A Pilgrim’s Progress

The most exquisite pleasure is being taken down off the torture rack.

https://www.hiddenwatercircle.org/ what could it possibly mean to be a “expert” healing? It’s got to mean that you have skills and experience at doing the thing. Not learning about the thing, not doing experiments concerning the thing, but simply doing the thing. 

Pois Boiton? How do we live our lives? That’s the one true question for all of us pilgrims on the trail to the western lands?

Here’s a true story from my family. This story was legend to me. The child of the tiger is born with stripes.

Vampires have to sleep in the soil of their homeland. This got me thinking about the ways harm in all its flavors can be passed down across the generations, evolving as it goes.

I love me some vampire lore. They’re my favorite supernatural critter, full of psychological insight. In this little story I go through Nosferatu, Let Me In, and True Blood.

https://www.hiddenwatercircle.org/ Hidden Water facilitates healing circles by and for those affe red by child sex abuse. I’m just a volunteer circle keeper! I don’t speak for the organization, but i’ve found the model for the path toward healing from harm very helpful. We find ourselves lost in a sea of suffering - that’s the coping phase. After that we wash up on the Isle of Facing, when we’re able to look at the reality of our experience. Usually this involves pain, rage, and the thirst for vengeance. The third phase is releasing and moving on. This is when we find ourselves living our lives. How do we live? That’s the question of life.

If you’re the one looking in the reflecting pool, you’ve got to dive into the reality of who you are. The way to the depths lies through the surface. If you care about someone caught ip in their own reflection, stay on the safe side of the event horizon or you’ll be sucked in. Save yourself! You’re Echo in the story. The most you can do is call their name and hope they look away from the pool. Only they have the power to break the spell.

Living with borderline, it ain’t easy. It feels like the whole world set traps for me…and then I realized I was setting the trap myself, and it’s people who care about me that get caught.

The core of narcissism is that you get your sense of identity almost exclusively from what you can get other people to believe about you. Narcissist came to his end because he wouldn’t stop looking at his own reflection in the pool. He was afraid to do anything to disturb that smooth mirror. The way to the depths of who you really are is through the surface of that reflection.

The core of narcissism is that you get your sense of identity almost exclusively from what you can get other people to believe about you. Narcissist came to his end because he wouldn’t stop looking at his own reflection in the pool. He was afraid to do anything to disturb that smooth mirror. The way to the depths of who you really are is through the surface of that reflection.

The core of narcissism is that you get your sense of identity almost exclusively from what you can get other people to believe about you. Narcissist came to his end because he wouldn’t stop looking at his own reflection in the pool. He was afraid to do anything to disturb that smooth mirror. The way to the depths of who you really are is through the surface of that reflection.

Burning away the dross of pain and suffering? Turning lead into gold? However you likw to think about it, it’s life!

Burning away the dross of pain and suffering? Turning lead into gold? However you likw to think about it, it’s life!

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Elizabeth Clements, founder of Hidden Water. It’s an organization that facilitate healing circles by and for those affected by child sex abuse. You can register at the Hidden Water website: https://www.hiddenwatercircle.org/ Elizabeth’s book, “Healing Together” is at https://www.elizabethclemants.com/store/p/healing-together-a-family-guide-to-recovering-from-sexual-harm Peace to you!

Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, the original lesbian! She wrote “if you are squeamish, don’t turn over rocks”. She meant that if you turn over rocks, you’re gonna see creepy, crawling bugs under there, and things that you might not want to see. Well, we have stones in our minds, parts of us that we don’t want to see. My experience as a Warzone kid is that if I don’t turn over those rocks and learn to accept whatever I find inside myself without judging it, then I’m just gonna stub my toes on those rocks forever. When I look inside myself without being squeamish, and except whatever I find without judgment, I find that the scary, creepy, crawling bug bugs are just beetles and centipedes doing their natural thing in the world. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. In my life the act of trying to change myself just keeps me stuck where I am. When I accept myself without judgment, that’s when things change.

Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, the original lesbian! She wrote “if you are squeamish, don’t turn over rocks”. She meant that if you turn over rocks, you’re gonna see creepy, crawling bugs under there, and things that you might not want to see. Well, we have stones in our minds, parts of us that we don’t want to see. My experience as a Warzone kid is that if I don’t turn over those rocks and learn to accept whatever I find inside myself without judging it, then I’m just gonna stub my toes on those rocks forever. When I look inside myself without being squeamish, and except whatever I find without judgment, I find that the scary, creepy, crawling bug bugs are just beetles and centipedes doing their natural thing in the world. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. In my life the act of trying to change myself just keeps me stuck where I am. When I accept myself without judgment, that’s when things change.

Sappho was a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, the original lesbian! She wrote “if you are squeamish, don’t turn over rocks”. She meant that if you turn over rocks, you’re gonna see creepy, crawling bugs under there, and things that you might not want to see. Well, we have stones in our minds, parts of us that we don’t want to see. My experience as a Warzone kid is that if I don’t turn over those rocks and learn to accept whatever I find inside myself without judging it, then I’m just gonna stub my toes on those rocks forever. When I look inside myself without being squeamish, and except whatever I find without judgment, I find that the scary, creepy, crawling bug bugs are just beetles and centipedes doing their natural thing in the world. Like Popeye, I yam what I yam. In my life the act of trying to change myself just keeps me stuck where I am. When I accept myself without judgment, that’s when things change.

This is the next obstacle for our pilgrims on the trail to the Western land. The canyons of the Furies! These ancient goddesses will chase you mercilessly with their fetid breath and their hooked beak and their talons. You think they’re chasing you, but really they’re in front of you calling you to their cave.

The Jenga tower of your psyche is the way it is because that’s how it had to be to get you out of your childhood. You may as well learn to love it, cause you are the only you you’ve got!

I did not realize that the name of this Uncle Rema story was also a racial slur until after I put it up and got some comments on TikTok. This is my response!

Sometimes the idea that no one else can understand our suffering turns out to be the stickiest baby of them all. 

What could I have been, if only all of this hadn’t happened? That’s my own private tar baby. The only answer? What happens in life is what happens in life. Nothing else happened. What happens now in this moment is all that matters. Every moment in my life lead me to now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Some ideas are very, very sticky to your mind. Some of those move along the path, and some keep you stuck right where you are. Those are the tar babies.

Every time you escape the Grail woods in your own life, you learn a little bit more about yourself.

The only way out of the Grail woods is by learning and becoming what you are, not someone else, not what you wanted to be, or what you tell yourself you are, but what you actually are, the beautiful, never-seen-before-or-again you.

You can only lick it out of the Grail woods by following your path. You have to discover it as you make it, and make it as you discover it. If you’re lost in the Grail woods, and you see a path, stay off it! It’s someone else’s path and it will take you around in circles forever. There is only one way out of this place, Pilgrim. Your way.

Do you know what a ‘league’ is, as a unit of measure? It’s how far you can walk in an hour. On the trail to the Western Lands, all us Pilgrims can always walk exactly one league per hour. No more, no less! Just like life. All you can ever do is walk today’s miles, and you’ll always go at the right speed. One league per hour. It might be five miles or five feet, and it doesn’t matter a bit which it is. You can only walk your miles, no one else’s.

When you’re lost in the dark woods of your life and the path has disappeared completely, you’re in the Grail Woods! You only have to see the next right step, and you can always see that far, if no farther.

Life just ain’t like a laundry detergent commercial. Life is like life, and the best thing you can do for yourself is to embrace yours for whatever it actually is.

If you’re a warzone kid, I’ll wager a dollar to a donut that you’ve got…ambivalent…feelings about the holidays. You know what? That’s ok. There’s no reason for you to feel any differently than you feel. If you’re putting pressure on yourself to be different, or if you’re firing second arrows of judgment at yourself about your attitudes to holidays, do yourself a favor and take all of that out of your rucksack and leave it on the side of the trail. Santa Claus will pick it up later.

When you're working to live in reality instead of the denial and make-believe you grew up in, it can feel like the ground is sliding out from under you. That's because it is! But the ground you thought was solid never really was. It's always been like this. It's just that now you're living in reality. Not a problem!

I like the phrase “safe space” even less than I like the word “healing”, but I understand what it means. I just think of it as making a secure perimeter! That soothes my manly soul.

A lot of us have an epiphany experience when we acknowledge the reality of our lives as warzone kids...but to misquote Churchill, that moment isn't the end of healing, or even the beginning of the end of healing, but it is, perhaps, the end of the worst of the suffering.