In The Annunciation, when Mary is asked to be the mother of God, she is being asked to allow her heart to remain open in a world that is simultaneously joy and pain.
Keeping an open heart through life's trials, some involving persecution, abuse, is the greatest challenge of all. Can you remain open to it all? Can you let yourself feel it all?
Can you look for the innocence in others? Can you believe if they knew how to behave better, they would?
I've been thinking and talking a lot about trauma with people in my life recently, and the journey from being somebody with low self-esteem who lets others walk all over them, to being traumatised and seeing the world as baddies and goodies, abusers and victims, which is a necessary step.
The final one being able to feel inside a sense of wellness and protection no matter what and seeing the humanity of those who hurt others, acknowledging that sometimes we are the one who does the hurting and we are no better than anybody else. It is a process of cracking open and being humbled.
In the stories of the life of Jesus, Clark Strand and Perdita Finn who wrote "Way of the Rose" encourage us to see ourselves as all the characters when we are meditating on the mysteries. Sometimes we are the Jesus being flogged and sometimes we are the one holding the whip. How good are we at surrendering to what is? How good are we at refusing to punish and persecute others, even if that is only in our own heads?
I think about this in relation to the birth world, a place I rarely engage in these days. So many traumatised women trapped in the second stage of recovery and either bullying each other or playing victim while also trying to rescue women from the system. I have been that person.
I'm not interested in trauma olympics anymore. Everybody has been traumatised, everybody. We are all in this together. I am here to hold compassionate space for that. I'm interested in how you are able to hold everybody's humanity and keep your heart open to feel it all.
- my progesterone always drops around day 22 and then I can't sleep and want to write.
