17 - The perspective that indigenous initiations puts on relationships

I've been thinking about how to write the next installment of this story for three weeks, and started writing opening paragraphs several times.

Some words of Martín Prechtel are ringing in my head, about how, when the old traditionalist Mayans in his village got asked a seemingly simple and straight-forward question by a modern-minded person, like "How do I get to the market?" they would be met with a long and bewildering blizzard of eloquent beating-around-the-bush, which was meant, not to throw the visitor off the path to an answer, but to give the poor little orphan question a nest to grow up in. In other words, to put it efficiently, what is valuable is not efficiency and "getting what I want," but the intricate and delicious messiness of being related beautifully with everything. At least, that is the gist of what my poor civilized brain can remember of the pages of description he writes about this indigenous way of interacting with questions.

A part of me would like to tell a linear story, and present a rational worldview that has arisen as a result of that story. But I am finding it necessary to acknowledge the bigger and more mysterious way that my life will never submit willingly to this project of linearity. This is actually scary, now that I say that out loud. Losing control. I didn't really think I was afraid of that, but turns out I am. Huh.

I have been writing about the pieces of my paradigm as they came along in the chronology of my life. At this juncture, I am going to make a jump. I'm going to skip over the nitty gritty of the stories for now, and just explain the paradigm I built on top of the foundation of the things I've talked about already.

I tried to continue chronologically, which would be the point at which I had an affair that led to Nick leaving me. (Remember that's not his real name.) But, just like what I did when I started writing about falling in love with Nick, where I went back to read all our emails from that time as I started writing the blog post about it, I did the same thing several days ago with the relationship that ended my time with Nick. I had created a whole different gmail account to correspond with the man I will call X, and we emailed and chatted voluminously for 2 months. I hadn't read any of it since we wrote it 14 years ago, but the internet doesn't let anything die, so it was all still there, as soon as I convinced google that it really was me trying to access it.

I was not prepared for the way that would affect me. Over the ensuing 14 years, I've thought about that brief relationship mostly as the thing that finally ended me and Nick. It turns out that there are a lot of things about that relationship that I had not been able to be present with at the time, and I'm still swimming through the tsunami that washed over me from the underwater earthquake of reading those emails and chats with X. X was the end of Nick and me. X turns out to be a whole lot more, as well. I may tell more of what's been shaken loose from reading those chats and emails eventually. But right now, it's all still quite intense viscerally and I'm not ready to write about it for public consumption.

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So instead, I'm going to make this post about the general ideas that got shaped by the relationships with Nick, and X and subsequent ones after that. And it will be about how another one of Martín's books tied together the ideas that made up my paradigm's foundation, and added on top of them in powerful ways.

My last post was about taking off my victim badge. I'll give a little summary of the main idea, because it's a profound enough shift in perspective, it's worth repeating.

The standard way our society understands our internal landscapes, which is how I had seen mine for most of my life, is that what I feel inside is the result of what the world outside of me is doing to me. So if I am uncomfortable, upset, agitated, in pain, ashamed, afraid, then I should try to change something in my external situation, and the discomfort will be alleviated.

This perspective fell apart for me in 2009, when I was getting frustrated with not getting conversation or accountability from my ex-husband for the way I had felt when we were together. In the spring of  2009, two years after we separated, I had a lightning bolt of an epiphany, where my past with him was illuminated in a whole different way. I suddenly recognized that all the feelings of being emotionally abused because of his behavior towards me.. all those feelings had actually been feelings that I had been carrying around with me from past periods in my life. He was there to bring those feelings to the forefront for me to see.

I had gotten an intuitive sense, suddenly, of how my internal landscape was composed of old emotional charges that had gotten stuck somewhere in my body, that were magnetizing external situations to them in order to bring them to my attention.

This idea, that I got a felt sense of in my body, came a year and a half after I had had the experience of myself and the tree as shining bright columns of upward-streaming unconditional Love. And it came about six months after I had gotten the idea of "doing my emotions" from Amy. (I've written about these two things in posts 10 and 13.)

The three main ideas, which form the foundation for my paradigm, then, are these:

I have an indestructible core essence of a higher dimension of Love.

I have the ability to let my emotions flow in my body.

I am carrying around a lot of emotional charges from the past, that never were allowed to flow when they arose, and they get triggered by current events.

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(I will say this about the end of Nick and me: it was a lot easier for me to see when someone else was reacting from old suppressed energies, than it was for me to recognize when I myself was acting from old suppressed energies...in other words, I didn't realize that I wasn't practicing what I preached. That would come little by little along the line, mostly by having teachers that didn't practice what they preached, and feeling a lot of disgust "about them," and then realizing that the reason it triggered disgust in me is because that's exactly what I was doing.

Case in point: if I'd been practicing what I preached, I would not have this tsunami washing up from the depths right now. I would have "done" those emotions 14 years ago when the events happened! But it's nice to recognize how far I've come in 14 years. I have been tempted to distract myself from the internal tsunami by writing this post anyways, but I could tell when it showed up, that writing would have been a distraction from feeling what was actually coming up, which is surprisingly intense and large.

And also, the two main themes of emotional resonance washing over me from reading the old emails are things that have been lurking in the background of my life, nudging me, for a couple months now, from other different situations, so I'm glad these things are finally flooding into my body, out in the open.

And I love the way that writing-a-blog insists on being something besides simply telling a story that is "in the past," or simply "this is where my paradigm comes from." It's a living thing that drags me into places I didn't even know were there.)

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On top of the foundation of those three ideas, I have erected a large structure of further ideas that fit together to make my worldview. A lot of the further ideas have come, (not surprisingly,) from Martín Prechtel's descriptions of life in his Mayan village.

During the summer of 2009, when X ended N, (and a lot of other things happened, too..) I began reading another book by Martín. This one was titled "Long Life, Honey in the Heart," and in it he writes about his time leading the year-long initiation of young men in his village. It was another fire-hose of beautiful and intricate prose, describing a way of being human that made me weep with relief on nearly every page.

The description of the initiations in his village gave me a whole new perspective that helped fit together the three foundations stones that I had discovered in the previous couple years.

I'm going to talk about the aspects of those initiations that I have been able to fit together somehow with my own experience. There are a lot of parts that I have no idea where to fit in with my experience. And I acknowledge that the pieces that helped me fit my own experience together and add more layers of sense to it, may be cherry-picked figments of my imagination that have been ignominiously yanked out of the context of an entirely different world in which they lived, and therefore do not actually mean what I imagine they do..

All that notwithstanding, I'm giving Martín credit for helping me make sense of my experience. Here are some of the things that have taken root in my brain from his writing and speaking about initiation in his village.

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The village elders, who would sit like stones or old gnarled trees, silently watching the goings-on of the village, would take note of when a young person was falling in love for the first time. When an adolescent boy and girl were seen to be spending a lot of time with each other, then it was time for them to be taken out of their family home and begin initiation.

The energy of being an adolescent in love with another human was seen as a precious and potent force that was designed to be harnessed for them to learn how to do several things that are actually more important than having a relationship with another human. During initiation, they learn to "court their spirit bride," and to engage in rituals and challenges and journeys that ended with the young men literally going over the mountains and coming back with the goddess that allowed the village to live for another year. Along with all of that, they make a journey to the underworld to meet the gods of death, whom they have to impress with their eloquence enough for death to allow them to live, as long as they keep the beauty and eloquence going.

(A tangential aside: it's noteworthy that this whole system takes into account that both old people and adolescents have valuable attributes that are essential to keeping the village heart alive.)

The whole process took a year. During this year, the boys (Martín doesn't say much about the initiation of the girls, because he wasn't involved in that and it's not for him to talk about) are housed with the initiating chiefs in an initiation chamber, and not allowed to see their family or their girlfriend.

Martiń spends 350 pages describing this. So, clearly, I am giving a ridiculously brief description of what happens in this year.

Several things stand out to me about this year-long cooking process. Firstly, before the young people get hitched together with each other, they have to learn how to get in touch with their own divine essence, "their spirit bride," and this is the primary relationship they have to sustain for the rest of their lives, not a relationship with any human. Then, if and when they do get back together with their beloved, they recognize that the other person has this divine essence, too, but they don't have to feed off the other person's essence because they have the connection established to their own.

They are taught how to express themselves beautifully from their hearts, not to impress the people in their lives, but to feed the "holy in nature" that gives them life. They learn to be feeders of life, givers of milk, not babies who are always hollering for milk. This involves expressing their emotions. Martín doesn't specifically say this in the book, but the way I understand it, the connection with the divine allows them to be in touch with their emotions in a different way than they could before. This is one of the things he talks about on the CD of the talk he gave titled "Grief and Praise." The village welcomes expression of emotion, exactly because they understand that the energy of emotions, which often are a version of Love, are food for the spirits, who then, having been fed, can feed us our lives, and the lives of the grass and lizards and avocados and rains and beetles.

This ability to allow emotions to flow, and what happens if they don't, has multiple ramifications. The current scientific "discoveries" around the effect of trauma on the nervous system is corroborating these ramifications.

When, as infants, we have adults around us who know how to let emotions flow, we are able to co-regulate our nervous system. The nervous system is designed to have emotions flowing, but our bodies can't do this, as infants, in isolation. We don't learn this unless we have people in our lives whose emotions are actually flowing, and who allow our infant bodies to feel our feelings with them, until they have gone through their natural cycles.

So in the Mayan village, the young people get initiated and get in touch with their divine essence, BEFORE having children. Then when they do have children, not only are they able to be emotionally present with their children, the children also have a whole lot of other adults around who consider them family and who can also be present with their whole authentic selves.

Imagine living in a culture where we were allowed to cry. And be angry. And be afraid. None of these emotions are unnatural or unhealthy. None of them last very long when they are just allowed to happen until they are done. Animals do this all the time. Fight or Flight, (which are anger and fear,) and Love and nurturing, are all completely natural. They become toxic and make us ill in all sorts of ways, when they get stuck and undischarged.

So the way this fits with my felt sense of my suppressed subconscious is this: if I haven't, as an infant and child, had adults around me who could be with my emotions, because they hadn't been with their own, I have all these stuck energies waiting for resolution. Most of them are buried deeply and I can't even access them consciously in my body. I may have a memory of an event, but I often don't have any emotion associated with that event, because at the time when it happened, if it was too painful, the only option I had was to dissociate from the feelings to protect myself. But they haven't really gone away.

As I become an adult, all those stuck emotions are what becomes my subconscious, and those suppressed energies have a way of drawing situations to me that trigger them. This will keep happening until I am able to face the emotions and allow them to finally play out in my body, instead of re-suppressing them through various means, which can include mentalizing about the situation, removing myself from the triggering situation, removing the triggering person from my life because I think it's their fault...

When I become an adult, those things that got stuck in me from infancy, which my caregivers at the time couldn't be with, become my responsibility now. This is a key piece of this puzzle.

But what usually happens in our society, given that we don't even realize that we're missing our own divine essence, or that we have all this undischarged emotional energy, is that we look for a partner that will fill the role that our parents should have filled. We're basically babies looking for that attachment we didn't get, in order to regulate our nervous system. But when I'm an adult, what I really need is to get in touch with the divine essence in myself so that I can be present with my own emotions.

It feels to me that once I become an adult, I cross a thresh-hold of some sort, where I am now required to take responsibility for my own internal landscape. If I don't, the physics of suppressed emotional charges continues bringing situations into my life to try to bring those suppressed energies to the surface so that I can Love them and let them flow finally.

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This is such a huge paradigm shift from what we are normally taught. The idea is simple, but profound. I've describe it in a couple paragraphs.

But this "mental life raft" continues to impress me with its power to put me in touch with deeper layers of myself. This getting-in-touch with buried emotional charges, and finally letting them flow, in a bigger container of Love, has, over the years, allowed me to feel more and more grounded, more alive, more at home in my body, more whole. If you'd told me 20 years ago that I had the capacity to feel this grounded and alive and at home in my body, I wouldn't have even known what you were talking about...

Year over year, as I've gotten better at paying attention to what I'm actually feeling in my body emotionally, I'm astonished at how, in every aspect of my life, I've been led around by my suppressed subconscious and the emotional charges that I had to dissociate from when they happened.... decisions I've made, career choices, relationships I found myself in, parenting methods.. the strings pulling all of these things have been the un-integrated subconscious energies I've been carrying since I was very young.

And the more deeply I am aware of what I've been carrying around, and how it affected what I think and do, the more I can feel that our entire society is a huge matrix of interacting suppressed emotional charges.

We are a society of uninitiated kids, trying to get from each other what we should be getting from the Divine, and not giving anything back, especially not our emotions.

The only way out of the matrix, the way it looks to me, is to re-connect ourselves with our divine dimension and do our own emotions. And I can't make anyone else do that, so the only thing for me to do is learn how to do that better and better myself.