Most unhappiness comes from not being able to sit quietly in a room.
Pascal
I’m mapping out a year of recovery from a traumatic injury. As a seventy-year-old artist, I am choosing to address the fear as well as the creative opportunities that made themselves known while healing took place. I could not have known the levels and layers that my body would need to attend to. The final piece, many months out was a shattered nervous system. More about that later. I share this experience with the deep desire to ‘mind-map’ a possible recovery approach to support and encourage you and others, should the need arise.
Decades ago I learned of these six basic fears identified by Napolean Hill:
1. Poverty
2. Criticism
3. Ill Health
4. Loss of Love
5. Old Age
6. Death
Culturally, if not personally, we are aware of the power of each and all of these. In Buddhism, we’re taught that life is suffering. There is the suffering of birth, old age, sickness, and death. And through the ages, Wise Ones, including Buddha, have been leaving clues regarding how to create Peace on Earth. Can’t have peace with poverty, criticism, ill health, loss of love, old age or death. What to do? It’s one of those questions each has to ask and then see what answer comes.
I have an existential map.
It has ‘You are here.’ Written all over it.
Steven Wright
Four days after the earthquake occurred (in the backyard when the squirrel, dog, tree root and my boot all configured to take me down). I wrote into my journal with my non-dominate hand:
© Drozda journal entry, December 10, 2018
I fell down.
I got up.
I am joyfully unstoppable.
I think and act creatively in the present moment soothing and
containing the 19-year-old me who carried
the feeling of failure in her bones.
It’s how I imagine myself that matters.
I matter.
My yoga mantra in place:
Save the self by the Self
Never upset the self.
The Self is the only friend of self
The self is the only foe of Self.
Sitting in my bed with a shattered right arm I rest. I wonder. I get curious. When in my life have I been in a situation that stops everything? I am reminded. I feel called to turn my attention to the gifts that came at that earlier time. I lean back and close my eyes and I see Dr. Robert Perchan offering me kindness when I was shattered at age nineteen. He gifted me with his own copy of Psycho-Cybernetics.
Now as a grown woman I sit in my bed and turn my attention back in time to offer my own kindness to that young girl/woman. I soothe my traumatized nineteen-year-old. I’m deeply curious as to how she made her way. Perhaps she holds a clue for my forward movement now. Looking back I can see, as in any good teaching story, that she received the gift of 3 talismans; the letter, and two books. Carrying these protections she began the long climb out of the dark.
I imagine her, in 1968, holding the gift copy of the book in her hands and attempting, through a shattered world view, to make sense of:
You must have a wholesome self-esteem.
You must have a self that you can trust and believe in.
You must have a self that you are not ashamed to “BE”,
and one that you can feel free to express creatively,
rather than hide or cover up.
You must have a self that corresponds to reality
so that you can function effectively in a real world.
You must know yourself _ both your strengths
and your weaknesses and be honest with yourself
concerning both. Your self-image must be a reasonable
approximation of ‘you’, rather being neither
more than you are, nor less than you are.
When this self-image is intact and secure, you feel ‘good’.
When it is threatened you feel anxious and insecure.
When it is adequate and one that you can be wholesomely proud of,
you feel self-confident. You feel free to ‘Be Yourself,’
and to express yourself.
You function at optimum.
The day before my first appointment with the trauma surgeon, I set my goal:
Return to full bone/arm health
Total healing.
© Drozda journal entry, December 12, 2018
Reality sets in; it’s the 7-day mark.
I meet with the surgeon and I require the full support of my Holy Helpers and my Mighty Companions.
I have a serious, traumatic injury. Required: time and constant attention for the foreseeable future.
The surgeon defines the level of injury to my arm and shoulder, “a Humpty-Dumpty break”. He tells me that, “Our goal is to heal to the point where eventually you will be able to touch the top of your head with the injured right arm. We want you to be able to shampoo your hair and put the dishes away on the low shelf in the cupboard.”
My stomach drops. My terror-edge erupts. How does optimism function now?
I immediately tell myself, ‘he doesn’t know me.’
I breathe in and begin the arduous journey of gathering MY strength.
I am Here!
How empowered I am!
How empowered am I?
The day after the meeting with the surgeon I journal:
© Drozda journal entry, December 14, 2018
I need help to shoulder this new experience. I need help and support. Really. Really. I really need help and support. I need to form a picture of a genuine possibility. I need a visual image. I need a focused direction for the six months ahead.
My journal entries unfold. I am listening to healing guided meditations on Youtube as I sit motionless, visualizing the healing that is taking place, the healing that knows how to happen without me doing anything except holding the vision of what is possible.’
On December 23, 2018, I felt ready to let my fragmented, frightened, invisible and alone nineteen-year-old know that I see her. I let her know that at my current age I recognize that there is nothing to fix. I can’t change anything from the past. I can only integrate her splintered self back into the fold by soothing and containing her ‘defrosting fear’. This experience has made her stir. The 50-year-old terror is reactivating. It’s my responsibility to make clear to myself, and to all parts of this journey, that we are present in the here-and-now. No regression.
© Drozda Journal entry, December 23, 2018
She begins to remind me of her exceptional willingness to ‘think different’. She begins to help me recognize that we can take on this healing journey hand in hand.
Thank you for being here.
I truly appreciate your support in piecing together a story of deep and focused healing. Thank you for reading, commenting, sharing and being open to the rich field of options available to us as we journey.
A monk asked Tairyu: “The physical body rots away.
What is the hard and fast body of reality.”
Tairyu said: “The mountain flowers bloom like brocade,
the valley streams are brimming with blue as indigo.”
Zen Koan
These sharings of your recovery are so important. Following your Process as you travel back and forth. So that there will be no regression. Such wise and expert and incredibly courageous relationship to Trauma.
Thank you so much for sharing this journey.
You are truly turning this difficult year into gold. For all of us.
Love,
francis
Thank you Fragitsa. It’s helpful to read your words. She (the nineteen-year-old girl/woman) is capable of sharing her journey in a way that I could not. My arm-healing experience brought her front and center. She began to speak. It wasn’t the first time. However, it was the first time that I could not be distracted. As I sat alone and motionless in bed, she reminded me of a strength that is rooted in the capacity to endure. It seems to me, at 71-years, that this may be the gift of a lifetime. being able to engage the ‘endure-dance’. Keep moving forward…keep gazing out at the horizon…and look UP^.
Thank you for sharing your remarkable journey into recovery. I so admire your fortitude.
Thank you Lynn ~ I truly appreciate your comment. I am watching the part of me that is hell-bent on keeping me quiet and invisible. Yet the story, each has a story, and the story can make us stronger. I am willing to have the courage to continue and continue…to share a story of moving out of the dark and into the light. YES!!
Dear Soul, My heart goes with you. Looking at “Renewal” as this month’s word…It was re-named for me last week as I experienced a glitch in thought/reality that reawakened a spell of intense anxiety from 17 years ago. I sensed the Spirit saying, “You don’t have to be afraid…you are being ‘RE-WIRED’ for a new season. I am in this.” Rebuilt, renewed, rewired…seldom comfortable because it requires the dismantling of what has become the “way we do things”. “The oh CRAP…” has to give way to, as you say…curiosity. OK, let’s continue to be curious together. Thank you, precious. Lots of Love, K
Dear Kristy ~ Rebuilt, Renewed, Rewired … for a new season.
What a grand message!
What perfect timing!
Oh, CRAP! morphing into CURIOSITY … YES!!
I wonder. I wonder. ‘-)
I think Napoleon Hill left out a 7th great fear………………aloneness. I don’t think that is covered in the other six he lists no matter how hard I think about each of them!
As far as loneliness and the list of six. I feel that each of these six isolates separates, makes us different and ‘other’ therefore ‘alone’. I suspect Nap Hill knew that and figured we would discover that along the way.
If I am poor I am isolated and alone.
If I am criticized, it cuts me off from belonging.
My ill-health: definitely makes me feel separate and alone.
When I lose someone I love = I am lonely.
In old age: we’ll learn as we go that, as my 90-year-old friend Sir John often said, ‘Everybody I know is dead.’ He felt in those moments so all alone.
Finally Death … nobody else can go with us. All alone.
The Wise Ones remind us that ‘there is only one of us here and that rather than feeling all alone find the ‘All ONE’ that spark of connection that we all share.
I so identify with Beckett…..and you, Donna. When I read these latest blogs, I feel my own body tense up and feel the stress of the ‘remembering’………….and yet I read on. Why? Because I, too, want to journey towards understanding, wisdom and wholeness and, if possible, deactivate, once and for all, the “triggers” that find us looking into that abyss of absolute fear and aloneness. So, I thank you for not only being brave enough to share your own journey but to hold your hand out to all others who need a support, a friend, a fellow sojourner at this particular time in this particular place. Thank you!
Hi Marianne ~ Yes. Beckett offers an important reminder … we can’t assume that what we’re ‘putting out there’ isn’t having an impact. A few years ago I was presenting to a group of Veterans. It was a visual journaling workshop. After the first session, one of the Veterans complained about me saying that I had offended her. She told the social worker in the room; “She triggered my PTSD.” I wasn’t able to identify what I could have said (I am truly sensitive to trauma and very respectful of my audience). Upon further investigation it became clear. We were in a new ‘veterans only’ apartment building. The group was meeting and I was presenting our program in a common room. A man entered a short time after we began. He hung out in the kitchen part of the space and leaned back against the counter, drinking coffee and listening in. At one point I turned and invited him to join us. He smiled slyly and declined. It turns out that the woman who complained about me was actually triggered by him. When I asked her, with the social worker there, what I had said that made her feel threatened she fessed up. She told us that it was that man being in the room that caused her panic. She told us that she had a restraining order against him for stalking her. He wasn’t permitted to be closer than 1500 ft. yet … there he was. Doing just that. She couldn’t speak up. And instead, she attempted to ‘make me the scapegoat’ for her fear.
In these posts, I will be addressing directly the smoke screens that we consciously and subconsciously throw out in front of us to keep from taking full responsibility for what comes to meet us. It can take decades for the results of our self-sabotage to manifest.
Donna,
Thank you for this post. It brought back the traumatic experience I went through at 16. Most days I think she is gone, buried by the stronger woman I became.
But as I approach my 76th birthday, I feel more and more like that very scared 16 year old is still with me. And I can’t help her! Love, Beckett
Hi, Beckett,
Thank you for being here.
I take the risk of my entries here bringing “back the traumatic experience” for my readers. I am so aware of this possibility and I ask that you journey along with me because I will be offering well-tested and viable ways to connect to that 16-year-old. Actually, you can help her and she is waiting. I so appreciate your comment. Love d