Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 671568" data-attributes="member: 17461">Could it be that the home you bought is yourself and your choices and the way it feels when we want to be real.  Could it be that the buying is part of the messages we all receive everywhere, every day, that happiness is somewhere out there ~ in fashion, or food, or plastic surgery, or pursuit of youth.  We are inundated with those kinds of suggestions as advertisers seek to motivate purchases.  It helped me to read somewhere that vitamin companies and nutrition companies and pharmacies even, are not in the business of helping me.  They are in the business of making money for themselves.  If one of their products does help me, that is good.  If one of their products does not help me, or if it harms me, there are disclaimers absolving themselves of responsibility.I am victim and villain and bankrolling both states of mind because somehow, I have come to believe happiness is some physical thing I can purchase.  This is the culture of scarcity Brene Brown writes about, in her explorations of shame.When you post that you were frantic with loneliness Copa, I wonder whether you are facing that place of abandonment beneath shame that I have been posting about on FOO Chronicles Benedictine thread.It is a truly horrifying thing to contemplate.  To become even faintly aware of, even.  But for me anyway, that is the next level of healing.Maybe that is why I am seeing your dream this way.But I recognize that sense of black panic.  For me, beneath it was contempt and bad names for myself and overwhelming, really crummy feelings having to do with, I think this is true, truamatic events from that time before we had words.  I had the definite sense that the words I was using to describe what I was feeling to myself had been added after whatever it was that hurt me.I wonder if that is what you are approaching, Copa.  If the dream is preparing you for it.  The aloneness in it is part of that place beneath shame, too.  Maybe, for people not traumatized to the extent we have been, that place is where the mother's positive grandiosity for her child holds them together.  We have posted about the negative grandiosity the troubled mother may reflect to her child instead of the positive grandiosity the healthy mother can reflect to her infant.That could be part of this, too.Maybe this is true, Copa."And there was so much money lost because I had invested badly...."Money is an interesting thing.  It represents all forms of wealth for us, and it represents prosperity, and it represents harsh judgment when we feel we have not been or done or known enough to protect ourselves.  In a way then, money represents power in the sense that power is when we are safe.Poverty is when we are in the capricious power of others.  That is the danger in poverty.  It has not much to do with money (other than the vehicle for safety from empowered others that it is) and everything to do with vulnerability.  With vulnerability to empowered others.So, to me, the issue is that you did not invest poorly or unwisely, Copa.  Seen in another way, you invested blazingly well given that you had no seed money, and no one to teach or mentor or advise you.From that place beneath shame, from that place where, in the Carol King song Tapestry, the frog reaches for something golden and his hands come back, empty...that is the place, to one degree or another, we all create our lives from.  For us, for those of us so hurt because our mothers were hurt and they could not give to us what they had not been given themselves, there is so little purchase, so small a place to stand when we confront "empty".  For some of us, for those raised very, very well, that empty place can be navigated.  For us, we must face and claim it on our own before we truly have ourselves.So, this would be Joseph Campbell's Hero's Quest or maybe, Jung's underconsciousness.  Or, Christ's night in the Garden, bereft and alone and betrayed.The reason to remember those things is that confronting our empty gives us to ourselves.  We are not alone in this quest.  It is just that we have so little to guide us.Work in a conscious fashion, with every activity seen as work, taken seriously, from the smallest things to the obvious ones ~ thinking in this new way seems to matter to me, now.  "The kind of junk that predators sell to dupe peopleI wanted to move back to an urban area so that I would have near me the movement of people and the street that fills the emptiness in me. And there was obstacle after obstacle. My mother was still alive. I would talk to her on the phone. Which was largely my relationship with my mother. But this did nothing to assuage the painful desperation and the longing." When our mothers have been hurt, and they do what they do to self-comfort, we learn to do those things to self-comfort, too.  You have posted before Copa, about your mother's beauty and happiness as she prepared to go out.  In another post having to do with the jewelry you purchase, you wrote that your mother would not have chosen the quality of jewelry that you had ordered ~ that the jewelry the mother would have chosen would have been more costly.It is a mosaic, Copa.Only you can know how the pieces fit together, but this is an amazing gift of a dream."I had the sense that my lifetime has been defined by this yawning pit of solitary desperation."I am glad you posted about the dream, Copa.  Have you learned more from it since it occurred?  When you then went online to purchase more jewelry, which were the negative tapes playing just beneath consciousness?Remember my resolve to be kinder to myself.  Not kind.  Only kinder.  And remember when "That'll do, pig." was an improvement over the negative tapes that had been forever playing, that had been forever informing me of who I was or might become, before.Maybe, Copa, if you set a dollar amount that would purchase an heirloom quality piece.  Something you could leave your son with pride and that he could receive with pride.  I know you will be afraid he will not be there to claim it.  Believe.Then, look for something for M.  And then, for each of his children.In this way, you envision something wonderful, something that matters.  Maybe, begin visiting jewelry stores to compare pricing and make bargains for only the best pieces you can afford.No more junk.No more junk that is what is left behind.Beautiful things, instead.  Valuable things; things that require choice and commitment and that sacred feeling of work I have been posting about.Cedar  </blockquote>

Verification