Appropriately Naked In April - Part I

I want to share some things about this past month. I'm talking about it as if its over and I still have one more weekend to go. These weekends, it seems, is when the Universe cranks the knob a little bit higher in the flowing river of intensity. Thankfully I'm given these weekdays to sit with it, go to work with it, and lend my support to my sister while the Universe cranks the knob for her during those days.

While back in Texas with Katy, she and I took to doing rune readings most mornings and tarot readings every few days or so. We just liked it, we were having fun. We both took it seriously as well, but mostly we liked playing with those "tools of fate reading" as they may be called. With those tarot readings we generally did full spreads and asked things like "what I needed to know about the path I'm on", "what did I need to know about the next week or month". Things like that.

I asked once what I needed to know with my visit to Port Townsend. I asked it because I was going strictly by request from my sister. She had broken up with Daniel, her fiance, and requested my support through the process; she even flew me up from San Antonio so she had a date she could rely on me being there. I wanted to gain any insights I could on how to support her best. Do I smother her with support? Do I just go to be there, but not be too invasive?

Again, I don't look to these tarot things as the end all be all of advice, I take them with a grain of salt. I do, however, generally find the cards giving good advice and I often will reference what they've said when I'm working out how to do things. For the skeptics, I grant you that this could be using the interpretation process of card reading as a tool to access my subconscious, much like the hand in the puppet methods of psychotherapy. Whatever it is, I find it helpful and it works.

Anyway, the reading clearly spelled out that I would be heavily challenged. That I would be facing a prolonged time when I would either make immense progress in my growth, or falter back into a terrible stagnance that would reverse all that I've done so far. As the cards lay out they give an inner self and an outer, or projected, self. Neither of them said very good things about me. The projected self called me a false strength if I remember correctly, and the inner self claimed I was an internal liar. Now lets get back into what happened this month.

The weekend of the first full week in April Wendie wanted me to go to these two spiritual growth functions at a place called Sacred Groves that she loves. I believe I've mentioned before my great disdain I've struggled to over come about psychologists, therapists, counselors, etc. That disdain doesn't necessarily carry over to these spiritual, self help, hippy things, but there's definitely still a wariness to them. I view them with the same adjusted view I've taken with the psychology field. They can be quite powerful and healing, or they can be utter shams, pathetically amusing, and a waste of time if you have no interest in the sociological aspects of how far escapists are really trying to go.

I have, however, been to things with my sister before like this (she is an avid pursuer of these venues) and have often been impressed with the authenticity behind the ceremonies and their affects. The times I have walked away from them feeling nothing but pity for the people who believed in it, my sister had felt the same disappointment, and usually more emphatically than I did. Still, though, whenever she invites me to these things I'm always curious to go, but wary of investing myself into it.

Sacred Groves is an hour and a half south of Port Townsend and has little cabins and yurts to stay in while there, so when we arrived we piled our stuff into the cabin and headed to the main building. I'll spare you the nitty gritty details as I feel myself starting to draw myself into giving them. The event we were attending that night was going to be a Wailing.

A Wailing, to the best of my descriptive powers, is a ceremony where I bunch of people assemble in a circle around a candle, or small symbolic altar of sorts, and create a space to really just grieve. I mean really dig in and get your shit out of you. This is something I'm often accused of repressing, yet claim as a large part of what this journey of mine is all about. So far my "spiritual sojourn" has consisted of tapping my intuition to the best of my ability and recollecting my past into something recognizable and tangible. This would be the first real step into digging around in the dark with vigor.

The room was large and circular with a domed ceiling crowned by a large circular skylight at the peak. There were about ten or twelve of us attending, three of us were guys, which was apparently an abnormally large percentage. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves by saying our names and why we'd come. From that quick round I knew I could take this ceremony seriously and invest myself into it as people checked in with serious issues one normally doesn't disclose to strangers among others who checked in like me as "I'm here to support my sister and see what this is". A few guidelines were given for the process which essentially were don't try to comfort someone in the process. All of us are here to dig into deep dark places and comfort will only pull us out of it keeping it inaccessible. From there some music came on and it was suggested that we simply start by stretching to relax.

It took me a good half an hour or so of really trying to feel and then leaning into that feeling of tingling in my chest and face to actually get myself to conjure up tears. By the time I did I didn't know it until I felt my leg getting wet because they were streaming off my nose and chin. I found my lead in to getting there very interesting because it was focused around massaging, stretching, and basically tending to my legs and back, but primarily my feet. All of these parts of my body are the work horses in keeping me mobile and nomadic, or to put it in other words, they allow me to be on my own or keep me isolated; disconnected or free.

What came up in my mind when the tears started was an image of the front steps of my first apartment in Denver the night I got jumped in there. That that came up first as the gateway was fascinating to me as well. I was drunk, and two drunk guys followed me into my building. One got ahead of and behind me as I spun to see the other come in the door and caught me at the top of the steps putting me in a full nelson. The other came straight at me to work me over. This was my bad ass Mel Gibson, Lethal Weapon moment. I kicked off the top step, as the guy behind me held me, just as the other guy was rushing me about a foot away. I kicked him in the chest with both feet sending him flying back down the flight of stairs into the wall, and with that kick I pushed off him into the guy holding me sending him into the wall behind us. I slammed the back of my head into his face and he let go of me. They both then ran out of the building and I stood at the top of my steps in all my new found Brutal Man Glory, drunk and adrenalized, yelling at them that they were cowards and who were they to fuck with me. I then went to my apartment and just sobbed for half an hour for a reason I still have no idea of. Pride of bad assishness to weak sobbing in a moment's shift.

None of that actual confrontation actually came up when I started crying at the wailing. I just saw the empty image of the stairs and front doorway in the night and had that dream knowledge that it was that particular night I was seeing. Once I saw that I was also hearing the other people in the room yelling, crying, shouting and stomping. I could single out my sister's shouts in particular which helped transfer me to the stairs of the house I grew up in. The light from the kitchen reflecting off the hallway wall and my parents loudly yelling at each other from there. Then I could see my sister as a little girl leaning over the railing from the second floor yelling down at them to shut up and stop fighting. That vision then pulled back to my bedroom door barricaded with stickers covering it, the top of the stairs just on the other side. A thickness of dense, dimly protective air between the shut door and my bed where I could feel myself sitting as a little white haired boy that muffled the screams just enough to be in my head.

My brain then took me on a wild, rapid fire tour of all the places in my life that I ever had a serious melt down. Really, just any place I cried and unloaded from my teens until now. I saw the living room in Brooklyn where I saw Happy Together that reminded me of a disintegrated friendship I'd lost my virginity too in high school, the Denver apartment scene again, storming out the door at 15 kicking the door in (which my Mom still talks about as that one day I got mad), and so on. It was intense. Overwhelmingly intense to the point where I was able to unload several years worth of a tears reservoir. I just leaned into it and sobbed, drooled and let snot run down my nose and face on to my leg until the well was out and I felt emptied of it. During all of this my body was curled into itself in a protective posture; head hanging over my right leg bent under me. My left leg up with my arm around it to hang on and my back curled over me as a shield from anything behind me.

When I was dried up I impulsively, yet slowly, opened that defense up. It felt a release of everything I'd just unloaded, I could feel it leaving me out into the domed skylight above. Then a subtle shift occurred. I felt suddenly like a receiving satellite dish. My body was laid out flat, half on pillows, half on hard wood floor; arms wide, legs parted, and I began to convulse from my stomach. It was like a tightening of the muscles spasmodically in spurts. As my body raised with each convulsion and dropped again, the back of my head would drop on the hard wood floor beneath it. It was controllable, but uncontrollable. By that I mean that I could have stopped it if I wanted too at the expense of losing it altogether, but by letting it just work its mojo. I was just left to slamming my head against the ground and convulsing for probably 20 minutes.

The weird thing to me, was that in these convulsions I was getting incredibly strong powerful visions of Peru, seeing the word over the country in my mind, with visions mostly of Lima along with occasional Machu Picchu draws. I say that that was the weird part, after all this other strange phenomenon, because it seemed so unrelated. The impression was so strong, though, that I wondered if I should drop all the other things I have lined up to do in the next few months and just get a plane ticket to Lima first thing in the morning, or maybe even that night.

When I came out of that a sort of circle had reformed a bit around the candles that were going and I squatted into that. The women were singing a song now that people were slowly chiming in on about ancestry. With lyrics calling our grandmothers spirits to help us in our healing, then another set calling on our grandfathers as well. I got crystal clear portrait images, almost like highly skilled pencil sketches of each grandmother of mine one at a time; Mor Mor then Nana. And then the same of both my grandfathers; Papa then Mor Far. All of whom are dead now. The portraits were positions I had never seen them in in photographs, which I thought was interesting. This had a powerful resonance with me in a way of helping to heal the horrible sense of disconnect I have to my family. As it cycled through the four of them it then expanded to my great grandfather on my mom's paternal side, Pop, then my great grandmother on my dad's maternal side, Grandma Mabes; both of whom were strong personalities in the family. Then it continued on through my other great grandparents, and down the line into other great greats that I knew images of.

Then the song shifted to a different song about healing. As it did, those family images shifted to family alive now who are having problems. The first of which was my aunt who is struggling deeply with a host of health problems. Then came my Dad, then my sister, another aunt of mine, then another, my Mom eventually came up, as well as my cousins, then friends of mine struggling with personal issues. The over all impression I felt from it was that I was meant to help heal them, and use what I learn in this little odyssey of mine to help re-found the family. I saw a metaphorical image of chunks of cement shattered off of a larger cement foundation and could feel strings attached to each chunk pulling them back into one solid whole again. On that solid whole strong foundation I knew was where I was to build my own new family for the future, with my own wife and my own kids.

With that last vision I came out of it. My face was swollen and stained with the tears and drool I'd bathed myself in. As came back into myself again I was singing along with the rest of the group simple songs I didn't know the lyrics to, but was easily picking them up through mumbling a few verses. The ceremony drew to a close and after some hugs and goodbyes Wend and I retired to our cabin in the woods. We went to bed pretty much immediately and I journaled the shit out that whole experience still feeling the intensity inside me. Peru was also very heavy in my mind, wondering what that intensity was. I still had that compulsion to go get there now to find whatever it is waiting for me there, but instead I went to bed.

Tomorrow would be the Sweat Lodge...