Your Life Expressions

While a child somewhere learns how to read her first words, while people meet for coffee, while a woman picks up the phone to call her mother, while a young man buys a book , we gather here today in this place because a death has occurred amongst us. While a deer crosses the road, while a man puts his gun away, while politicians change the course of our lives, we sit here with our private thoughts of death and of life and of love and the stray thoughts of what we will eat for dinner and what must we do to prepare for tomorrow. While a cricket hops into the web of a spider and while a fish eyes a potential mate and while a counselor talks to a man about suicide, we consider that someone we have known has left the physical where we live with time, space and our earthly stories. While someone, somewhere forgives her father, while someone, somewhere, packs a bag and walks out of the door leaving her abusive husband and while six puppies are born beneath a cottage in Key West, we think of our own deaths. How will we die? When will we die? Do I have enough insurance? Should I start going to church? While a baby takes in her first breath, while an old man takes his last, we think of Elizabeth Reddoch, and how is it possible that she no longer lives with us where the earth is the foundation and our eyes see only sky.
So while we sit here, while this earth is beneath our feet and the sky is above us, while we sit here together between the moment of our birth and the moment of our death, let us consider that we live. And while we are considering the fact of our present status of aliveness, less us be courageous and ask a few hard questions. Let us allow Elizabeth’s departure from this realm to be an opportunity to consider that we might just not be as alive as we could be.
The one thing we can do for the dead is to be fully alive. So let us put all else aside for this moment and consider how it is a human being becomes fully alive while they walk on this earth.
So let’s take advantage of this moment while a loved one’s death has awakened us slightly to the nature of living. Let us allow Elizabeth’s life and her departure from this realm to shine a spiritual light on the possibilities for life lived fully and without fear.
Let’s go back in time. Let’s return in our imaginations to the moment of our birth into the physical. It was a time when were not aware of our mother’s fears and our father’s fears and the world’s catastrophes. We can go back to the moment of our births before anyone had a chance to tell us who they thought God was and before we knew anything about all the religions man has created in order to feel safe and secure in a world that is a frightening place to live.
So one minute you are nice and comfortable floating around in your mother’s juices and the next moment you are outside of her body and thrown into a new world of air and light. For just a moment let us all agree that within your small bloody body is a Spirit that is connected to all life. It is the Spirit we think we have seen in a child’s eyes. It is the Spirit that withstands the earthly journey. It is what you will sometimes see in an old woman’s face who has remained aware and awake. It is spirit that Elizabeth has become. It is a spirit that knows no fear. It is a spirit that is perfect. It is a spirit fully aware and accepting of its beauty. It knows its connection to life and to love and to the divine.
For just a moment let us imagine that the spirit within your baby body is connected to all living things. It is connected to the sap that runs within a pine tree and within the veins of a leaf. It is the life behind a the muscle of a black bear and within the wings of a hawk. Your connection to all life is with you as you begin your earthly journey. But there is a problem. The world you have been born into has forgotten its connection. The world that has forgotten its connection to Spirit has created religions, governments, wars, famines and educational systems that make you forget your own connection. The world can not disconnect us from our Spirits but it can make us forget or to doubt our connection.
Our Spirits will nudge us toward awakening . We will make efforts to reconnect our true selves. But the world is loud. It is fueled by fear of there not being enough, there isn’t enough, there isn’t enough. The child’s instinctual awareness to its true beautiful Self is forgotten. The world in which you were born could not nurture your true Self because the world in which you were born is disconnected from the spirit.
We can allow this death amongst us to nudge us toward a new aliveness and connection to the spirit that lives within us. Some have called that Spirit a loyal and faithful lover who awaits our return. The story in the bible of the prodigal son is about the return to a part of our selves that we abandoned early on. We can reclaim the part of us that truly understands what love is, what peace is, and it is the only place where lives uninterrupted. Look around and ask yourself where joy might found? Look around and ask yourself where you might find the truth. Where is that child that was fully aware of her beauty? Her perfect self? Her perfect connection to the Source of all things?
If Elizabeth could stand here in front of you having gone into spirit and able now to return to us and describe what she has experienced so far on her new path, she would be delighted to do so. Her scientific approach to things would make her want to tell us what she had expected to see and what she actually sees. She would use that Elizabeth rhythm of speech and do the work of a story teller that would teach us and entertain us and would shine a light on what it means to live totally in spirit. And I am certain that because she knows what it is to be human and now knows what it is to be fully in Spirit that she would advise us to live from both places. She would tell us to do whatever we have to do to reconnect to that Spirit within us that is love, that is beauty, that is eternal and that is the one true source for happiness. And then she would tell us to celebrate the fact that she lived on this earth beneath the sky and swam in its waters and ate its food, and touched its leaves and dug in its dirt and walked in its airports and on its sandy beaches. She would tell us to stop trying to fix ourselves. We have a true Self that lives within us and it does need to be fixed, it just needs to be remembered. And then she would laugh with her mouth wide open and she would close hers eyes and tilt her head like a gleeful child and say loud enough for our spirits to hear. “Enjoy the journey.” Thank you Elizabeth for your life and for the help you might offer to those if us still left in the physical. You will always be a part of us and us a part of you.

I would not have imagined that my life would have taken a turn toward installing raised-bed organic gardens for people. I thought that my path would follow the healing arts, writing and the self-help energy that is now so gloriously pervasive in western culture. I thought that because I was passionate about being on a life-fulfilling journey, having overcome familial pits of fate and having developed a love for other people’s journeys, that I would find a service niche which would fill my life with purpose.

I had thrown myself onto the mercy of the Universe and the Universe responded by being quiet when I desperately needed a response and speaking when I was in a place to listen. I learned that though I thought I knew the Universe was on my side, I did not really believe it. I learned that I actually believed the Universe was against me and was undermining my efforts. It was a deep-seated belief that has previously sabotaged more than one of my endeavors.

I am not sure where that belief came from. Perhaps I accepted on a deep level, the Christian tradition that says humans arrived here on earth as sinful beings who must then have a beloved child of god die to have those sins washed away. Humans are bad from the get-go and to glean the favor of God is tricky business and subject to the moods of his vengefulness. Perhaps it was being born into the culture of man where fear and insecurity usurped our Spirit’s words of comfort that made me slowly agree that the Universe could not be trusted. The Universe was not on my side.

Strange that I thought I had examined all this before and had breathed in the parts that fit my deepening relationship to Spirit only to discover that I have layers of harmful and derailing beliefs stored inside of me. It appears that when a human decides to jump out of the circle of safety, she is likely to find a net that does not support her deepest assumptions. But, if she holds on to the hope of discovering a true relationship with that singular force of energy she has called God, she is likely to discover the beauty of her Spirit which surpasses all understanding.

I appreciate the opportunity to be with you tonight. I want to thank Justyn and Nicole for asking me here to do what they termed a Mini-Healing Night.

There was a time in my life when the option of participating in a life-affirming event such as this much less facilitating an event such as this did not exist in my mind.

We each have our own story. We each have a history that has shaped who we are at this moment. When I ook out into this audience I am aware that I am in the presence of and am connected to people who have traveled a human path and for whatever reason, that path has brought us all here tonight.

It deserves to be pointed out that we could be doing a lot of different things besides sitting here with one another. Our society offers thousands of distractions and thousands of opportunities for fun, excitement, and experiences. And here we are on a Thursday night, gathered around the painful subject of abuse.

We have chosen to be here. There are delicious things occurring outside these walls. People are laughing. People are watching a movie. Some are dancing. Some are making love. And here we are, with our stories of one human doing harm to another and the process of healing from that harm.

What is it within us that would make us want to listen to another human beings struggle? Why do we want to share the pain of being struck by a fist and describe the eyes of anger and insanity? Why are we able to come here in support of a friend whose pain has affected our lives and whose journey has crossed our own?

I believe it is because the human spirit has within it a spark that yearns for wholeness. We want the gaping wounds healed and we want to know the power of our authentic selves. We know there is a strong, empathetic, stable, and creative being within us and we want to clear away the debris of pain in order for that being to live fully.

We want to flourish in our lives because we have a suspicion that we have something to offer the world. We know that we have every right to claim our potential no matter what life has thrown our way and no matter what we have had to overcome. We want what is ours and tonight is another step toward becoming a more self-loving, nurturing, and powerful human being to support others in that journey as well.

My struggle to become the person I am today is similar to many peoples struggle. Many of us were born to parents who were incapable of being good parents. It isn’t that they did not or do not love us, it is simply that they are incapable on this go around in this life time to give to their children the best advantage for the best life possible in their lifetime. It took me years to learn that parents can not give what they do not have no matter how badly they want to give it.

They are at their own level of enlightenment and will only pass on to their children the emotional and spiritual tools they actually possess, not what they wished they possessed

Like all humans, my story starts with my mother. My mother became addicted to prescription drugs that the doctors gave her for depression. Later she would combine alcohol with these drugs.

My father struggled with the thin layer of resources afforded to a man who was told reaching out for help was a sign of weakness and that crying was for women. My mother’s pain and addiction became so intense that she slit her wrist on a number of occasions and by the time she had five children her life had found the bottom of a self loathing pit.

My father put my brothers and I into foster homes the two times when my mother was institutionalized. The doctors would clear her to come home and we would all be gathered from our various placements and be united once again as a respectable but dysfunctional family.

I would discover later in my life the reason for some of my mother’s pain. I found out that while I was in my mother’s womb, not far from the time of birth, her mother was shot and killed by her mother’s live-in boyfriend. As an explanation for the murder, the headlines the following day read, “Police Blame Nagging.” It was 1958. The boyfriend killed himself and his son discovered both bodies.

So I was born into the arms of a woman whose mother had just been killed. My mother was young, beautiful, and incapable of dealing with the blow of losing her mother in this way. She was in her early twenties when she lost her mother. I wrote a personal essay called Good Mother and I want to share it with you now. I share it with you because many victims are created by one act of violence. This essay is about a mother who could not rise to the duties of mother, in part, because her mother was murdered in a moment of domestic violence.

Read Good Mother (See Healing Products on Site)

My father was young and lacked the tools to deal with a wife full of sorrow and the children his loins produced. They were good people trapped in a society that did not offer, at that time, therapy or family support capable of dealing with that kind of tragedy.

My father died an alcoholic and some of my siblings have not been able to transcend the addictions of our parents.

Family fate has a strange pull on the generations that follow. I was born with just enough insight to save me from total self destruction. I knew I could turn out like my mother and I knew many women turned out like my grandmother. I knew I needed to keep my eyes open to the possibility of following tragic footsteps. I woke up at the age of twenty five realizing I had closed one eye.

I realized that my own drinking was taking me in a direction that could easily clear a path for a third generation of violence. Please do not misunderstand me. Violence against women was and is a reality with or without alcohol entering the picture. Alcohol just upped the chances of me being raped, battered or murdered. So after I realized my drinking was leading me down a path of self destruction at twenty five, I thought about it for another ten years and gave up the alcohol.

But what actually made me quit drinking was that my baby brother hung himself when he was nineteen years old. His sorrow was so great and his personal resources so slim, that the only way he found to remedy his pain was to take his own life. His mother had never been able to give him the love and attention a son needs to flourish and a harsh world full of expectations of what man should be, stacked a wall to high for him to climb.he killed himself.

It was this blow to the core of me that woke me up.

I made a decision to live and have been on a healing journey since that day. This journey has brought me into the lives of many women and some men who have shared with me their story of family abuse and their story of self reclamation. I have written and am writing about my own healing journey and am conducting Healing Nights and workshops to facilitate other people’s life affirming journey. I offer opportunities for women to create art, writing, performance, spoken word or any personal expression of healing from abuse. My own healing from being molested as a child began with just such an opportunity and I have never forgotten the power of that event.

My life experience has afforded me a strong passion for helping others reclaim their lives. I am honored to be a witness to that amazing stance of a Human Being declaring that what was done to them will not define who they are. They are more than what was done to them.

Many things have changed in our society since 1958, the year my grandmother was murdered, the year my mother lost her mother and the year I was born. You probably will not see a headline blaming nagging for the murder of a woman though I have seen things over the years news articles that come very close to that and I imagine you have as well. Police take classes now after thousands of women lost their lives as a direct result of domestic violence. A domestic violence emergency is treated more like a real emergency because of the numbers of murder suicides that occur in domestic situations. And because feminist rallied and educated and lobbied for change we see less headlines like the headline about the murder of my grandmother.

But what you will see on a daily basis are women being objectified. They are beautiful body parts on calendars, magazines, and TV shows. They are full lips, big breast and flat stomachs.

There are hundred of insidious ways to demean another human being and to allow yourself to be demeaned. Insidious and powerful. When a news cast introduces a family as “Mr. So and So and his wife So and So, she has become lesser than the man. It is a leftover way of introduction that seems innocent but has more far reaching effects than we might realize. The other day I watched a news cast concerning Haiti and the American journalist had put the caption “A farmers wife” below a woman talking. Is that any different than the Mrs. John Smith or Mrs. William Smith that was used in our culture for so many years and what we still sometimes see today?

If women are minimized as less than the most respected people in our culture, if they are not recognized as equal to the ones in power, a door to abuse is opened.

Abuse starts with the perception that one person’s importance and right to respect is less than another persons. Both the victim and victimized live under these perceptions. It is that perception that drove the institution of slavery, still hinders women from gaining equal pay for equal work and fuels the blockade against Lesbians, Gays and Trans Gendered from absolute access to full American citizenship. The societal perception is still that men can not display weakness and women do not have the strength to run countries, companies or become leaders in their own right. And if she is not beautiful, she needs to stay in the background of all of it.

It is deep and engrained and no matter how many football players shed a tear about their fathers, they had better bucky up and be men if they face a personal crisis and no matter how many female presidential candidates, she had better be able to explain why she wears pant suits. How our tribe views the roles of men and women will have a direct result on our diminishment or elevation as tribe members.

And if we are living in a role of strong man and weak woman, we are not living by who we really are. And if we are not living by who we truly are, we are not seeing who someone else truly is. And if we are not seeing who someone else truly is, we risk minimizing their status as spiritual human beings and we are both diminished in the process. Actual and physical abuse follows the heals of a warped perception about other human beings.

I have a friend who is about five years older than me. She fights hard battles like the trafficking of women and children, domestic violence and rape.

She just came back from Costa Rica after having a facelift. She is a friend and so I had to try and understand how it was that she felt she needed to have a face lift given her years of work for women’s rights and her firm stance for the empowerment of women. Surely I said, the new feminism that women have struggled and fought for had come to more than women being able to pay for their own facelifts?

Her response was that she was in a battle for her economic life with this financial downturn and the competition of a youthful face with the same law degree was her motive for her trip to Costa Rica. I am not sure she is right in her assessment but there is a part of me that suspects she is.

Perception is a powerful force. If we perceive women as weak, and unfit for leadership we will have a United Nations full of men in dark suits making the decisions that decide who gets to eat and who gets to starve. If we have the perception that a woman is less of a human because she gives her opinion in a way that does not placate the egos of others we have polite women who teach their daughters to be quiet and men who will not have the opportunity of loving someone they view as an equal.

We have perceptions about children that have followed us from the dark ages. The perception that children would endanger themselves if they, nurtured their intuition, honed their physic abilities and learned to listen to their spirits, continue to create emotionally immature adults who pass on their weakness to their children. The perception that children are to be seen and not heard still prevails in this society and that perception quiets the daughter’s voice that would scream from the rooftops that her father touched her vagina and made her touch his penis. It happens every single day.

That little girl will grow up and not know how to give herself the respect she will need in a society that has yet to embrace her as an equal being. She will whisper No instead of roar like a lion when she is pressured for unwanted sex. And she will remain quiet after date rape and drink her voice back into submission if it threatens to break lose beyond the confines of her closed-off throat. That little girl will grow up and not trust her own voice when her intuition warns her of a new acquaintance she met at a party.

The images we see on TV and the movie screen of weak women and strong viral men saving them continue to create generations of women who feel they will be safe if they have a man. I once read an amazing essay by a man whose girlfriend was raped while they were out on date. He had the same perception about a man’s hero status as so many women do before that fateful night. He believed he could stop violence from occurring against a woman because he was a man. He describes in painful detail his impotence during those minutes of having one man hold a knife to his throat while another man raped his girlfriend.

I am not trying to frighten you. What I am trying to convey is the need for each of us to realize that the most important thing we can carry in this world is a true sense of self. Take as many self-defense classes as you feel is necessary, carry your keys in your hand as an eye-jabbing weapon and scream loud and hard if you are threatened. But more important than any of these things combined is your sense of Self. Discover for yourself that you can become your own person. Perceive yourself as someone who does not live by someone else’s definition of who they think you are or should be.

What stops violence is a changed perception of who has the right to power, love and respect. What stops violence are women declaring they will not be treated as though they have nothing to contribute but beautiful body parts and a willingness to please. What stops violence is men’s willingness to see themselves with respect and to act on their desire for a better society. What stops violence is an active intolerance against any human being treated as less than anyone else. What stops violence is each person’s decision to heal from society’s small mindedness. But what stops violence on the deepest level and has the most far reaching effects is each one of us deciding to cast from our selves ANYTHING that goes against our spirit of who we truly are. If we do that, and I view it as one of the most powerful things one human can do, we can not help but to see that one person’s belittlement is our own.

Violence is the small person’s solution to things they can not control. We know that rape is not about sex, it is about power. We know that our daughters, mothers, aunts, sisters lovers and friends become who they came to this earth to become when they are released from oppression. We know that an unenlightened society that oppresses one group will oppress as many groups as it feels is necessary to maintain that power.

We also know that people have the ability to transcend the culture in which they were born. Black Americans, women, and now Lesbians and Gay Americans, have not allowed the world they were born into to define their worth. When Nelson Mandala was asked about the one thing he attributed his ability to withstand the oppression of apartheid, he replied that his strength came from the fact that he never forgot who he was. He knew who he was as a human being and remained connected to that self knowledge all of the days of his imprisonment.

Victims are not responsible for being victimized but they can help how they perceive that victimization. The victim’s job is to know that what was done to them does not describe them as a person, it merely describes something that happened to them. It is not to be taken lightly nor is it to be integrated into their perception of their worth.

Why would being hit make you feel like you are worthless? Why would being raped influence your ability to love yourself? Why would being molested as a child make you question your right to a full and happy life? The beliefs a victim internalizes about herself after abuse is what fuels her ability or inability to overcome the abuse.

Healing from the negative beliefs we have created when were victimized can be healed. Tonight is an example of an opportunity to heal from the deep wounds of having been hurt by another human being or loving someone who has been hurt by another human being. What someone did does not have to make you feel small, timid, or less worthy. If we allow that then we have agreed to a double victimization. It does not have to be that way. It does not have to be that way.

You have come here tonight because you already know that. You know that beneath the sorrow, the anger, the outrage, there is a steady, unified declaration of strength. You have a strong suspicion that a deep healing and powerful reclamation can take place inside of you and inside of someone you love. It is the spark that first made you decide to come to this building when you could be doing something to distract youself. But you came and something I have said tonight will fall onto the fertile ground of your desire for wholeness. There it will grow. I promise you that peace and understanding can grow from this time together tonight.

You will assist others in their journey of reclamation and growth. You will give love where there is sorrow and you will give comfort where there is pain. You will not be able to help yourself because that is what love does. Healing clears away the debris of pain. It creates room for the love that we all want to give and the love we all want to receive. Love follows healing and it is a deep love born from a place that is indescribably painful and equally indescribably valuable to the human journey.

The small act of hearing about this event and by coming here tonight you have said YES! and joined a thousand other yes’es that have been declared in the minds of those who have chosen to heal and to assist others in their healing. You have tapped into a place within you that surpasses all pain and all confusion if even for a few minutes.

Humans have the potential to transcend all of their meanness and all of their insecurities all of their pain. I believe this. I believe this because I keep talking to groups like this who know that the human spirit is stronger than concentration camps, apartheid, institutionalized oppression, sexism, misogyny, and hate. The human spirit that is within you and the human spirit that is within me is unquenchable in its desire for inner peace.

I appreciate you honoring me with your attention.

I will be conducting the fourth annual Tallahassee Healing Night for Women in the fall. Women will bring their art, spoken word, written word, performance or any artistic expression of healing to the event to share with other women. It is a powerful event with powerful stories of self reclamation. Send me your email or go to my website for upcoming details.