What’s going on beyond the reaches of my mind? That might be the best way to phrase the question I’ve been exploring in earnest for a little more than three years now. I’ve always worked at improving myself, and little of my adult life was spent with no self-improvement “projects” underway, but in January of 2022, I took the work to new levels. Perhaps I’ll add a Bibliography page/section and share all of the books I’ve read since then.
Anyway, about a year ago, I read Focusing by Eugene Gendlin, after stumbling upon the concept at a therapist’s website. The first time I tried the practice, which I described in yesterday’s post and which involves visualizing yourself going inside your body to ask it questions about whatever’s bothering you, I did it with the help of this video (also shared yesterday) right before bed, and I experienced the best sleep I had had in years. Since then, I’ve gotten better at Focusing and have used it any number of times to check in with my unconscious.
Also about a year ago, I discovered Making Marks by Elaine Clayton, a book on what she calls “Stream Drawing,” a technique that involves moving a pen or pencil while looking away and focusing on feelings. Like Focusing, I’ve used Stream Drawing any number of times and have found it quite revealing. Today, I sort of combined the two, and you can see the results in the photo above and the two detail shots below.
Let’s see if I can walk you through this stuff.
- “Right Hand Today”: Clayton generally has you use your non-dominant hand, but I wanted to try something different.
- “What am I afraid of?”: that’s the question I asked my body first. “Words” is the answer that surfaced.
- “Why am I afraid of words?” I asked. My unconscious responded with: “Because they pin me down.”
From there, I used my mind to flesh out what my body was telling me, but I also dipped back into the unconscious here and there and let my hand move around the paper while all of that was going on. The pink words encircled in green can be considered “the Focusing conversation,” I guess. The pink marks are the Stream Drawing (I’m capitalizing the term because it’s special, as is “Focusing” as a modality), and the words in blue are the ones I came up with as I gazed at the marks I had made. So, what else is there?
- “Dennis uses words as weapons.” He’s my husband of 31 years.
- “I’ve always used more words than others.” As people in my life love to point out, not always in the nicest of ways.
- “So am I truly afraid of them?” Hmmm. Thinking about this question now, something else comes up: I could well be considered afraid of words, because so much of my adult life has been filled with people telling me that I talk too much, that I overwhelm people, that I’m “too much.” (Like Snow Miser or Heat Miser, perhaps?) What’s more, I’ve spent far too many years creating and deleting blogs and websites, because of fears of offending someone or making them uncomfortable. This meant that I could never truly express myself. Besides, when I shared via these venues with people I know and got virtual silence in return, it really hurt. It still does, which has everything to do with why I’m here instead of there, where I have a decently sized, established audience.
- “Everyone else is [afraid of words].” See those above comments about being “too much” and “overwhelming” people.
- “I respect words and the power that they have. Do I love words? Love and fear are not compatible. Or are they? But in a different way? I need to travel through fear to get to Love.”
- “Do I love words? I used to. But now? Not really. Because words have kept me from the Truth, from my Soul for far too long.” What I mean by this is that I was never “allowed” to feel my emotions, to trust them. It was always about facts and the rational mind and the words that would net me the good grades.
Here’s the rest of the page:
Whoa! Just as I was scrolling down during the proofreading phase, the word “Mom” jumped out at me. See that squiggly line beneath the word “soul”?
Let’s look at the rest of the pink words.
- “‘I don’t understand you and I never will’ means, ‘I don’t HEAR you. It’s how I protect myself.’ Dennis has said this to me over and over and over throughout our marriage.” Well. I guess that’s pretty self-explanatory. His unconscious seems to have been paying attention to his words all these years, and I’m wondering, at this point, if he’s even capable of understanding me.
Now we get to look at what came to mind as I gazed at my Stream Drawing (the words in blue).
- “Blank screen? Blank paper?” That rectangle at the top is the first thing I saw, and all I could think of was something waiting for words.
- “My Soul”: I see a person with one head atop another and connected to that blank paper rectangle. The top (smaller) head is my Soul.
- “My brain/rational mind. (It’s bigger than my soul b/c I dealt with mind almost exclusively throughout life. It’s what I was programmed to do.)” I recently read another of Elaine Clayton’s books, The Way of the Empath, and it was like someone finally reached out to me and said, “Cheryl, you no longer have to try and squeeze yourself into Model No. 3249374. You were never meant to be a factory-made, conveyor-belt assembled person.”
- “My physical body trying to deal with all the demands others place upon me.” I have six kids, and I homeschooled them all. The youngest is still doing lessons. She and two others are still at home. Until the Plandemic, my husband traveled for work nearly 30 weeks out of the year and had little time for (or interest in) his family when he was around, but no one ever told me I was essentially a single mom. So when things got really hard, all I could do was berate myself for not being good enough to handle the challenges as gracefully as other Catholic,* homeschooling moms did.
*I won’t go into the trauma I experienced because of Catholicism. That’s a story for another day, week, year. I don’t know. It’s a lot.
