young hearts burst open, wounds bleed fresh

"You carry your wound.  With your ego, your whole being is a wound.  And you carry it around.  Be aware of your wound.  Don't help it to grow, let it be healed; and it will be healed only when you move to the roots.  The less the head, the more the wound will heal; with no head there is no wound.  Live a headless life.  Move as a total being and accept things.  Just for twenty-four hours, try it- total acceptance, whatsoever happens. Someone insults you, accept it; don't react and see what happens.  Suddenly you will feel an energy flowing in you that you have not felt before."

-Osho 

The Furies

Beyond a certain point, there is no return.

This point has to be reached. 

-Kafka

When the Greek god Cronos flung the severed phallus of his father toward the sea, the Furies were born of the blood that fell to the earth.  The Furies embody the dark side of the binding power of Eros,  the madness of blood betrayed, the primal emotional cry when one's identity is denied.  These three whip-wielding sisters, winged with serpentine claws are the beastliest of predators when enraged. They emerge from their underground lair to punish the most heinous of crimes. Their names are Unceasing, Vengeance and Strange Dark Memory. 

Relentless, begrudging, insatiable and pitiless, they avenge all betrayals and sins against primal relationships with ruthless intensity.  They do not allow a single disregard of the humanity of others through envy or greed or insufficiencies of love to go unpunished.  Even inner struggles between independence and relationship provide fertile soil for the scathing marks of the Furies' claws.  Fury is a psychological reality, like madness and guilt, that cannot be denied.  They must be suffered through in order to reap the benefits of their deeper meanings.  The Furies know their way around the darkest parts of humanity.  They were born there and continue to thrive there as horrifying reflections of the darkest, meanest, most hateful nature that lives inside each of us.  The Furies painfully dismember all prior realities about who we thought we may be and force us toward the fertile magic of rebirth.   

Because of their destructive force, the Furies also offer correction and redirection toward wholeness... if we allow ourselves to embrace their work fearlessly. This is challenging because when the Furies are in action, they tear us apart so thoroughly that it becomes difficult to believe we will survive.  If we let them lead us to an underworld initiation, their darkness becomes communal and guilt no longer makes sense. 

We have been taught to deny the Furies, shrugging them off as "crimes of passion" or "temporary insanity" but like an earthquake pressing toward rupture, they continue to burst forth.  When we do not give them the credit they deserve, they bomb, chide and mutilate until they are sure that perpetrators of crimes of the heart know they are watching. The Furies cannot be subdued and it is a wise person who learns to befriend them, through right actions, empathetic approaches to relationship and a recognition of our own suffering souls. 

We all will have to go below, again and again.  It is the Furies who drag us down into darkness to set things right. 

children of the sun, begin to wake

What direction is human evolution moving in?
I've been speaking to others about becoming strong lately. Everyone wants to be strong. Yet culturally we are moving away from our bodies and toward our networks. Two people drew me pictures about becoming strong this week. One was a lion tearing apart and eating a human body. He lay on his belly and chomped on a bloodless leg while various body parts were strewn around him. The second was a robot shooting another robot with a gun. The robot shooting the gun was a female robot, with breasts.


It is difficult work to become strong. It hurts to do strong things like make conscious decisions, wait, and take responsibility for our tiny lives. Are you attending to the things that will help you be strong? Not just as an individual, but as a member of a culture that needs all the conscious strength it can get.

PATTERING

Humans create patterns...or "pattering" as one of the many astute preschool teachers in Los Angeles was recently teaching a client. But I digress, the point is that patterns are a fundamental element of human consciousness. Our genes form patterns and when our patterns deviate too much, we either become unrecognizable as a member of the human group, or we cease to exist. Our language is made up patterns of sounds and patterns of letters that we assemble together to create meaning. As I learn more about physics and astronomy and biology, sometimes all I can see are theories of patterns: If this means this, then that must mean that; If that happens, then this is sure to happen.

So, we can come to the logical conclusion that our relationships and perhaps even our consciousness is created based on assumptive patterns. This idea is not new. In fact, this is the fundamental belief behind the ideas of so many thinkers throughout history- but the only one I can think of now is the Shakyamuni Buddha and subsequently, the abhidharma. The more awareness I bring to life, the more aware I become of my own patterns and the patterns of those around me. We all do it, this is how stereotypes come to fruition. The Debbie Downers and the Wounded Healers and the Rebel all arise from collective awareness of a human pattern. Jung called these archetypes and some believe that we all must carry bits of them inside ourselves in order to perceive them. All is one and such.

Either way, I ascribe to the belief that all we are is an amalgum of bits and pieces of each other temporarily assembled into a "self." I also ascribe to the belief that we have access to everything at all times, but that we do not easily understand how to access it. If only we had a knowledge tree that whispered to us with the voices of our ancestors. Instead we have a subconscious and altered states and DNA to silently carry our knowledge underground.

My ultimate question becomes, how can we gain awareness into the patterns that we carry which don't serve us well and what can we do to change them?

Today I made my first video of myself trying out Visual Understanding with some clients. I really can't believe how well it works. I have a client who is 4 years and 2 months old. She has been removed from her mother's care three times during the past year, which means she has had 3 different households/families and been removed and replaced in 2 of them 2 times. Her mother is an alcoholic, so she has been told that her mother is "sick" and can't care for her. Today, I showed her this picture:

The painter is Balthus. The title is "Joan Miro and his daughter Dolores". It was painted in 1937, but my client doesn't know any of that information. She just sees the picture and the following emerges:

Client A: Why she's putting her face like that?

Me: Why IS she putting her face like that?

A: Maybe she's worried, too.

Me: Maybe she is worried, too. What do you think she could be worried about?

A: Her mommy....And her daddy, too.

Me: What do you see that makes you think she's worried about her mommy and her daddy, too?

A: because... they left....home. Yeah, this is the social worker (pointing to Miro).

Me: This is the social worker (pointing to Miro)?

A: Yeah, taking care of her.

Me: because her mommy and daddy left and they are not taking care of her anymore?

A: Yeah, because the daddy and mommy are sick.

Me: They are both sick.

A: Yeah, because they went in the hospital.

Me: They are in the hospital! They must be really sick. No wonder she is worried! Who will take care of you if your mommy and your daddy can't do it? Some strange social worker? That would make me really nervous.

A: long pause (looking directly into my eyes).

And the camera runs out of batteries! But I think this is a great example of utilizing visual arts images to support increasing awareness of the patterns we have internalized as reality. For example, "this girl has a sad face while standing with a strange looking man, so she must have been abandoned because her parents due to sickness" can easily generalize to indicate a belief system such as "if I feel sad, I will be abandoned" without opportunity to create awareness and process alternative perceptions. This client is not one who would say "Well, I'm feeling anxious because my mommy and daddy left me with a social worker and went off to take care of themselves". Instead she would be whiny and act as a victim. I'm satisfied with the first tape, but am so excited to keep gathering responses to the model. I'm ready to see more work that transcends the awareness stage and enters the transformative stage.

**Details have been changed to protect the innocent/victims. Any familiarity to real persons is entirely coincidental.