* Detailed instructions for making comments are in “News Items.”
* Beltane, is, of course, tomorrow. And Walpurgisnacht is tonight. I’ve written about both in prior posts.
https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/walpurgisnacht/
https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/beltane/
I hope you all can stay safe over these hard, hard days, and that you can find ways to comfort yourselves. None of this was your fault. By the very fact of your reading this blog, you are working to heal yourself from the wounds they inflicted on you. And, in healing yourself, you are part of the growing movement to fight ritual abuse throughout the world. Perhaps this realization will be an additional comfort to you.
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Last Saturday I shared at my support group that I felt very spacey, like I was not myself. Like I didn’t really have a self. And that I felt ineffective and inferior. It is really annoying to try to do much of anything feeling that way.
It was suggested that I was dissociating and that maybe a memory was trying to come up. Then they gave me some loving reminders that I had, indeed, done a fair amount in my life, and that I was not sitting alone in the house watching TV or staring out the window all day. I still was doing things, maybe not as many as twenty years ago, but still a fair amount.
Lo and behold, a memory did surface. It was prompted by this chiropractic journey I am on. The brain is part of the body. and the mind seems to be part of the brain (most days!) It is therefore no surprise that bodywork of any kind can bring up all sorts of things.
I’ll share some examples. Be aware that they are a little more graphic than usual.
Once a bodyworker commented on rigidity in my neck. I asked what caused it. She replied, “Trauma. Trauma usually before the age of two.” And I, who at the moment believed that everything started when I was four, sobbed for the rest of the session.
Another time I was taking a Feldenkrais class. and we were working on one large mat. Some movement, I forget exactly what it was, triggered me. I had an image of myself, naked, with other naked children, lying on the floor in a grid pattern. Somebody made the sign of the cross on my stomach and said the words to the effect of, “In the name of Satan, we offer this child to you.” I was sure they were going to stab me and kill me. Again, I sobbed and shook through the rest of the class.
Once again, healing bodywork reminds me that the mind and the body are one and that they can trigger each other. The movement of my body triggers a memory stored in my mind. Other times, the mind triggers body memories – it works both ways.
We are given exercises to do at home every day. Thirty repetitions, which I consider a lot. One of the ones I am working on now consists of sitting up tall in a chair, raising my hands in a T-position (hands in the air as if I were signaling “I surrender,”) opening my chest, and tipping my head back until I can feel the skin on the front of my neck stretch. It’s a very vulnerable position.
I saw myself naked in that same position. I felt a knife at my throat. A man said, “If you talk about this, we will kill you.” And then I felt something warm, the way blood is warm and sticky, along the length of the knife. I don’t know how old I was, but my thinking was sophisticated enough to realize after a few minutes that I was not bleeding to death. I assumed they had made a superficial cut. I expected a scar, but there wasn’t one.
Later I got a second image of me in that position. This time my eyes were shut. The man said, “If you tell, we will stab your eyes.” And the tip of the knife gently touched first one and then the other eyelid.
These flashbacks don’t consume me like the early ones did. I know through and through that they are flashbacks, and I am firmly in the present once the image has surfaced. I take care of myself by telling myself that I am at home, nobody else is there, that my home is beautiful and filled with things I have chosen. I am flooded with feelings of gratitude for being able to choose whatever I want, anything and everything. Food, reading material, projects, friends, furniture, clothes, everything. This is true freedom!
I am reminded of the end of a poem (Out of the Cult) I wrote and posted here.
then oh!
on the horizon
sunflowers, rivers. green hills, sun and sand, soaring gulls, deer,
rabbits, suburbs and suburbs of warm homes, laughter, dancing,
song, beds and food and drink
a plentitude, a plentitude
It was a long road, but I got here.
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Upcoming Holidays
April
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
May
5/1 Beltane
5/12 Mothers’ Day
5/18 Full moon
5/27 Memorial Day
June
6/9 – 6/10 Pentecost
6/16 Father’s Day
6/17 Full moon
6/20 Corpus Christi/Feast of the Body of Christ
6/21 Summer solstice
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve
6/24 St John’s Day
July
7/2 Total solar eclipse. Visible in parts of South America
7/4 Fourth of July/ US Independence Day
7/16 Full moon
July 16 – 17 Partial lunar eclipse. Visible in South America, Africa, most of Europe and Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God
Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
4/30 Anniversary of Hitler’s death
5/1 – 5/2 Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day)
5/7 – 5/8 Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day, Day of Remembrance)
5/8 – 5/9 Yom HaAtzma´ut (Israeli Independence Day)
5/8 V-E Day (Victory in Europe, WW2)
5/18 Armed Forces Day (?)
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)
Ritual Abuse 