As If

I’ve lived my life as if my life depended on it, in the perpetual present. I value my experiences, regardless. They have all together brought me to where I am now. No regrets. No mistakes. All OFLs.

My mistakes are all OFLs. Especially the ONE bad-ass of the bad relationships I allowed myself to remain in for 2+ years. Now, as the song goes, Now you’re someone that I used to know.

OFLs. Every. Single. One. Especially that one. Each contributed to where I’ve arrived in my life today. But, that one? I have to thank her for that one… as … I decided to….

Feel Into Myself with…

3 Years of Brainspotting

Feeling into that last experience that led me to that, and forgetting it into action. As, forgetting is for getting. It makes more room for the good stuff. I feel to embrace, breathe, and share…

The greatest fear for success should not be failure. It should Be succeeding at something that doesn’t matter.

~ Francis Chan

That Relationship

That relationship didn’t matter with the constant, toxic drip of shaming behaviors. I mattered, though, and understood that even a Professional Psychologist could get to her. I’m not a Professional Psychologist. I woke up when, outside of my family, I lost the thing most personal thing. 1st my creativity went. Then, my imagination died on the vine, desiccated by the drip so slowly that right before my eyes that I hadn’t seen it happen… right under my nose.

Creativity and imagination going away are pretty much one of the most common symptoms of PTSD, and when a relationship is a prison camp of Steven’s Wright’s dog named Stay. And, for an Artist, an Architect, a Tarot Reader and Astologer and Author? Fear incarnate. Like Steven Wright naming his dog Stay.

Come here, Stay. Come here, Stay.

I had to do something about it. We went into couple’s therapy as my requirement for staying in the relationship. I’d never given an ultimatum before as I typically see them as a unilateral decision made by one, though hidden behind the fakery that the person being given the ultimatum even has a chance. I never saw the merit of an ultimatum except in extreme cases, and this was certainly that. Still, ultimatums root themselves in control, and that has a tendency to cause disconnection and are most likely manipulation born of being afraid in most cases?

You Give

You give an ultimatum? Well, you need to be comfortable with the infinite responses possible, not a finite set of them, and certainly nothing definite. Definite, that which takes the finite away and results in a decision.

Ultimatums are worse from my perspective than the attempt to count to infinity, except in extreme cases. So, I cocked my head and realized this was one of those, an intense extreme case. If I didn’t want to die on the vine in total, or worse, experience the creative catatonic of being forever miserable, then it would begin with this.

The 1st Session

Funny thing happened on the way to…. Funny thing happened. Every time the Psychologist asked her a question in the 1st session, she’d put it off on me.

I started seeing something I’d never seen before as I wasn’t engaging in argument. I was powerfully listening because no one was coming at me directly. He was simply asking her questions. What did I see? The Narcissistic Sociopath. Projective Identity way beyond Psychological Projection, and stresses that were not Eustress. I saw rage and hatred and no fear and plenty of being afraid. Such anxiety about anything coming from the outside world… as it wold most likely be dangerous or to harm her. At least, that’s the expectation I saw her not inspect.

While calmly, calmly but fully dafuqin surprised, I calmly listened as my historical friends Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche hopped up on each shoulder and settled in, settled in as I simply listened. Listened to the therapist turn her back to herself, which she would push right off over to me. And, he would calmly repeat.

I simply listened until the Psychologist turned to ask me something, and I felt into the question, attempted to open, attempted to feel-say, and say what I feLet. Rough. Raw, rugged geodes of statements where if he didn’t know what to hear for, the happy-mad-glad-sad hidden, I would have conveyed no feelings whatsoever. Though, he knew geodes better than me as a rock hound.

1st session, she leaves frustrated. I get it. This shit, this mud’s not easy. I leave with a hopeful though very furrowed brow. What dafuq just happened?

The 2nd Session

The 2nd session, I’m opening up, getting comfortable with things I was not comfortable with at all. He checkmates her. She still pushes it over. 3/4 of an hour and nothing but deflection. The therapist turns to me, and she, Wait! He’s the one with the problems. I don’t want to hear his bullshit. The therapist turns to me, Jordan, what do you think about that? I smiled one of those smiles where your temples flex. I feel she just described herself perfectly to a ‘T’. I don’t know that I have much to do with it. In fact it felt selfish to make it all about me. Her words not mine is what I got there. Her words for her to respond to.

Glad I brought a lighter. Guess that lit a show fuse.

The 3rd Session

3rd session. The therapist opens up with, Ok, Jordan is putting in an effort with an honesty that is based in vulnerability. You aren’t pulling your weight here. You are also a Psychologist. These sessions have started off wholly imbalanced, so I suggest we have two initial choices: we do them individually moving forward with each of you until both have made progress to come together in a session set; or, with him here we spend this Whole session on you in the interest of re-balancing.

OH!

Ohhhhh, was she incensed. And, I saw it, felt it whole-body. I saw the caged animal inside her lashing out through the bars. All her pain and what had been done to her — which, credit to her was quite a bit of beyond terrible And tragic things throughout her life. There’s a beauty in that gift of sight with someone when you see them warts and all, and then I came back from the experience on the other side… of the couch… into the room as she burst out in a rager of a Rantra at HIM… you know, the therapist, the one who couldn’t have done any of this to her? Yeah, that guy.

And, up and out of the session she flew.

We Had

We had come in from different parts of town, so different cars. His eyebrows go up calmly nodding to me. So, do you need to get up and go? I smiled. Ha! I saw what I was up against when she blamed you. She’s been doing that to me with every question she has ever asked after the 1st 2 months, for the last 2+ years. Your a profession in the Psych industry. With what I saw happen in these past 3 sessions, could YOU even ever get to her?

It doesn’t happen often, though most likely not.

Ok, I’m not a Psych professional, so the odds of me getting through? Less than zero to give myself at least some credit.

He smiled. I Continued.

She’s an Angler fish with her shiny questions and then GOBBLE, and you only then swim inside her shame. I saw that for the 1st Time today. There’s NO way YOU could be responsible for ANY of what she put on you tonight. She and I? That ended when the door closed behind her just now. It’s not the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was caused by the 1 million 435 thousand straws piled up on there unnoticed one by one until… I’m not Atlas.

So, nope, not leaving. We came in separate cars, she and I are through. I’ll handle that later. For my safety I may need to check into a hotel. Though, we still have 40 minutes, right?

Well then, yes we do. What would you like to focus on?

And the Long Road Home Began As…

I saw on your bio that you do Brainspotting. How does that work? Something is like a magnet inside me fascinated with that, and I know spare little about it.

He proceeded to give me the general overview in several minutes.

Well, COOL! Let’s get started. Let me stand up and shake that previous off, maybe an adrenaline dump like dogs and cats literally shaking it off and back into flow, and breathe deeply, then sit down…. Ok, how do we start?

And, We Did

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I Took the Long Road Home

I took the long road home, ended the Internal Civil War between my own Parts, things I’ve called Inner Inheritances in Tarot in the Land of Mystereum and ImaginAction, and ImaginAction 2.0 that caused me to not only allow that kind of relationship, but to maybe even to expect it. Interesting to me that I wrote about things that I was doing naturally, though that wouldn’t reach the intensity to dive even deeper than I had in writing those books.

The Parts Now?

The Parts now? Now, I continue to work with and listen to them regardless of their intensity as they come up, or they choose to be allies in different ways not ready yet to dissolve in those ablution cascades of tingles in parts of the body when they do. And, some are heard, and I ask them their message. As I receive, they disappear into me, and I feel ablution tingles as they cascade disperse to re-home where they belong in my body.

I feel again now. I feel and do my creative work. I’m in love with my creativity and imagination again. I look forward to where that takes me from here.

After 3+ years of Brainspotting, Sovereign.

18 months ago I paused Brainspotting after 3+ years, looked up from my desk. Why was I even sitting there? Why had I been sitting there for the same hour every day for 2 weeks. I chuckled and smiled wide temples flexing eyes brightening and began writing as if I had never stopped… as out loud I said,

In Regards to Unresolved Trauma That Triggers You, Here’s a Bastille Day Poem I Wrote in 1993

Now, it’s time

Now it’s time to grow a Lotus out of this mud.

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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now, put the foundations under them.

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

And, I began writing again, differently now.

That All started

That all started 4 1/2 years ago.

I took the long road home, on purpose.

I cherish what I went through and have done and how I’ve grown into myself where my boundaries look like… well, they look just like me. In the last 18 months from It’s time to grow a Lotus out of this mud,, and from all the creative work I did before the poisonous drip and ooooohhhh SHINY of the Angler Fish‘s bait… they live here now. In me. Perennials waking after a long winter sleep to wake verdant and naturalize in my voice.

And, what’s that? What have I done. Naturalize my perennials? I’ve begun to naturalize the perennial of me in my wonderful Soul Garden. Soul Gardener… hmmm, I like that. Thank you M.Y. — you know who you are. That card you gave me at REI that day Sitting on the bench with coffee in Denver in 2006-2007. You wrote that to me. You referred to me as a Soul Gardener in your card. It was such an honor and went way over my head of the credit I was NOT giving myself back then to believe in my work fully. That stuck. And now, I’m unstuck. Thank you for that gift, for that card, for your astute and apt and heartfelt words, so I can now thank myself for my value, and be grateful… I can be grateful that I have a Soul Gardener to help me Naturalize further in my life, may way. Thank you, M.Y.

Quick fixes have shallow roots.

~ Unknown

Storms make the oaks take deeper roots.

~ George Herbert

A tree with deep roots laughs at storms.

~ Malay Proverb

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was greater than the risk it took to blossom.

~ Anais Nin

Religion and Heaven are for people who do not want to go to Hell. Spirituality is for those of us who have already been there.

~ David Bowie

My Soul Gardener Asks

What cornerstone in life do you brace against to grow a Lotus out of the mud in an area of your life… no matter how long it takes?