Bad news and greens...out of my head and into the garden.

I had some bad feelings to process and was becoming more and more 'curled up' inside. My gorgeous and very spiritually in touch lodger and friend Kate suggested I might find some answers in nature. So I wrapped myself up in a blanket and I went and sat. I listened to the birdsong; beautiful blackbirds, the beginnnings of the spring face-off jazz impro sessions. Across the sky the friendliest red robins like nightingales and in the rosehip tree just behind me the nosey and noisy bluetits fill the air with their gossiping. I closed my eyes for a short time and when I opened them there were eight wood pigeons perched opposite me in the tall Oak. How did this happen? Last year I noticed there were just the two, loyal lovers returning every year, well they've beeen busy!

Look!! These luscious leaves are from my garden. I'm going to make a nettle soup, some dandelion coffee and then juice the rest. What a profitable stroll I've just had!

Thank you Kate, that really helped. It's stretched me out a bit. I was all crumpled. Now I begin to remember how much I love the outdoors and I have land; how lucky am I and there's stuff growing on it that I can eat, and the world is much bigger than the inside of my head, and my body has good things to tell me if I listen to it. How the mind can keep us in...

Back to Bentonite and down with nostalgia!

Remember this?

Trying not to remember this..

But today the reality is this...

It's working it's way up, not down which is frightening because I've been 'saving face' for some time now, don't ask me how, the body is a wonderful thing. My face has been as smooth as a babie's bottom, I want and need it to be, but if I'm honest the rest of my body has wanted the steroid cream and this was already not a good sign at all..

Since I came out of hospital in November I've been using steroid cream diluted with shea butter and coconut oil. I wasn't particularly happy about this because it is very toxic and really puts my liver under a lot of strain when it is already working overtime. The body cannot process petro chemicals, funnily it doesn't like them at all. I wonder why?

Anyway at that time my skin was so relentlessly itchy that I was feeling very depressed and agitated all the time. The steroid cream gave me some respite and this is all. What's happened now, inevitably, is that I have gradually become desensitised to the cream. Meaning that the next decision for me would be to either use more of it or go through the withdrawal and out the other side back to independently healthy skin and a resting and grateful liver.This may mean more quasimodo moments I don't know. Today what I do know is that I'm feeling scared and a bit demoralised because I'm very itchy and uncomfortable again. I feel scattered, my lymph system and my circulation feel sluggish, my hands and feet have been going blue again, I can't concentrate on the silliest things and I'm unreasonably tired and a bit yellow.

It's going to sound crazy but simultaneously I am taking huge emotional leaps forwards and I feel so much more able to understand the origins of my dis-ease. Sometimes, a lot actually, the process of healing the body is a beautiful series of swirly circular movements. I have learned that in the qi-gong tradition most of the body movements that are designed to harvest and balance life energy contain some form of figure of eight. This felt so completely right to me, and within these movements we inevitably re-visit aspects of the journeys in space that we take. It's necessary. More on this and on 'saving my face' when I'm feeling less fragmented..

Today's song, cheesy I know but it's how I feel today..I remember dancing to this when I was 13..Oh those dear dead days beyond recall...

https://youtu.be/ZBR2G-iI3-I

3 fold breathing..should I let sleeping dog's lie? I think so don't you?

Lola and I have just meditated together! As you can see it's had a wonderful affect on us both..

The environment was perfect for it. It's a blowy day here in a courner of Kerry with the sound of the trees swaying in the wind like oceon waves, the breath of life; and our breathing, a lullaby engulfing this room from all sides..I feel 'held' in the arms of life. What a hippy I've become. And proud!

I've just finished a weekend of Qui-gong. I've learned how to breath in and out and to move my body in a way that just feels so right for me. So I will be continuing with this learning as I KEEP GOING with all my other stuff.
The women who shared the Qui-gong weekend with me were so good. Nine good women. A good number anyway in Qui-gong terms. Everything in multiples of three. Each woman ordinary and so special in her own right. Each woman with her own unique story to tell. The giving and receiving felt like a microcosm of what life is all about. One of these women Lisa gave me an insight that I feel has helped me in ways that I am still digesting. She offerred that maybe everything I'm doing and have done for my health is working and that I simply need to trust my body to continue doing what it's doing. It doesn't sound like much does it? However it's made me realise how mean I've been being to myself. I think I've literallly been doing what my mother used to do. Standing over myself tapping my fingers, sighing, looking at my watch and saying 'pah, is that all? come on, come on, I'm in a hurry, I haven't got time for this!" You know this kind of thing. It's abuse isn't it. Lisa you've helped me to remember to celebrate my successes and to allow myself time to heal. After all one year and two months is only 2.2 percent of my life so far!

So today I practiced a meditation from Reggie Ray's teachings recommended by a good friend. Again learning to breath; learning to live. I love it! I recommend these teachings highly. They are very simple, so that you can really get in touch with and feel the complexity of your body without the mental chit chat. I am discovering through my body what I hold onto. As I become more aware of the tensions in various parts of my body I become aware simultaneously of what I can let go of. It's not an intellectual process at all and the sense of physical and so mental freedom that arises in the process is awesome! There's everything you need to start you off for free on this very generous website.

http://www.dharmaocean.org/meditation/learn-to-meditate/learn-to-meditate-awakening-the-heart/

So current themes in my mind. My mother was emotionally absent. I was a premature baby. I was born six weeks early.I
was in an incubator for about four weeks. I remember there were no edges. I remember this because I have done the work to understand my triggers and to really appreciate the importance of being and feeling held. I'm still at it. Also I trained hard to work with children with attachment struggles. Now I understand from the inside out. It's what I'm meant to do and the seemingly dissonant pieces begin to fit together eventually. It's the telling of the story as it comes together, slowly and gently. I'm attempting to chart this process...

So this one is for the beautiful Courtney. Please sing it if you know it, or listen, http://youtu.be/luxHpy7IKRM

I listen for your footsteps
Comin' up the drive
Listen for your footsteps
But they don't arrive
Waitin' for your knock dear
On my old front door
I don't hear it
Does it mean you don't love me any more

I hear the clock a'tickin
On the mantel shelf
See the hands a'movin
But I'm by myself
I wonder where you are tonight
And why I'm by myself
I don't see you
Does it mean you don't love me any more

Don't pass me by don't make me cry
Don't make me blue
'Cause you know darlin' I love only you
You'll never know it hurts me so
How I hate to see you go
Don't pass me by, don't make me cry
Don't make me blue

I'm sorry that I doubted you
You were so unfair
You were in a car crash
And you lost your hair
You said that you would be late
About an hour or two
Well that's alright I'm waiting here
Just waiting to hear from you

Don't pass me by don't make me cry
Don't make me blue
'Cause you know darlin' I love only you
You'll never know it hurts me so
How I hate to see you go
Don't pass me by, don't make me cry
Don't make me blue

Don't pass me by don't make me cry
Don't make me blue
'Cause you know darlin' I love only you
You'll never know it hurt me so
I hate to see you go
Don't pass me by, don't make me cry
Don't make me blue



Read more: Ringo Starr - Don't Pass Me By Lyrics | MetroLyrics

After a nasty stomach bug here is last week's unfinished entry: Feelings, learning to be comfortable with the paradoxes..and how did I get here?.

Tracing the roots of my dis-ease

This was how I felt in the morning. A little bit tired but quite chipper, quite fresh..within two hours of this I was chucking my guts down the loo from a semi-horizontal position. and then within another two stuffing my face with biscuits. Bizarre! This got me thinking about paradoxes. The sadness and the joy, the pain and the pleasure, the hate and the love, the fear and the safeness..all present for me at once sometimes. Lots of laughing lots of weeping.

My theme at the moment is this motherlessness I mentioned before and all the different ways of being absent mother's can be. I know, I have been and my mother was absent for me. Being ill was a major inconvenience in our house. My mother would be insensed if we were. It was a change to the routine that she clung to. A disruption of the highest order. She woud make you wish you were never born and in the same moment she would know 'exactly' what to do in a 'crisis'. She would be there with clean sheets and towels, hankies, soup, semolina pudding, steamed white fish and even a hot water bottle. But she wasn't present, not there with us. Somehow she was nowhere to be found. She was off somewhere in her tormented mind, running away from it all, running running as fast as she could from the trauma of it all. So the giving and receiving of love; it was a paradoxical experience in our household.

No pictures no music..just these motherless moments..

How strange and wonderful life is! Having vomited my guts up today and yesterday without really knowing why, I realised that I have experienced moments of "enlightenment" this and last week..I remember to breathe again and I begin to digest these moments in my life that are true milestones if I allow them to be. A beautiful friend tells me of how she recently watched a treasured cyni film of herself. Captured childhood moments stored and re-ignited for her. She is deaply moved. I am deaply affected by her telling of it, what she saw, what she feels, again and now. How in the film she observes that no-one seems to notice or appreciate her as she plays. How alone she feels and how luckily at the last minute she is scooped up and held lovingly by a favourite aunt... My unreasonable sense of abandonment and betrayal when I realised that I had allowed myself to be deceived by certain people who travelled through my life briefly. The builder, the plumber, the doctor, even a friend.... The watching again of a favourite film of mine 'The Hours' a scene where Julianne Moore whispers words, that seem almost incomprehensible, about why and how it was that she came to abandon her children...The teenage women suddenly large in my life. Both in a sense motherless daughters... such rich material for me to digest..I now remember a few weeks back a good friend of mine asking me "do you keep a diary Caroline?". We had been talking of my thoughts and feelings and various healings.

I've had this seminal experience today having listened for the first time to a random talk by Chogyam Trungpah Rinpoch, a universally cherished Tantric teacher. Nothing obviously special in what he is saying however because I found him in that particular moment, everything overwhelmingly has come, or came into focus and I'm trying to stay with all the fragments that came whoooshing together all at once. I began asking myself 'why'? 'why am I here?.."why am I doing this?"

I've been uneasy with this blog for some time if I'm honest. Not comfortable with the venue really and the seeming superficiality of it. My entries are not inauthentic at all, I'm not saying this, but the details are stillhidden as far as I am concerned. And when I think of this I feel really tired and I don't feel like taking part in it at all. So today, now, I am in touch with strong feelings around not wanting to 'hide' anymore. I want this writing to be about me. Who I really am and I don't want to have to worry about what people take from my story anymore. I do this intensive editing of what I say, to myself and it leaves me feeling trapped in a kind of half-light. I just sit in a metaphorical upright chair in a hallway of discomfort and I feel angry and self-loathing and stuck. I don't want to worry about worrying people because ostensibly I am okay. So I'm not going to do that anymore.

The reasons for doing this remain the same. It's about life and living and at the same time I can't live like this anymore. So this entry is a kind of declaration. A solemn promise to myself to tell the real story of me. Again, it may not be linear and sometimes it will seem to be just a page of strange and inert ramblings...but I promise that I will be as authentic as is bearable for me to be on the day and I hope that together we can weave a new story....the right one for me.

No picture today. No music. It doesn't feel necessary and I hope you will, whoever you are like and share this and I will take the meaning of this 30 second long action of yours to be encouragement and support. I'm going to need it!

Swallow pride, breath in and APPEAL! Juicing still juicing..

http://www.prolificjuicing.com/green-juice-benefits/

Yes a great week what with the boiler breaking down again, the discovery of damp in nearly every corner of my flat and then the realisation that the plumber and the decorator had kind of ripped me off, not to mention the shenanigens with the Ayurvedic doctor.

Yes but I'm still juicing for England. In fact if I don't I quickly feel the difference. The health benefits are numerous, which is why I've included the link to some tips about green juicing for those who may be interested. I'm now doing just four a day down from six because I was finding doing six too expensive and exhausting. This time of year the vegetables are giving out about half the juice they normally do and it's costing an arm and a leg, literally. The skin irritation is creeping back up my legs and arms but frustratingly I've had to cut down on the organic vegetables. The last two weeks I've had to order double the ammount to get only not much more than half the juice I normally get. So THIS WEEK if anyone fancies donating a couple of kilo of green apples, carrots, green leafy veg, cucumber, celery anything along these lines I'd be made up, because to be honest I don't know how I'm going to do it after last week's bill.

Very recently I have taken on a new client for arts based counselling, a referral from Social Services and a major step for me. So I am exploring my capacity for work at the moment and the money will go towards paying off one of my many debts. SoundHeart Music School in Forest Hill have very generously lent me a room in support of this and we are already scratching each other's backs by arranging for the same child to have some music lessons while they are there. Good eh! I'm going to try to get some publicity together for their face book page at their request, but I must admit it feels a bit early for me because I don't know how much energy I've got and you can't take on clients and then realise it's too much for you. It just doesn't work that way in this game. I'm dipping my toe in the hot hot water and spending the rest of my time looking out for myself so I can carry on thinking about working.
It was a lovely sunny day for a while today wasn't it..

Hello, Yes!

Exploring ways to hold and contain but mainly survive itching and pain. In my current meditation how amazing to discover that each moment is jam packed with 'material'. In the context of itching for instance, I have learned that just as with pain when your body may twist and tense in response to it, simultaneously contained in the physical sensation there is a mental clinging to a past and a future. I'm aware that with pain (and itching) my body becomes immersed in 'a fearful anticipation of the future' for example that this itch will get worse and worse and will never ever end leading to my head swelling up again and my illness going back to what it was and looking like a monster and feeling like I'm half dead just like before and and and ................But. If I remember to breath into it, even welcome it?, say "Hello" or "Yes?" to it, my body feels this and the same itch begins to dissolve. It really just goes away puff!.It's as if a small child is pulling and tugging at me and the more I try to push her away or ignore her the more persistent and distressed she becomes. If I reach down and say kindly 'yes what is it you need from me?' and I try to feel what it is I'm feeling in the same instance, she becomes calm again. I'm beginning to see a correlation between certain thoughts and feelings about memories and people or things or situations and the intensity of the itching, just like I have with certain foods and substances.It's grounding and soothing and I'm beginning to experience the day to day differently. I experience moments in a more Caroline friendly way, when I remember... and I don't beat myself up too much when I forget. I just carry carry on.

It's been an important week with my emotions. I had a bit of a blip and I really had a bit of a wobble. A situation arose where it became very clear that somebody whom I chose put alot of trust in turned out to be not who or what I expected them to be. This was someone supposed to be guiding me with my healing. I really wanted to relax and have someone look after me for a change. The situation delivered me back nicely to a place in my heart filled with unresolved feelings from the past that needed airplay and space before parking them for good. Useful but very painful too. Better out than in (and dragged around with me where ever I go eh!).

For one reason or another I now have two absolutely amazing teenage/young women firmly in my life and I think they've inspired me because I find myself re-visiting my own teenage years. So I've found myself listening to some choice numbers from the eighties when I ditched the bondage and safety pins, grabbed a chain bag and played with being a soul-girl for a bit. So for today's song here's a performance that's just complete madness to watch. I secretly wanted to be a backing singer and I especially liked this whole production. Costumes to die for! Enjoy.... and dance if you like this sort of thing, I'm going to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=god7hAPv8f0