Posted by BarbaraCat on August 2, 2004, at 14:02:46
In reply to Re: Baby Rock's Blue Ribbon days » BarbaraCat, posted by katia on July 31, 2004, at 18:18:57
Hi Katia,
Well, good news at least about Shashee. She seems to have asthma instead of the fatal heart condition. But the weird thing is that since we moved here into this small logging town, out of the city, we're on a very dusty unpaved road that spews up dust and whatnot every time a car or f**cking logging truck goes by. We were not away of this when we moved in, thinking this was the end of the road kind of street.Four of our cats, including myself, have come down with asthma and other respiratory ailments, and it's no wonder. It's just that much more of an incentive to move away from this dull drudge place where we had hoped to find a like minded community. All we've seen in these three years are thwarted attempts by others, hampered by fears of 'those new fangled city folk's ways' (yes, that was said at a town meeting). I've never bonded here, and possible attempts at friendship were ended disastrously - like last Winter,the mean-spirited fear-based response to showing pictures of my Mom on the one-year anniversary of her death. That hurt so badly, but it was just one more validation that this isn't the place. The other heartbreak is taking a well loved familiar trail, rounding a bend and finding it's been clear-cut overnight. It feels like encroaching Mordor and it's time to get off the pot. I feel like I have a purpose to clear things out. I will either move into this energy or sink into it and falter and probably not care if I live or die.
So now, I will focus my blasted bedraggled grieving energies into things like cleaning out the archeological layers in the garage - doing 'busy stuff' to focus on rebuilding a new life somewhere. Creating auspicious feng shui in order to move the trapped energy in my living space and in my mental space. I don't know what else to do. I feel like anything can happen and I need to prepare and get strong. I am looking at this like Warrior Training - although I wish I had a mentor.
I don't presume to believe that anywhere else is perfect. You can spend a lifetime wandering around trying to find that perfect place and it doesn't exist. We live in an anxious world, but it helps to have a community of people who we can share life with, who give a damn. We can't do this life alone and here I have been lonely and isolated, especially in my illness - can't just pick up and distract when the body is screaming. My cats have provided such companionship and selfless love, and by God, it will be for them that I get my butt in gear and heal this life of mine, and find a way to move beyond the fear of pain. They are worth it. Someday I may find that I too am worth it.
The next place we consider, we will be very wary if all we see are fundamentalist churches, no bookstores, no yoga classes, and plenty and plenty of bars. These are good indications to move on. We were originally in a hurry to move because I needed quiet. One lives and learns.
As far as the EMDR, you tap the same side - tap right thigh, look to the right. As emotions, memories, swirl, you can pick up the tempo until something 'gives' and releases.
Another technique that helps me when I'm feeling overwhelmed (besides taking to bed, which I am going to be doing all day today) is to 'see' a loving light entering my third eye area and embracing the wounded parts of my brain - all of it - like loving hands holding my brain and imparting healing that looks like a glowing blue light. Sometimes it feels like the crown center opens, like a tingling feeling, and adds to this blue glowing light that is so soothing. I imagine that it is clearing out gunk and repatterning my neural circuits. I believe this healing is at the utmost level. We can take pills, potions, whatever, and they do help at a certain levels. But calling upon our loving helpers to heal us at our deepest wounded natures is where it has to happen. I don't think most folks are aware of this need or the possibility of this kind of healing. Pills can only do so much.
I'm glad you have Cathy. It sounds like she knows you and what you're going through. Definitely PTSD, I regognize the signs. Your body is in a chemical shock and perpetuates the loop of the trauma memories. It is adrenaline and CRF. Those loops must be broken by deep rest to the adrenals, but the ultimate healing is releasing into the pain and grief and the not knowing, and moving into the expanded state it offers. It is a powerful doorway, but a damn painful one and you need your body's strength to support you, as well as the support of loving friends on both sides.
Who knows what's going on, Katia. Rock may very well be a very special companion from lifetimes and lifetimes, and this is just one more pas de deux in your dance of lifetimes. The fact that you had to put him down is devastating. I feel the same way about Merlin, although every breath was agony - he had absolutely no lung tissue left! And yet he wanted to continue. His death agony was shattering. I wonder - gee, maybe if it hadn't of been for this shitty road, his lungs would have had a chance. But that's just mind noise and of no help to anyone. He had FIV. His organs, one by one, were succumbing to anything and everything. There was nothing I could do except to send him on as lovingly and courageously as I knew how - because IT WAS TIME. Rock's tortured existence taught him much, I am certain, and now it's time for him to heal, incorporate, and perhaps act as a cosmic cop against those unconscious numnutz who do these things to innocent critters. Someone has to do it, and I get the feeling he might enjoy this new job of his. Who knows?
Yes, we miss them. There's nothing anyone can say to make that pain feel better. Whatever happens in the next reality, in this reality, it hurts and there is an empiness and the physical longing to hold a warm cuddly body. I can't begin to tell you how this has activated all kinds of stuff from my Mom's death as well. Mainly the unanswerable questions of life and death and continuation. My life feels consumed by this right now. Every book I read, movies I'm drawn to. I have no time for sitting in the bars in town trying to convince clueless drunks that they need to think about voting, get a clue, go see Farenheit 9/11 if they're undecided. But even that fire in my belly feels 'oh well'. Life will go on, will flounder, falter, we all may be wiped out and that may be the best thing. I simply don't know and that's all I know. And I have to put this anguished trembling energy into something constructive and that, for want of anything better, is to MOVE. I am wiped out. I need to go unconsious for awhile, take a benzo and take refuge in Nepenthe. Later, Barbara
poster:BarbaraCat
thread:371461
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/grief/20040220/msgs/373211.html