It seems like they would teach you this stuff in grade school. Require a comprehensive understanding for graduation. What emotions are. How they work. How to work with and through them.
At the subway platform following my sTMS treatment today I returned to a book I started months back but grew frustrated with and left behind, apparently prematurely. Before I gave it the boot for what I perceived as overly generic and leading language, “The HeartMath Solution” changed my life. Or at least it changed the way I breathed for a while: into my heart, the authors urged, to increase my awareness of the body’s immediate emotional state. It proved to be a useful visualization when I was going through some of the worst of my anxiety last year.
I don’t get far into the book today before the train arrives, but I clung to this nugget to share: “Emotion” literally translates from the Latin as “energy in motion.” Emotion, they go on to assert, is primary, neutral stuff before it matures into something more definable, something like red hot rage, bleak depression, or thought-scattering terror. (Or love, I suppose. Happy Valentine’s Day, etc.)
The concept is empowering. It tells me that as I wrestle with troublesome thinking that has (by definition, it would seem, it is my head, after all) a personal — and frequently circular — component (“Did I really just think about my mom’s tits?* I’m such a scumbag. I deserve to be killed and buried under a pile of fluttering mommy tits. I wonder if they look like my sister’s? Maybe I have a mommy disorder. Or a sister disorder? Were those my sister’s tits I just saw? It must turn me on, why else would I be conjuring them like this? Wait. Was that a mole or a scar before? Tits! Did I really just think about my mom’s tits — again?! I’m such a scumbag. Sigh.“) at root it all boils down to bland material stuff.
The mind, as anyone who has tried to meditate knows, is constantly churning out images. Bizarre images, even. As unpredictable as a drunken monkey, as one branch of Buddhism is fond of calling the mind. Frequently remarkable and utterly bizarre images spill forth and swing before our eyes. It seems the quieter the mind gets, the louder and more raucous things become. (“Were those my mother’s tits? On a dancing goat?”)
An image of breasts may have innocently floated to my conscious awareness as images from the unconscious will do, without warning or reason. Maybe they were even a facsimile of my mother’s. But after that initial prompt the culprit behind my anxiety, self-loathing, and depression (should such responses follow. I’d much rather the image of your mother’s nurturing glands should soothe and calm you) was all me. I feel embarrassed, ashamed, guilty, and mull the issue, helplessly turning the image over and over in my head like a puzzle that must be solved. I’ve seen them now 20, 30 times (or, I suppose, depending on how you count ‘em, 40 or 60 times). They reappear before bed. Are back the next day. And reappear at the end of the week as I’m working on my delts.
I must be developing a syndrome. Why me? Why mom breasts? Because I’m a scumbag, of course. No. Not exactly.
What authors Doc Chidre, Howard Martin, and Donna Beech, present here is nothing less than one of the key principles at work keeping me gripped by this abundance of sorrow, anger, and fear. Thanks to the very materiality of energy in motion our emotions aren’t unfathomable, incomprehensible. They start somewhere (even when we can’t remember where). And only after they find a place to roost up in our attic do they start to change form, working to maintain our attention, to sustain themselves at our expense. Physics again. A body in motion.
Once established, these bugaboobies start telling stories.
We are sick because the breasts didn’t feed us. The breasts tried to smother us. The breasts rose above us. Disappeared. Demanded too much. Never stopped crying. Called us Jake (our name’s Jack). From the other room. Late at night.
Was our dad’s name Jake?
In short, the only thing I’m guilty of is observing leaves swirling in the street (or breasts swinging in the sky, if we really must stick with this metaphor), collecting those leaves, and freaking myself out to no end over them.
It’s been one of my goals for a while now, to stop collecting. Leaves, breasts, guilt, confusion. If you find you’re torturing yourself likewise, I invite you to do the same. The breasts (or leaves) will still be there when you get back.
–
* BTW, I wasn’t really thinking about my mom’s mammaries. I’ve never even seen my mom’s slightly imbalanced, round, C-cup, brown-nippled boobs. I dreamt about them. There’s a difference. … I’m such a scumbag.
hahah
Oddly enough, I HAVE seen my mother’s mammaries, though she never even breastfed me. I walked in on her a few times getting dressed – she had the only bathroom we could take showers in that was attached to her bathroom. She didn’t lock her door when getting dressed (my step-dad always did). Yeah, one of many boundary violations in our household.
My mother’s were depressingly small, just like I thought mine would become (I was a measly A cup). I had horrible insecurities with mine because they weren’t so different from hers, until I became a mother and breastfed, then I finally got the beautiful C cups that made Magic Mama Milk. (now, post-breastfeeding, I’m comfortable with my boring B’s).
There’s a sweet saying in the breastfeeding community: “I make milk, what’s your superpower?”
I always loved that, especially since I was the only one of both sides of the family and the only one of any one I knew in my social circles who breastfed, and after getting lots of negative commentry* about how I should stop after one year with my youngest, I started getting aggravated so I breastfed more publically (but discreetly enough in a sling) – even at the zoo and the county fair and wherever I felt I wanted to whip it out and not have to use the damn bathroom (ick!!!). I felt like such a breastfeeding badass. And I never felt more sexy than when I was breastfeeding.
(* yes, that’s a made up word)
I don’t think you are a scumbag. Once or twice I let my husband try my breastmilk, especially at night when I was really full of milk and painful but my daughter was dead asleep. It tastes like melted vanilla ice cream (yes, I tried it too out of curiosity).
Little known fact – breastmilk can be used to treat pinkeye…and I used it when my infant got pinkeye on Christmas and didn’t want to go to the urgent care.
***
You know, when our weird dreams, fantasies and proclivities are accepted without shame, it’s amazing how much of a non-issue they become. Carl Jung said, “What we resist, persists”. It’s why he emphasized embracing our shadow side. Inevitably our anxieties fade with acceptance.
Whatever you dream about is perfectly okay. Truly. It is.
i love it. yeah. i know. just an example of where unwelcome images can lead. the other night’s dreamtime boob assault didn’t create any disharmony in me. i guess it could have. i sort of brushed it off, though, and didn’t really think about it. but the boundary stuff is interesting. i had similar experiences w/ my dad, who was typically absent growing up, but randomly very physically obvious (the doors do close, really).
as a side note, i tried breast milk not very long ago myself for the first time and it made me wish i were young enough for the rowdier face-flushing pink eye solution. ;)
I always get confused, then, when people reveal something taboo, then call themselves a name (in this case “scumbag”) for it.
So the dreamtime boob assault doesn’t cause you disharmony, then why should you call yourself a scumbag for it?
Are you implying that TALKING publicly about your dreamtime boob assault makes you a scumbag, or are you just trying to mollify any potentially offended readers by calling yourself a scumbag (as if you recognize the potential to been seen as a creep, but as long as you acknowledge it, it makes it okay?)
I wish people would just stop being afraid of saying what’s on their minds and say it without the added self-deprecation. It’s devaluing your self. I know most people do it to release tension and guilt. But, it’s always bothered me.
It’s bothered me because it makes me sad that we all have to treat ourselves disrespectfully in front of others for expressing our true thoughts and feelings.
In this case, it’s bothered me because by saying it outright, it really seems as if you DO worry that someone will see you as a scumbag if you don’t say it first, and therefore take the sting out of any potential judgment.
And I apologize for making a ‘big deal’ out of this…but, I have this compulsion to try and make other quirky people feel acceptable, no matter what they reveal about themselves.
the ‘scumbag’ element (much of what is presented as self-destructive think) was an intentional mental exercise (an example) exploring how circular depressive thinking works. i state this at the end of the post, but i suppose i could have been more clear (aims after humor have a way of clouding things, as does a lack of precision, which i employ here as a device to get at a concept. the concept is what is important, not whether or not i entertained mothers’ breasts in this exact particular way. (but, rest assured, i wouldn’t feel unacceptable if i had. i wouldn’t mollify for anyone else’s benefit. i’ve done so much worse, i suppose these little guilt trips don’t interest me much. or it takes much more to send me down one.) i’m only attempting to show how one’s mental response could take form if one allow’s themselves to get carried away with self-critical thinking — in this case over a dream i (in fact) had.
there was also no dancing (mammary-enhanced) goat. or delt training. humor again, or my attempt at it, in any case. i’m in a bit of mind-funk right now so i hope this doesn’t come of as coarse. but i’m not concerned for the readers. i mean i’d love for them to have a lovely time reading anything here, but my satisfaction is paramount. and that comes from being able to tell the truth (even if i have to employ unusual misleading methods — or struggle against my own interests — to do it) and i do appreciate you keeping me on target.
Oh. Okay. This is one of the reasons I don’t normally speak up about my thoughts about other people’s blog writing (because mostly I don’t read other people’s blogs – though every once in a while I get the urge and made some great pen pals that way). Most people’s blog writing is just…lackluster. Yours has been intriguing.
I have this ‘helper compulsion’ that I nearly had beat, but every once and a while, it comes out of dormancy. Sometimes it takes me a while to realize “I’m doing ‘it’ again”.
Because your thoughts seem to blend reality, dreams, past, present, etc…it’s a tad bit hard to know what’s going on when you write. But if you are just writing as exploration or processing and it makes sense to you, then that’s great. It doesn’t have to make sense to me.
I’ll probably be more concerned about misunderstandings, so forgive me if I pull back on commenting in the future. Thanks for the food for thought lately. It was inspiring me for a while. :)
Keep up the good work.
you’ve got keen insight, vital knowledge, and a strong heart. hope to see you around, around the bend.
Oh, I’ll still be around reading…for sure. We’ll see what happens. :)
I am a proud breastfeeding mama too! I thought it was interesting that you thought of breastfeeding regarding the dream as well @Casey. .
When the brown nipples in the dream were mentioned, I thought of how my own nipples got very dark and almost brown with pregnancy. So, a mother with dark nipples is a very maternal image.Breastfeeding is as well.
Just a thought.
Oh, you are my kind of woman. Excellent.
damn…i’m going to fire my editor…
the bathroom was “attached to her bedroom”
Dang, what a story and reminds me that I might have to do an article on a haunting memory of many years of my mother’s brown breasts (we are white). . stay tuned! Thanks for sharing and make it okay (smile)!!
yeah. i’d definitely be interested.
We are all scumbags for thinking what we think. But if you consider the mind as a sixth sense gate like seeing, smelling, hearing etc. We are only guilty of having consciousness…that’s all.
Thanks for stopping by my blog, hope to see ya again. If ya do, keep in mind it’s basically a humor blog. But with little chunks of truth that can bite ya in the ass. :)
…this is deep in the sense that I somehow relate this to the absence of nurturing (i.e. my mom’s breast ~ why or was I not breastfed). The state of emotion or as you so delicately elated as “moving energy” above is quintessential when I expurgate the energies which eradicate willingness to play along in this path called life as if there is an obvious undeniable right to our wrong, yet wrong to our right…(didn’t make much sense to me either at first glance :-) However, it is the energy of substances of wrong and/or right which often absent a pilot, wield and navigate are sagacious thoughts, ideas, or dreams to take flight…
~La Sonya. Very Nice Post! Got me to thinking…
I’m curious… where did you get the first image of the woman sitting? It just brought back flashbacks of my first color photography class, posing nude for a self-portrait and light-painting in a dark room.
wikicommons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page search terms “woman sitting” i think.
I really liked this post.The mind is so strange–I think of it as an ocean with everything we’ve ever seen or felt or dreamed or imagined swimming down there, with bits and pieces rising to the surface then sinking below again. I’m not sure all that’s there makes any sense or is supposed to. Maybe we’re just supposed to make-up our own kind of sense about what appears. We might not be able to control what appears, but I think we have more contral than we think about choosing to make sense of it and what kind of sense–like lucid dreamers can do with their dreams. So we may as well make the meaning something helps rather than hurts us. Maybe those images of your mother’s breast are just reminders of how nurtured we all really are when we stop to consider: sun, air, scent, food, water, trees, breeze. You couldn’t make up this stuff–but it’s all here, feeding us. Amazing.