The Gifts of Mercury Retrograde

As they say, “energy can neither be created or destroyed” (Albert Einstein). Fact is, all matter is condensed energy; that includes our bodies as well as the earth and cosmos that we inhabit. Each object has a vibration that communicates with the energetic field through the experience of emotions and vibrating its presence within the tissues and organs of our bodies. Much like a soprano who hits the energetic vibration of high C and shatters a crystal glass sitting a distance from her, so does the cosmic surge of solar flares as they come to interface the earth’s energetic resonant fields of existence. It is a well documented fact that cosmic events, such as solar flares disrupt the energetic platforms that we have come to depend on. But what of the energetic centers of the human body? Fact is, those are affected as well.

Symptoms of energetic bombardment come from any and all things that exist as matter, that is, energetic condensed forms of existence; people, animals, insects, trees, rivers, mountains, oceans, valleys. To think that ours is the only planet exhibiting such characteristics is to undermine the reality of the interconnectedness inherent with all energetic forms of existence, including the planets that make up our concept of the universe. Vedic and Western astrology (Vedic teachings over 5000 years old) a postulate on the energetic vacillations of the planets and have observed their potential minute effects on the human body and the human experience.

SIDE NOTE:

I am by no means an expert on all things either energetic or astrological, I merely recommend the acquisition of narrative introspection in the formulating of a personal understanding of our own experience. The sharing of these processes allow others to take the journey themselves. Maybe yours will be a different perspective than mine. It matters not when we are given the freedom to truthfully come to know ourselves. As we do, our thoughts and ideas may bring revelations to others. Together the authentic sharing of differences begins to highlight the common ground we all share. Building a collective understanding and tolerance for difference is not an outcome that we “should” prescribe to, but rather a destination and journey we must undertake to be worthy of.

MERCURY EFFECTS ON ME PERSONALLY

I was born under the sign of Virgo. The ruling planet is Mercury. Mercury is considered to be the planet that embodies communication; spoken, written and the ability to “gather facts and make connections based on data” (https://www.wellbeing.com.au/mind-spirit/astrology/astrology-and-communication.html) -Welcome to my energetic somatic resonance as it interplays with the energetic manifestations of Mercury on the time of my birth. Makes sense if we take to heart and accept the meaning of Einstein’s Law of Thermodynamics-

Because Mercury is my ruling planet it is not far fetched to consider Mercury in retrograde (when to the naked eye Mercury appears to move backward) as having a significant impact on me. How we personally handle these shifts affecting planetary bodies in the cosmos will allow us to use the natural energies outside us to help us attain and maintain emotional and physical balance within.

Retrogrades bring us opportunities to face the past. For me and my turbulent upbringing, I have been in a very reflective state this Mercury retrograde (May 10-June 3). I am moving so setting up arrangements. There was miscommunication during the set-up of the move (Mercury retrograde) and so I asked to speak with customer service.

…I have always said that I would prefer seeing a Mac truck bearing down on me at 120mph than deal with a car appearing to be under control that swerves in my direction at the last moment… I have been unnerved since coming back from New Mexico because all around me people have been less than authentic with how they really feel, not dealing with their own pent up energetic emotional dysregulation but keeping the proverbial lid on it. I use the analogy of a warm soda can repeatedly shaken until the pressure erupts unexpectedly. I always can sense the bubbles and pressure building (energy can neither be created or destroyed… in this case, it is communicated because I am paying attention-a radar developed by trauma survivors)…

Well having a general conversation about pick-up was escalating so I was careful to recheck the details of my understanding of the arrangement, that was when she blew up at me accusing me of not allowing her to clarify. Versed enough in appropriate boundaries with irate people I told her that this was not a discussion that I was willing to continue. It would be what it would be. After, there was no anger, there was relief. Her soda can blew up all over me and I couldn’t be more grateful. Yes, I thought to myself, that is what you were dealing with.

But then the question came up as I reflected further. How many times, in order to protect myself growing up had I used a similar method to create a crisis to break the mounting tension that I felt growing? I wonder how many mental health diagnoses are created to explain this scenario by “professionals” that lack any understanding of what is needed to survive chaotic and dysfunctional situations in a society more invested in preserving the idea of my own personal psychopathology?

Please Revoke My Caucasian Status and Heritage

Standing in an AutoZone filled with pasty white men I watched as one of the most striking Native American young men that I have ever seen come into the store. It was the richness of his color with its stark difference to my sun deprived gaunt appearance that made me shudder. The metaphor was striking to me… Me, the nutritionally deprived stereotypical WONDER bread (the bread of us older folks) and he demonstrating the thick, textured fullness of a bygone era, long assimilated out of generations of ethnic immigrants who arrived with their foreign tongues and thick accents.

I imagined what his life would a have been had he been allowed to mature with a respectful homage to his people and their ways of life. I found my stomach tighten with thoughts of the many years of cultural genocide that took place at the hands of men with white emotionless expressions demonstrating a depraved ethnocentric sense of superiority in the obliteration of any or all who appeared or embodied “difference”. I look away from the young man not wanting to make him any more self conscious than he appears. I feel shame for my lineage and our refusal to change our ways and learn the vast lessons of the narratives that arise from “difference”.

It is similar with African Americans, Asian Americans and individuals of Latino descent. It is as if we want to deprive the richness of their appearance, their dialects and their narratives making them as white bread deprived as we have become. We criticize people for not speaking English so much that I have yet to encounter a family who has allowed their own children to grow up speaking their native language. And despite the fact that our constitution allows for “freedom of religion” I have yet to come across a verbose Christian who doesn’t try to shame me for my Hindu and Native American practices.

I prefer the richness of color now because the ghostly shells that now take residence in the souls of white men, regardless of their original ethnic heritage, are disheartening. This sentiment was further engraved in my soul as I took a spot in the whirl pool after doing my lap swim. There, 5 aging men sat stoically avoiding contact with each other, their faces grim with what I can only assume was a sense of loss. Now resigned to the fate of aging, white men who bought into their own ethnic superiority over “others” deemed inferior faced the karmic reflection of the injustice done to so many. They had lost their status and been relegated to having to live the rest of their lives devoid of the truth inherent within their own truths. They had chosen to create and maintain the practices towards others that now imprison the perspectives of their lives.

Inspirational Stories about People with Limiting Labels but Abounding Spirit

A Bad Day

I was in a local quick stop and was grabbing a drink before heading to Rasar Park, my oasis on the Skagit River in northern Washington State. I was disgruntled and struggling to get the needed change to pay my bill. Just behind me a older disheveled man reeking of alcohol, with unkempt hair and tattered clothes watched me struggle. “Hey,” he said as he pulled out some wrinkled dollar bills, “let me get that for you.”

I turned to look at him, surprised. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Some day,” he said, “you can do the same for someone else.”

Couch Surfing instead of Homelessness

I had taken a supervisor job in Bellingham and came back to Washington State after my first round of chemo. Housing was horrendous so I was given a room in a “rehabilitation” apartment complex for adults with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI). The housing accommodations were substandard, to say the least.

After a month at the unit where I resided, with no where to cook or bathe comfortably, no companionship of note, no access to computer hook up or way to even watch a movie, no furniture outside a single bed and one drawer, I was at my wits end. Feeling depressed when I faced the fact I was to start radiation for the residual cancer that western practitioners were convinced I had, I needed a more secure setting. In came my my angel.

I would consider right of center politically and she doesn’t take anyone’s sh**. She’s hard as brass with strong opinions and a sometimes grating way of interacting. “You can stay in a room at my place,” she told me. Despite her labeled shortcomings, she cared enough to see me. When I asked her why she would do what she does, she just shrugged her shoulders, “My husband and I have done this before and I know we will probably do it again.”

Who I call when I need Emotional Support

There is a woman I know who lives in a trailer on a small piece of property in one of the poorest towns on the Puget Sound. She is now hosting her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend on the property so that her daughter is not homeless. She has her misgivings about the relationship between her daughter and her boyfriend but tolerates the unresolved angst to be there as her daughter needs. She drinks too much, lacks safe boundaries with others and so is suffering from the chronic conditions that indicate the stress that have physiologically accumulated in her body.

I am constantly reminding her that she matters and that if she doesn’t care for her own needs first, she will be unavailable to be there for anyone else. She shakes her head in agreement but really lacks the conviction to make the needed change for herself. She has been my rock as I face losing my housing yet again, willing to come with me to check out modular homes for me to buy.

Her shoulder is causing her tremendous pain constantly so she takes her pain meds, trying to avoid taking opiates preferring to drink instead. “You shouldn’t go with me,” I tell her. She just shrugs it off… “I am okay,” she tries to convince me. I know better!

Complete Stranger Offers Room in House

I started looking for a roof over my head by first considering living in a trailer. I spoke first to the dealership where I had bought my Prius to get some ideas of where to start.

“When do you need to get out,” he asked me.

“May 1st,” I replied.

“No one should have to be homeless,” he said to me. “If you need to buy some time while you are looking you can stay in a room at my house. It’s too big for my wife and I and we are always working.”

It is my hope that work does not rob them of their connection.

The Blessing of Giving to People Who Have Gone Without

“I just want to compliment you on your son,” my mother told me over the phone.

“What are you talking about,” I asked her bewildered by her comment.

“He is so different than the other kids around here,” she continued, “he is so grateful even for the smallest of things.”

“He has gone without Mom,” I tried to explain to her, “He finds value in things that people often take for granted.”

_________________________________________________________________________________

MY WISH FOR US ALL!

-To have someone to talk to when you spend most of your time alone

-To have well prepared food when you have been eating from a food bank

-To feel safe enough to experience a loving hug when you have been mistreated

-To have well made and fashionable clothes after wearing hand me downs

-To appreciate a warm and comfortable bed

-To be grateful to come in from the rain

-Truly feeling gratitude for all that you have despite having spent many days going without

-To open your heart fully to the gift of the authentic spirit that resides within everyone

-To be healed enough to allow the painful truths of others to emerge without censorship.

Labels will never fit the good people around us, so why do we limit them by definition?

The Experience of Going Without….

Yes, I have been one of “those people”. I know what that means to me. Do you know what it means to me or are you just chasing more and more stuff to convince yourself that my now articulated plight is as self created as your right to assume your elevated status over me? I even know what I mean to you, and though I strongly object am dismissed even before I am given the right to utter a single word. My position in your mind creates the enforcement of my gag order and the deafening silence that surrounds our existence. You, on the other hand, have chased “upward mobility” and succeeded, convincing those with power and privilege that went before you to elevate your status, financial compensation and privilege. As if it means anything except the signing of the contract for you to actively “ASSUME THE HABITS OF YOUR OPPRESSORS. The cost to you? Your essence and soul in its entirety.

It’s a choice, you tell me as I struggle to manage situations and conditions that you have bought yourself free of. My response to your chronic stress related illnesses and DIS ease; lack of morality, though claiming yourself to be a devout Christian; your own narcissistic features caused by lack of interest in anyone outside of you; and the very real sacrificing of anyone who you perceive gets in the way of your compulsive need to accumulate material belongings? “Its a choice!” I have nothing more to give you!

Creating Hope

You entrap me through my dependency on your use of money and your lack of positive regard for me as a human being. Heads up… I am gaining my wings and I promise that one by one, I will break free of your manipulation. I will find kindred souls who know the ends don’t justify the means. Ours is a united movement of conscience and integrity… something you have chosen to ignore and, quite frankly, punish.

The Socialized Monetization of ‘Need’

Addiction exists everywhere. Here addiction is both created and reinforced with every interaction through the artificially contrived notion and fundamental need for acquiring purchasing power for everything required to exist. From the most basic of human necessities to the most extravagant of purchases, human beings have come to accept that they just cannot live without more and more greenbacks to buffer their existence from the well ingrained and socialized fear of going without.

For those living in tent cities, eating out of dumpsters, shivering in the cold, poorly dressed and misunderstood, theirs is a reality that few pay witness. To acknowledge the plight of the disadvantaged reinforces the socialized and accepted fear of scarcity. To accept responsibility for ones own fear takes courage, the commodity that is the most limited in supply. It is easier instead In to avoid facing the self reflected mirror emanating from the lives of those who struggle. It is the privilege of wealth to assert blame for the forced conditions back on those who suffer. Monetization buys a false sense of superiority and entitlement over “those people”. The mark of a true coward ultimately seeking to avoid personal suffering by instead imposing it on those less able to stand in opposition. Is this not a manifestation of our societal addiction to money?

The Exposure of Financial Rationing of Resources based on Status and Privilege

March 2022 and here in Washington State the proverbial shit is hitting the fan. March 1st, that is the day I received notice of a $300.00 increase in my monthly rent. Here in the “progressively elected and democratic state” where we have been led to believe those who have the least are protected from the parasitic interests and demands of the business and corporate hording of monetary and asset resources, there exists NO SAFEGUARDS FOR RENTAL TENANT RIGHTS! As written, landlords at this moment can increase their financial compensation by sheer demand as often and as high as they so desire.

My situation is not as dire as some others I have heard about. I came across a story of an elderly woman whose rent was increased $800.00 a month. She, like so many, have chosen to take residence in trailers to keep a roof over her head. I am facing the same.

The benefits of being forced out of participation in the social structure comes from the fact that my resources, monies and talents are not being used to support and maintain the accumulating greed that places so many of us at risk. The elite amongst us have gotten so secure in their own tactics that they remain oblivious to the power of those they consider beneath them. Our unified efforts become the hidden and unspoken key to creating “the straw that breaks the camels back”. As a result, I have actively and mindfully chosen, as was appropriately coined in the 1960’s, to become “a conscientious objector”

We as a people have to stop fighting opposing perspectives and start questioning who benefits from pitting all of us against each other. Easy. The process of creating division generates the manufactured and socially constructed need to “rehabilitate” the situation (a money incentive) with enactment accepted masculine aggressive tactics financing corrective measures seen with law enforcement and legal matters. The fight for the right to exist as a person, self defined, truly outside of the pathologically defined “rehabilitative” model triggers REACTIVE fight or flight responses ensuring personal survival. It is a neurological fact that psychological pain can and does register in the body as physical pain. The consequences for both are devastating for the human body. Western medicine then collects our hard earned meager incomes to “rehabilitate” our physical conditions while mental health and addiction “professionals” collect monies to correct our cultivated psychological pathologies. Both fund research aimed to prove a genetic and biological cause thereby NEVER choosing to acknowledge the social construction that ensures pathology. We are all slowly dying needlessly from this accepted and unquestioned socially constructed mandate.

Viewing Money as the Root Problem of Social Maladies

I am sure that no one has performed a study of the acquisition of money on the brain’s neural placisity in early development. Having money enables small children to have their most basic needs met. The stress of parental access to financial resources affects everything in a child’s development; nutrition, health, accessibility to appropriate care of all kinds, the availability of appropriate bonding and interaction time with parental figures, aggression, violence and childhood abuse. You can’t tell me that there is not a significant difference between the brain development in children brought up in financially secure families over those facing disadvantaged conditions.

Social scientists have spoken in vague terms about the effect of poverty on child development but how many are actually putting the pieces of the biopsychosocial puzzle together? The effect of deprivation on neural placisity? The resultant preexposure and priming of vagal nerve dysregulation? The behavioral implications of the previous two antecedents on social functioning? The imposition of “professionals” diagnosing individuals out of contextual and social understanding? The pathologizing and criminalizing of conditions thus created by imposed scarcity tactics based on erroneous judgment? The lack of social accountability in an unjust and dysfunctional social system that continues to monetarily reward inhumane treatment of “others”?

The literature speaks openly of “Adverse Childhood Experiences” but mainly from a perspective of pathology going forward… in essence, the child’s impact on society. Its psychological perspective fits the social construct… creation of personal pathology and its proposed intervention to “fix” the “problem”. Toxic shame (well learned from the ACE itself) is reinforced and the person accepts their lack of worth based on the ill-informed but solely imposed criteria. Personal accountability drives the “need” for monetary exchange to be “worthy” of respectful inclusion in the society. It is those facing the predominance of ACE who end up financially supporting “professionals” accumulating their own financial reserves based on the manufactured lie of psychopathology. This creates a perspective need for individual responsibility while imposing an unspoken gag order against efforts to expose the socialized and manufactured “need” to instill personal blame over consideration of societal and institutional dysfunction. Families of poverty and survivors of ACE are least likely to have the financial reserves to hold up the system of “rehabilitation” yet that is exactly what they are expected to do. It is the structure of the system itself that ensures the repetition of this grave injustice but no one, that is, anyone benefitting from the practice, will give these assertions the credence they deserve.

The Answer?

As long as we seek the answers to stem this problem within the systemic institutions that create and maintain the socialization of our youth, and newcomers to our shores, they will be more invested in preserving the status quo and our efforts to effect change doomed to failure from apathetic complicity. The system cannot be changed from within. The answers lie in learning to tolerate other viewpoints and perspectives, from our own people and from outsiders paying witness to our endeavors.

The problem is that control is easier to maintain in a homogenous group. Our socialization is literally achieved through control of access to information. Public education was built for factory workers, not deep thinkers. Deep thinkers question more, consider more and, from the governmental viewpoint become less easy to control. What works very well in the control of others is fear… a fear that limits my ability to connect and resonate with you or anyone else. The efforts made to highlight “differences” among groups lie as the root cause for all that is wrong with our own social standing and status. This socialized experiment both creates and maintains a perpetual “fight or flight” reactive stance. This fact is backed up by the statistics that prove that the United States leads industrialized nations in chronic diseases evident of a prolonged stress response. It is a fact that Americans are more willing to die from long arduous and painful DIS eases than give up the fight with someone they see as “other”. They, like so many before them, have “ASSUMED THE HABITS OF THEIR OPPRESSORS!”

The Inevitable Lack of Personal Responsibility in an Ill-informed Society

Truth is power. Yet every person has a different perspective on the evolution and existence of that truth. Each narrative, as different as a human fingerprint contains part of the story that must be revealed in order to be learned from. The sharing of different narratives is difficult, if not impossible because of the personal internalization of our need to be right above and beyond the need to listen, empathize and understand the formulation of reality from another person’s perspective. That incapacity to hear and listen is most beautifully articulated in the “Sound of Silence” Simon and Garfunkel masterpiece shared in October 1964. Now close to 60 years later, the genius of their words continues to escape us.

I found a recent Disturbed (2016) revision created for a new generation of young people growing up to face the same atrocities, haunting. I was a 60’s child, the previous time of youth centered opposition to the dictates of an establishment more invested in sending young people to war than hear their heart felt cries for peace. Silence ultimately led to the loss of innocence and my generation choosing to succumb to the dictates of the establishment thus “assuming the habits of their oppressors” So now almost 60 years later we all are faced with the same energies that imprisoned us back then. We are headed back to another war that serves none of our young people.

With Gratitude and Appreciation for Simon and Garfunkel (1964) and Special Thanks to Disturbed (2016) with the hope that the message is heard AND ACTED UPON!

“Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams, I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

“Fools” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you”
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
Then the sign said, “The words on the prophets are written on the subway walls
In tenement halls”
And whispered in the sound of silence”

There can be no appropriate recount of HIS tory when access to the many differing narratives are actively silenced. It is a cultural set-up instilling ignorance through dissemination of serious misinformation and the lack of of properly tutored critical thinking. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santaya). There are those who would argue the point. My response? Until truth IS INCLUSIVE OF ALL THE NARRATIVES of human perception and their experience during a particular time period, mass generalizations taking sides, asserting blame, creating sanctions and enacting punishments themselves become human atrocities. It is an active choice that the American public abdicates all responsibility for and yet in which we are ultimately complicit in.

Apathy and indifference do not absolve us of our own complicity. The double bind we are placed in by the social hierarchy places us between two polar realities: having enough to have our basic needs met; shelter, food, clothing, warmth and, acknowledging the horrors of the human condition enforced by an industrial society now effectively maintained by our own subservience to the unspoken and unrealized constructs of the monetized dictatorship of the human condition. Is there any wonder why we are angry, hopeless, depressed and forever in search of something that just makes the pain go away if just for a little while.

The Reason for the Creation of Individual Pathology

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick  society.” Jiddu Krishmurti (Indian philosopher 1895-1986)

We talk about personal responsibility in a culture where we fail to hold our cultural institutions accountable for their irresponsibility in our own personal care. Tell me… if corporations are people as asserted in Citizen’s United, why aren’t corporate entities held reliable and accountable for the damages inflicted on the individuals affected by their indifference and acquisition of profits?

In medical care there is a notion of “informed consent” but all too often information is withheld from “patients” “for their own good”. In those situations “SILENCING” of important information is often practiced. Proper decisions by “patients” WILL fall short where information is withheld OR information is manipulated to serve the practitioner’s own personal agenda.

Addiction facilities reinforce downright abusive treatment of their clients in recovery when clients fail to meet expectations, finding it financially convenient to “blame the victim” they retraumatize through enactment of their own agency policies and procedures. These specialized service providers remain ignorant of trauma impacts on reactivity and instead feel justified in protecting their own perspective of addiction without input from other practitioners or, GOD forbid, the client him or her self.

Mental health like addiction practitioners rely on diagnoses of pathology to justify service intervention especially with mandated clients. In those cases clients agree to both mental health and addiction diagnoses to avoid a trial and court sentences. Most practitioners on either side lack appropriate boundaries with the clients they serve. They can project their own issues on unsuspecting clients through countertransference. Mental health practitioners have some understanding in this regard but most chemical dependency practitioners do not. In either case any practitioner who has not faced and dealt with their own issues in advance of the therapeutic relationship places their clients at-risk due to the inequity created in the inherent power imbalance. In cases where boundaries are not well established transference between client issues and the practitioner is also possible. Such an interaction is draining and as a result poorly prepared practitioners often “burn-out” from assuming the negative energetic input and projections from those they serve.

Nurses are quite similar to other care-givers. They gain a sense of pride from service but many times to their own detriment. They face what doctors avoid and therefore are, without a doubt the most important part of Western medical practice. They often lack boundaries themselves, taking abuse from “patients”, other “professionals” and the doctors who often fail to take responsibility for their own carelessness, looking for someone to blame outside themselves. Because they are who they are, physicians often get away with it too. Hierarchy is maintained and the unspoken learning of the lie received is… if I attain that much status and power, no one will be able to touch me and I will have everything I want. Upward mobility? Just “assume the habits of Your Oppressors”

But it generates capital to pathologize and correct the broken. Fact is, the more broken we see humanity, the more capital we can amass and that remains the driving force of “human service”. This oxymoronic idea creates and maintains a karmic cycle we have yet to break free from. The industrialized view/perspective of humanity is one of enslavement to full participation in the continued maintenance of pathology as the driving force for ALL humanity. With pathology comes the need for correction through punishment such as in the now mounting war in Ukraine, and the mass criminalization taking place in the United States. It also manifests in objectives that diagnose DIS ease and DIS ability rather than actually reinforcing a perspective built on the human strengths that exist in every single human being. It refuses to respect and actively seek the alternate viewpoints from critical thinkers engaged in the effort to speak the truth and raise the vibrational level of every human being. We have yet to learn the Quantum Physics “Law of Attraction”. Readers digest version? Like attracts like. Create and maintain a socialization and economic process built on hatred, intolerance and indifference? Attract the opposing force from others built on the same; hatred, intolerance and indifference. And while all the infighting occurs become complicit with the continuation of human atrocities.

It’s a choice!

Every day, every decision and action we engage in either reinforces the pathological within the system or contributes to the energetic pull to break free of the bars that hold us imprisoned with our socialized and accepted delusional reality of our existence.

Tolerance of the Imperfections that come with Suppressed Emotional Articulations

Our culture rewards perfection… through the words we use and the actions we take. Falling short is not just a mistake, its downright criminal! Punishable by docked pay and privileges… Problem is those privileges are not what they seem, special incentives to garner better compliance. They are, in fact, the meat and potatoes that are needed for us to live; attain shelter, food, and clothing. Our noncompliance with expectations and our efforts to be heard in our authentic voice can now literally kill us. So, in fact, anyone who speaks from a personal perspective that resonates from within themselves while actively choosing to shed the mass hysteria being cultivated faces pathological diagnoses, efforts of imposed deprivation and segregation and ultimately social and physical ostracism.

My last post was difficult for me because it revealed a over 50 year sexual historical impact I suffered at the hands of my adoptive father. For most of the years of my growth and development, not being able to access the facts left only brief glimpses into the horrors I had endured. As a result of the use of words, my sexual historical drama began being formulated. During that time I struggled over the words I chose to use so I could first come to understand my own experience and then come to help others understand personal behaviors emanating from me that had no meaning out of context.

In a place where I was devoid of explanations for my own behavior and experience, I was open fodder for the “professionals” to assert their own. At those times MY PATHOLOGY became the focus rather than the resilience within me to withstand the mounting years of cruelty. I was a delinquent in need of rehabilitation. There were many times when my comprehension waned and sentence structure eluded me. As long as YOU sit in judgment of me and my behaviors without an effort to understand the context within which such behaviors developed, the more unjust your methodology in it harsh criticism of what you cannot and choose not to know!

A paragraph title is inappropriately constructed in the previous blog about my “recurring nightmare”. It happened when discussing the “Abysmal Understanding of Trauma Informed Care” I asserted the word, needed before Trauma Informed Care. It is a “Freudian slip” revealing the depravity of my own treatment during my sexual subjugation over the past 50 years. Psychiatrists, MDs, teachers, parents, siblings, coaches, neighbors, grandparents, aunts and uncles, were all privy, if not participant in some part of the mounting evidence but chose NOT TO SEEK THE NARRATIVE taking place within MY OWN DEFINITION of the experience. It was too easy to “blame the victim”. I was the whore and obviously “wanted it” (a quote from my adoptive father to his sister when he told her he would not intervene when he watched my 16 year old ‘boyfriend’ rape me in the next room. Now a licensed gynecologist, that ‘boy’ has girls and women to play with to his hearts content. The Attorney General received documentation of my experience but I am sure found themselves ‘too busy’ to care)

I am angry because I do not trust men…. after all, I haven’t ever experienced a loving relationship with any man nor have I received the respect that my experience and education has given me. Instead, across the board, men have wielded their power and privilege to silence me, impoverish me, and sexually abuse me. I have gone without the basic necessities more than I have gone with everything I need.

The one exception with the men I have known was my first husband, a kind man but also a friend and nothing more. He loved me deeply but had a difficult time with handling my drive to seek my own “sexual healing”. He treated me with kit gloves. I was a passionate athlete, expressive through dance, art and music. He was awkward and lacked a sense of adventure. No wonder why I was confused because I was not physically attracted to him in anyway. On top of that, when broaching difficult subjects, he would experience an epileptic seizure. I was too much for him in every way, shape and form.

Why did I marry him? He respected me like no other man did before or has since. I never knew healthy relationships with a boy or man, so I latched onto what I thought love should be; respect. I just couldn’t and wouldn’t give up the best in me to fuse with the unspoken limitations imposed by him.

“Is there anybody out there/” (Pink Floyd)

Putting the Pieces of My Recurring Nightmare Together

It has had a stable presence throughout my life. In the dream I am immobilized with sleep when I become aware of someone coming towards me. When the dreams started they were quite illusive but the common feeling was the same, I felt threatened and yet immobilized, a sitting duck for whatever or whoever meant to do me harm.

Over the years since the vague threatening nightmare began interrupting my sleep, more details were made available, disturbing enough in the subconscious experience, its resonance broke through to elicit physical movement though still in a deep sleep. The first was the feeling of being exposed and covering my body with clothes. The second was eliciting a parallel dream of escaping the threat by moving around in an alternate reality. When it reached that level my body was catapulted into a “flight” effort to avoid the impending threat that I knew was seeking to find me. My children witnessed my sleep walks and could often engage in conversations with me from that alternate reality.

There were certain stimuli that connected me back to the recurrence, the most common among them, the emotional, physical, financial and sexual manipulation and abuse of me by the men who invaded my existence, a pattern I am only now coming to terms with.

It was engaging in neurofeedback that brought the first breakthrough revealing another fragment of the story and narrative that had been denied me but had imprisoned my existence. In this dream I felt the common foreboding of someone seeking to do me bodily harm as I lay in a vulnerable and exposed position. But this time… I saw the man on the other side of the door. It was my adoptive father.

My Professional Neurobiological Training and Its Ongoing Help in My Healing

Since then I have been certified to do sound therapy through the Safe and Sound Protocol of Steven Porges, the father of Polyvagal Theory. Since I wanted to understand its effect on those I plan to serve, I used the methodology myself to help balance the connection between my vagal nerve and its resultant effect on cranial nervous inactivity or hyperactivity. That was when another piece of the puzzle was revealed. In my dream my father has already gotten into my bedroom but I am only semi-aware of his presence. It is like I am looking through a sheer curtain shielding me from blatant acknowledgment of the visual experience…. But what takes center stage is his touch on my body. I am immobilized. I am disgusted and repulsed by the tactile sensations. I awake in the now, disturbed but more wise.

The immobilization has been effectively revealed by Polyvagal Theory. Proper innovation of the vagal nerve allows for appropriate social interaction by helping us to remain calm despite the environmental circumstance that we face. Understimulation innervates the visceral cranial nervous system so that physical “fight or flight” responses can occur and thus keep us safe. Overstimulation creates a “freeze” response, seen as the deer in headlights. It is clear that my dream exposed vagal dysregulation, both understimuation and overstimulation.

The Abysmal Understanding Needed in Trauma Informed Care

Because “professionals” themselves have neglected their own needed trauma work, they project their own issues on those of us REACTING or SHUTTING down from vagal dysregulation. My story here will be dismissed as hog wash because my words and convictions are an inconvenient truth that those in positions of power would rather dismiss then take seriously. Systems change is hard AND it starts with confronting the reality of the experience WE ALL have endured in one form or another. Health begins from the bottom-up. It starts with the search to understand the holistic experience that generations have been denied… the trauma and human atrocities that just keep mounting creating DIS harmony, DYS regulation, DYS function, and the very avoidable DYS topia we all play a part in maintaining and upholding.

The choice is YOURS. It is YOUR responsibility as much as mine. I just took another step forward towards freedom and hope for; first, me and then by my authentic interaction with others, the rest of humanity!

Anger: The Most Vilified but Important Emotion We Have

Anger is not tolerated regardless of the reason or intensity with which it is expressed. Fact is we  look at the emotion in black and white terms without ever considering  why we get angry in the first place. All emotions are adaptive. Each one of them is a body report on the condition of our state of being. Anger lets us know when we have had our boundaries violated. It is what I like to call the Emergency Awareness System in voluntary cooperation with our own individual body, mind, emotion and soul needs. The soul is the seed of human potential born of energetic experiences over lifetimes of learning. It is the GOD within. It is the divine individualized as part of the collective human potential. The authenticity of the individualized human incarnate is just one piece of the whole. Unrecognized and silenced it defies the GOD we revere and commits blasphemy as to the divine seed planted lying in wait for our recognition of its truth. It is cognition without guidance of inner knowing that takes residence in our heart and gut. It is when the mind has overrun the truth of the divine awaiting expression that great human atrocities occur. The mind and cognition is allowed to override and even silence the emotions that are GOD’s internal navigational gifts to direct us on on our spiritual journey. Since we refuse the signs, we violate the divine gift given. The things we encounter on our way then lack the guidance to keep us safe and we fall victim to the cognitive enslavement of money and power as the primary motivators to have what we need. As we struggle too be good enough we perform in harmony with the lie we have come to accept as the only reality. It is then that the violations accumulate in our physical bodies and manifest as DIS ease.The signs are as individual as our own genetic blueprint or our fingerprints, unique to each one of us and no one else created and maintained by the toxic experiences we have come to accept. How can anyone wonder why we are angry??

Anger repressed and silenced comes to reside inside us like a warm soda can, shaken and primed by an initial insult. When dismissed without acknowledgment it lies in wait for triggers (bits and pieces of events that have made up part of a narrative story never acknowledged or learned from) As they say history not learned from becomes history repeated… For each assault we endure; physical, mental, emotional and sexual, even spiritual, the soda can is shaken yet again and increases the pressure within our bodies. At some point there has been so much accumulated anger there is “no room in the inn” and the pressure bursts forward in unwanted and detrimental ways for both ourselves and those around us. Because we are kept from feeling anger, many of us are sitting on Mount Vesuvius.

The Adaptive Need for Anger in Our interpersonal Relationships

We live in a violent and unjust society that continues to vilify emotions. For that reason from the time we are born we are punished for angry expressions regardless of their cause or merit. Rightful anger is never given consideration because responsibility by the powerful elite has become a hard pill to swallow. Frankly, those with money and privilege don’t have to envision their lives any other way. They have what they believe they need and are reticent to consider any other perspectives from those they believe are beneath them. We, as the oppressed and ostracized majority, have learned to internalize anger as a guilty and shameful characteristic rather than a starting point to achieve a healthy understanding the existence of limited belief systems have on the understanding between two factions.  People in positions of authority have insulated themselves from this consideration by buying into the expectations of “upward mobility”. This subservience to the cultural status quo enables them to project themselves, their own issues and their own reactive, angry responses  on “those people”. The elite get away with irresponsibile and criminal acts by the process of inadvertently accepting the “upwardly mobile” gift of narcissistic entitlement. Fact is, we are in the process of actively socializing and rewarding narcissistic behaviors. Those of us who object to the victimization of humanity by this process are ridiculed, criticized, ostracized and deprived of our civil liberties, and for many, the right to have the most basic of human needs met and supported.

Hierarchy  ensures that some of us are granted the right to punish on a regular basis. These are “professionals” and elite who are so shut down to the residence of anger within themselves that they end up triggering those of us in lesser positions of power. They then feel compelled to punish us without consideration of their own complicity in the interaction, often with such repulsion that it speaks of their own pathology not those that they feel justified in judging.

Lack of Status and the Idea of Anger

We have legitimized anger by the wealthy and hedonistic because in this culture money determines the amount of power one is allowed to wield against all others without consequence. “Those other people” are deemed less worthy and are used as the dumps for the accumulated anger acquired during the elite’s rise to the top. As they say “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”(Lord Byron Acton) The price of upward mobility you ask? Sacrifice the authentic version the divine intended to bring forth within you and… “Assume the Habits of Your Oppressors”. Or, to coin another phrase imposed on those in the process upwardly mobile transition, “Act as I say, not as I do” (The Table Talk of John Seldon). Hierarchy is born in allegiance to the status quo. Subversives (those with different perspectives are silenced OR punished regardless of the truth of our circumstances.

Making Peace….

I spent so many years focusing on articulating and envisioning my story from the top – down. I had inadvertently viewed my evolving story from the narrowed and damaging perspective of the elite. From that perspective I was a prisoner of my very justified and rightful anger. The powerful elite had been socialized to see me as the problem and they had everything they needed to destroy me. In my unvoiced, over the top anger, I was prime for their manipulation and opened myself to more punishment. My practices at that time, unbeknownst to me were indeed masochistic. I revolted because  I saw myself as a victim and because I was defining my experience based on their limited perspective of what was possible for me. They spoke to me as a pathology, something in need of “fixing” The more they tried to “fix” me, the more they asserted their pathological view of me. From their perspective there was no strength and beauty in me. As they say “perspective creates reality”. Fact is there was only one thing missing, the heart of everything… I hadn’t constructed a perspective of my own based on strength, beauty and the divine within. I hadn’t realized that ALL that I encountered was a gift, divinely inspired from the GOD we all know and that resides WITHIN us all whether we want it or not! The gift and arduous training I received, when faced with courage and grace led me to be supported from gifted women, something I had never known. They allowed me; my anger, my fear and sadness, ultimately my  process, my struggle and ultimately my victory from C – PTSD and Cancer. I endured what can only be called a shaman’s death, so that I could awaken and bring you this important message….

Lay down your arms. There are others like me. We are here to help you find your way back to the divine within you. ONLY with us together can we can make the difference that we all crave!

Facing the pandemic occurring in human consciousness; At the DIS ease Root!

“Energy can neither be created or destroyed”. That is the first law of Thermodynamics that further asserts that energy and matter are consistent in the universe. They are just able to change from one form to another. In nature the energy of everything around us is in constant interaction creating a communication mirror reflecting our perceived reality. The energy within us knows no boundaries. We create and maintain the energy manifesting around us through attention. Our energetic core is strong enough to affect people, places and things. When combined our energetic focus and attitude becomes synergistic. The law of attraction comes into play and like attracts like; so a person centered on hatred, intolerance and aggression attracts others of like mind and together they combine with similar people with the same perceptions. The growing force takes on a life of its own.

But energy is not just playing out in the attitude and aggression between us, it is also manifesting physically through the changes that occur biochemically thru fight or flight reactions taking place in the emotions of hate, intolerance, and judgment. Built to help us survive when faced with very real life threatening altercations, these reactions are loaded with epigenetic and past learning imprinted; some with racist, sexist, classist views. Higher centers of the brain cortex that help us understand and de-escalate from these conditions in which we are faced with these overpowering emotions become moot . In these highly emotionally charged scenarios reasoning shuts down and we are left with the immediate; fight, flight or freeze responses, none of them effective or appropriate under the conditions.

We have a social crisis that is feeding our propensity for human atrocities. The energy of that under appreciated DIS ease is now energetically altering our physiology and will continue to wreak havoc on us until we acknowledge the energetic foundations born of the culture we have chosen to create and maintain. It is a time of great reflection, all of difficult realities we have a part in sustaining.

Covid is attacking our bodies because cancer and chronic DIS eases were not enough to get our attention. We are failing ourselves and dying in the process! “Physician, heal thyself” Each one of us is responsible for our current state of affairs. Scapegoating one group over another is simply perpetuating the foundational DIS ease that rooted within each and every one of us. So my question is this… Are we going to pull this dandelion out by the roots or are we going to find an easy fix thereby plucking the head off the dandelion while waiting for the roots to continue to grow and spread?

Phase V, ACT VI: Child Protective Services, The child catchers

The story went like this… Neighbors saw two toddlers out in the middle of the street without the supervision of their mother. A call was placed to Child Protective Services who promptly removed the children.

I began seeing the mother through a county program that provided mental health services for people who did not have medical insurance. In order to continue servicing her needs, my work was to be transitioned to the child welfare department as an independent contractor. I immediately found myself having difficulty understanding her rambling, disjointed thoughts and sheer anger with the department. I asked her about the work that she had been doing with another therapist and she was unable to clearly articulate any information that she had been able to retain. I knew that that she was suffering from a learning disability that would significantly interfere with her ability to process any information delivered in a linguistic format.

Through my own digging I was able to find out was that this young mother had gone to a local physician up river after feeling depressed. He had seen her over time for a multitude of issues and prescribed her more than 5 different medications. Because of her depressed state and strange speaking pattern, he diagnosed her with Bipolar Disorder and prescribed her another medication. It was then she began to act erratically. That led to the incident where the neighbors saw her two children out in the street and called CPS. I suggested that she see another physician who changed her medications and her behavior stabilized.

I was able to have her seen and evaluated by a clinical psychologist who formally dismissed the Bipolar Disorder and concurred with my diagnosis of a learning disorder. He suggested that she continue counseling with me and that there was no reason she would not be able to effectively parent.

CPS was convinced by an assessment conducted with the mother that she needed Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I was able to convince the department that the woman was in need of some accommodation due to a learning disorder. I decided to take the most emotionally salient issue, her CPS involvement, and use it as a teaching tool instilling the best of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy tenets. The approach was tailor made for this woman and enabled her to learn skills that would make her more successful in her interactions with CPS case workers.

Using this adapted modality, this young woman felt more in control of the often contradictory and demeaning treatment that she received by the department. My notes reflected her ability to master awareness in her CPS interactions through noting differences in the people that she was forced to deal with and alternating her approaches to each person, using their responses as a way to gage whether she was being effective. She slowly mastered the skills through witnessing her own ability to meet the incessant demands placed on her.

Despite my positive feedback to the department, it was clear that they wanted her to lose her parental rights. Because I supported my client, I began to be harassed and told that she had NOT done the training because I did not use a book. Since I was not going to continue to work with her, as they saw fit, they were proceeding with termination of her parental rights.

During this mounting pressure, a hearing was held “to transfer the children to a family member” so that she “will be more likely reunited with her own children.”

She turned to me frantically, “I know what they are up to… They want to move the children further away, out of state, so that I cannot visit the kids. Then they can make the argument that enough time has gone by and I haven’t been able to visit…They don’t want me raising my kids. It doesn’t matter what I do.”

Her public defender told her not to worry and so did I. She was complying with the court expectations. You know something? She was right.

At the termination hearing, which I was not allowed to attend, the mother of these two young children was asked specific questions about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Of course, she was incapable of responding. Her parental rights were terminated.

 

 

Apathy, the culturally groomed pattern of Indifference

As an adoptee I was mesmerized by the Real Stories YouTube video, “Children of Shame”. My particular experiences were not exactly the same but the energy communicated by the complete disregard of me as a person based solely on arbitrary and erroneous judgments resonated within my body. Fact is my adoptive paternal grandparents would not acknowledge my existence, sending well wishes and holiday gifts only to my adoptive sister, my adoptive parents “REAL” biological child. While I was expected to “fit in” as a member of the family there was no recognition of the traumatic beginnings of my life. Because I FAILED to live up to what could only be seen as unrealistic expectations, I was beaten for “behaviors” that judged my existence in much the same way as the video and painfully shared by those birth mothers and children others felt more comfortable in judging and demonizing. The judgments themselves made it inevitable that grave injustices and human atrocities would occur. Being considered different by the powerful elite is a death sentence for those of us ostracized by their complete disregard literally, figuratively and metaphorically.

I wanted to share my learning with my adoptive sister. “I choose not to watch that. I started to but then I stopped,” she told me. “It just upsets me.”

How do you evaluate your own worth as seen by a culture? In how many ways do you find yourself gagged, where you are not even allowed the right to share your human experience? Where your revelations of understanding are silenced by those who are supposed to be the closest to you? That, my dear is elitism and privilege… where what you have lived and suffered is of no consequence to those who have amassed wealth, prestige and status. In fact that is just one step away from the justified means those in judgment of us use to deprive us of our jobs, our homes, our right to our children, our freedom, nutritious food, drinkable water and a safe place to sleep. We are expendable. We are “the other”.

The more people are willing to walk past the homeless man in rags and his dog as they try to find refuge under an awning…. The more restaurants, agencies and businesses drive away these same people the more that the energy of apathy and indifference transmutes to hatred, intolerance and injustice. “What a wretched soul,” I heard one person mutter as he veered away from the aging gentleman seeking shelter from the rain. Its not a stretch to see how the indifference is mounting to intolerance, ultimately rising to hatred and a wish, as what is taking place in Seattle, to just get rid of “those awful tent cities.”

Upwardly mobile professionals do not want to be reminded of the true grim realities their preferred enculturation has meant to those deemed less worthy. Instead they, in their grandiose self importance continue lining their pockets literally willing to take whatever they want while hushing the cries of those they dismiss from lack of attention. Through this process the less worthy among us acquire labels that create the need for “rehabilitation”. There we find out about our pathologies in great detail and are referred out to “professionals” hired to FIX us. Money is further generated to those “professionals” hired to CORRECT our issues. That money lines professional pockets and depletes the resources of those mandated to their care. Ultimately those of us facing these professionals become groomed and brainwashed into believing our pathological nature and we suffer from depression and anxiety. We turn to ways to self medicate the horror that we believe is our existence and addiction is born all in an effort to escape the harsh realities constructed and maintained by the monetization and dehumanizing of a culture. This pattern is self replicating and exists in EVERY Western Medical approach to care

Energy is neither created or destroyed it transmutes, changing form. Like energy begets the same. In our society “those people… get what they deserve”. Our organizations and establishments only give attention to worthy people WHO CAN PAY for their services. Pay, monetary reward, has become synonymous with worth. Not earning money? You’re a bum, living off the funds and generosity of people more worthy as identified by their wealth acquisition. Upward mobility is only acquired by supporting these judgmental tenets. Those of great wealth acquisition have accepted some level of apathy and indifference of “others” even if that “other” is a family member.

We all live in fear, recognized or not, of not having enough. That fear is the contrived and manipulated grooming of the idea of scarcity. The difference is that those of us deemed unworthy have actually faced or are facing that fear on a day to day basis while people of wealth, affected by the same fear find ways to buffer through acquisition of more so that they never have to fear the realities that those of us deemed less worthy have felt firsthand. Remember the law of attraction? fear begets fear. Depending on class and status it is dealt with in deferent ways.The sad thing is that those with wealth are never comfortable with what they have acquired because deep down they know “there but for the grace of God go I” The problem is apathy and indifference to, not only those who are suffering, but even within those denying their own truths and experiences that continue to lay unspoken and unacknowledged. Its as if the vehemence in which a person REACTS to the “other” lies in a grim but silenced reality within themselves.

So what does this all mean? We are all suffering from the construction of our reality through the ongoing socialization and enculturation process tied to a centralized monetary system. Because of the constructs set up money as the exchange required for the right to use our own voice to create change those of us who have been trying to “Speak truth to power” have fallen on deaf ears. That is because our vantage points are seen as unworthy and therefore easily dismissed… just like the birth mothers and illegitimate children in the video. Until we all share our narratives and reevaluate the consequences of our damaging social processes, we deprive ourselves of hope moving forward.