Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I’ve had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please use one of my recent entries. Thank you and sorry for any inconvience caused.

March 15, 2004

I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?

IMG_0168_a_320.jpg

View larger image

"I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?" is the kind of book that I would have ordered by now, pre meditation, pre Abraham-Hicks, pre blog, pre fourth and fifth dimensional healing.

In that past way of being, I savored every book I could find about surviving, coping with, or dying from a major illness. A bit preoccupied with the subject, I'd say. What do we know about this, Dakota?

(Note: I will provide a major illness reading list. at some point in the future. "Planet of the Blind" , "A Whole New Life", "The Body Silent" I won't even start down that path.

There is a part of me that feels it is dying, or at least hurting very badly. If I weren't so scared of this part, I wouldn't have developed another part, probably a "manager", in Internal Family Systems talk, who reads books about exactly what's going to happen, when something bad happens. Guess what, it has already -- what I fear the most, has already happened. Reading books like this helps the "manager" part of me to stay in control, and control my environment Big job for a small part, if I do say so myself.

Going right along with IFS, however ineptly, I ask that "manager" part of me to step aside, so that I can talk to the "exiled" hurt part that really runs the show. (literally, a projectionist - playing a film of my own chosing onto the blankish screen of life - I say blankish, so as not to deny that there is reality. Most of us can't see much of it.)

So what does that squeaky aspect of myself who is/was dying, have to say?
It would say, with great perturbation, "Finally, Fred, where have you been?" if it were not so diplomatic and empathic, or it became offended easily by being called squeaky. But no, this is my spiritual core self, my true self, all of who I really am, the part of me that is connected directly to life force energy. It has grace and diplomacy.

It says that I grew up under spiritually neglectful circumstances. Actually, there was a rather successful campaign waged to kill my spirit. My mother was quite the manager. I have one of those managers in my internal family who took the hits directly from mom. If you read the beginning of this blog, her shadow is more in evidence. I was projecting being slammed by the world for what I had to say.

What really happened is that I got slammed once, I got some heartening encouragement and mostly I got ignored. Being ignored is a big relief to the part of me that was scrutinized for everything I ever did. My mother was terrified of differentiation, and had to squash it whenever it raised it's ugly head. Catching those signs of deviance was a full time job, squashing them was recreational and satisfying.

I no longer want to be ignored. There I said it.

I want to be Martha Beck and Anne Lamott . I hope I have the attention span.

Maybe I'll just wait until that book comes out on tape.

Photo note: I really should save this for my next haircut , but it was both brain-like and Mexican, so I used it here. Check out Anne Lamott's hair too.

Posted by Dakota at March 15, 2004 05:40 AM