8:00am on Monday morning. My last day of a four day weekend. I return to work tomorrow.
I'm sitting in an Adirondack chair on the back deck of my husband's brother's house on Cape Cod. Birds are singing, the breeze whispers its wisdom, and tickles my bare feet. I am reading, enjoying coffee, and tuning into nature. Moments of meditation follow my morning reading. I am also dabbling in social media; a habit of mine that can suck time away with little or no warning.
After examining a passage from the latest book I'm reading, I pause to pray. I know the difficulty of some trauma survivors where a higher power is concerned. Despite years of practice, I constantly fear moving closer to god (small case god, utilized here to emphasize openness to any philosophy or deity). In the beginning of my recovery, I would pray to the collective wisdom of those who were sober in my life. When ready, I transitioned this to a visual conception of god being a cloud. I could envision the cloud enveloping me in a light but powerful mist of safety. For me, god could not have arms, legs, and any other human attributes with which to physically hurt me.
So I'm praying to this god this morning, and offering up the practice of letting go. I ask for god's presence in the person's life I am focusing some of my energy on, as a way to release myself from carrying fear and worry about their circumstances. It is an exercise freely given to me by many wonderful people over the years. That collective wisdom that I initially prayed to, opened me up to the spiritual lessons of individuals who I have been blessed to know on this journey.
I have altered and added to this practice to suit my comfort level with god , based on my relationship with my trauma history. There are times where the disconnect from god has been crucial to my survival of horrific memories. At the other extreme, there has been desperation in my need to seek comfort during suffering. In working with others, I offer compassion regardless of their closeness or distance to god. As I continue the practice of prayer and meditation, I try to give myself the same courtesy.
One of the things I've added to those prayers is that god quietly and anonymously pass on my care and concern for the person, dynamic, or situation that I need to relinquish control to. For me, this is an act of trust and faith in a higher power. It is an acknowledgment of giving over to something bigger than me that has a plan. A plan that I may not be privy to the particulars and purpose for someone or something else. The flip side of this spiritual letting go is to ask god to hold my fear, anger, etc, so I can make room for compassion in my heart for the person, dynamic, or situation that merits letting go. This act of prayer and meditation allows me to move closer to faith, and away from my ego that thinks (Knows! lol!) that it has the best instant fix for any relational problem that brings me discomfort.
As a survivor of adverse childhood experiences, the trauma events programmed into my developing psyche that anything with power over me was dangerous and harmful. To ask a newly aware trauma survivor to turn things over to god (while well meaning) is asking the person to submit to dominance all over again. And we wonder why trauma survivors react so strongly at our attempts to offer help! It's perceived as dominance! Then we write off their strong reactions as symptomatic of their diagnostics. In helping, the helper can forget about compassion and wellbeing for others.
So it's not surprising that I would defy god. And it's easy to see, from this perspective, that relating to god can be difficult for trauma survivors.
Back to this morning though: I was just beginning to express love to god to pass on to someone else when a small piece of a leaf landed on me. Instantly, I broke from my spiritual exercise to brush the leaf off me.
I had to laugh at myself! Here was a beautiful, gentle sign that love and concern was being passed on. And what do I do? I abruptly brush it aside in favor of "my" prayers. I laughed out loud at myself, and the circumstances of my reaction. How very human of me!
Which is why I practice prayer and meditation in the first place. To experience my humanity. That's not why I started actively practicing this over twenty-seven years ago. My bare beginnings were a humble and desperate attempt at survival.
It is only now that is see where that too, was an appeal to my better humanity.
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