P52 Week 8 - Low Light

What do I do when I feel like my light is low – feeling un-centered, low energy. What are ways that I bring out my light?

I tidy a little, maybe go through a drawer and clean out one of my many piles. There’s a sense of satisfaction that comes with taking care of something that’s been bugging me for some time: like getting my taxes done; like completing and submitting my PNWA (Pacific Northwest Writers Association) literary contest entry; like boiling the beets that have been sitting around for over a week; like wiping out that crusted milk stain in the fridge that I’ve been looking at for days. For now, every time I open the fridge I have a frisson of pleasure at seeing a clean shelf. When I eat the beets, I soften knowing that I have saved the red veg from an early demise in the compost. When I hear others whining about not having done their taxes, I feel a huge sense of relief that mine are all done. When I think of having accomplished a PNWA contest entry, I feel a glow of contentment. And those little body senses of relief and pleasure, glow and softening add up to brighten my inner low light.

So getting things done is one way I brighten my inner light. Listening to music is another way. Right now I am listening to my Hawaiian Radio station on Pandora. This resources me in two ways: first, it is music, sweet music that fills me up and resonates in my body and second, it brings me to my tropical Hawaiian beach nature place that I love and that also fills me.

I have used the term ‘resourcing’ and for me it has a quite specific meaning. In the somatic/neurobiology field that I have studied, it is a physiologic state known as the Optimal Arousal Zone where the best learning, best creativity and deepest social interaction can be achieved. In even more technical terms it is when the ventro-vagal part of the neuro-endocrine system is activated. It is a place where I am neither over-activated – as when I am in an adrenalin rush or chronic stress mode – or under-activated – as when I check out or dissociate.

I am outside the Optimal Arousal Zone when I am in a low light mode. Under-activated, I am usually numb, ‘bored,’ or unmotivated. At the other end of the low light mode – when I’m over-activated – I feel stressed, worried or riled up about something. I sense it as a hint of a churn in my gut, tenseness in my jaw, itching on my skin. In this mode, my light is ‘burnt out,’ depleted, and I know I am overdue for refueling.

So, I add watts to my low light or ‘resource’ with music or getting chores done. I also find resources in meditating, nature, literature and movies, moving about taking walks or working out, and spending time with beloved friends and family.

What are ways that you ‘resource’ yourself, build up your inner light when you are in a low light mode?

P52 Week 7 - Back Light

My daughter’s Project 52 is a photography exercise – hence the lighting references: sidelight last week, backlight this week. In my weekly pages that accompany her project prompts, I will no doubt have to riff off of many technical photography terms. Sigh!

The Project 52 moderator technically defines backlight as a controlled technique, intended to produce depth or separation of subject and background.

OK. So, lighting from the back creates depth. If we use light as a metaphor, we may say that backlight comes from how we have lived our lives and perhaps the depth from such illumination may even be seen as an accumulation of wisdom. I hope I am lit up from my past with a lot of depth. Surely I’ve gained some measure of profoundness for I am pushing 65 years!

Separation of subject from background. Yes, I have been able to – to some extent – separate myself from my past. I think that ability too comes with age – and with wisdom if some of it has been picked up along the way. I’ve learned to let go of some of my anger and blame. I have gotten better at accepting my part in the dysfunction that makes up my past and that allows me some distance. ‘The past is in the past’ as the Frozen song says.

Oh, I can year my kids now: “Not again, Mom, stop bursting into song when you hear a phrase!” Sorry kids, I can’t help it. Anyway, the past is less able to whipsaw me this way and that, like a dog clasping a play toy in his teeth and flinging it to and fro. I am able for the most part to ‘let it go.’ Come to think of it, the lyrics of Let It Go have quite a lot to say about my life:

Don't let them in, don't let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don't feel, don't let them know

Hmm, I did a lot of hiding as a youngster

It's funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can't get to me at all!

… Wow, I’m thinking that that’s another illustrative description of backlight separation.

All right, all right kids! I’m done with the song references.

Back to backlight. Light from behind shows our shadow in front of us and thus makes our reflection easier to see. If we use our physical shadow as a metaphor for unconscious shadow material – that which we hold onto which is below our everyday consciousness – seeing our shadow looming in front of us can be pretty unnerving. The concept of Jungian shadow comes in two forms, both of which we tend to reject or remain ignorant of: the negative shadow because that’s the least desirable aspects of our personality; the positive because those qualities are hard to acknowledge, especially in those of us with low self esteem.

So backlight gives me a direct look at my shadow. Hello, hello! There I am procrastinating again. Really? Dang, what’s that about anyway? Come on shadow, get behind me. It’s too hard to look at you. Or maybe it’s my positive shadow that stares me in the face. Oh my, perhaps I do have a sweetness about me that I find so hard to acknowledge. Oh no, really, I’m not sweet. I’m more of a cold person. Where did that sweetness thought come from? It’s not me.

I’m done! That’s enough of looking at unconscious shadow material for I’m beginning to squirm. Better to change the subject. I could use another song reference here to get some separation from my unconscious shadow like

Me, and my shadow….

Not a soul can bust this team in two
We stick together like glue…

Yep, it’s tough to shake that unconscious shadow material and yep, I’m sorry again, kids. I’ll give the song references a miss…for now….

Oh, I have another thought with backlight: what about auras as backlight? No, don’t even get me started on that…

P52 Week 6 - Side Light

Last Thursday I went to see the So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) tour concert in Seattle. Most of the stage was lit from the sides. Occasionally the spotlights shone out into the audience – right at me as if to say: I’m talking to you, lady. The spotlight is on you, too! I want you to pay attention and to remember this night.

And so, the sidelights have my attention.

Dancing has been a sidelight in my life. As a kid, I adored the ballet lessons I took for almost ten years. I loved the time-honored discipline and the established flow of it. I quit when I realized I didn’t have the body or the turn out for ballet. The young SYTYCD dancers last Thursday didn’t have perfect reedy, diaphanous ballet bodies. And that got me to wondering: what if I hadn’t dismissed the ideal ballet body notion? Could I have made dancing more of a highlight than a sidelight?

Growing up, ballet helped me to express my emotions in physical form. I was delighted when my dance instructors singled me out to demonstrate expressiveness in port de bras arm movements and in character dancing such as the Italian tarantella and my native Hungarian czárdás. But what I saw last Thursday far surpassed the dainty dramas of ballet.

SYTYCD had taken sedate, structured ballet and thrown the dance art form into a display of pure creative abandon. The emotions were raw, their expression exquisitely choreographed and beautifully interpreted by the dancers. I marveled at the genius and originality of the dance moves: where I expected a step to end, the choreographers extended the movement and pulled my emotions along with it. A pose moved into a drag, a spin shifted to a leap, a lift rotated into a breathtaking plunge and feet were fused together in a heartbreaking paired walk. Stunned and riveted, I was drawn into each of those extensions. My body surged as emotional thrills flew up and down me like arpeggios.

I am paying attention.

I’m noticing how sidelight accentuates the light – and the dark – and the program last Thursday highlighted the whole spectrum in the various dance genres: rolicking hip-hop, joyous Bollywood, saucy broadway, romantic jazz and anguished – and at times destructive – love-gone-amuck contemporary. I felt like I was watching a full-length movie, getting every nuance of what it wanted to convey in every single movement, every expression on the dancers’ faces. And a whole story was packed into a two minute dance – without the need for words.

I believe this cutting edge art form is building a reservoir of passionate emotional and soulic expression – and all of it is helping to shape and transform our collective consciousness. And haven’t the arts done just that through the ages? Hasn’t artistic expression led political, social and even scientific change for eons?

And then I wonder, if artistic expression is so important, then why on earth have we sidelighted arts programs in our schools?

I am paying attention.

On a more personal note, how often have I side-lighted my feelings when something grabs my heart and moves my soul? What if I go home from a concert like SYTYCD and tell myself: well that was cool, that was fun, that was impressive but I have work tomorrow, a living to make and I can’t stay in a dream world like that; or yeah, I thought of taking writing classes but who has the time or the money; or that felt good, that felt passionate for a moment but now it’s back to the real world and life isn’t always passionate – it’s mostly mundane. How often have I minimized, how often have I turned a moving experience into a sidelight and then sidelined it forever?

Well, I am paying attention and I have taken a step. My humanity has given me the privilege of expression and I have desires that are clamoring to be heard: the light and the dark, the good and the bad, the joy and the pain. I have chosen to create, to write about it. I am choosing to live my life with passion. A sidelight has become a highlight.

So thank you SYTYCD – and bring it on! I wish you every success with your TV series and tours for many years to come.

P52 Week 5 - Inspired By

"It's not where you take things from, it's where you take them to." - Jean Luc Godard

I have taken my spirituality to a different place.

I was raised Catholic. I attended twelve years of parochial schools – the whole nine yards. I memorized healthy doses of the catechism. I learned about the ‘one true Church,’ the Pope’s infallibility, mortal and venial sins and the sacraments. I heard gruesome accounts of martyrdom, and how the devil tempts us all the time. I received punishment at the hands of a nun who rapped me on the skull with her silver ring and who called me insolent, impudent and cheeky for lying. Actually – that particular time – I was telling the truth.

Don’t get me wrong. There were many things I loved about my Catholic school experience. There were nuns and teachers who inspired me. Their influence led me to pursue medicine, to soak up literature, to begin to question and discern, and to listen soulfully. I loved the structure of my schooling: the Christian foundations of love and service and the educational discipline have served me well.

My first marriage was in the Church, but I never thought twice about using contraception. Long ago, I stopped going to Mass.  According to the Church, I have accrued many mortal sins for this lapse, but I don’t believe that, and I have felt no remorse.

Still, I have kept pieces of the Catholic tradition in my spiritual core. I loved its rituals, have felt in awe when receiving the transubstantiated body of Christ in Holy Communion. Now I also commune with the sun and the moon, with mountains and trees, and with the ocean – as I wrote about in a previous blog post a couple of weeks ago.

My heart soars with Church music. I have sung in choirs and still like to attend an occasional evensong and compline service, but I no longer limit my sense of the sacred to religious repertoire. I sense spirit moving in music of all kinds: from Roy Orbison to Pink, Mozart to Verdi, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole to Angélique Kidjo.

I have resonated with bible passages – the Wedding of Cana, the lilies of the field – but I have also found inspiration in the sacred texts of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Eightfold Path and the poems of the Sufi mystic, Rumi. And I have appreciated religious figures like Thomas Merton and Paramahansa Yogananda who so beautifully bridged the commonalities of all faith traditions.

I have prayed the Our Father and St Francis of Assisi’s sweet supplication: ‘Oh Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace…’ but I have also found solace in the sayings of indigenous cultures and in quotes from secular literature. My prayers are now meditations, where I allow moments of silence to permeate my being, and where I sense the sacredness within and without my physical body.

I have explored the links between science and spirituality, between quantum physics and the energies of healing. I have studied neurobiology and somatic psychology and am captivated by the miracle of our own amazing physiology. At my core, I have felt the essential resonance of spirit in my physicality: my body is the final common pathway for how I experience the sacred.

I believe I have taken the underlying beautiful intent of the Catholic Church and run with it.

Inspired by a brilliant 5 year old artist, Iris Grace, who also happens to have autism.