![]() Close together, holding each other tight.Įditor’s Note: Dr. It’s a cliché, but there is really only one way to truly face the demons of life: Hear the words that are said to the small, fragile self of you and let them expand and echo in your heart. Remember the hand on the face and exactly where it was placed and how it warmed your skin. I invite you to remember a time when someone comforted you, held you, and made you feel precious. So, like a prayer, a mediation, a dance with my own mind, I must grasp and refine the image, write the story of that holding experience in my neurons, and then pull it up when I need it. I will soon be in the hospital and my loved ones may not be able to walk in and hold me. It’s the ONLY thing.”īut many of us are in lockdown and we cannot access this perfect, biologically-prepared resource. Maybe this is what poets mean when they say, “ Love is not everything. THIS is what our nervous system longs for. To be rocked in the arms of a loved one, to feel a loving hand on your face, to hear a soft voice telling you that you are precious and are not alone… A scrambled brain.įor me as an attachment theorist and researcher, all these threads tie into and reflect the most basic biological survival code of all: being WITH another who is present and loving. I lost my glasses, called for the same appointment twice, and forgot the email of my best friend. But most of the morning I felt anything but competent. The sense that you CAN deal with this demon, this darkness. A friend told me that Johnny Depp only has one good eye! Now why should that comfort me? But it did. Stories can calm us, especially those that reflect our dilemmas and show them to be universal and able to be faced with grace or humor or some kind of aplomb. ![]() These days, my exercise bike sometimes takes me out of my dark track, and I find suddenly find myself singing ABBA songs at the top of my lungs. As a child, I would pump up and down on my swing in my garden and sing simple songs again and again. Movement can calm us – singing and moving in rhythm seems to lull our amygdala and offer the promise of emotional grounding. The Journal of Behavioral Medicine in 2005 reported a study where focusing on the breath in mediation was less calming than focusing on the word “Love,” which was defined as a more spiritual mediation. Yesterday IT (the Holy Spirit, the Goddess, or whoever) said, “The light comes in your good eye, too!” Just sometimes, when I recite my personal incantation to a greater power, I hear a voice. ![]() New meanings seem to pop up from the intense focus of prayer and incantation, too. It offers the brain predictability, just like nursery rhymes while someone rocks us, and we hear the same sounds again and again. Ritual gives us a sense of order and a sense of control. Prayer is ritualistic, incantatory, extended repetition, as in hymns or reggae music. It is my passion and my life’s work to bring it to the therapy field and to my audience.) There are only so many ways of soothing our nervous system. (I am always reading or writing about attachment, it seems. I remember reading about attachment and religion. We pray – even those of us who do not believe in God or at least a God who is listening. My adult brain says, “Oh, this must be what is called the ‘dark night of the soul.’ This is ‘suffering.’” I scramble to get some perspective, to find a place to stand, but I can’t find any solid ground. Then, I am a small child of about 4 curled into a fetal position. ![]() I also fear that, after all this, the tumor will spread elsewhere. This stokes my fear that someday I will be basically blind. My remaining eye works but isn’t that great. But this is not what it feels like when I wake at 5 in the morning, guts churning. It sounds manageable when I say it like this and see it in print. One of the great struggles for all of us is to answer the question, “How can I find a way through this darkness?”įear is a program for escape, but what if there is no escape?įor me, this moment happened just a few days ago: finding out that, at a time when I am busy moving into some kind of richer, more “retired” lifestyle, I have an aggressive tumor in my eye ( which I last mentioned in January) and have to have this eye removed. Moments of raw vulnerability come for everyone – those moments when you feel totally helpless.
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