my hands, because it distracts me from what is happening elsewhere….The first horrific flashback was like a nuclear detonation.  It felt nearly real as if I were actually experiencing the original event, as though the nerve impulses for perceiving it had frozen into the tissues of my body, never reaching the level of conscious awareness, and were now finally completing their long-delayed journey…"
    She also writes about an extremely painful doctors visit that now made sense.
    "I am twenty-six, lying in another damned emergency room.  The Doctor has just told me that I waited so long to seek treatment for an abscess in the tissues of my perineum (look it up) that he's afraid infection might enter my bloodstream any minute. There is no time to put me under general anesthesia, so he gives me a shot of novocain in a very private place, then hands me a washcloth and tells me to bite down on it.  "please don't hate me," he says, and starts operating."
    "Numbed by the local, I don't even feel the first incision. But then he sticks a pair of scissors into it, and the pain is just absolutely incredible.  I've never felt anything this bad, not in childbirth, not when a dentist accidentally drilled right into a nerve.  I am positive that nothing could possibly hurt more than this. Then the Doctor opens up the scissors inside the incision, and I realize I was wrong.  And then, oh Lordy.  Then he starts to cut."
    "Out of all my medical misadventures, this memory stood out most in my mind the day of my first flashback – not just because the injury was related to those badly healed scars, but because the pain during that surgery was the only thing I could compare to the pain my mind and heart felt when the flashbacks started.  It wasn't simply the agony and degradation of being raped but, more, the absolute horror of a five year old who has just learned that the universe is ruled by an evil god and that this god seems to have commanded the most beloved and powerful figure in her life to destroy her in a manner much more devastating than death.  "We all have our little sorrows," said my Allusion Manager, quoting screenwriter Ronald Harwood even at this awful pass, "and the littler you are, the larger the sorrow."   Martha
    What I find so remarkable is that the physical pain is of a lesser degree in devastation compared to knowing that your father is capable of doing such awful things.
    That knowing is by far worse than any bodily discomfort. The body will heal and the pain goes away….but the knowing who your father is and what he is capable of doing does not go away.  
    No scar will form over this knowing…it stays an open wound.
    What is also comforting in a very horrific way is how she too experienced the time travelers that brought forth the exact feelings from her childhood.
    When my niece spoke up stating that my father abused her, my body responded before my mind could comprehend.  It shook and was filled with terror in every cell.  I knew without a shadow of doubt that she spoke the truth.  I too could not stop the mental tumblers from clicking into place and my life began making sense in a horrifying way.
    Her husband too was seeing her in a new light, she began to make sense to him…"That is why you space out when I touch you," he said.   "That is why you scream in your sleep. That's why you can never really relax."
    And while her direct honesty and openness about her abuse may be very disturbing, it is very comforting for an abused child of abuse.  It Makes us make sense.
    We make sense coming from whence we came…

  • Feeling the Unbounded Heart.

    In Martha Beck's book, "Leaving the Saints" she writes,

    " I recall its horror and beauty, the enormity of the things I have lost and the incalculable preciousness of the things I have gained. I wouldn't give up the journey – not a moment of it. On the other hand I have no desire to live it again."

    My journey from not knowing to knowing has equal parts horror and beauty, for it seemed with each new glimpse into the vestiges of evil sprang a new wondrous insight and freedom…

    The dichotomy of the polar opposites and how you are plunged into the horrors that you failed to see and or acknowledge to your self, and then the beautiful release from them into the wide-open space of freedom leaves me breathless.

    We somehow believe if we sit smack dab in the middle of the horrors of our lives, we will get left there, that you will sink as if in quick sand, but that isn’t so.

    If you don’t go into what frightens and scares you, you will live in the space between.

    No terror and then no beauty.

    You are in the middle land, the purgatory space, neither heaven nor hell…

    When you leave the comfortable space of no feelings and dare to walk fearlessly into the emotions and truths you were too frightened to see as a child, it feels alive, electric and the enormity of it all leaves you overwhelmed.

    Fear keeps us out of those dark corridors where our unexpressed, unexamined life lives. And by leaving that door closed you live a life that isn’t alive…in its truest sense.

    You are forced to live without feelings and free expressions.

    Martha is so right…for I too recall the horror and the beauty, the enormity of the things I have lost and the incalculable preciousness of the things I have gained.

    You truly lose the world as you have known it, but you gain a self you have never met.

    I lived in this the middle ground for 46 years, where fear kept me motionless, frozen and lifeless. I followed life, but I did not live it freely.

    I never wavered from the path of least resistance, I had no individual thoughts and I was not connected to my body and its feelings.

    The middle ground certainly will not allow you to see the horrors, but it also keeps from you the intimate beauty of love and freedom.

    Stretched into the zone of nothingness…but keeping the static going so you never dip into the terror that lurk at the sidelines of your life… your life’s goal is to remain numb.

    You are frozen in place and have no conditions.

    No rules of your own, in fact I see this as being a lump, where the dark murky waters can wash over you and you feel not its affect, nor do you try and get out of the way…and sun is shining just above the surface, but you make no move to reach toward it.

    It is living and letting all manner of things happen and you don’t move…and the delights of life await and you are unable to reach.

    Waking up in this state left me horrified of what I had allowed and how I had not been aware…and as Martha writes about the Lion stage of awakening.

    “When we have discovered the hearts capacity to face any situation, the joys and sorrows of existence as they are, we awaken to freedom. Then the Golden Lion speaks with a roar. Out of the mouth of the lion comes the undaunted voice of truth, the liberation of the unbounded heart.”

    It is the liberation of the unbounded heart…whereas before it was wrapped up like a mummy unfeeling anything.

    And she goes on to say about the third stage of awakening, “In the last stage the lion gives way to the child, to an original innocence. This is the child of the Spirit for who all things are new. For this Divine child there is wonder, ease and a playful heart. The child is at home in reality of the present, able to enjoy, to respond, to forgive, and to share the blessings of being alive.”

    (I best give you the first stage as well…”In the camel stage of awakening, we make ourselves available to the Spirit through humility, prayer, repetition, and manual labor)

    The first stage was where I spent most of my life, ‘repetition and manual labor…not so much humility or prayer.

    The tumultuous unwrapping of going from living life bound up in the beliefs and thoughts and affects of abuse etc, to undoing it all is extremely horrifying and beautiful in equal parts.

    Isn’t there a saying from the bible, about ‘what is bound on earth is bound in heaven…? I believe that it is talking about the heart.

    There is truly an incalculable preciousness of feeling the unbounded heart.