95. Stop. Breathe. Grieve

BLOG 95—(present reflections tied to May 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—I received a text, followed by the local news last Thursday evening: our New Mexico schools would close for three weeks.

As a teacher, I was relieved. After all, the schools, especially at this time of the year, had already become a cesspool of germs, and with the Corona Virus it was just one too many unknowns to deal with. But when I read the news of schools closing, I was hit with a much bigger emotion: GRIEF. I felt like I had tapped into a collective unconscious energy, and my own part in it.

The grief I felt was like a soft wind or water that filled in every crevice of my being that remained with me briefly. Then, like everyone else, I joined in the frenetic activities of hoarding food, medicine, and whatever else we needed to disappear into our shelters that would protect us from this germ war. And I called friends, checked the news, and kept abreast of the latest updates.

But the grief remained, and when I slowed down, I could feel it again. I felt the grief of the world, for those sick and dying, for those without the resources and friends to help them through this, for the emptiness we would feel, and for all of our lives forever altered. I sensed a kind of death, an end–for now–to all the running and running of this world. And inside this space, I  felt we would need to look at ourselves, and reflect on what this crazy modern-living paradigm has been all about.

Beyond this, I felt a deep grief for having lived a kind of isolation myself–like we are now–during the years when I was injured at the turn of the millennium. And the fear that came from not being able to walk—the fear of never being able to get up again. Of being so alone with my pain in a culture where people had forgotten what it was like to show up for one another. Back then, I was struck with a quote that Mother Teresa had given: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” I understood that sentiment so strongly. There wasn’t time for most people to check in, to see how I was, to have compassion for someone in a vulnerable place. And so, back then, 20 years ago, I stepped into my own cocoon, into my own aloneness, and reached out to God for answers that would help me walk again.

In 2001, I had written in my journal about how scared I had been to go to sleep after I received Reiki energy treatments from my shamanic teacher. Because, afterwards, I would have nightmares. The subconscious part of my body would rise up to the surface and tell its story woven into my cells from this lifetime and others. I would wake up, surprised to be alive, after nightmares that included frightening episodes of being unsafe and under attack.

The fear I held back then, which I imagine many feel now, is that the world would never be the same again. And it won’t. But, I discovered then, as I feel now, that the GRIEF, that energy below the fear, which I carried, was of having been on the treadmill of life far too long, and feeling an immense loss of soul and self from all of the going, going, going. And in this process of slowing down—whether then or now—there’s this immense grief of being with ourselves, of truly being with ourselves—with the pain, the nightmares, the stories our soul and body long to tell us, to guide us through, so we can come home again.

This grief of what we have left behind has been carried down from our ancestors. It’s a grief for the loneliness and aloneness, for the lack of human compassion and community, for having lost our way without a sense of place or true origin. It’s a GRIEF that longs to bring us home, inside the quiet, away from the noise that has distracted us too long and caused us to do such harm to ourselves and the planet. That’s the Grief that needs to cry itself back onto this precious earth, to fill her with our tears and love, so we can be home, in balance with her and this beautiful life we’ve been given. And this is the time.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu, that’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page or at www.michelleadam.net. It will soon be published by the Spanish publisher Corona Borealis and the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma. It can be ordered at a local bookstore or directly from me (for those outside of the U.S.) as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video

88. My Soul is Tender after Spain

BLOG 88—(present reflections tied to February 2001 journal entries about my healing journey and my return from presenting my novel in Spain)—I returned almost a month ago from Spain, from a book tour with my novel in Spanish, Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espíritu, presented in four cities (Madrid, Murcia, Málaga, and Granada) and six venues. My journey to Spain was a homecoming, a return to the land that had shown me my soul. And this time I came with my novel, written while in the U.S., a kind of exile from that home.

My soul is tender now, not just because my gift as a writer and healer and as the person I am were beautifully received, but because, upon returning home to New Mexico, I now feel a truth I wrestled with almost 20 years ago, when healing from hip pain in New England.

Back then, while in pain and learning to listen to my soul’s voice, I wrote about feeling angry at being asked to “unmask” myself. I had worked with shamans from Ecuador, translating for them in events, and one had told me, ever so subtly, that maybe my whole journey of healing was about become soft again, about softening, which for me was a kind of “unmasking”.

Me as a little girl in Spain (front, left)

Twenty years ago, that meant becoming that little, vulnerable girl I had once been. “How dare you ask me to soften when I’ve worked so hard to gain the power, strength, and courage I have had to survive,” I wrote in my journal in 2001. “I feel the younger person I was didn’t have any power or value, and that all the power and value I had, I had to build from the ashes of my father’s blaze.”

It’s especially interesting reading those words of long ago, when today, a month since returning from Spain, I awoke from a dream that resonated with what I had written. I dreamed I was in high school again, and I had just come from Spain to the U.S. and felt extremely alone inside those school walls. In my dream, I felt what it had been like back then, entering into an environment that had been so harsh and foreign to me. And I woke up feeling the angst and trauma of it all, while also getting how I had coped back then by shutting down, becoming depressed, numb, and disconnected because it wasn’t safe to feel the pain of being a stranger among all these students I was meant to connect with, yet couldn’t. I got how a part of me had, as they say in the shamanic world, lost a part of my soul when I came to the U.S. and needed to survive.

As I lay in bed this morning, feeling all of this, I got so clearly that this is so much what happens to all of us. Every one of us experiences different traumas that we need to survive, and in order to do so, a part of us leaves, shuts down, disappears. We keep on going, appear normal to the outside world, but later, somewhere down the road, we pay the price, because a part of us is locked down, gone, and without this part, we are not whole. And then we hit some big wall in life—as I did with my injury and not being able to walk—and then the journey backwards, toward those moments in which we shut off and dissociate, begins. Because we must go back and retrieve those parts of us that we left somewhere else while we were busy surviving.

This morning, after my dream, I meditated, and I felt my soul’s tenderness. I really felt it. Because I got so clearly that all the places in our lives where we stop feeling, where we have to override our soul’s tenderness, our soul’s beautiful soft body that is as light and agile as the wind or a feather, need to be felt. We need to feel these moments where we weren’t really present, where we checked out, and we need to check back in, with immense compassion for our soul’s beauty and tenderness. We need to feel, and feel, and feel again, and less the fright we felt, and more that soft, vulnerable part of us that we shut down yet wants to be seen…that truly human, big-hearted part of us that we need with us so we can be our full soul-selves in our bodies. Then, and only then, can we experience true joy for living.

Ironically, when I came back from Spain this time, I met up with a woman who had been in my high school class in New Jersey, yet was now living in New Mexico. And what I discovered is that we had a lot in common and were very much on a similar spiritual path. Yet this time, unlike so many other times I had returned to the U.S. from Spain, I was able to feel that child I once had been who had gotten lost in the U.S.  I returned to New Mexico to make peace with that trauma I had experienced as a child when I had originally come to the U.S. from Spain. And now, that tenderness of my soul, that soft body, can more fully come home inside me.

I see now, that when I, or any of us, feel that sense of agitation, that disconnect in our lives, that it’s really a call to feel that tenderness that is our essence, and inside that space, to feel those parts of ourselves that were left behind and that long to return, to be seen, to be felt, to be whole within us again.

My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu, that’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page or at www.michelleadam.net. It can be ordered at a local bookstore or directly from me (for those outside of the U.S.) as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth” in Spanish: https://youtu.be/FaRK7wOHcJU, and in English: YouTube Video