A funny thing

So, it's been an interesting last week or so. Hard to know where to start exactly with this story, but I guess a good starting point is to talk about a couple of books I've been reading.

I read the book Fringeology recently (very fun read, about the problems with the sort of extreme rationalism that dominates much of science; the kind of uber-rationalism that refuses to look at things that are not easily explained and writes off those who do investigate phenomena on the fringes as kooks, that ends up being closer to dogmatism than what science in theory is all about: discovery); the author is not a "true believer," but he's curious and open-minded. The book was fascinating on many levels, but one immediate result was that it piqued my interest about a therapy called EMDR.

I guess EMDR is nothing new, but it was new to me. I got a book about it written by the woman who first started developing the treatment protocol, Dr. Francine Shapiro, called EMDR: The Breakthrough "Eye Movement" Therapy for Overcoming Anxiety, Stress, and Trauma. The book is written with counselors in mind, so I found myself skipping parts of the book that were too dense and technical to be interesting to me. But the case studies were fascinating, of how a very short series of treatments could allow people who've experienced trauma to integrate and move past the pain of these experiences.

I didn't really think I was reading the book for myself. I've never thought of myself as a victim of trauma or anything like that. Sure, I've had some things happen that were difficult, things that I've struggled with through the years. But I was more interested in how this could help other people, people who've experienced "real" trauma. But then I picked up a book we had in the house about raising emotionally intelligent children, by John Gottman. I've read a number of his other books about relationships, and I picked it up because my kid is navigating the start of middle school and something he'd said made me think that perhaps the book could be helpful. He saw it, picked it up, and asked who was reading it. I told him that I was, so he started flipping through it and came to a page that talked about the three types of parenting styles that Gottman's lab work had helped identify that were not helpful in raising children with emotional intelligence. He told me that he thought I was a "dismissing" parent. Which is not something that I would have thought. So I kept reading.

When I took the test in the book (with some prompting from said kid; it was late at night and I was sleepy), it turns out that although my score wasn't super-high for "dismissing," it wasn't, well, super-low either. Reading the description made me realize that I do have some aspects of that in myself; that some things from my childhood had made me very uncomfortable with anger. Although I knew that, and that I've certainly gotten more in touch with my angry side as an adult, still it hadn't occurred to me to think that this had caused me to sometimes shut him down, to downplay his emotions, especially the ones that I found threatening. His dad was often more angry than I could handle, which was one factor leading to the end of our marriage. More times than I can count, I've worried that he had his dad's temper, his dad's habit of shifting blame. Sometimes I think it's felt safer to try to distract away the anger than to face it and deal with it head on. When I was talking to him about it, I remembered that much of my terror around anger had come from the scary fights that went on in my house between my sister and my parents. I was afraid of my sister for a long, long time after that.

And then yesterday, I was telling a new friend something about my painful experience in the church I used to belong to, and how my heart rate and breathing used to accelerate when I heard the word "Jesus." And it occurred to me in that moment that this was a PTSD response. That I'd conditioned myself past that reaction, but that perhaps there was still some place where that trauma, and perhaps others, are still locked up in my body, or my brain. That maybe there might be something there to explore, whether there might be an expedited way to really heal that trauma, and perhaps some others that I'm not even consciously aware of but that perhaps I still hold within this body.

Today my workbook lesson was Lesson 222: "God is with me. I live and breathe in Him." I was doing my meditation on this lesson and suddenly I was sobbing. And then calm, and then sobbing again, and yet again.

Now I don't cry too often, unless I'm doing watching something emotional (like the "Born This Way" episode of Glee I watched yesterday—totally made me cry), and even then it's just the tears. So this took me somewhat by surprise. I asked the Holy Spirit for help, and guidance.

Now, according to ACIM, we are not bodies, we are projections of separation, cooked up by the delusional Mind to help us hide from God. So...I think part of me has thought, well, all I should need is the Course. I shouldn't need hocus-pocus to heal me, if the real problem is with this Mind anyhow and the body is just a mistaken idea. Especially when it comes to the emotional stuff. The Course has done a lot to help me suspend judgment, and to practice forgiveness.

But the body is a persuasive illusion. If my mind were healed, I wouldn't need any form of magic. But it is not healed. If I sometimes will take pain capsules, or homeopathic tablets, or immune-supporting supplements, and I can justify that to myself, then how really is it different to seek treatment for a trauma that seems to be real? This treatment may be magic, but I think that sometimes (and maybe most of the time), we aren't really ready to handle Reality yet, and that magic (in the sense that the Course talks about it, as using anything that isn't knowledge of our oneness with God) is sometimes what we need.

I thought I'd moved past this stuff. But maybe not, maybe mostly what I did is just stuffed it into a box and told myself that it didn't matter. That I'm a grown-up now, I've moved past these things, forgiven my parents for their neglect, the boys who said mean things to me growing up, the church people who thought they were doing the will of God by weeding me out...haven't I? Maybe not as much as I'd thought.

Crazy

So in the last week or so I've started back with the workbook. So far I think I've made it through about 4 lessons in about a week. Not stellar progress, but considering how long it had been since I'd done anything at all with the workbook, it is something.

I think I went just a little off the deep end there. Just a bit. I think I got really afraid of the Course. Felt like I just wasn't ready to deal with what I thought it was going to put me through. Was scared for my health. Just kind of wanted to put it on the back burner. It didn't occur to me until very recently just how nutso my reasoning was there.

I just re-read Carrie Triffet's book, and have been re-reading The Disappearance of the Universe. And I got a Kindle, and started reading the Text (somehow it seems less intimidating on a screen than with that big fat blue book). Somewhere between all of those things I realized a couple of things. First, that if I was going to face some challenges with my health, I'd be much better off keeping these teachings close at hand. And second, that this ego which is so roiling with anger and wrath that it would sooner make me sick and kill me off than have its own existence threatened...that it really has no power on its own. That I am holding it up between me and God, as a form of protection from the punishment that I fear. That it has no power in an of itself, because all it is, at its core, is a mistaken thought. Yes, working with the Course did start to stir up a bunch of ugly and vicious stuff. I thought I was basically a nice person. I had NO idea a lot of this stuff was lurking there right beneath the surface. In some ways it felt easier to set it aside and try to live a normal life, like I could fool this nasty ego into leaving me alone if I did it.

It seems pretty crazy when I think about it now.

Part of the lesson I've been working on for the last couple of days (Lesson 204) says this, which I think is so beautiful:

God’s Name reminds me that I am His Son, not slave to time, unbound by laws which rule the world of sick illusions, free in God, forever and forever one with Him.

Sick illusions is right. The more I look out at the world, the more it confirms the central message of the Course. A world of sickness and death, of frailty and apparent lack, where loss is inevitable, is so far from perfection it's laughable. And yet we long for that perfection, don't we? From the moment I started to learn about the problems of the world, it never made sense to me. Why would we all together create this world which would seem to be nothing that any of us (in our right minds) would choose? The answer that we are NOT in our right minds...well, it makes a certain kind of sense. But no matter how crazy the world looked, I always thought I was pretty smart and pretty...sane. It's a hard idea to accept that you might be rather crazy, along with everyone else. But once you start to see it, really see it, it starts to open up some cracks in the veneer, and some light starts to shine through.

So...back to the lessons. I've been a good student most of my life, but this has been a different journey. Fits and starts. But I'm so grateful for all of the people who've helped me so far, and for God who has been faithful through everything.

I AM, the Movie

Just got back from Tom Shadyac's movie, "I AM". It was quite a moving experience, as it was designed to be. In fact, we were meant to be moved to prove an important point: that we are human in relationship to one another. That we face many problems in this modern world, but that while the causes may seem disparate, our problems all stem from the fact that we think that we are separate from one another, and that we've been taught that satisfaction comes from winning, not from connection. The conclusion? That love is the answer. Not romantic love, but the kind of love that says "I am connected to you; you are an inseparable part of the fabric of life that we share. As I love you I love myself." All this was delivered against the background of quantum physics and our new understandings of how we influence the world.

An example: at the HeartMath facility, we see a petri dish of yogurt react to Tom's thinking about his agent, his lawyer, and a question about his marital status. This is hard to believe until you see it. We hear how random event generators around the world react to—and perhaps even anticipate—big events. Like 9/11, and the tsunami in 2004. This should be impossible. But this is what cutting-edge science is saying.

Now...how does this relate to the Course? The movie touches on a number of things the Course teaches. That we are One, not just in some touchy-feely feel-good sense, but quite literally. When the movie talked about how love is hard-wired into our DNA, it made me think about the introduction to the Course that says "The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite."

But in contrast to the Course, which is not the easiest thing to jump in and grasp, as beautiful and amazing as I think it is, I think the movie is tremendously accessible. Tom Shadyac tells his own story, which is the story of someone who's touched "success" in a way that few of us ever will, touched the depths of despair and agony in way that few of us will either, and come out of it to say, "We can change the world. We change it every day by our every thought and every small action. We can do life a lot better than we have been doing, not by having to recreate ourselves, but by embracing what we really are." So it's a great opening, which I think will touch a lot of people.

The Course deals in cause, and not effect. This film doesn't talk about forgiveness, really, or much about the illusory nature of what we like to call "reality" (although he does touch on it), but I think that it still gets us to ask some important questions and has the potential to help many people to open up to a new vista of possibilities.