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.
Tag: set
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What we endured.
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A New Legacy to Begin.
“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Soren KierkegaardI did yoga today, only the second time this week, and I felt the stiffening up of my body, the tight joints and the way I seemed to have drifted away from the presence of me.
I fall quickly into a world that has little of me in it…for without taking the time each day, I slip away unnoticed.
My body pays the price; my essence gets left in the background and to the forefront arrives all kinds of reasons to leave it there.
My weakening resolve plays with any lazy excuse and before I know it a week has passed and I have not spent any time with me just for me.
What came to me in yoga today (which is another reason to do yoga, great insights) is that we are greeted into the world and then ‘told’ or highly suggested how this world operates and are then programmed to fit in. We learn life from the eyes and perceptions and actions of our parents.
Imagine instead if we were left to explore on our own, to see freely and build ourselves from the inside out?
Instead our insides desires and passions, questions and interests are put aside due to the ‘knowledge’ our parents have about life.
Instead of us gulping up and witnessing the fresh look at life when babies arrive, we stifle it and bend it and hurt it so that the child’s view of life matches our own.
How backwards and how growth stunting this is to take new fresh energy and make it look old and stiff.
On my mail route I deliver mail to what we would call ultra conservative families, where the woman are dressed as they did on the wagon trails out west, bonnets and long flowing calico dresses.
As this bonnet-wearing woman answers her door, there are children of each age at her legs, and I am amazed that she has gone along with this dress code and submissively is led to live as they did 100 years ago…yet what I know is that each generation before refused changes, refused to see progress and actually applauds the legacy that has held strong regardless of progress all around them.
The youngest ones smile freer, the bit older ones look in awe but with a tinge of fear as they hang back, but the littlest ones meet your eyes and smile wildly for they react naturally untaught.
Along the route are various degrees of ultra conservatives and what I see the most is the absence of children being children, for they are like young adults, doing adult jobs with adult responsibility.
In Alice Miller’s books, her main trust is the lost child, how adults greet it with all their issues and steal away the innocence, the lack of pure enthusiasm, love, peace and joy, and fill it up with all things opposite.
As I completed my yoga, I thought what most of us are craving and thirsty for is the freedom and innocence of babies, to be able to be set free from our parents legacy, to give back our ‘inheritance’ and go it alone.
Imagine a world of grown up newborns…all living life from what they feel and experience instead of what is acceptable by their parents.
The parents are our biggest detriment to society and yet they can also be the biggest factors in change…for by changing my attitude and by me seeing my children, my children will see theirs.
The chain has to be broken in order for it to be fixed.
You can’t fix things at the same level they were created at, says the wise man Einstein, and I agree.
I told my daughter yesterday, I had to leave my family in order for the abuse to stop; I had to leave my family in order to save my children. I had to do what was best for the child, not the legacy of the family
That old legacy had to end in order for a new legacy to begin.
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Free to be you.
At the end of Dr. Jill Bolte’s book, “My Stroke of Insight”, she writes what she needed the most to heal, and I too would like to share what was most beneficial to me as I made my way out of the legacy of dysfunction.
When you wake up and find that you lived in denial for 46 years, you are smack dab in the middle of a pretend life and you need to begin finding truths everywhere and living truth.
Here are some things in no particular order…
The book, “Loving What is” by Byron Katie helped me embrace the idea of acceptance and how it is much easier to walk with reality and to separate whose business is whose. My lines of responsibility blurred and I was lost in other people’s lives and absent from my own.
“Be Here Now” by Eckhart Tolle helped me live in this moment while unraveling the past. Showed me how to not deny but to embrace the moment right here and all that it delivered.
Martha Beck’s book “Leaving the Saints” showed me the way abuse blinds you and how the family situation and religion has a great impact on how you then go forward, abused and confused.
My brother’s ears listened, his eyes sought the truth like I, and his hand reached forward in healing always. Together we bravely walked deeply into what we had experienced to find where we lost ourselves, felt the pain or discovered the things we missed, clues that led us to our self. It greatly helps to have one family member in a dysfunctional family that wants to get out as bad as you, that wants to end the legacy in their life. His understanding of dysfunction as well as his desire to be free was the perfect companion on my journey. His willingness to bravely let go of family in dysfunction to be whole gave me strength.
My husband bravely walking with me in the unknown, of me and the future, of allowing me space to figure it out, of hearing the truth and not fighting it. He made no demands for me to Not change, nor did he make demands on how I should be, he simply stood by and let me find me. We both had no idea if when I healed if there would be a we. Love is letting go and being free. We found a love that has no strings, you be you and I be me kinda love. His freedom was key.
Friends. Well, I lost some old friends and old family members who were unable to bear the new me and my new found truths, and I am way okay in letting them go, for I don’t want to make them believe that which they don’t.
New friends arrived, deeper, wiser, more understanding and caring, they match my new me.
Playing in Art was my saving grace, a place where I still could play with colors designs in fabric, creating and letting go of the heaviness of dysfunction, there I felt free to be. My Art carried messages to me, like letters from the Universe, showing me I was on the right path and that I would be okay.
I M Perfect Lady blog, is a key component as well, it has be a sacred space for me to bring my truths, to lay them on the white sheet and to dissect each morsel and to find answers. While I often hoped it would help another person, I have selfishly gained the most. It has beautifully displayed all aspects of me, the broken wounded little girl, the mental survival woman, and the sprouts of the real me. I grew to love this imperfect me and know that each part is perfectly me! There is no part you could take out, for each part hold up a section of my life, each part has a hand in making me me!
What we need the most is freedom and for others to hold the space of our innocence until we can find our way back.
We need to use reality like Braille watching all actions as they brilliantly say what words can try to cover; we need to have narrow vision staying with the evidence of actions.
As we tear down our life of denial, we need to build a life in reality, we need to build up our strength, add wholeness to support what we want to become, while saying good bye to the things that kept us down.
We need to find the stamina to go against old beliefs and life patterns.
We need the courage to face all we turned away from.
We need to reconnect to our bodies and yoga is a spectacular way to join, the mind, body and soul.
Mostly we need the space to be free.
Abuse steals our power; we need to become powerful again from the inside out.
Abuse steals our love; we need to become loving of self.
Abuse steals our faith; we need to become faithful to self.
Abuse steals our trust; we need to learn how to trust our judgment, our value, our morals again.
Denial or dysfunction or abuse has us living from the outside in, where we will please other before self.
We have to turn ourselves inside out and begin living from inside. Listening to our quiet inner voice, and following our feelings inside.Mostly become one. Separated from the leagues and groups and piles of folks that wanted us to be something for them. We need to become a sovereign nation of one. One wave in the Ocean of the Universe.
What is great about victims is that they bring love, trust and faith and give it to another. In order to heal, they now need to use all those great gifts to heal themselves, to now treat thy self, turn inward.
All my strengths I had for helping others, I used to help me. I became my biggest cheerleader, my strongest friend; I learned to love my self.
It is like having the wounded heal the wounded.
The ultimate healing, I who was broken healed myself.The blind learning to see.
The deaf learning to hear.
The dumb wanting to know.The desire begins with you.
“Ask and yea shall receive.”
Seeks the answers of who you are and you will move into being you.
It all begins in wanting to know the truth.
The truth shall set you free.
Free to be you.
I M Perfect lady 