Appropriately Naked In April - Part V

With Stacey on the train heading home I jumped on a bus to West Seattle where I'd meet my ride, Abhishek, down to this Mankind Project thing. At this point I still had no real idea of what it was I was getting myself into. It turned out Sage was not actually going to this thing, he had wanted to but there was no availability. The weekend itself was called the New Warrior Training and from what I could tell it was designed out of initiations into manhood from various cultures with the intention of honing the modern man into actually becoming a person of accountability and integrity, rather than continuing to slump through life hoping to avoid real conflict.

There would be 36 men training that weekend and the rest would be staff men to facilitate it. Sage was hoping to be one of those staff men, but that was where the availability fell short for him. The organization encourages the trainees to carpool from where ever they are so that they can get to know each other a bit on the way down. There were supposed to be three of us, but the third, it turned out, was going to be down in that area already, so it was left to just Abhishek and I.

I arrived in West Seattle a good three hours before I was supposed to meet him. I picked up some food I was supposed to bring with me, then plopped myself down in a coffee shop to read for a while. I'd been reading Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine, a nostalgic book for me since I grew up with the TV movie in the '80s that my Mom loved. Reading the book now, in particular, was incredibly interesting drawing the parallels of her experiences to my own. Around 1pm, I moseyed over to meet my ride.

Abhishek is some where around 6'7" as far as I can tell, and skinny as all get out. We grabbed some pastries for the ride then set off, hitting it off immediately for the entire ride. Given that this weekend was to be what I was calling an emotional boot camp he and I went straight to talking about all of our issues, things we wanted to explore in ourselves, and family dilemmas we wanted to heal. It was among one of the best rides I'd had. Three hours later, arriving at the camp, Abhishek knew more details about my upbringing than some friends I've had for years, and I suspect the same maybe true vice versa.

Over that weekend I found myself in a position where I was to access everything. To fully dig deep inside myself and pull it all out for everyone to see. What I wanted to do when that time came was reach in and continue to explore what had happened at the Wailing. I wanted badly to cry again, to pull that dark essence out once more and really get a good look at what its root is, what that feeling is, and what its done to me in my life. When I tried to do this my face literally went dry.

Not only could I not produce tears, but I couldn't even spit. I tried burrowing into that wall again and could find nothing there to explore. I had emptied what was there two weeks earlier, and though its still there it didn't need to be explored anymore then. Fear flooded me that while all these other men were baring their souls for everyone in screams, tears, and convulsions I would have to resort to my old standby of faking vulnerability to get through.

I tried switching to my sexuality, which is an easy dark pool to draw from. I have a long history of purging out bad sexual mojo from myself; that had been the basis of everything I spewed out in the Sweat. I had never considered myself abused as a child, but I pulled up what I could for them like being humiliated incessantly by a cousin of mine that had given me scars I've long since recognized. That felt like old and well tread territory. I had been a male escort back in NYC for a time, and had a long history of manipulating gay men for sexual power because I was incredibly insecure with women at the time. None of this was new to confess.

In the end I did not have to fake it. What came out wasn't tears but a deep well of frustrated anger. Anger doesn't even feel like the right word, more like aggression and it came in the form of screaming. When Todd later asked me how the weekend was, what happened, was it worth it, I was reluctant to give specifics. I did give him the right impression though when I told him they got me to yell, to really, truly, and genuinely get up in to someone's face and yell from my very depths for a good five or ten minutes. I honestly don't know how long I yelled at this poor guy, but there was a deep root tying it down far inside me that came howling out until I was hoarse, and even then it came out some more.

The thing that was interesting to me was that with every long winded yell I pictured this friendly beast with a giant mane in my head, as if it were my face itself, roaring horrendously with the small curls of a smile on the edge of its mouth. It was as if to show this was good and okay to do, and that it needed to be done. Not that I should yell more often, or something like that, but that this side of me was also a good side and needs to stop being suppressed. To further that thought, it was saying that all sides of me are good and need to stop being suppressed. I have many dark sides, much like everyone else, and this entire past month of April has all been about tapping into them, pulling them out into the light, and publicly accepting all of it. It sounds a bit silly to me that simply yelling for a few minutes did all that for me, but I can say that since then I've become much more comfortable with asking, even demanding, what I feel is right for me to have, yet have still retained my more comfortable sense of generosity.

Sex, as I've mentioned before, has also been quite a complicated bag for me. This also came up over the weekend. I grew up in a home that didn't talk much about it, but it was around, and what was around was dark. It was an unspoken entity that was left to teenage imagination to discover, and it was ultimately what forged and then split my family in two. I was a late bloomer in this regard, though. I didn't become interested in girls until I was about 15 or 16, and I didn't lose my virginity until a few hours before my high school graduation. That story alone is a dosey, and I think I'm going to do another post on sex altogether.

Just after the divorce, when I was 13, my sister went through a particularly hard time. She ended up in and out of a psychiatric retreat while I was off busying myself with creating a new family of friends for myself. It wouldn't be until later that I began to recognize how much she lost in the division of our home, and longer still until I could process its affects to all four of us. There was an anger she had against my Dad that was deep and fierce, and I had no idea why. My assumption was that it was general teenage angst against parents, which as an early teen I was just starting to feel, and that she had chosen my Mom to like and my Dad to not.

My Mom and I have always had similar personalities of being the diplomatists, where as my Dad and sister have always been the fighters. Both roles have positives and negatives to them, but my assumption was that Wendie naturally was drawn to be close with my Mom because she's more passive. I was very wrong about the source of this bond, but I wouldn't find that out until my mid-20s when I found most everything else out about what had happened in the house I grew up in.

Wendie had a vehemence against my Dad when the separation happened, and she naturally assumed I did too. My view, however, was that with two kids and two parents one should go with each. Wendie and I have always been extremely close, but she was completely blindsided by my decision to live with my Dad when we were given the choice. In fact, I believe I blindsided everyone with that decision. Later on I found out that even among my parents the biggest thing they could agree on in the divorce was not to split up the kids. Since then, 20 plus years later, she and I have never gotten that particular level back again. The funny thing is that this decision of mine was rooted in a Mr. Belvedere episode. The dad, played by Bob Uecker, is kicked out of the house and ends up alone in some crappy apartment drinking cans of Bud playing poker. I didn't want that isolation to fall on my Dad. Ever the caretaker.

Back to my main point, while Wendie was in the psychiatric retreat it was deduced by the experts that she had been sexually abused by my father. I had been living with him for about a year on our own by that time and I was told they wanted me out of that house. I refused, and from then on set the tone of my disdain for psychologists I'm still just getting over. After years passed these allegations drifted away into a strange obscurity of our family history's past. Not necessarily as something we didn't talk about, but something that seemed more as a surreal crag everyone had to navigate that turned out to be universally accepted as false. Wendie, Mom, Dad, me, probably even the psychologists after a while all deemed this a misdiagnosis that caused a lot of random confusion but was now in our past.

Since then, Wendie has done a ton of work on herself on her role in that, my Dad too seems to have processed what happened, though I've talked the least with him about it. I had never felt affected too much by the whole thing, since my big deal was always feeling as if I wasn't involved with the chaos of my family's discord. I had always been heavily protected from every member of the family, from my sister on up to my grandmother. This had the affect of leaving me feeling like the one guy in the platoon who wasn't in the trenches with everyone else. Sure I was safe, but I wasn't apart of anything either. Since then I've found myself continually submerging myself into the muck, perhaps to make up for lost comradery.

Because I never felt affected, I never did much work on how this period in time took its place in my life. The possibility of being scarred from it at all never even occurred to me, yet at the same time many who have known me sexually have asked if I was abused as a child. My thoughts have scoured over my youth and found nothing, no lapses in memory, no times of trauma other than harassment by my cousin but I certainly wouldn't have called that sexual. What finally came to light, the following Monday night as I tried to go to sleep, was that it seems I absorbed both sides of these floating allegations.

With an inability to see any guilt in my father or be able to fathom my sister making these accusations without sincerity I think what happened was that I internalized a sense that perhaps I had been the abuser. My mind ran to memories of us bathing together as kids, or running around naked together as toddlers. I was able to reconcile these memories with the accusations into the possibility that she translated those same memories into trauma. This all also happened around the time I was hitting puberty. I believe as my sense of sexuality developed I took on the role of a victim. Years later, when I got into New York, with that shelter of anonymity to run around under, I found myself exploring many scenarios as the abused.

I mention all this, because I had no idea how that affected me until I got home from this weekend. By that Monday everything had been addressed in the past two weeks between the Wailing, the Sweat, and this weekend. I'd felt huge ancestral ties which addressed my disconnect with my family. I had pulled up my childhood memories of fighting and yelling between everyone in my home along with my isolation from it all. Now my sexual explorations were beginning to see much clearer roots. These things are, from what I can see, the base palette of where the root of all my various darker deeds stem from. The need for chaos, the need for isolation, independence, the inability to stay put anywhere, the lack of attachments all stem from these base things. I spent the entire day writing. Some writing was emails to the huge base of male friends I'd just found, other writing was the writing you see up here, and more still was done in my private journals.

By Monday night I was exhausted, needed to work at 8am the next morning, but when I went to lie down at midnight something about those accusations against my Dad when I was a teenager knocked loose in my head finally. I didn't sleep the entire night. I lay staring at the ceiling for a good two hours excited at this new realization, and terrified of the talks I knew I suddenly needed to have. One with my sister, another with my Dad which I've yet to have, and another still with my friend Loreli just to tell her my appreciation about how her and her daughter, Izzy, being in my life has helped heal this rift I didn't quite know I had.

After those two hours trying to sleep I gave up and went back to writing until 7am when I had to leave for work. When I got there Teresa was surprised to see me and let me know I wasn't scheduled that day, so I could go home and sleep. I went home, but I still didn't sleep. From the weekend I was able to pick out a mentor, basically someone to keep in weekly contact with to help keep myself in touch with everything I accessed then. Essentially an exterior touchstone reminder. I called him and left a message then waited to hear back.

A different staff man from the weekend called to tell me about a Welcome Home ceremony that Friday and then asked how I was doing being home again. I hesitated, sputtered, told him I was fine, then told him I'd called my mentor and was simply waiting to hear back from him. He asked again if I wanted to talk about anything, and again I stalled. I found myself clamming up again until finally I told him about being unable to sleep the night before and what was going through my head. It was an immense help.

Later in the day my mentor called back and we too had a very helpful talk continuing on what the previous staff man and I had worked out. All the while, I was also receiving emails back from many of the men I'd trained with over the weekend who also were telling me their stories of coming home, and asking honestly how I was as well. Every one of them wrote me back. By the end of that Tuesday I felt much better but I was discovering yet another wall I was floundering under.

On Wednesday I did work, and was feeling much better after getting some sleep. When I got home, however, I found more emails to respond to from these men. Sitting down to write back good solid honest replies of how I was and what had happened I found myself shutting down again. I thought, these guys don't honestly want to know how I am. I get it, the weekend was intense and powerful, but its also over. Everyone's at work again and everyone is trying to hold on to those last threads of what had happened then. I nearly shot back a bunch of emails saying things like "that's cool, I'm good." and other such trite responses. I didn't. I literally had to dare myself instead to write back how I actually was doing, what that battle was I'd just gone through. Over and over I found myself thinking the next guy I was writing was just asking out of politeness or to hold on to the weekend, but then I was getting huge in depth emails back expanding on what I'd just written to them.

What I was finding was that I had no trust in this idea that a man, especially a new male friend, wanted to hear anything about how I was doing. It was a stereotypical male problem that a really didn't think I had an issue with. I spoke with another staff man that day about it when he called about a group I was hoping to join of his on Thursday night. There are follow up groups for the weekend for support for those in different regions, but generally those people are in one place. With all my wandering, my question for him was if I would be able to drop in and out of different groups around the country. Later that night I got an email from him that felt like a calling out to the villagers for aid.

It nearly made me cry I was so touched when I got the email going to every community group leader around the nation. It was to let all of them know that one of their own was wandering and needed safe havens where ever I went. I pictured the blowing of a battle horn with vikings sailing in.

That night I had that talk with Wendie about those days of the accusations and how I realized they had affected me. She has done loads of work on this for her end, so she was well prepared and very solid in her perception of it now, and for that she was a huge help to me again. by Thursday I woke up feeling energetic and very much alive and healthy. Wend had to move that day, so we packed all her things up and spent the day relocating her to her final nest. It was my turn to help her again.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part IV

The Workshop in Portland was not all that I was hoping it would be, but I still got some things out of it. The night before Wendie went off to a party with Abby and Will while Stace and I wandered off on our own for the night to catch up. The three of us, Wendie, Stacey, and I, all rose with some sluggishness in the morning, but found our way to the Convention Center in time with ease to do our volunteering.

The volunteering was a bit ridiculous. We were charged with simply making sure we got a wrist band on everyone with a ticket. Once that was done we were participating audience members right along with everyone else. Wendie was hilarious to watch as she grew a sense of amused frustration at the lack of efficiency and effectiveness of our job. It was easy to see how to scam the system that was set up and there was no way on our part to prevent it. I could have cared less, Stacey was pretty much the same, Wendie learned to let it go but had a hard time accepting that the job she was doing was completely irrelevant in the long run. She's always been the academic and career oriented one in the family.

Once the workshop started it was interesting to me to hear what Dr. Weiss had to say. Most of it was what I'd read in his books, although I hadn't expected him to be as funny as he is. After an hour or so, though, he lead us through the first regression of the workshop.

It was much like listening to the CD. I was getting vague impressions and seeing images here and there that would barely focus before flitting away. Again, though, I saw myself in my mother's womb, but this time I could feel the excitement I had about being born. I had a sensation that I was the last to come and that everyone was waiting for me. I was about three weeks overdue and the youngest in my immediate and expanded family. In fact, I told an old girlfriend once that I felt like the world's younger brother at one point. The sensation I got about what I was excited about was that I really liked getting back into a body again, getting back into the adventure of living a life on earth. There was a nervousness in me as well, but I couldn't quite pick out what it was until later in the regression.

As he guided us through previous life times I saw myself as a young woman either in the Highlands of Scotland or out in the American frontiers by the Rockies, in a little cabin with snow on the roof. She was looking away, off to the mountains as if alone and waiting for someone to return. I had the impression that she was strong physically, but weak emotionally, somewhat dependent. This seemed to be sometime in the mid to late 1800s; maybe 1876.

I then saw myself as an old grandmother lying in my deathbed. There was family all around, among them was my Dad's mother who was my son that time around, and my Dad who was a grandchild of mine. I could feel Wendie there too, but only in spirit. I got the impression she was my husband in that life, but had been drunk and abusive, and had died before me. We were guided through to after our death and I found myself, in spirit, with Wendie after that life arranging how we'd correct the wrongs we'd committed against each other the next time around. That was the hesitation I felt when I revisited the womb before. I was nervous about coming back into a life with her again, afraid that she would be as abusive as she apparently was in the one before. So far, I think we've worked it all out pretty well.

Anyway, that was the big thing that I uncovered through the workshop. Later in the day there was a second regression that was a bit murkier. I could see images of being an Asian farmer somewhere, silhouetted walking by a rice paddy with some oxen, and a few other things here and there, but nothing that really stuck with me. We were also guided through some sort of imaginary building that took us life to life, and we had someone to guide us through. My image was of running all throughout this building with my friend Ang, which surprised me a bit.

The workshop ended around 5pm and we returned to Will and Abby's for dinner before heading home. Wendie fell asleep on the ride back, so Stacey and I had a good visit over the four hour drive back to Port Townsend. On Monday, Stace and I ran around town together exploring, while Wend looked into all her various house options that had arisen over the weekend. By the end of the day she'd found a great house by the north beach in town she could move into next Thursday and a place to house sit until then.

Tuesday I went to work again, then afterward we had a small picnic for my 34th birthday. Wednesday Stacey and I took the ferry out of Port Angeles and spent the day out in Victoria, BC wandering around. Thursday, as planned, we returned to Seattle where we set up shop at my old coffee shop haunt, Bau Haus, and visited her friend Molly before staying the night back at Chieu and Scott's. After a really great week with her, Stacey was already heading back the next day. We had a quick coffee and a bagel Friday morning then I dropped her off at the train station.