Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Soul journeys’

Apr 16

The Secrets We Keep

Since coming home from the rehab center, I’ve been playing catch-up. This weekend I binge watched Netflix. 

Why? There are two reasons. My birthday was this last Friday, and I needed a break to reboot it all.

The physical therapist is doing house calls right now because I’m not walking distances yet. In talking with her today, I told her what I’d done, and how good it felt. She commented on the fact that I’d been through a great deal with it all. Yes, I have, and no one has asked me about dealing with the stress of it all! I commented on this fact, and her response was that it’s different for each person. Here I am writing this, because someone should ask everyone about the stress of such injuries.

The fact is, injury that requires a rehab stay is hard, and dealing with it all is difficult. I knew the signs and still felt that I couldn’t ask to talk to someone! I will now.

This is all about understanding our needs and tuning into ourselves, and yet I was overwhelmed and couldn’t ask. When you’re in the soup, you can’t see out of where you are. Trauma of all sorts causes us to need assistance. A grieving person is stuck in the soup, and they need people to come and “please do” for them. It might be the dishes, the garbage, a meal, or something else.

I try to be independent, and I need help at times. My enneagram type eight can be a hindrance if I don’t get to my two arrow, which softens me, and then I can ask for what I need. So now I’ll go there and get what I need. 

This makes me think of all the things that are hard, that we don’t speak about, and that we keep in until we discover that we’re not alone in our thinking. I get that we need to hold things confidential. Confidential isn’t a secret, and we keep things secret to ourselves. There are many things that we all fail to process in the time period they are happening to us. Then it makes it easier to hide from the facts. My spiritual director has been a real resource for this. She calls me out and asks good questions, and in reflection I learn where I am. My therapist makes me work to fix what is going on within, and I go there when I need to do short-term work and fix-it work. Both are helpful.

My hunch is that we don’t talk about some of the stuff we need to talk about because of old taboos. In the past, depression and sexual assault and molestation were two of the biggies that got buried deep down. Addiction, and all of its variants, was another area that was not to be spoken of. Here we are in a time when we can speak, and we hesitate until it gets so bad that it may be critical. Opening up about what ails us can be good for the soul.

Sometimes we wind up on a new soul journey, and as we navigate the river, it feels like we might be evaluating old relationships with all areas of our lives. I think we’ve crossed a river of time in how we talk—and don’t talk—about things. We’re distracted, and so, maybe we hide it all. What a wild web it all is.   

We’re distracted by tech, the fast pace of life, and the stuff that happens automatically that we don’t see. We’re caught off guard by the global pace of change. What we need to do is build in time for ourselves to reflect. This weekend was all done on instinct. My psyche knew what I was ignoring: I needed to vegetate and do nothing. Today I can face the world again. The time not thinking seems to have reset an internal clock that needed resetting. This week, the catch-up will hopefully move to the caught-up phase. This week I’ll ask for more help. Lesson learned.

Jan 4

The Tram

I’m standing on the inbound platform at the UMC station as the tram pulls in, and I board. The tram isn’t full, and I find a seat facing forward, not too far from the doors. I notice the quietness of the tram, and we pull away. The next stop changes everything.

I’m in what is the medical area, and the science park. The med students board, taking every vacant seat and filling the vacant standing areas. The next stop allows for more students to board, and the tram is filled with the chatter of the students.

I’ve taken this tram ride multiple times, and this time I stop to notice the voices, the animation with which the students are speaking. Then I look at the physical behavior of the passengers. They are alive with excitement, enthusiasm, and hope, and it is catching. For the first time I’m noticing the vibrant nature of the students.

Something tells me to stop my thinking, and to watch carefully. I listen to that suggestion and I quiet my mind to listen and observe what is happening around me. That 20-minute tram ride altered how I think about others in group settings.

Normally, I avoid groups because it is chaotic, and I can’t hear others well enough to converse with them. I wrote about this in “When Sanctuary Is Offered.” As I’ve sat with this experience the past few months, some things have changed.

Could it be that I opened up to some type of new understanding? Did I rethink the present hearing aids I have? Was it a combination of things? I realized that things needed to change and I took steps, and some risks, to change things. It pays to rethink things: it did!!!

With the new gadgets approved and all mine, I will venture into new situations. With an appointment at the UMC this month, it will be interesting to experience the ride on the tram in a new way.

I’m also having a new doorbell installed in my house. It will use light, and not sound, to let me know that someone is at my door. No more missed doorbells for me! Oh, and it’s covered by the insurance!!! As mentioned in a previous post, I went shopping for a better hearing situation!

I hear the noise of the organics being picked up and pause to think about the winter winds that blew all the leaves in the universe into my front yard space. I think about the storms that put it all there, and the storms that have blown unpleasantness into my life due to disability. I recall the time when I asked Jon to answer the question of the one gift he’d give me if he could. I still feel the same way about my body. Why would I want to change my core self? Yes, it would make some things easier. It would mean that I would not need to deal with people who show frustration at the way I do things: slower than they can do the same thing. I am happy with who I am. I’m proud to advocate for those with disabilities. I’m proud to be me. It isn’t my issue; it’s yours if you can’t deal with me as a disabled person.

Once we’ve taken an inner journey and done our soul work, things change. Going inside is liberating!

This time around, the work I had to do to get to new hearing aids wasn’t as intense as other things I’ve done.

How do you know when you’ve done enough work? My experience is that the things that were hard or difficult become easier to deal with. Doing the work wipes out a level of fear that can be present when confronting the nasty and the unknown. In this phase of things, and when dealing with our lives in new ways, it is important to tack a mental reminder up: one byte at a time. I think this isn’t something we all start out doing at first; it is something we learn our way into.

Taking it slowly and not being overwhelmed by things isn’t something that comes easily for some of us. We labor under the misguided notion that we can take it all on at once. Then getting overwhelmed by the task before us hits us with a grand force of wind. POW! Sometimes anxiety builds, and we stop it all, only to discover that we’re not where we want to be with any of what we’ve dealt with.

Going inside myself enabled me to flesh it all out. This time, I’m navigating a new stretch of the river that I’m surprised I’m on. I suspect it has some new places to tie my boat up to, to leave, and to explore the new interiors I’ll engage with. I suspect that this part of the soul journey will bring new things, people, and joy into my life.

I return to the tram, and as I watch and listen, I realize that I’m learning something about myself that I haven’t been able to admit as I’ve needed to: the isolation of my hearing situation must come to an end. I’m not the widow who is sitting alone on the tram. I am the widow who is claiming the life she knows is out there in new ways. I’ll risk large groups. I now have a tool that will enable me to do just that.

This all happened because I became quiet in what I once viewed as chaos. Had I not done that, I wonder what would have happened. Time to muse on this experience some more.