Death Looks Not Towards the Moon: My Journey Through the Dark Night of the Soul.
Life’s waters flow from darkness. Search the darkness, don’t run from it.
Night travelers are full of light, and you are too; don’t leave this companionship . . .
The moon appears for night travelers, be watchful when the moon is full. ~Rumi
PROLOGUE
Monday, June 5, 2006, begins with this entry in my journal: “I’m not sure how on earth we do this grief process, son.” Our children are our greatest teachers. My son, Andrew, lived his life with passion. He made his entry into this world in a 45-minute span of time and continued to live his 21-year life span with boundless spirit. I have heard it said that those who live with passion are able to live wholeheartedly, without fear of being judged. I never expected I would have to learn about how to live with passion by enduring the death of a loved one, especially my exuberant, generous child.
It is Sunday, June 4, 2006. Andrew’s soul, unbeknownst to me, was making its transition as I was walking on the beach. It was dark gray and misty. Not many walkers. As I walked towards Neahkahnie Mountain at the north end of the beach, I spotted an odd, burnt-looking log not far away that looked as if it had been left standing upright, the remnants of a previous night’s beach fire. Walking closer to this “log,” I observed a distinct white spot at the top which lifted and then shifted into a white head standing on legs. It was a bald eagle. It allowed me to walk closer, as we held each other’s gaze. With a feeling of supreme awe, I watched this eagle slowly spread its wings and rise effortlessly above my head, circling many times, setting down 15 feet away, again captivating me with its steady gaze before rising to soar gracefully across the sky. Still held in this sense of misty timelessness, I turned to my friend to state with conviction, “This is a message. I don’t know what it means, but this is some kind of message.”
I did not know at this time that my son was dying. In Native tradition, eagle medicine is the power of the Great Spirit. It is the ability to live in the realm of spirit, yet remain balanced and connected in the realm of earth. Eagle represents a state of grace achieved through hard work, understanding, and a completion of the tests of initiation which result in the taking of one’s personal power. Some believe Eagle is the messenger between heaven and earth.
Tomorrow is June 1, 2016. It has been 10 years. It has occurred to me in the past few months that it seems to be about ten years before those of us mothers who have experienced the death of a child are able to write. Perhaps it takes that long to unravel the journey of the night.
In the first few days of shock, it was trust in a power higher than myself and the felt sense of ongoing communication with my son that allowed me to continue on. It was faith that the unknown yielded some semblance of divine order that carried me through the unfolding of my life. It was the knowledge that death looks not towards the moon.
In her memoir “Caravan of No Despair,” Mirabai Starr writes: “In a dark night of the soul . . all the ways you have become accustomed to tasting the sacred dry up and fall away. All concepts of the Holy One evaporate. You are plunged into a darkness so impenetrable that you are convinced it will never lift. You may flail about for something—anything—to prop you up, but you grasp only emptiness. And so, rendered reckless by despair, you let yourself fall backward into the arms of nothing. This, according to John of the Cross, is a blessing of the highest order. Tell that to the mother of a dead child.”
Learning to walk this long journey through the dark night left by the death of my son was partly about learning how to live between the veils that separate physical and non-physical reality. It was also about learning how to listen to my body’s felt sense: a kind of inner knowing that comes from the wisdom of the body. It was about learning to listen to the voice of the little girl who had felt abandoned by both parents and was now reeling from the loss of her own child. It was learning to sit with the shame, mistrust, and anger originating from trampled boundaries as a child.
Through the guidance of a qualified therapist, I began to learn to trust my inner voice as I gained the sense of being a sturdy, worthy person who learned to survive the dark night of the soul. This is the story of finding the gift in trauma and how I am learning to live with darkness as well as light, wholeheartedly and with passion.
THE BONES
As a small child and young girl, I was close to my grandfather, Charlie. Charlie was not my grandfather by blood. My mother’s mother married this man of Spanish and Portuguese descent in the 1940s. He was a dark-eyed, olive skinned man of very few words who represented a sense of loving-kindness and safety for me. When I was 17 years old, a dream in the middle of the night caused me to sit up with the vision of a small wooden house on an open prairie . . . The words, “Death Looks Not Towards The Moon” were emblazoned above. Although my mother use to call me a “moon child”, as my birthday was in July, I did not connect meaning with this vision of the night. I only felt an extraordinary closeness of my grandfather’s presence, as if we were staring across that prairie into each other’s eyes.
Early the next morning when the phone rang, I heard my mother’s voice ask, “Randi?” Without thinking and before she could speak, I questioned, “Grandpa died last night, didn’t he?” “Yes”, she replied, “How did you know?” How did I know? It was a deep knowing that came from my dream. He had not been sick. He died of a heart attack at approximately the same time of night my dream occurred. I believe I had developed this trust in the ‘interconnectedness of all that is’ as a young child, spending much time playing alone in the woods. I believed this dream was my grandfather’s message of love to me. It remained a visual touchstone throughout my life.
Growing up as an only child in a family system fraught with alcoholism, mental illness, and secrets, where children were supposed to be seen and not heard, I spent a lot of time alone in nature. I would sometimes sit in the sun with a book, my thoughts, and the comfort of a huge granite boulder supporting me. I often studied the flow of the Spokane River, watching the currents play out smoothly, rhythmically, the water becoming more frantic as it tumbled and spread into concentric circles around boulders obstructing its way. Even as a young person, I sensed the river may be a metaphor which paralleled the changing currents in my life—one could expect there may be gentle times of flow, as well as imminent challenge and danger. During the long journey through despair, when I began Focusing and could see glimmerings of light at the end of the tunnel, I came to be aware that it was this ability to trust in something larger than myself that I longed to have back again to quell the fear of life’s impermanency. I knew that when I could find this trust again, I would begin to inhabit the fullness of my being.
Childhood taught me good skills of observation and how to ground myself in nature, which gave me resources to draw upon throughout my life. As my parents were divorcing, I returned to my birthplace in San Francisco. Working as a waitress, a housekeeping maid, and other various jobs, I managed to graduate with honors and a master’s degree in speech-language pathology. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college. During that period of my life, I learned more fully the art of putting one’s feelings on hold and ‘going for the gold.’ (I sometimes now wonder if putting my nose to the grindstone of scholarly studies was not only a way to survive but also an unconscious way to delay the unwinding of childhood trauma that would someday need to be grappled with.) In my early 30s, I married a man whom I loved dearly. He brought an almost 2 1/2 year old cherubic daughter to our marriage and we had two beautiful, smart, highly-spirited children together. Due to marital indiscretions, the intimacy in our marriage eroded. The marriage began to flounder, although we stayed together for 18 years. When we divorced, I plunged myself into a master’s program in counseling psychology, again working full time, but this time mothering two active teenage children. When my son and daughter finished high school, I moved to a small town on the Oregon coast where I worked as a speech-language pathologist and licensed mental health therapist.
It was two years after moving to the Oregon coast that I got the phone call that “there has been a terrible accident. Andrew is dead”, his father reported into the phone. Andrew had failed to show up for Sunday dinner with his father and sister. On Thursday, three days prior, Andrew had phoned me to say that he had had an accident playing around with a friend that resulted in his needing medical attention at a small hospital near Spokane. During a phone call on Saturday in which we discussed his drive home to Oregon the following week, he told me he was having memory problems. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, he lay down to sleep and never awakened.
My life was changed forever. The first year was the shock of a big Trauma. As I sat on my bedroom floor soon after Andrew’s death, asking for help, I still trusted in something bigger than myself until it all unraveled and I was forced to look at the years of little traumas that lay under the calm exterior that looked like it was ‘handling it all’. I later learned these underlying traumas which make up a system of stopped processes are what is now referred to as complex trauma. (See comments from Rob Parker on Pg. 5 of this article).
Initially, learning to live without my son’s presence meant learning to live with a gaping hole and a physical pain so wrenching that I truly understood the ache and meaning of experiencing a breaking heart. Eventually, I found the place where I could maintain contact with Andrew as I navigated between physical and non-physical reality. Learning to live with this grief meant learning to negotiate with people who had no idea of what to say to someone who has experienced the death of their child. It is not natural for one’s children to die, especially in Western culture. Universally, motherhood is a cultural symbol for the great nurturer and fierce protector—someone who is always there for her child. Western culture has not yet integrated the concepts of death and dying into our youth-oriented society. It meant bearing the stigma of a mother who has lost a child. It meant living with unresolved and inherent guilt, questioning whether I could/should have done something differently, something that would have prevented my son’s death. I lived with the intrusive memory of the dream I had six weeks prior to his death that foretold of his drowning. In the dream, our fingertips reached desperately out for each other, minimal fractions of an inch separating our fingertips which were unable to touch, until he slipped under the water. Not knowing who to turn to with that dream, I gently told my son about it, requesting that he be aware and take care. I later blamed myself for telling him the dream, as if that was somehow responsible for his death.
It was not until the second year after his death that I chose to move 400 miles back to where he and his two sisters grew up and to where my granddaughter, my son’s little girl, lived. I was wanting to be close to her. It seemed important to help her remember her daddy. Two months later, I received a phone call that my father had died in Arizona. One month after that, I received a phone call from a friend of my mother’s who communicated to me that my mother “lay very ill on her death bed in a small-town hospital in California. You must come and get her. There is no one else to care for her,” he said. This involved a precarious move in which I brought her over 3,000 miles to Spokane, where I was living. My relationship with my 26-year-old daughter, my husband’s daughter from a previous marriage, suffered a rupture. She had been an important part of my life since she was 2 ½ years old. My youngest daughter, 23 at the time was angry and withdrawn. . . perhaps going through her own seemingly impenetrable devastation at losing her brother. The once supportive partnership I became involve in after my divorce didn’t seem to be able to withstand any more stress. My life was falling apart.
Slowly over time, I realized I was living in a trance-like state of depression, although from all outer appearances I looked like I was ‘handling it all’. So conditioned are we to be full of judgment directed towards ourselves. So deeply internalized is the idea of our wrongdoing, of how we’re supposed to be, that we forget who we are. I had lost my passion for living. Something in me realized that I needed to allow myself to turn towards that which was wounded in order to heal.
HEALING IS A GIFT OF HUMAN LIFE
MY JOURNEY THROUGH TRAUMA
“Trauma is a wound. It is a subjective human experience, colored by an individual’s perception, life experience, and healing style. The human brain is hard-wired for healing in both a physical and emotional sense. However, the quality of the healing conditions can make all the difference. If a person is given the resources needed for healing (e.g., time, social support, validation, proper care, spiritual guidance), emotional wounds can be healed. As with physical wounding, there may be scars, but if that emotional wound is given proper attention, the part that was hurt can become tougher—just like the skin of a physical scar—a beautiful metaphor for resilience” (Jamie Marich, p. 3, 2014).
She outlines three important principles with regard to trauma:
1) Trauma is wounding;
2) Wounds need care and time to heal;
3) A little common sense and human connection go a long way in helping wounded people heal.
The model proposed by Marich supports the theory that there are everyday traumas incurred in the process of childhood and living life. It is how people are cared for in their early years and how wounds are handled along the way that impact each person differently. It is how these wounds are handled in our early years that may impact the handling of emotional needs in later life.
Rob Parker states in his article on the difference between Simple and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), “a child growing up in a chronically abusive environment has no way of ‘knowing what normal is.’ Where the survivor of Simple PTSD feels, ‘That was a really scary event in my life,’ the child growing up in a chronically abusive environment feels, ‘This is life.’ The ongoing trauma influences all aspects of development . . . . Instead of a single trauma or a traumatic situation, there are a multitude of traumas. In all of this, the child learns to cope, more or less well, so that the adult who comes in for therapy can appear fairly strong, yet actually be extremely fragile. In contrast with simple post traumatic stress disorder, this is complex trauma. When we grow up with trauma, the parts of us that are terrified split off and become forgotten because we don’t have the skills to deal with them at the time of onset and/or we are too busy surviving. These stopped processes that split off remain in our bodies, trying to carry forward and be heard. They may appear as intrusive memories, nightmares, cutting rituals, a devastating inner critic, or other symptoms. As adults, we don’t recognize these symptoms as lost or blocked parts of ourselves - instead, we (and sometimes our mis-guided therapists) just want to get rid of them.
The blocked parts of ourselves we carry are not separate from our physical bodies. At the cellular structure of our very being is the life-sustaining energy called homeostasis. No matter how broken or how abused, we carry within ourselves the great heart gift of healing. Just as the earth is a living being in the cosmos, repairing itself time after time, we human beings have a natural capacity to heal. Current research in neuroscience now documents it is our natural state to return to health and wholeness.
The prefrontal cortex, or executive functioning part of our brain, is the thinking part of the body that labels, evaluates, judges, categorizes, and attaches to story. The limbic region of the brain (made up of the amygdala and hippocampus) is the part of the brain that processes emotions. The brain stem at the base of the skull is the part of the brain that registers danger in the form of fight, flight, or debilitating fear, which elicits the “freeze” response. The freeze response occurs because our body is overwhelmed at the time of trauma because it does not have what it needs to adapt, acclimate, or take care of itself. When we try to resolve issues with the thinking part of our brain, we are not tapping into the visceral memory held in the six trillion cells of our bodies. These become unresolved issues which cannot be resolved by the thinking part of the brain alone but must be accessed by bringing awareness to the non-conceptual part of the brain that is holding the body’s memory.
My journey of healing began when I was introduced to Focusing Oriented Therapy by a friend (Jeffrey Morrison) whom I met at an Embodied Life Retreat taught by Russell Delman. Focusing-Oriented therapists understand that it is the experienced body, the lived-from body, where meaning is made. At the heart of the somatically oriented therapies is the work of Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher who developed the concept of the felt sense in his work with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago. It is based on the theory that our minds alone do not know things. Our minds can remember the past, repeat what others have told us, and invent any number of possible futures to be either wishful or anxious about. But the past and the future, the primary domains of the thinking mind, are not the place where change can happen. Change happens in the present.
LIVING IN PRESENCE
UNWINDING COMPLEX TRAUMA
Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people—in fact, the whole universe. The sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside. ~ Eugene Gendlin, 1996
The body believes in images. If we can give it pictures, we can learn to hold and be with images that come from within our own self. When we can step out of other’s word definitions of who we are, we can recognize the power of our own felt sense and work from it to help our own healing. In the article “Integration Requires the Body: Focusing and the Felt Sense,” Ann Weiser Cornell writes, “Getting felt senses. . .taps into the same ability that artists use to sense what is missing or needed in a work of art. When clients get felt senses, they drop down below language to the creative soup that lies beneath.”
Ann Weiser Cornell, who began as a student of Gendlin’s, and continues to expand his body of work, describes the forming of a Felt Sense as a breakthrough moment, which takes a person outside his or her usual concepts and habitual categories. It’s not the same as having a simple emotion or thought. “We speed up to think; to get Felt Senses, we slow down and form a new bodily awareness of some life situation. When we try to solve situations using our thinking alone, we often become stuck in frozen, fixed structures, forms of habitual thinking and feeling which often seem as though they are going around in circles. Thinking and storytelling becomes repetitive and even emotions seem to come at expected places, without bringing relief. With Focusing a truly new experience becomes possible, one that gets outside of the habitual ruts we have been circling in and allows new meaning to emerge.”
The gift of the body is that it is always in present time, always here. To move into the part of you that has the power to transform your life, you must set aside what you think you know and bring direct awareness to various other parts of the body such as the lower belly, heart, navel, and throat—areas that neurobiology now tells us are independent centers of intelligence that carry our direct experience. These parts of our bodies carry the knowledge about how we are living our lives, about what we need to be more fully ourselves, about what we value and believe, about what has hurt us emotionally and how to heal it. Our bodies know the right next step to bring us to more fulfilling and rewarding lives.
Although I had been a meditator for over 30 years, it was seven years after the death of my son before I learned the wisdom of Focusing. Being able to lean into the healing quality of presence encouraged a quality of non-judgment and connectedness which facilitated the quality of trust in myself and others. To align ourselves with our life force energy so that we can move forward through trauma requires the presence to return to our circumstance. Turning towards difficult situations, our wounds, with presence is critical for our well-being. In learning the process of Focusing, I learned how to sit in presence with myself and listen with gentle compassion to what my body wanted me to know, in a way that allowed tangled emotions and wounds to become clear and release back into the earth. As I learned to trust myself and others around me, I became able to reclaim my vitality and life force energy. From this place, I was able to find balance and learn to hold both the light and the dark inherent in the permeability which allows for a vital, fulfilling life.
CONCLUSION—THE GIFT
When one’s child dies, life is changed forever. Life as one knows it stops. The only way forward is through, and one does not get there by rational thinking. As Mirabai Starr so exquisitely states, “I was trying to think my way through the problem of death using the wrong tool. By going around and around the same stories, my mind short-circuited, leaving me beaten and bruised. I failed again and again to resolve the predicament.”
My way through the riveting fear and sadness of grief from the death of my son, compounded by my own childhood trauma, was messy. By learning to compassionately acknowledge and trust my natural body wisdom, I learned to unwind a lifetime of trauma and move forward to a more authentic place of living and being. The gift in my trauma was learning to access and heal those hidden places in myself that had, outside of my full awareness, created patterns and ways of thinking.
Focusing-Oriented Therapy can be learned and used as a process by itself or it can be combined with any other therapy. Focusing originated in the research and practice of Eugene Gendlin who worked along with Carl Rogers to expose the roots of all somatic-oriented therapies.
*********
My unbounded gratitude extends to those who have helped me ground and inhabit my whole, authentic self which includes my children: Hilary, Andrew, and Marianne; my husband, David, who always leads me to my growing edge; my teacher, Russell Delman; my Focusing Mentor, teaching partner and friend, Jeffrey Morrison; my focusing partners along the way who know who they are; and the teachings of many wonderful and curious Focuser’s who have written of their research findings along their journey.