Tsunami Mommy and Other Year-End Thoughts

Looking through the slips of paper on which I've written random thoughts and quotes throughout the year,  I found some fun, funny and touching ones. May you find one that resonates with you. 


The best things in life are nearest:
Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
                                         
                                       ~Robert Luis Stevenson


If you are irritated by every rub, how will you be polished?        
                  
         ~Mevlana Rumi, 13th Century Sufi poet and mystic


Tsunami Mommy is one who, in an effort to do everything for her sweet darling child, knocks his feet out from under him. 

                                         ~Melinda M-S


We turn to writing because no one will let us finish a long-winded story (that they've heard before).
                            
                                                ~ Jennifer Castrup


Learning is weightless: A treasure you can always carry easily.
                                               ~Chinese Proverb


Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

                ~ Coretta Scott King, civil rights activist


In the web of life
     Our rhythms reverberate
          Let us dance with love

                                                            ~M M-S


I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) it. This makes it hard to plan the day.

                                                      ~ E. B. White


The secret of Happiness is insensitivity.

                                          ~ Tennessee Williams


If you're happy and you know it, you're oblivious.

                              ~ Mark Robert Maxwell-Smith


Some things have to be believed to be seen.

                                                   Ralph Hodgson


No Society can function democratically until women are considered equal on every basis, particularly to themselves. You will never attain such a thing other than through your own self-support.

                                            ~ Mayan prediction


Art disease is caused by a hardening of the categories.

                                             ~ Adina Reinhardt


I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson, to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into power which can move the world.

                                           ~ Mohandas Ghandi


If you ever find 
yourself, some where 
lost and surrounded 
by enemies 
who won't let you 
speak in your own language 
who destroy your statues 
and instruments, who ban 
your omm bomm ba boom 
then you are in trouble 
deep trouble
they ban your 
oom boom ba boom 
you in deep deep 
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred years 
to get 
out!

                                              ~ Amiri Baraka


I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear.

                                                       ~ Rosa Parks


A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

                                              ~ Margaret Atwood


"Remember only this one thing," said Badger.  "The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put theses stories in each other's memory. This is how people care for themselves."

                                                   ~ Barry Lopez


May we care for ourselves and for one another, and may we act to preserve this world. May our wonder stir gratitude of such magnitude that it fuels our current actions to preserve the planet's magic for future generations so they too may marvel at its intricate and inexplicable beauty.

Blank Scrabble Piece

May the coming year be a blank scrabble piece for each of us to write upon it our fondest dreams. 

May you grab with certainty and conviction that which makes your eyes light up and forget the rest of the dross.

May the beauty of Nature and her ferociousness inspire us to worship and care for her. 

May the light you carry within you illuminate the dark spots in your surround - inspiring others to do the same: Beam out our love light into the dark night.

May you have good healthy snacks available for watching the Rose Parade or football or whatever thou art inspired to do on New Year's Day. 

May you commune with Nature whenever possible.

May you walk much and drive less; eat fresh and just enough.

May you laugh often till your belly hurts.

May music inspire your heart to sing its own song.

With love and gratitude do I wish these things for thee and thy kin.

~Melinda

Diamond Anatomy

The Earth Diamond at the base of our pelvis

(Drawing by Frank Netter, MD, Atlas of Human Anatomy, plate 336)

(I added red dots for emphasis of diamond shape)

The Sky Diamond at the top of our head

(Photo of plastic replica of newborn skull from my collection of faux bones)

In Meditation

In Meditation one morning, I had an internal visualization about the anatomy of a seated human  that causes a diamond to form at the base of the pelvis and another diamond at the top of the head.

The diamond at the bottom is formed by a sit bone (ischial tuberositiy) on either side, the tailbone (coccyx) at the back and the pubis symphysis up front.

The fontanel of a newborn, likewise, is a diamond shape formed by two curved parietal bones on either side and the frontal bone, with a diamond shaped opening among the bones until they fill in during the first year of life. The bones grow together and form sagittal sutures — like interlocking puzzle pieces only more intricate.

While sitting, but before meditating, I orient by taking an awareness inventory. The routine goes something like this: Earth, sky, front, back, right side, left side, outside and inside. I can feel each part come alive, or not, as I bring conscious awareness to it. When it’s hard to get consciousness into any part of me, I simply note it. Oh, not yet fully awake. It helps to do a few simple yoga poses to wake the body up before sitting in quiet. Some days are easier than others to be conscious of my entire body.

This particular morning, I was keenly aware of the diamond shape as I oriented to Earth. My pelvic floor felt alive and the shape among all the bones was particularly clear in my visual cortex, perhaps because of increased sensation that comes of sitting on a wood block. When I moved my awareness to the top of my head for the sky orientation, a similar diamond shape presented itself to my awareness. 

Even though our adult skulls no longer open to sky, after one parietal bone presumably slid over the other to allow our big head to navigate through the birth passage so we could emerge, and the bones knit together during our first year of life, there is still the slightest imprint of what was there before the calcification process was complete. It feels like a diamond.

The significance may be of no import to anyone but me, but it delighted me to notice that correspondence of our central skeleton’s two diamonds top and bottom! It’s bound to be a rich life with diamonds fore and aft.

I then went on to recognize an imaginary diamond shining from the breast bone like that on the sculpture of a maiden carved to be mast-head of a ship, and the shape made by the trapezius muscles of the back. More correlations of paired diamonds. (It was a busy mind sort of meditation that morning!) Then, I dropped into a lovely weightless ease of being upright with no drag from the body. The diamonds lingered.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

When I was in sixth grade, Rhonda Dunstan and I would draw crosses and then draw lines between each of the points. The finished product was a diamond shape. Perhaps diamonds are a girls best friend — on the baseball field and in God’s Eyes - made of two sticks with yarn wrapped around them. (I swore I’d never own a real diamond because of the huge kerfuffle in my household when I was about nine-years-old. My Grammy Maxwell, a widow since before I was born, had recently remarried and somehow lost her new diamond ring down my mother’s sink. They never found it and there was as much grief and upset about that ring as there had been around my best friend Angelika’s mom dying that same year. And anyway, most gemstone diamonds that I’ve seen do not have that iconic cross-with-points-connected shape.

Kites we flew on kite staff had that same pleasing shape. My friend Katy and I built a kite at her house in Pacific Palisades. The handy part of having parents who don’t pay much attention to the play of their young ones is that we children got to explore deeply how to do things and how not to do things. Katy and I built this kite by using a hack-saw to cut off two strips of plywood from a hunk we found in her carport. We nailed the shorter piece to the longer piece so it made a cross shape and covered it over with newspaper held on with lots of Scotch tape and rubber cement. I remember the smell of the friction-burnt wood and the rubber cement. We tied torn-up rags on as a tail and found a ball of yarn for kite string. We laughed and laughed. That sucker must’ve weighed seven or eight pounds and we couldn’t hold it aloft long enough to catch a wind without muscle fatigue. We needed a gale force wind to catch it and carry it aloft. Woe to anyone who was in its path when the wind died.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 

Our mailbox at this time of year is filled with cards of all sorts — including funny ones, secular, religious, utilitarian, heart-felt, skinny and fat santas, reindeer, trees, dreidels, creches, and giant diamonds in the sky above the lowly manger in Bethlehem. There are my sixth grade stars! What fun to revisit them and to wonder if that’s how they came into our consciousness and how we came to replicate them compulsively on our paper-bag book-covers, notebooks and nearly every paper we turned in as homework. Rhonda and I seldom had to do the cursive homework. Our handwriting was that good!

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Over the weekend, my husband and I watched a four-star (four diamond?!) movie called Okja. It is wonderful, but not getting the press it deserves. I highly recommend it for story, acting, directing, special effects and timeliness. Mostly, it is a heart-warming and inspiring tale. Not for children, but about a female child with gumption and a very intelligent creature. 

May you enjoy WHY-A-CAT-TOY*

*Whatever Holiday You All Celebrate At This Time Of Year!

Good Grief

Sunday was Children's Remembrance Day for parents whose children died too young. At George Mark Children's House in San Leandro, many families gathered in the afternoon and early evening to decoupage memory jars with stickers, sayings, butterflies, and glitter, and they placed votive lights inside. Jarring memories of their beloved (pun intended) to take home.

From the kitchen came food, hot cider, warm hugs and lots of Kleenex.

In the Sanctuary two ceremonies were held, an early seating and a later one. Each family placed a single rose in a vase after speaking the name of their child aloud. What comfort in community! What beauty created out of tragic loss to see all those colorful roses together; to hear the sighs and cries and accept the make-up of the day for all assembled was streaming tears.

The Threshold Singers provided soft cushioning for our ears as all the names of children lost from the past thirteen years were read again. Four-hundred and twelve names read aloud from 2004 to 2017, from one facility in one community. 

It fell to me to translate the ceremony so that Spanish speaking families could partake. After the formal gathering, I spent the rest of the evening listening; primarily listening, sometimes mirroring the recuerdos (memories) of madres, padres y abuelitos. (Mothers and fathers and grandparents.)

I'm reminded that while terrible things happen in isolation; healing happens in community. 

To watch my beloved blowing bubbles and being his goofy, kid-magnet self with teeny baby beings to teens, was a great joy. I see him setting down and watering rootlets in our new chosen community. Ultimately, our ties to camps in Southern California will give way to these new venues for volunteerism closer to home. Kids are kids. Families all over are in need of the clown who can meet them where they are in their journey. Tears and laughter, so close together. 

Children with whom we've interacted over the years will never be forgotten, the long list will be added too with names of these new friends, families and fine folk who volunteer or professionally staff so many different venues ~ from hospitals to camps to hospice / respite care facilities.

Grief is a terrible thing to bear in solitude. Truly, it is borne as a lighter burden when carried in company and community.

From the ceremony:

We Remember Them

At the rising of the sun and at its going down,

We remember them

At the blowing of the wind and at the chill of winter, 

We remember them

At the opening buds and at the rebirth of spring,

We remember them

At the blueness of the sky and the warmth of summer, 

We remember them

At the rustling of the leaves and at the beauty of autumn,

We remember them

At the beginning of the year and when it ends,

We remember them

When we are weary and in need of strength,

We remember them

When we are lost and sick at heart,

We remember them

When we have joys we yearn to share,

We remember them

So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us,

We remember them

Adapted from "The Gates of Prayer" 

by Rabbi Jack Reimer

Wakes and Waves

Harvey Weinstein’s Wake I’d like to attend,

If all the “Me Too’s” are accurate in the end

Lengthening list of perpetrators grows

For all those who lie, so too grows their nose

The sky is falling ‘cause half who hold it aloft

Are beaten down for being too soft

Have been down so long it looks “up” to us

Struck mute till Harvey’s antics allowed a good fuss 

Open the window, to let out the stink

How low did you think some people could sink?

Open the window to let the truth in

Step up and welcome the brave and good men

“Women and children first” sounds noble and nice

Words to live by after throwing the rice.

Yet, in practice they seem first for sacrifice

"Rule of thumb”measured the beating twig’s size

In the animal kingdom must males display,

Beating their chests and killing their prey

Showing their tool to all so they’ll see

The lord of the tribe has the biggest wee wee?

Open the window, to let out the stink

How low did you think some people could sink?

Open the window to let the truth in

Step up and welcome the brave and good men

Learning to use our top brain over lower

Cherishing children and women? True Power!

Society’s strong as its own weakest link

My fear is too many are full of the stink

Can women ride the wave toward safe shore

Ride the crest do our best and a little bit more

Watch for dark currents that could pull us under

Will we seize our equality this time? I wonder

Open the window, let the stars wink

Knowing and nodding they bid us to think

Open the window in truth let us soak

Step up and welcome the brave and good folk

A Perspective

The most arduous journey any of us takes is about two or three inches long. Under the best of circumstances, being born can be overwhelming. The immature nervous system is bombarded by sensations, sounds, and temperature changes that are mind boggling because so much happens in so short a time frame while we’re being kicked out of the only environment we’ve yet known as physical beings. Does this scenario perhaps underlie the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from paradise?

Those of us with more harrowing entrances into the world than “best of circumstances,” may still be carrying around the unexplored burden of our birth story in every cell of our body. First imprints pack a wallop. 

Do you ever get stuck in your life? Do you know anyone whose default setting is anger, withdrawal into depression, or perhaps frozen like a deer in headlights? Chances are, he or she, you and I are suffering from a bit of birth trauma reenactment. All of us are, to some extent, as we try to heal the initial wounds. 

Simply put, it is difficult to arrive in the world without overwhelm to our tender being, and that’s the basic definition of trauma - being caught in circumstances that overwhelm us and from which we don’t get a chance to discharge the survival energies of Fight, Flight and Freeze that get triggered by a perceived threat to our life. 

Threats during the birth process can be as routine as the big squeeze as one skull bone slides over another so we may pass through the outlet. There may be sudden pressure or stillness, harsh noises in the delivery room, forceps or suction bonnet, or chilly dry air and breathing with our brand-new set of lungs once the umbilicus is cut. It’s all so new. It’s all so foreign. Perhaps that scenario is why so many science fiction stories feature being lost in a new world.

We’re all trying to find our way back to the garden.

We’re all trying to shed the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness born of that two inch trip.

During nearly thirty-five years of seeing clients as a body therapist, it has been my privilege to help some of them to resolve birth trauma, and to witness the ordinary miracle of healing from those earliest impacts. We are a resilient species. Each human has been given three graces to help us survive: Fight, Flight and Freeze. We’re hard-wired to survive. We’re also hard-wired to heal. 

With a trained practitioner, we can slow down the stimuli that overwhelmed us on the day of our birth and the days following it by gently revisiting what the body is doing now, in the moment, and naming the sensations that accompany the memory of each stimulus. Slowing things down and tracking sensations allows us to discharge the bound survival energies through sweating, gentle shaking, tearing-up or yawning. Thus we free ourselves from the reenactment cycle born of trying to heal from the too muchness of coming into the world.

When I was teaching nursery school in Topanga in the late 1970s, “P” was one of our most challenging and interesting students. At four, P was bright, creative and physically very active. His first order of business every morning upon arrival to the classroom was to dump all the small manipulative toys - Legos, Tinker Toys, and Bristle Blocks out of their respective baskets onto the floor and to ice-skate through them methodically to mix them up thoroughly. He seemed to be showing us how chaotic things were for him. The other peculiar habit P had was to find a place to get his head stuck. Sometimes, he would move a chair close to the wall and insert his head into the gap. Other times, he would force it into one of the plastic juice pitchers. Once we had to call the fire department when he discovered “just the right size” hole in the ledge above the back seat of a car that had been made “safe” for kids to use as a climbing/imaginative play structure. P climbed into the trunk which had no door, stripped off the fabric covering over that ledge under the windshield, and put his head up into one of the holes in the metal. There, he stuck. No amount of coaxing, coaching, supporting him to retrace his steps or attempts to physically remove him worked. He was calm; untroubled by all the adults who really wanted him to get free. He seemed content to stay with his head stuck in the hole. When the gentle firefighters arrived and worked their magic to get him out, they just smiled and assured us it happens a lot with kids. 

When P’s mum came to pick him up that day, we asked if anything unusual happened during P’s birth. “Ah, no,” said his mum, “apart from him getting stuck in the birth canal for eighteen hours. I just kept talking to him, until they put me under anesthesia and pulled him out by Caesarian Section. He does like to put his head into boxes and the like, doesn’t he?”

I think my eyes bugged out of my head in disbelief as I wondered why she had not thought to disclose this pertinent information to us.

Another little guy J was just under three years and a non-talker. We did know the story of his premature birth and how long he’d spent in an incubator. Can you remember a time when you didn’t want to get out of bed but were forced out - either by an insistent alarm clock or a parent worried about you being late to school? Can you imagine a little one inside mom enjoying full-on womb-service, and who isn’t ready to come out yet, but due to circumstances beyond his control is booted out before he’s fully “cooked?” Can you imagine living in a clear plastic box for two months where much of the touch you receive is painful or intrusive - like a poke for a blood test or a suction to your nose or a tube stuck down your throat for food?

One of J’s favorite games was peek-a-boo. I was watching him one day as he watched activities in the room while hidden behind the back of an upholstered wing-back chair. He had turned it around so that he could stand on the seat and all we could see of him was the top of his head peeping over the top of the chair back. Soon he stood on his tippy-toes and sought eye contact with me as I sat a few feet away. We played peek-a-boo for several minutes until he began to giggle, then guffaw and finally he came around the side of the chair and flung himself into my lap. He was beaming. It was as if a light had come on or a flower had bloomed. The difference in this self-initiated game of peek-a-boo was that he was the one peeping out, at his own pace, not an adult creating the timing. Within a few days, J began to speak. Like sunshine after a storm.

These are but two examples of kids re-negotiating their birth scenarios in an attempt to discharge bound survival energies. In the first story, P took much longer to heal the urge to get his head stuck so he could heal once and for all. It might have been faster had we known what he was trying to tell us and we'd been able to name and acknowledge his story. In the case of J, the discharge and moving through the feelings of discomfort was much quicker. 

Both these little ones were helped by our intuitive interventions even though it would be fifteen years before I began to study birth trauma resolution techniques with Dr. Ray Castellino of Santa Barbara.

There is hope for all, from newborns to nonagenarians, who wish to resolve early trauma and stop the cycle of feeling stuck with undischarged survival energies ruling our behavior. 

May all beings be happy. May all babies and their parents be surrounded by caring people. 

Pee in your pants kind of laughter when you can’t catch your breath, and your belly muscles hurt and tears are streaming is too rare an event for adults.

Robert Provine, a scientist who has stalked wild laughing for years reports in the Magazine “Mental Floss,” that children laugh upwards of three hundred times a day, whereas adults laugh between seventeen and twenty times a day. How utterly sad!

The advantages of laughter include the release of soothing endorphins, the reduction of stress hormones, improved muscle tone and the lowering of blood pressure. In his book Anatomy of an Illness, Norman Cousins reports he cured himself of a debilitatingly painful disease called ankylosing spondylitis by watching Marx Brothers’ films and episodes of Candid Camera.

Lucky me to have fallen in love with a man whose greatest gifts are his sense of humor and his sense of human. Every day we laugh. Even in the midst of loss or tragedy or political upheaval, there is dark humor.

At my mother-in law’s funeral service in New York in 1989, the Rent-a-Rabbi, who had never met her spoke of the many relatives who were unable to attend her service that cold February afternoon. At the end of the list, he said, “… and of course, there’s Cousin Ralph.” Well, there was no Cousin Ralph in the family. Later, we thought that maybe he meant Cousin Jack and perhaps got the schwa sound confused in his mind and said, “Ralph.”

During his pre-service interview with my husband, his brother and sister, the rabbi heard some pretty outlandish claims about the deceased. Among them, that Friedabel, their mom, was a brilliant jazz-harmonica  player (not true). Then, my husband piped up suggesting that it wasn’t too late to follow through with Mom's request (not true either) to have her freeze-dried and sent in mailable sections - like weekly installments - to her estranged husband. We laughed till the tears came.

When, during the service the Rabbi said, “…Cousin Ralph,” perhaps he was joining in the fun or maybe seeking comic revenge. My personal belief is that he was clueless and in over his head. Whatever his motive, when we, the family heard  “Cousin Ralph,” a slow-building rolling giggle began in the first two rows of the pews where the family sat. By the time my husband stood up to share the eulogy, he was hoping the rest of the congregants would think that the shoulder shaking they saw in the family pews before them was from sobbing, not laughing. As he eased into the aisle and made his way up to the dais, he gave us the most convincing imitation of a stern seventh-grade English teacher’s glare he could muster while trying to wrestle his own smile into submission.

What follow was his, as usual, honest and heartfelt recollections of his mom, Friedabel Smith, and her life on a roller-coaster. For all gathered, there were laughs and tears.

Cousin Ralph followed us into the reception and has given us streaming eyes, sore belly laughter ever since. As I age, and gravity continues its persistent tug on me, maybe I’ll even pee my pants again next time someone mentions Cousin Ralph. 

Procurement (Warning: This May Be a Difficult Read for Some)

“Procurement.” 

The word hangs over the table between us. I gasp. The sharp inhale causes the word to slide down my core. It stings. I hold my breath. 

There’s a feeling of visceral realigning as my gut makes sense of a final puzzle piece plopping into place. The picture pops - clear of the fog that’s been there for over fifty years.

The back of my head clenches. My brain feels the squeeze as if I’ve just registered the ingestion of way too much caffeine, but my belly unclenches. So weird. So physical - this process of the body making sense of new information. 

“‘Pro-cur-ed,”  I roll the word around my mouth, “That is what my high school buddy and I were, in 1967! Procured for six members of the UCLA basketball team. That’s what happened to us!” I exhale. "And, Oh, my God, Kelly, my boyfriend's friend got paid for our gang-rape!" 

“Wow. Sorry that happened,” she says, “Yeah. It’s a regular practice. Learned about it when I was in the WNBA.”

How could an event fifty years ago come to table with us here in Oakland? What miracle was wrought for this new friend, who understands what happened to me as a teenager in Los Angeles, to be here now? She knows all about arrangements made for young women to be bought from a procurer and brought to male members of sports teams for pre-sport sport - mice for cool cats to play with. It’s a regular practice. 

Shame morphs. Rage rises. Red hot. I burn and yearn to fight them off, NOW, those five bastards who pinned me down on the wall-to-wall mattresses in some apartment living room in Westwood Village where they killed off a part of me. 

Fifty years ago, I was inert. Frozen. Prepped with hash and pimp sticks and copious amounts of vodka. My friend fared much better taking only one of them to another room. For neither of us was escape an option. Kelly had driven us to the "party" and he wasn't there now. But she had no previous history of early childhood sexual abuse. She fought back as best she could. Fifty years ago, I was not aware of my own history of boundary violations at the hands of our father who ain’t in heaven, Howard was his name. In his drunkenness, he used me, my older brother, who began drinking at age nine, and my older male cousin as well - the one who’s schizophrenic in back woods Oregon. 

Dad had perverse appetites. What can have happened to him to allow him to think that using children for his sexual gratification was a good idea? He spent time in jail for molesting my step sister. I didn’t know this when it happened. I didn’t know why he was jailed when I was ten. I only learned years later that it wasn’t for “disturbing the peace and resisting arrest,” which is the only part of the story that our adults told us kids. He was arrested for molest. Step-sister Heidi’s mom called the cops on him. Sentenced to a year in jail, he got out after six months for "good behavior." My Auntie Nora knew the story. She told me when I was forty-five, three years after my memories began to surface.

It’s taken me a long time, a lot of energy and a lot of money for therapy, bodywork and survivor support groups, twelve-step programs, self-defense courses and lots of hair-pulling from thinking I was crazy, in order to heal - or make sense of - my adolescent acting out, drinking, drug use, promiscuity and feeling like I was made of black Jello at my core. Throughout my school years, I feared people getting too close to me and finding out about the slime that lived within me. Yet, I had no conscious memory of what happened to me from a time before I had teeth to when my father left - just before I turned ten. My memories didn't surface until I was forty-two.

How lucky I am to have had wonderful support from my husband and daughters, therapists and healers. Lucky and thankful.

There is a statistical link between early boundary breaches and subsequent rape, molest and harassment. It’s as if we’re trying to assemble the raw materials to recreate that initial wound and heal it at last. We keep trying, thinking this time we’ll get to the core and heal what needs to be healed. Usually, we only end up being hurt again. I'm here to testify: Once healed, we won't stand for being victims again.

Here’s the thing about very early trauma: It feels like a life sentence. Before age two or so, we haven’t developed the mastoid processes of the temporal skull bones behind our ears. We have no sense of temporality; of time being bound to moments. To infants, it feels as if what’s happening in this moment will happen forever. This causes huge overwhelm for the immature nervous system. Catecholamines and other stress hormones flood our bodies, creating extreme fight/flight/freeze responses.  When unresolved, the accumulation of stress hormones leads to hyper-vigilance, nervousness, premature aging and inability to focus. Often times we only have one of the Three Graces, with which we are all born - Fight, Flight, or Freeze, as our default setting. How many people do you know who are always itchin’ for a fight? Or always on the move? (stuck in flight) Those of us who cannot respond to situations,  go numb or become totally withdrawn or depressed are stuck with Freeze as our default setting. 

Fortunately, we’re hard wired to survive. We’re also hard-wired to heal.

My hope is that this moment in history when the Post-Weinstien flood of women (and men) disclosing what has happened to them at the hands of perpetrators, will be a teaching moment for young women (and young men) everywhere to TRUST THEIR GUT. If something doesn’t feel right about any situation in which they find themselves, they have a right and duty to avail themselves of all three in-born defensive responses: Fight, Flight AND Freeze (if necessary). Freedom to use the best option is key. If you’ve a history of trauma, whether male or female, please, see a practitioner who specializes in helping folks heal and reclaim their resilience.

You’re worth it. Healing what happened to us is the only game in town worth playing. The time of passing down inter-generational trauma must end. 

Bringing to light what has been in the shadow of our human psyche for millennia may help all of us to heal enough so that we may be able to turn to the healing of our home: Planet Earth!