R.M.

~ Essays. Poems. Written Meditations.

R.M.

Tag Archives: PTSD

she said, briefly ~

08 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by racheltejas in Grief, Meditations and Poetry, Melancholia, Motherhood, Yoga

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Tags

Ashtanga yoga, Bipolar disease, Enlightenment, faith, hope, love, madness, Mental Hospitals, motherhood, Peace, personal essay, photos of Iyengar, photos of Pattabhi Jois, PTSD, Richard Freeman, Sanskrit, yoga

she said, briefly ~

I

In each person there exists a point of stillness. I have had the most direct experience of this often inaccessible terrain while being guided in practice by Richard Freeman. In Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, if one slows down enough, there are moments that can stretch to an infinite vista, vast as the Universe: it is the brief abandonment of the ego’s poison-grip.

Before lifting the body, which at this stage of practice often feels weightless, into Salamba Sarvangasana (shoulderstand supported with hands), it is recommended to lie flat on the Earth, palms down, limbs delightfully stiffened just to the point of muscular sensation, not beyond.

This pose, which might look like a tense corpse, is called Tadaka Mudra. Tadaka, from the Sanskrit, means a pond, or a pool. Mudra, loosely, is a seal, or a gathering in by the body, the hands, the head, to increase or decrease a certain energy or spiritual intention.

As the body rests-does-not-rest in Tadaka Mudra, occasionally a hollowing takes place. The hollowing is at the deepest root of the lower abdomen: it is as if the limbs, the ribs, the pelvic bones become the land, perhaps the land of our common, every day life, and in the center that land gives way to a sacred, secret and primordial, indeed impersonal, depth.

I have touched this depth in guided practice, in Zen practice, and, very occasionally, in my own exploration. This is the great stillness I believe we all seek, which is ironic: in the seeking we create suffering, grasping, and so the illusive, shimmering Tadaka floats further away. Water, after all, cannot be gripped.

We know this point through spiritual practice, through poems (Eliot’s Four Quartets: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;/ there the dance is,/ but neither arrest nor movement…”), through philosophy (Kant’s theory of noumenon vs. the world apprehended by the senses and intellect), and, of course, through personal revelation.

II

What does it mean when the access to stillness abandons the mind, or is stolen by that Thief in the Night, overwhelming circumstance?

The place of silence, which might be Peace – consider the Greek Eirene, so like Mother Mary – or Infinite Love – seeing Vishnu in one’s heart: this place is the perfect Jewel of the Soul. Or, if one is uncomfortable with spiritual image, this is where relaxation, genuine letting go, occurs. We build around this Jewel temples of protection, ambition, structure and illusion. It is the place within us that holds the most contradiction, as we will do anything to guard it and then exert equal effort to never visit it for more than a moment. If there is a center to Being, this faceted, blinding Jewel is the representation.

And here we enter a world necessarily beyond language, a world in which language itself is a poor symbol, an extended hand of mere gesture, a simplistic outline of meaning.

And yet, and yet.
For me it is more and more concrete, the Presence and then the Absence of soul, of peace, of love. Recently I spent a week in a madhouse. I went, simply, because the circumstances of my life, what I have done to myself, allowed others to do to me, has caused me to slip, fall, and the falling did not stop.

In the madhouse everyone was falling. And because humans have a need to love, to seek peace, we tried to catch one another. If one imagines the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy blended with Euripides’ brutal interpretation of murder and madness in Herakles, this is a fairly accurate portrayal of the comedic hopelessness of Bipolar-Major Depression-PTSD-Extremely Anxious humans attempting to connect.

III

Now I know.

Madness is the sacking of the Jewel.

Who does the sacking, and whether the Jewel can be replaced or if its absence is only an illusion is all a matter of interpretation, and, as one is in the middle of the mess, utterly irrelevant. What replaces the Soul when it’s gone is pain. A pain that is physical, existential, mental, in the body and out of body all at once and all the time. People who judge the suicidal have no sense of the pain that encompasses the Soul-less beings who are, quite simply, seeking relief from something so far gone it is indescribable.

Madness is absence, the incapacity to describe the absence, and the solitary confinement that is the natural result of that incapacity. In this way, just as Love can be an infinite loop of openness and joy, so can its departure: pain begets pain, the trip becomes a fall, the fall becomes an endless vertigo of isolation.

Aside: if you ever wonder what it’s like to be around crazy people when you, also, are  crazy: it is, in a word, comforting. We are all in this (secret, shamed) war together. And, to be as simple as possible, there is nothing left to protect, defend, or to dress up and pretend. My roommate showed me the open wounds on her wrists as casually as one reveals a grey hair. I was around impoverished addicts and perpetual liars and lawyers and mothers and beautiful teenage girls and an 80 year old retired executive and we were all leveled to an equality that I imagine only combat and sickness can create.

I have always been a child, then a girl, then a woman, of extremes.
I know what it is to touch Infinite peace under the guidance of Richard Freeman’s patrician, elegant hand.
I know what it is to live, if one can call it that, with moment by moment suicidal impulse.

This is either a gift or a death sentence. (What in life is not a death sentence? I cannot help but allow my mind to linger on the comfortingly obvious…).
But here I am, my daughters asleep by my side, and I am writing these words.

And I can see a glimmer of diamond in each of their perfect hearts.

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Invitation to Exit

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by racheltejas in Melancholia, photography, politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

activism, anger, Buddhism, Christine Blasey Ford, feminism, Kavanaugh, personal photography, political photography, politics, progressive politics, PTSD, rape, Trump

Invitation to Exit
a lovehate note for Dr. Ford

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter”
~~ Christine Blasey Ford

“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.”
~~ 
Anne Sexton

There have been probably millions of words written about Brett Kavanaugh, and I don’t flatter myself I have much to add.

My writing is read by very few people. Not even my family reads it anymore. Yet somehow, knowing I have language, some kind of document, of my own observations, sadness, love, joy, personal regret, cultural anger: it makes me feel more alive, and more connected to the roiling stream of human existence.

There are mothers searching for dead babies at this very moment in Sulawesi. They don’t know about Brett Kavanaugh, or the people, mainly women, who feel some kind of end has been reached in our Great Experiment. Suffering is everywhere. Birth is everywhere; Change, as the Buddha cannot remind us enough, is the only constant.

When the man currently living in the White House was “elected,” I thought we had reached a nadir, and would quickly correct our nightmarish, almost comical, mistake.

It was only the beginning. And his beginning, this little, stupid, mentally unstable carnival barker, will leave an impossibly long impression on this country that might well mark its demise. He is remaking the courts from the bottom up in his own image, filling vacancies Barack was unable to fill because of the thoroughly racist, undemocratic obstructionism of Republicans, of the quasi-fascist Mitch McConnell, and he is going to fill those vacancies with minds so far to the right we may as well be on a tilt-a-whirl that speeds only in one direction. What was fringe, what was Pat Buchanan, is now the celebrated norm among unimaginable numbers of white, often college educated men and women.

Shame to them. Shame on this country.

I thought I had no love for this country. For a long time, my entire life to be honest. I should have moved to France when I was 17; that I didn’t was a result of a rape that made me paranoid, fearful, and incapacitated for years. The memory still does, particularly when I hear the so-called President of the United States happily mock a brave, dignified woman who had the temerity – the fucking balls – to confront a system already rigged against her. Listening to him bring her down, the crowd laughing its approval: how similar that must have sounded to Dr. Ford to the laughter of Brett as he covered her mouth and prepared to have his way with her body.

Kavanaugh joins Clarence, who is publicly silent, poisonous, and unimaginative in his “originalist” views of the Constitution. Such a viewpoint is really just an excuse for profound intellectual laziness, a sentimental attachment to a past that never existed, and a convenient cudgel to keep traditionally marginalized humans in their place. Now the two Yale men can have drinks and chat about their college days, the ones Kavanaugh can remember anyway, which apparently aren’t many.

I try not to hate him but I do. I hate him as I hate my own rapist. And I battle the same feelings about donald trump, who is a dangerous, petty, profoundly mentally ill, narcissistic black hole of corruption and greed. He is a shell of rage, and it is my work, the work of all people who loathe him, to not become a mirror to him. Or to Kavanaugh, who revealed a temperament so fraught with anger, paranoid rantings, self-pity, and arrogance I cannot see how his mind has room for any input other than his own. Kavanaugh brags about having four women clerks. I am convinced he sussed them out for bullying purposes and bragging rights.

Kavanaugh is a travesty. He will possibly bring down Roe. His previous rulings have shown him to be about as far to the right as rush limbaugh. He seems to think regulations are a mere inconvenience to the great gods of commerce. What else can one say about a man who looks at Kenneth Starr as his shining beacon, his mentor? Apparently the Clintons still weigh on his mind. They should: he was part of a huge mess that should never have happened in the first place. Why this country insists on having no collective memory after 18 months is beyond me; perhaps we might evolve a bit if we held the evils of the past as something from which to learn, not promote, as we have this vengeful, drunken man.

Kavanaugh might make this country so dangerous for women I will be forced to leave: I have two daughters. And a son I will not allow to adopt even a shadow of the white-boy me-firstness so celebrated by the powers that be.

These “men” – trump, his minions, Kavanaugh. Not only are they terrifying and disgusting in what they represent for women, for the so recently empowered, now endangered LGBT community, for brown people, for black people, for common sense environmental regulation (god the list is apparently endless) – they are a mortal threat to our boys as well. What parent wants to see a child grow up to be an angry, narcissistic and selfish power monger? I have never believed politicians should be personal role models, but these men are infusing and altering our entire culture; the racists, the homophobes, the anti-choicers are crawling out of the shadows like starved prisoners who have been waiting to be released.

So I teach my son about honesty, equality. I am stern. I use foul language when I need to, sometimes just because I’m so fucking scared of what is happening around us. I teach my daughters about their bodies, that there is no such thing as shame, that they own their bodies, and no one has the right to touch them, even look at them, in a manner that creates discomfort. I teach them to use force. Verbal force. Physical if necessary. We practice. No “baby” voice. But they are babies. It breaks my heart.

I am boxing.  A lot. I want to adopt guard dogs. I am… so scared.

And yet. And yet… in the middle of the Catastrophe, something has been born, deep inside me:
a tenderness. A new tenderness. I feel a love for my fellow countrypeople I have never known before. trump supporters – that is a struggle. I don’t understand them. I want to, but I don’t think I can. I still try. Even racism is born from Fear. A wounded heart. It is a wounded heart that carries a loaded gun though, and that is hard to hold.

I still would rather leave. But I am more involved, more loving to my neighbors, far more aware of the inequality around me, and far more willing, wanting, and needing to leave my little white-woman-yogi-ballet-arts bubble and see what the Hell is actually happening in the world.

The non-president is having, in untold numbers of citizens, mainly the ones he loathes (women, people with various pigmentation), an unanticipated effect, of which he is probably unaware: his rage creates love. I will not be him. I will see him. I will see the people around him. And I will admit to my own hatred, my own shadows.

But ultimately his absurdity, his indescribable foolishness, will awaken many to dignity, wisdom, and walking the long road to acceptance and love.

And that is my fuck-you valentine to trump, Inc.

May you find peace, quietude, and healing Dr. Ford.

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