Dear zenstraweberry:

Thank you for your kind words and I do find your writing very interesting! I re-read all your posts to me on this thread as well as the last one.

I think your practice of meditation and yoga are extremely helpful, have been helpful and will continue to be!

As far as the outer, public persona at the front of the body and the inner, private persona at the back of the body- interesting… The inner, true self can be also thought as inside as it has been pushed down, repressed, constrained… placed in a jail cell, closed in a dark room and sometimes struggling for air. The outer self may be the logical brain mostly with a little bit of the inner self because ..we can’t help being a bit of that! We can’t achieve a robotic existence, perfectly robotic, that is.

As I re-read your posts here I saw you in my mind’s eye as a child when your parents were fighting. I saw a beautiful little girl with big, wide eyes hearing her parents in distress, fearing for their safety… for her own: what is happening? What is going to happen? She is scared, her little heart beating fast. And she wants to fix it, to make it all right, all okay, all safe like it was before… like it should be.

So courageously she picks up a paper and colors and makes the most beautiful drawing she can come up with, flowers and the sun shining … butterflies. When she is done, she looks at her masterpiece and knows in her heart THIS will make her parents happy. It is perfect! So with her little heart beating, now from excitement, because she is going to fix things, she takes the drawing to her parents, who are still angry… and she gives it to them. That is her gift.

Only it doesn’t do the job. They look at it, quickly, maybe say something nice but they are still angry. They are still not okay and danger is still there.

So the little girl figures: the drawing was not perfect after all, not good enough… if only I can draw well enough. And maybe she is thinking: there is something wrong with my drawing… too much red in it… And the need for perfection was born. And the need for others to make you feel safe was intensified and is there, in you this very day.

What do you think of my imagining?

anita

Dear zenstrawberry:

And I need to think about your post as well on my 2 hour hike in nature. There are lots of trees where I live and lots of birds, more birds than I have ever seen before (Western WA, USA). The sun does come out at times. I will try and find a sight of the kind you painted: a tree, a bird, and sunlight pouring through the branches…

Will write you when I am back!

anita

Dear zenstrawberry:

Change of plans: I will go on my walk shortly, after a couple of postings here. I re-read your latest post.

You wrote: “I can remember the fear and extreme cautiousness and sadness from childhood, but reconsidering those emotions as one that I had as a child, undeserving of those feelings, as opposed to ones that I earned or was deserving”- I didn’t understand: are you saying that you now deserve feeling fear and sadness? That you are guilty of …what?

Regarding the painting you gave your ex boyfriend, the sunlight pouring through the branches of a tree and the bird. You wrote before that you shut down during the relationship, during arguments… I wonder if the sunlight shining through the branches is you opening up, what he wanted you to do. I wonder if that was your way of telling him you want to open up to him, you want to open up to love, to the sun light, you were offering that to him… and the sunlight is about you making yourself known to him, letting him see you, figuratively, in full light, visible in the light. You were inviting him to come through the branches and see you…?

He smiled and thanked you but didn’t see you, which is what you invited him to do?

We miss so much. There is so much we are blind to: people trying to tell us and we don’t pay attention. It makes me sad. I wish I listened in my life… to the reaching out-to-me of a child. My own regrets.

There is pain we have to live with because there is so much hurt and so much lost. And there is hope in the sun yet to come through the branches and shine on you, zenstrawberry. This is a painful process, letting the child in you, that scared and sad little girl out of her little jail inside. Unfortunately it has to be painful, but there is no other way. You have to free her and give her her rightful place, not locked inside of you and not shoved to the back of you but place her in the front of you, where she belongs.

anita