O my sweet and Smiling One Call me from the other shore, Call me, Whisper Every echo I have chased within my Soul. Call me Padmapadma, Call me lotus foot Walking lightly on the river Toward a vision Calling Wooing. Call me foolish and enchanted With Tibetan lore and love call, Charmed by streams of endless chanting, Through the mountains, Across vast canyons, His was the One Voice That I followed. Mountains hide all secret treasures, And the sweet voice of the Master Fades as night in all directions. Empty, longing for His love song, I knelt in prayer, Wept to hear His kind voice Calling, Calling only love To me. | Secret treasures, mountains, streams, Only when we yearn for Nothing, Nothing only beauty's ways, Ah Tibetan Love Call - Singing at the height of China, From her grandest, sacred mountains. Only when We stand naked, All emotion opened in us, Mourning to we plead to God To come and scatter all the phantoms, All the voices But His one song. Then within the sacred Presence We surrender Every burden, limitation And to His breast Our hearts now run, Our souls to rest. Listen For His sweet words call me: "Precious Padmapadma, Ever so faithful, Lotus Foot, come cross the river, I am here to ever guide you, Follow now My ancient Love Call." Call me beautiful, The disciple In a vision's height enraptured By the Lotus Smiling One, Calling with Tibetan chanting, Moving as all nature dancing Through my depths A memory calls. Call me foolish And enchanted, Laughing with the swirling waters. Call me childlike To abandon Every fear, To hear more clearly The sweet mystery of our union Ah Tibetan Love call. Ananda (Aíne Nevar) June 5, 1986 |
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"In this time of managed care, more emphasis seems to be placed upon medication and the quick amelioration of symptoms, short-term work and privatized, profit-making clinics, than upon the lovely and mysterious alchemy that comprises the cords between people, the cords that soothe some terrors and help us heal. " Lauren Slater Most of us know the story Alice n Wonderland. Containing numerous parallels to our own individual and collective modern-day circumstances, Carroll's novel of fantasy adventures could be read as a predictive interpretation of the conditions within our system of mental illness/health diagnoses and treatment in the United States today. We have become a people driven to distraction by boredom, plagued by self-absorption, addicted to entertainment, estranged from nature and the environment, and most of us live our lives fueled by non-stop busyness that we mistake for true connection. Proportionate to our fascination with the increasing speed of life is our preoccupation with sickness, which has become epidemic. In fact, the treatment of illness is the number one profit-making health system that we have created to entertain ourselves. Thomas Szaz similarly alerted us to this emerging catastrophe of modern psychiatry in his compelling, though controversial book, The Manufacture of Madness. But just how sick are we, mentally speaking? Go ask Alice. Her adventurous slide down that rabbit hole into Wonderland is an appropriate description of the experience of many patients within the mental health system today. Into this rabbit hole of modern-day medicine we discover the proliferation of diagnostic nomenclature and treatment recommendations, whose research is fundamentally based upon the quick amelioration of emotional, psychological distress (also known as evidenced-based treatment or best practices). We forget that distress is often a warning signal, a sane response to a harmful, threatening situation. Or call is depression. Or Anxiety. Or choose another of the nearly 300 diagnoses of mental illness. Please do not simply take my words for truth. You can read the book yourself: The DSM-V. The latest edition published by the American Psychiatric Association in May 2013, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V (DSM-V) is the authoritative standard used by mental health professionals within the United States. It is the mental health clinician’s 443-page bible for identifying symptoms and criteria of every mental illness. Thorough and elaborate, using complex pathological phraseology to describe and codify just what’s wrong with you and me, this big book is the penultimate tunnel into wonderland. Open it, peek in, and suddenly you are its patient: slip sliding through mind-altering adventure, wandering glassy-eyed among the alluring gardens of diagnostic codifications, and questioning, like Alice, if you really are the same person you were before or will ever be again. Perhaps I’m too short? Oh, no, now I’m too big. Should you question your own reality (or that of your family, society, or your culture) or begin to actually feel with some intensity what it is like to really live your own wild, authentic life, you are given a referral to Dr. Caterpillar. He has the medicine to make you just the right size. AND it’s covered by your insurance (that is, if you have health insurance). In fact, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, marriage counselors, and mental health providers are required to give YOU (the patient) one of the 297 diagnoses in their book in order to get paid by insurance companies. Simply drink the medicine, eat his pills, and you will fit in quite nicely. Just remember to read the invisible print: In order for there to be a doctor, there must be a patient. Ask Alice. (Excerpt from Birth Cry: The Journey and Triumphant of the Spirits of Fire, edited for Raven Heart Blog.) Earlier this week I watched the movie Captain Phillips, which has been nominated for numerous awards, including Academy Award nominations for Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Barkhad Abdi), and Golden Globe nomination of Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture--Drama (Tom Hanks). Inspired by the 2009 Maersk Alabama hijacking, the movie portrays the very real plight of both Somali fishermen-turned-pirates and cargo ships and their unarmed crew that transport resources around the Horn of South Africa. Suspenseful and poignant, Captain Phillips is worth watching. But I am not a movie critic and sharing a review is not the reason for my writing about this today. The sole reason is to draw attention to the final five minutes of the movie and the spontaneous performance that so accurately portrays the trauma response. After a harrowing ordeal as a victim of piracy and kidnapping by a clan of Somali khat-eating fishermen/pirates, Phillips (Hanks) is rescued by the US Navy. Covered in his captors' blood, he is freed from the lifeboat and taken aboard the USS Brainbridge--a nearby destroyer that has responded to the hijacking alert. Escorted to the ship's infirmary by medical staff, Phillips is in shock, unable to talk, and begins shivering By the time they arrive, he is shaking uncontrollably; he is mumbling, asking about his family, disoriented, scared, and detached from life all around him. Dissociation--a predictable biological and psychological response to overwhelming events. The female attending to Phillips does her job well and stays with it--looking at him kindly, touching him, healing, examining him for injuries, respectfully asking him questions to engage him: bringing him back from the trauma-dead. Apparently, the final five minutes of shooting were completely unplanned. "It's a moment like I've never had making films," said Hanks at a New York Film Festival post-screening Q&A. "It's not on the page at all." "We shot a scene upstairs which was a similar scene, because we felt there had to be a cathartic moment where you understood what the experience had meant," said Greengrass. "But we could tell it wasn't perfect." Reviewing the scene and recognizing that in real life medical treatment does not occur on the upper decks of the ship, Greengrass and the actors all go down into the bowels of the ship to where the actual infirmary is located. "Should we give it a try?" Greengrass asks. And that is where the magic happens. Marlow Stern of The Daily Beast (online) writes, "That's what there is in that scene--the truth of vulnerability, shock, confusion, and all the things you'd expect of an experience like that." Knowing personally and professionally the reality of trauma and shock, my belly quivered as I cried the entire final five minutes. When the attendant consoled Phillips and kept repeating, "Captain, you're safe now," I balled, and I realized just how deeply trauma survivors need that experience and feeling of safety. It's like playing a favorite song over and over again: The song of of safe sanctuary after the storm: needing not only to be safe, but to feel safe psychologically. Captain, you're safe now. For as long as it takes and as long as you need, keep saying to yourself, "Captain, you're safe now." "After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains." ~Walt Whitman When I was a child, I loved to climb trees. I was trapped in a home where domestic violence and abuse occurred daily. But climbing, reaching, climbing high into a tree, that is where I could relax and breath. I was free, as I experienced each tree as being alive and aware, helpful in my efforts at escape, and a guardian of my invisibility from hell below.
From that vantage point, I was safe. I watched as the world and her people went about their social and business lives. Perhaps it was the magical thinking of childhood--or maybe just magical me--but I saw through the walls of the homes in my neighborhood; there were no secrets. Yet vision is a two-edged sword: in loneliness I watched as the other children played happily far below, their sweet laughter sad and untouchable and fatal. High up, this heart beat against the breast of a tree and longed for a place among the laughter. But greater than longing was my fear of belonging, and so I trusted only nature, yet remained distantly curious about this drama of humans. Compelling motivation for my professional career as a psychotherapist. Decades later, I'm still in that tree. Watching. Curious. The difference now is that after having walked a path--a very long path--of self-awareness and acceptance, there is some insight that focuses my vision. As it turns out, you're never really wrong about yourself, wherever you are along this path. I still understand and trust trees, experience my greatest happiness when walking, hiking, or climbing quietly anywhere nature. She is my church, my lover, and my Mother's breast. In writing, I seek to honor her and be completely true to myself. I am allowing myself to plant, garden my spirit, and fully blossom--this is the wisdom from the cold winter's morning: Let go, let die what is dying, go deeply within and discover the fields that are fallow. Renewed, empty, longing for new seeds, life welcomes you home. Sow the new seeds mindfully and in harmony with life. Although I don't like to admit it to myself, let alone others, I've experienced depression since infancy, numerous times with such severity as to be hospitalized. Depression--that foreboding of doom, heavy and wounded, that tucks me in at night and greets me with her warnings in the morning; that dark paralysis of hopelessness, like those dreams where you are being chased and your heart is pounding, you are trying so desperately to run, to escape some monstrous thing, but your legs are heavy, weighed down by an invisible sludge, and you are powerless. And you sweat and and silently scream, yet never fully wake up. I believe this is the reason I have always sought out and found solitude in nature and with her creatures. Also, the reason that I have been so driven as a seeker of spiritual truth and of mindfulness training: to fully face and experience this darkness and honor it as my teacher, for despite my own efforts, I have not been able to get rid of it. And I have learned that depression is a doorway to beauty. She has taught me compassion for myself and others. She has told me that She is fierce and has many disguises, but unclothed She is divine love cradled in the arms of the many shadows, protecting what is budding within. She has done her job well. I see that now…I see her beauty and I love Her. And now I don't want to say good bye. |
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