"He held a gun to my head"

“He held a gun to my head. He punched me and I fell to my knees. He kept holding the gun to the back of my head.”

These are not my words, I am listening to an interview of my friend, Marcia, telling her story for a mini-documentary we are filming for my women’s empowerment project, “Women + Sex + Power- Stopping sexual violence and abuse”.

Her story is every woman’s nightmare. She was home alone in her apartment cooking dinner one night when she heard a noise like a screen falling. She looked around, but didn’t see anyone and went back to cooking, she was making chocolate banana eggrolls she had seen on a TV show. Then she went to lay down and watch a movie. She looked up and saw a big man with a mask over his face. She started screaming.

“Shut up!”

He punched her in the head and led her to her bedroom. 

She had been sexually abused as a child and something in her broke, "I will die before I let this happen to me twice in my lifetime".

I listen to her tell her story, amazingly she had been able to escape by following a voice in her head, her intuition. The voice said, "The gun isn't loaded". She had tricked him and ran from the apartment and called the police. They never caught the man that had attacked her.

Marcia had been training for the LA Marathon when she was attacked. She tried to keep training to meet her goal. One morning when she went to run in her training group, her body shut down on her and she had to be carried back to her car. She realized it was going to take a long time to heal from what had happened to her. “He stole something from me. He stole my joy”. For the first time in her interview, Marcia began to cry. I could see her shell melt, it takes so much strength to tell this story, she had been focused and not emotional. In this moment, I see her breaking down, feeling the pain and loss of what had happened to her. Breaking the silence is part of the healing process. Many women are still frozen in silences from their sexual traumas, and that locks up their power long after the actual abuse has ended.

Long after the attack, the feeling of not being able to achieve her goals had remained, he had taken her power. She had already been struggling with alcohol before the attack. Unable to run for the marathon, she spiraled out of control drinking to deal with the pain.

Sitting silently in the next room listening to her interview, I feel an ache in my own stomach like I have been punched in the gut. My own sexual wound begins to awaken and throb. I feel slightly nauseous. The solar plexus is the center for power and self esteem. Where there has been sexual trauma, power is lost and needs to be found again in ourselves. Even though I have done a lot of work to heal my sexual issues, I still feel pain especially when I am working to help heal others and I feel the pain of their stories trigger the old pain in mine. When I feel that old pain I wonder if I have really healed. I know I have healed though, because in the past I would have fallen into a deep depression, and now I have the strength and energy to help others with their pain. I have my power back. 

When we lose our power, the problem is, we will look everywhere else for it. We will look in bottles, powders, pills and sex to escape through our pain. Where is our value? Where is our power? Inside our core, we have lost the natural God-given connection to Source- our infinite power and worth.

How can we change our fate and earn our destiny? When we have had violence and trauma, we think it sets our lives on a certain negative course. We feel trapped in the fate of these negative patterns. There is a way to change these negative patterns. We must go on a path of healing and empowerment. We must become the heros we have been waiting for. We must go back our worst fears and reclaim the parts of our spirit and power that were taken from us and left behind. We are the heros that will hold us and forgive and love ourselves. And where we have healed, we can help lift others up to heal.

Three years ago, Marcia saw an ad in a yoga magazine of a Core Breakthrough Yoga program I was teaching and signed up for it. She had moved back to living with her parents, knowing that would stop her from drinking. She was so excited to begin my program that she missed the first day. She came every day after that and began to experience deep healing. It was not always easy, there were days she felt the pain and no running, no yoga could make it disappear. Still she had the strength to breath through the pain without drinking, without escaping and she began to integrate herself again.

Marcia has become a healer now, working with women to find their womb wisdom. She is an example of how we can go beyond our traumas and find healing beyond what we have imagined before.

"I promise you can be more powerful than before you were wounded." I said this to a woman in the Courage to Rise women's Leadership program and it has become the motto for the 2013 CTR campaign.

Marcia's video will premier in January 2013. Please support Courage to rise by donating to make more powerful videos of women's stories and a yoga video that can be downloaded from the internet that teaches the Core Breakthrough Yoga technique for healing trauma.

www.couragetorise.com

www.psalmisadora.com

"It's never too late"

Joshua Tree

Sunday, Oct 7

“It’s never too late”. My friend Alfred’s mother is dying of cancer, she is lying in a hospital bed after a seizure unable to walk anymore. He has been told that she will not leave the hospital again, he is praying for a miracle. Her long time boyfriend told him that he regretted never marrying her. Alfred told him, “It’s never too late”. His mother is not able to speak after the seizure, but she can nod her head yes and no. Her boyfriend proposed and she nodded yes. They held a small ceremony around her hospital bed. Four days later she passed away. Why do we wait until death comes to make peace?

I have not seen my own mother in 15 years. A history of mental illness and abuse. Stories I am tired of telling. I recently got a massage to relieve some of the chronic pain in my right shoulder. As the knot melted, a memory surfaced. I was 14 and my mother was kicking me while I was curled up in fetal position to protect myself. I remember looking up at her, angry that she was still beating me like a child as I grew into a woman. I looked at her with hate in my eyes, all the suppressed rage that I could not express in talking or fighting back. I had no power. So I found a way to have power- I promised myself that no matter how bad she beat me, I would not let her see me cry. Hot tears that stung my face betrayed my weakness, my vulnerability. She could beat my body, but she could not control my mind. I began to twist the scenario. She was the weak one for losing her temper. I was strong because I could control my emotions, and I made my face like a mask. I would not let her inside. That memory was so visceral and as the knot massaged out, I wept and wept all those tears that had been trapped inside for so long. I am tired of this anger inside me. Is this where I learned to control my emotions and keep people out of my vulnerability?

Over the years when the trauma and abandonment come up, I take myself to the shower to cry alone. I curl up like a ball on the floor and let the water fall on me like a powerful rain, something to wash me clean of all this pain inside. I let the water fill my gaping wound. Will I ever be complete?

I found a contact for my mother online last week. I left a message and she emailed me back. Now I am left to wonder what will happen when I call her back? Will she be verbally abusive again? She had her own pain that was so unbearable that it came out in rages of beating her kids. She had her own struggles and had been abused as a girl. How many generations do these patterns carry on?

I look in the mirror at the lines on my face. The wrinkles show my journey. What does my mothers face look like after 15 years? I think of Alfred’s mother, I think about making peace before death. My mom used to say, “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead”, when I talked back to her. I got tired of the death threat as a manipulation to get me to behave, to quiet down. I guess I am lucky that she is still here for me to try and make peace. I say prayers that it will be different this time.

What do I want? I want to lay my head in my mothers lap and have her stroke my hair. I want to receive all the mother love I have been missing. I want to be held. I want forgiveness and peace.

an open letter to my father on fathers day

fathers day 2012
venice, ca

hey dad
i wish i could honor you but i'm still so angry at you
and that's just the truth
my heart doesn't understand and still beats with love for you
but it's got no where to go, no where to flow
you won't see me face to face
all your shame of the past has you hiding from me

i'm 37 dad...
it's been over ten years
i wonder, do you miss me?
i wouldn't know how to walk away from my son
he's 19, i started young
you know the math
so many girls who have been abused have babies young
i pray everyday to be a good mom to my son
i'm still working out the shit from my own past

all around the world i work with women who are angry from the abuse of men
where can the healing come from?
we are all One

i wish i could see you, i wish we could have a cup of coffee
i wish i was free to pour my heart out to you
so i do it here
in an email
i always hated hallmark cards and holidays that are supposed to hide all the problems we have
happy birthday, merry christmas
and now happy fathers day
i wish i could honour you dad, but i'm still so angry at you
but i'll send this wish
cuz it's all we have
happy fathers day

i miss you
i am waiting for you
don't let it die this way
let's make a new story between a father and a daughter
i am waiting for you

i come with a sword...healing abuse with anger

maybe this post has nothing to do with you, maybe you have no history of abuse. but the longer i teach, the more i see a lot of the reaching for love and light we are doing comes from abuse that needs healing.
who is the abuser and who is the abused? don't we all have to learn to love each other to heal, to see we are all one?

i have run into two camps, one that focuses on victimhood and blame and one that focuses on forgiveness.

the one focusing on victimhood and blame doesn't see a true transformation of pain is possible.

the one that focuses on forgiveness is often trying to take a spiritual bypass and whitewash the issues to move straight from the suppression to forgiveness.

i received this email recently,

I've got to tell you that I think it's the biggest fallacy in spiritual teachings that we've got to love our abusers; especially when the abuser is a parent. "Honor thy Father and Mother?" That's the first lesson in perpetuating abuse to the next generation.

I think that we don't begin to release the repressed feelings trapped inside us until we learn to DIS-honor the people who abused us. Otherwise, our unconscious minds won't let us access those repressed feelings in a meaningful way.

After that, we can work on healing the damage the abuse did to our neurology.

After that, we can love the abusers.

After we can express and integrate the repressed feelings of shame, anger, rage and grief, then we can reach a true kind of love, not a spiritual bypass.

This reminds me of a teaching of Jesus when he said,

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law--your enemies will be in your own household."

a great deal of physical, mental and emotional abuse comes from our own families. it is a hard thing to understand being angry at the people you love. sometimes these relationships get worse before they can heal. the psychologist carl jung described this process as individuation. learning to separate yourself from your family, culture, society, to become self aware. in tantra, the healthy ego center is manipura, in the belly and solar plexus, in your guts. the element of this center is fire.

what place does a sword have in healing? sometimes a wound must be cut open to air and find healing.

Jesus also said, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword".

so jesus contradicted himself, as all great spiritual teachers do. truth doesn't fit into neat categories. this life and the spiritual path is a sloppy human interaction of fumbling towards love and forgiveness through human relationships.

anger is a double edged sword, it can be used to slice through and transform, or we can get stuck in the habit of anger and bitterness without the transformation. anger is strong medicine, but it should not be avoided on the spiritual path for fear of it's power. anger is an emotion close to the surface, grief lies sleeping deep below in our subconscious. anger can make us aware, if we are able to follow the reaction to it's source. anger always stems from an unfulfilled desire. the way of healing, letting and moving on is to grieve our unfulfilled desires, not suppress them. without fire, there is no transformation. my guru says, "keep the power in your heart, otherwise it can be cruel".