Coaching by G

Finding My Way

August is the month that ushers in so much loss for me. It is the month that school starts.  The summer months are full of kids back from college and high school kids lifting and learning in my studio. In August, though, there is an abrupt ending with kids leaving for college.  It is a time of grieving for me, not because I didn’t think they would leave, but because we grow together through deepening connections and I feel the loss of their presence, even though they almost always return for many years.

Looming even larger is the anniversary of my mothers death, August 26, 2019. Four years ago my mother turned 85 and 8 days later lay down for an afternoon nap and never woke up.

In the months after my mothers death, I would awaken each night with alarming precision at 2:14 A.M.  In the glow of the moon, the experiences of the sweetness of my mother came to me. I had spent the better part of a lifetime huddled in the cold, dark cellar of my resentments of her.  Many years ago, I had made peace with her and with myself.  Especially when we are bereaved, we seek comfort.  I find some comfort in the piece I wrote for her memorial one of those early early mornings. 

When I recall these parts, these very real pieces, of my mother, I recall her loving presence. 

She was everything.  She was the fiercest, meanest, kindest, warmest, coolest, loveliest, cruelest, gentlest.  She gave tirelessly of herself to nature, art, children, friends, and to family.

She was my mother, my source.  She was my first heart break. 

The role of mother is the role of everything: the life giver, the channel for the Great Mystery to move through, the Earth, the moist rich soil of nothing and therefore of ALL creation.  It is no mystery that I am not a mother.  I prefer my role of Auntie.

My best friend became a mother at 48.  I was shocked.  She had moved to DC.  I was in grad school and preoccupied with my own existence (which turns out to have been a really poor excuse for letting friendship lag) and she sent me a card with a picture of her at about 8 months pregnant with twins!!!! I mean you have never seen anyone this pregnant. And then she gave birth to these babies and one day she was gracious enough to bring them to me and I fell in love instantly and the rest is history.  

This whole life is about how we survive breaking our own hearts.  How we survive our perceptions of other peoples trespasses, foibles, transgressions, etc……..

I spent my whole life CERTAIN that my mother had been the source of my deepest pain. I wanted her to fix it, make it go away, all the things we imagine are our mothers duties.  And, for sure, I’d known exactly how she had devastated me and so I knew exactly how she should repair that wound….

It doesn’t work that way, I’ve discovered. I was pretty much wrong about it all.

Even had she accepted responsibility for all the pain of my life, which she did not,  there is no way to take away another persons pain.  We each must be willing to let it go, to recycle it all back to Spirit, to leave it to grow something new in the compost of life. 

I spent years grasping for relief. What I was attached to turns out to have been the narrative I created to seemingly assuage my pain.  I was not forgiving her, for sure, and I was not forgiving myself. What I discovered along the way is what Nelson Mandela said: 

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”  

It is common to keep our own healing at bay by blaming something or someone outside of us for our pain.  It helps us feel into the role of victim. “They” is an ephemeral.  They did this to me.  If I am a victim I am surely absolved of responsibility? But the truth is I am not ever absolved of the responsibility for my own life. Whatever happened, whatever I am experiencing in my life, with other people, situations, etc is ALL mine.  Everything that comes up is coming up so that I can clear it.   

When I went to my mother and asked her wtf and learned that she would not be offering me any relief, I understood it was mine alone, and, finally, willingly, undertook the journey toward myself.

I had found the rock bottom, so to speak.  The hard place that I could, at last,  push off from.

And it took me on a wild ride.

It started in movement.  I was fortunate to have always been able to find my way into my heart through physical activity.  Then I began meditation, another practice undertaken on a path to finding inner peace. 

I’d sit in meditation and say “I am willing to forgive you for not being what I needed.”

And that softened into forgiveness and then that softened into forgiving myself.  

Or, at least, a beginning. I began learning Breathwork techniques as a means to open further and followed my own inner guidance to learning about the root causes of pain, illness, and diseases.  

Self forgiveness is really what I was after, all along.  Self love is the journey we are all on, it turns out.

I was a little bitty baby girl and I survived so much.  I survived the things that people aren’t supposed to have to survive, or so we tell ourselves.  In reading books, many of which were given me by my mother, I learned that, in fact, everyone has to survive.  It’s really just biology.  We are all victims or survivors or whatever word we choose to define our relationship and our exchange with this one precious life. Birth is painful.  If you watch any creature being born, the incredible brutality of it will change you forever.  

We are all fighting like hell to get here. 

Why is that? 

Can you imagine yourself being born? What is it you fought so hard to get here to do? Is there a story about your birth? What is it that we are doing here? 

I realized I wasn’t here on earth to blame my mother.  But, the blaming showed up in me as physical dis-ease and pain.  The blaming showed up as dysplasia, eczema, ulcers, irritable bowel, excess body fat, a herniated disc and a tumor in my breast…

Bleeding from my nipple was really the last straw. The way the body speaks to us is a metaphor that only we can untangle for ourselves.  Whatever is coming up in or on my body is showing me my blind spots.

The great thing about me, though, is I have used every physical ailment as a point for change. 

All the things I have held onto in an effort to hurt someone else have only hurt me. And all of those things taught me a lesson in letting go.

So how did forgiveness create the life I want?

It let me release the life I don’t want.

This healing journey started many moons ago. The most current path I have chosen includes Breathwork and working with the root causes of pain, illness, disease, in addition to my lifelong practices of weightlifting and meditation. There is nothing linear about a human’s evolution, either in the macro or in the micro.  We are all on a unique path. As it is with physical development, spiritual development is individual. We all learn on our own time.  The curriculum, while ours alone, is not optional, only the time we take it is ours to choose. The life we have is ours to unfold.  No one can know it for us or explain it to us.  

I learned to be wary of the people who have the answers. Most of them likely did not understand the question.  And none of them can know me as I know myself. 

You are the power.  You are the answer.  You are the light.  You are born complete.  You don’t have any missing pieces.  Your life is your medicine and holds all of your answers and all the questions.  This is all accessible to us. Breathwork and a deeper inquiry in root cause practices can bring us closer to ourselves by quieting the mind in a space of deep compassion. 

“I’ve never felt more grounded and yet I also felt that I was floating!  That is the first time my mind has ever been quiet.”  

J.R. Oak Park Breathwork client.

You cannot smash open an acorn and find an oak tree, or rip open a rosebud to make the flower appear, even though you know the acorn will become a massive oak tree and the rose bud a rose.  

Life is an unfolding, an ebb and flow, a becoming, a birth and a growing and a dying and a rebirth over and over and over again.  The acorn takes the time it takes to grow into an oak.  Your job is to simply allow it.  How can you nurture its growth? Like the seasons floating in upon the breeze, none of us can make them appear faster or slower, none of us is making them come or go or linger longer.  Each of us can put a fence around the oak sapling, water it, and tell it how big and strong it will become, providing homes for many creatures and shade for many more, and food, and fun, like a swing or place to sit high above the earth to read or get a different view.

Everything the oak needs is already baked in the acorn, just as everything that you need is already in you; you were born perfect. Your only job is to allow your own becoming.

I help people find their own way.  My tools are Breathwork, Root Cause Practice, weightlifting, meditation, and nutrition.  I weave these together depending on the needs and desires of each individual.  I help people open to their own unfolding through compassionate inquiry and some physical work, either through breathing or lifting weights or literally, through whatever moves you forward on your own path.

From my heart to yours,

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Reflections About Alcohol and Life

I reflect upon my life choices regularly. I work at acknowledging the many ways I have lived against myself following “stinking thinking” patterns and I am working on acknowledging some of the ways I have lived toward myself. I am enough

“We are all spiritually powerless, however, not just those who are physically addicted to a substance…….Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see.  The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addiction and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.”

Richard Rohr

I reflect upon my life choices regularly.  I work at acknowledging the many ways I have lived against myself following “stinking thinking” patterns and I am working on acknowledging some of the ways I have lived toward myself.  

I have tried to right my wrongs and I will continue to do so as long as I live, Goddess willing.

I was reflecting on some choices recently when talking to my very best friend in the world, Susan.  She has somehow been in my life, voluntarily, since 1990, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. 🙂

I have been connected to her daughters almost since they were born and she was relating a story to me recently where she was discussing drinking alcohol** with her now college aged daughters who described little interest in booze partly because of the alcoholism they know of in their lineage.  

One of them was counting the alcoholics in the family and listed me—and while I am not biologically connected—we are kin in a way that is unbreakable. My friend said ”Wait a minute! Aunt Giulia is NOT an alcoholic.”

We talked about it a bit and I sat down and wrote this letter to my “niece.”  

Here is the letter I wrote:

“Dear “Niece”,

I was talking to your mom and she was telling me about a conversation you guys were having about alcohol and that you thought I am an alcoholic. I must admit, I really do not know if I am an alcoholic and I don’t mind the label—it seems like saying—I had a not great relationship with booze. Alcohol did not make my life uncontrollable.  My life started out uncontrollable and I tried to get a grip in all the wrong ways and in some of the right ways…….

 Alcoholism is a self diagnosis—kind of like everything, really.  I never felt like I had a “healthy” relationship to alcohol—but there was never any kind of relationship in my life that felt healthy.  I was not taught anything about health and wellness—except mostly what not to do, which I only learned by paying attention to other people’s pain, and that it would probably never be accessible to me, because I was never going to amount to anything.  I never could imagine living to even 30 years old.

My parents did the very best they could with the information and life experiences they had.  All of us are always doing the best we can—even when it’s not enough for other people.  As a little girl, I was abandoned in many ways.  My parents were unable or unwilling to heal their own wounds and so they perpetuated their wounds in the way I was raised—with no touch and in total chaos.  I have lived most of my life afraid of adults and of authority.  I have had to overcome a great distrust of other people because I grew up in an environment with lots of alcohol, violent rage, constant criticism, sexual assault, and belittlement.  

I certainly tried a lot of things to find a way to feel better—or to feel nothing.  Not unlike an eating disorder—I used alcohol, drugs, sex, binge eating, smoking cigarettes, work, and exercise to change the way I felt.  

Every single thing a human being does is to change the way we feel.

Growing up in a home with chaos leads a person to not trust anything.  I had to learn to make my own ground, I had to find my own center. (Though we all must—I didn’t realize it and was never shown how). No one ever made me feel safe to explore my creativity, my athleticism, my intellect, my body, my sexual orientation.  No matter what I did or said I was told I was too fat, too stupid, too sensitive, too judgmental, too masculine, too muscular, too queer, ……anything but perfect.

Why?

Because it is what I chose, somehow. 

I have used everything that has been given to me—the good and the not so good——

Every scrap of my ragged life was a gift FOR me. 

I spent a lot of years lamenting my childhood, blaming my parents and feeling sorry for myself—I did drink too much sometimes and it fed my shame.  Am I an alcoholic? I don’t think so.  I have been able to give up so many things in my life that even if addiction has played a role—it’s not one thing—it’s everything. I have done a lot of things that were very dangerous and life threatening.

We are all addicted to something.  Giving up drinking was easy for me. Giving up sugar is mostly easy—but sometimes really tough, lol.

The thing in life that I continue to find incredibly difficult and often heartbreaking is letting go of the belief that I am not enough. I just still do not know how to give up believing that I am wrong, that I was born wrong.

We all develop defenses for survival when we are little.  Even if your childhood was idyllic—you had to learn to get what you needed from your caregivers.  We are not born with language and as you know, even when people speak the same language—there is often incredible difficulty understanding what each others words really mean.  This all goes back to our experiences and our perceptions of our feelings. We learn to do things and to be certain ways that allow us to survive—but then we still don’t know how to let go those survival mechanisms.

How did we get here?

I don’t know and mostly I really don’t care.  Explaining how I got here is a long and boring story because its a litany of what I survived which is only another way of saying I am here—I AM alive.

To be fully alive is to be in the process of surviving whilst also finding a way to thrive.

We thrive when we are healing ourselves and sharing what we have learned with others: helping is how we heal. 

On my worst day, I can offer a smile to someone who needs it more that I will ever understand. I can open a door, let a car go first, etc I can be grateful for everything I have even when I think I need more……..

My incredible opportunity to work with children has saved MY life, not theirs.  I am not here to save anyone but me and I can only do that when I am connected; tuned in, turned on, and plugged in to the beauty and connection of community. Communion. Nature and my body and my feelings are all my connections to this life.

The opportunity to know you is something I almost missed in my life.  I was wrapped up in my own pain and drama when your mom married your dad.  I didn’t have money to travel to WV to the wedding and when Susan sent me a card announcing she was pregnant I was so out of touch with everything that had transpired in her life that I was just shocked.  I do not even know what I did —but it was not enough and I wasn’t there to support her through the pregnancy.  Your mother is part of her mother, who was in many ways a saint—an angel on earth, as is your mom.  Your mom never gave up on me.  She somehow believed that I was worth hanging onto, though I cannot fathom why.

The only reason I even know you is because she was gracious enough to bring you to Louisville and invited me to come meet you.  Dumb and wounded as I am —I somehow made it to that hotel and it was really one of the happiest days of my life. I no longer have the picture of your sister on my lap—but I swear you could have been my children. 

Life is long, if we are lucky, and labels are short.

I don’t know what I am still, but I know enough to know that love is ALL there is.  Your mom is one of the ONLY people in the whole world who has supported me and loved me no matter how fucking stupid, egotistical, selfish, wounded I have been. 

She has never been anything less than the very best friend in the whole world.  I have so many gifts because of her generous spirit, not the least of which is a beautiful relationship with you and your sister.

I am so many things—as are you, as are we all. 

I have done a million things and I have at least a million more to do—but all I want is to be in love.  In love with life and with the people who show up in my life.  Its not how they show up that makes me love them-it is simply THAT they are there.  My God, my spirit, my soul, knows after all this time and all this shame and blame and worry that it was there ALL the time—inside of ME—everything I need is already baked in. Just like in The Wizard of Oz.

If it is happening in my life—it is FOR me—ALL of it—the pain, the joy, the peace, the fear—everything and everyone is for me. If something comes up in my body—illness, disease, injury, pain—it is MINE.  This is my body and everything that happens in it is mine and if its mine—its for me to learn something.

The body shows us where we are blind—literally. It shows us where our emotional wounds are and it we pay attention —it shows us how to heal everything.  Healing is not symptom relief—it is peace and when we have peace many symptoms go away. 

I hope I can teach that to as many people as possible before I die. 

To be loved unconditionally is a self love journey—and we can help others see their worth through our eyes—our vision—(I’m not making a joke about your vision—I am trying to make a point though—that you can see just fine through your heart). 

Every single thing each of us needs is already inside of us.  The journey is to learn to stop letting our fears stop our wild and unique expression of who TF we are.

I know this was totally unsolicited—

I hope it lands as intended—with love.

We have to face the hard things in our lives to discover our truest selves—and that journey never ends——I don’t even think it ends with physical death—but I will let you know after I transition—hopefully many years from now.

I will love you forever, unconditionally. 

You were born as perfect as any seed with everything you need  to become fully you already inside.  

The work is to find it all and set it free. 

Give it ALL away.  We can only ever keep what we give freely……

I know you will—I know you are already and I hope I get to celebrate a lot of milestones with you along the way.

All my love, always, ALL ways,

Your aunt, 

Giulia “

 

**If you think you have a problem with alcohol or drugs,  you do.

If you need help please find a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous https://www.aa.org or Narcotics Anonymous https://na.org/ 

If you were raised with alcoholics or addicts and/or you have an eating disorder or any other addiction, please seek help. You can text me or email me or call me and I will personally help you find the help that works for you.  

“We are all just walking each other home.” Ram Das 

 

The Mind Body Echo

The only thing we have our whole life is this body

We take our first and last breath in this one body we are given.  The only thing we have our whole life is this body; the one thing we are guaranteed.

I really feel like our body is the most important thing we have.

Whatever ailments come up in the physical body are an echo of our mental and emotional life. Healing will not come in the form of a pill or a potion or something outside of us. We are taught from a very early age to medicate any and everything.  As a society, most people generally have no idea how the human body works nor how biochemistry works within the body. A fever is not something to stop or get rid of with a pill.  A fever is a symptom of healing. Taking ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin, Motrin or any other Cyclo-oxygenase inhibitor is NOT healing.  It is killing the messenger (and your gut microbiome is being destroyed), it is numbing the feelings and ignoring the wisdom of the body which is raising its temperature to illicit a full immune response, which will resolve the issue.  Killing the messenger is a temporary bandaid, which are also generally unnecessary.  The bandaids often serve as a reminder of pain that when we look upon we remember and relive.  To what end? I don’t need to relive pain, but I may need to remind my caretaker that I need attention?

Pain is a symptom of healing. Pain and injury and illness are all messengers for a deeper inquiry into what is going on beneath the message. Your life and all the ways you are living are expressions of your emotional health. Your life is your medicine.

Your body has an infinite wisdom that cannot be over ridden. When you take the pills and potions, does the thing go away forever? Probably not.  The pills have to be taken daily, sometimes 2 or 3 or 4 times daily. 

We must address the root cause. We must address the imbalance in the system and work towards finding balance anew. 

An alcoholic can quit drinking and solve all his problems, right? Wrong.  

Quitting drinking is changing the EFFECT not the CAUSE.  Creating sustainable change demands change at the level of cause.  You see this with people who “diet”.  They do the diet and maybe get a result and then they boomerang back.  Change is not about DOING something it is about BECOMING someone who doesn’t just DO something.

Change, then, requires a deeper understanding of what is happening in the body and in the belief system of the individual. 

Bessel Van der Kolk wrote a book called “The Body Keeps The Score” where he revisits the trauma of living and the pathways to healing and recovery.  There is a lot of information floating around about the spiritual connection between the mind and body. There are a lot of us who are exploring the mind-body connection and the way it echoes the spirit. I understand that what ever comes up in my body is a way of showing me my blind spots.  Achy joints? Where am I holding on to anger?  Diarrhea? What do I find undigestible in my life? 

There is not a linear path to self discovery, though western medicine would have us work that way.  Western medicine is geared not toward healing but toward ridding the body of whatever the issue is. Cancer? Cut it out! Fever? Take a pill.  Parkinsons? Take a LOT of pills!!Does anyone else notice that none of these “solutions” is healing anyone?

What would healing look like?

I find this a critical query for all of us in every area of life: mind, body, spirit, environment, equality, mother earth, socio-economics, politics, etc……..

Healing is a spiritual practice, whether you take the pills or not. 

By the way, I am not suggesting that you don’t take the pill or that the alcoholic not stop drinking—for many people this is the first order of business, and, in my humble opinion, is certainly not the last.   

What comes immediately to mind for you when you hear the word spiritual? 

Usually, when I use the word “spiritual” I look both ways before emitting a sound.  

I have heard some really interesting meanings given to the concepts of what spirituality means.  Some people say it means following a guru, reading certain texts, or not believing in God.  Some people say it is synonymous with religion. Some people say it means crystals, and burning sage, and tarot, and astrology, maybe even breathwork.  Certainly some of these things may be ritual in a spiritual practice, but only ones mindset will determine the outcome. 

When I say I don’t have any religion and I am very spiritual, I mean I practice bringing into awareness that which I hold unconscious. 

Our minds want external circumstances to change so that we can feel better.  But how many people do you know who have a complaint yet no matter how many great strategies could be employed to shift their experience, they remain “stuck”.  The prayer is Dear God please undo the thing.”

The spiritual prayer is “Spirit/Universe/Grandmother Moon/Goddess/God…help me accept what I cannot change so that I change what I can.”

What is the nature of what you call spiritual? To those who are aligned consciously in their lives with spiritual work what is the nature of what you call spiritual consciousness or dealing with your unconscious? 

What does it look like to you?

Surrender is all we can really do and that involves recognizing how we never really live with anything, we live with our own inner experience of it.  How we emotionally respond with events in our life is really what we are experiencing. People never experience a dented fender, they experience their own emotion about a dented fender.  People live with their thoughts and beliefs about what a dented fender means and they live with their thoughts about how it occurred and possibly who is to blame, etc.  But none of that is about living with a dented fender, it is living with the THOUGHTS about a dented fender. 

When I realize the thoughts I have about what a dented fender means, I can explore the beliefs I have that lead to those thoughts.  And when I understand what I am believing, I can choose to keep believing that or I can choose to shift to something that feels better.  I can choose to see the fender as it is, dented.  I can choose to see the fender as the defender of the car body and be grateful that the car was not dented.

Either way, it is a practice.  

Yes—we practice feeling bad, we practice having thoughts that perpetuate our bad feelings. We all practice practices that augment and galvanize beliefs that are ingrained in us, until we choose to make the unconscious conscious.  This is the point when we can change for good.

As C.G. Jung said, “Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fate.”

I would invite you to have a personal inquiry practice.  One that I recommend is taking a blank sheet of paper and dividing it right and left with a line down the center.  On the left top, write “Body experience: illness or injury or pain”. On the right side write “Life Events”.

See if you can notice what was or is happening when different things show up in your body. 

The very acts of writing it out begins a healing process.  It means that you are willing to see things differently and this shift in your mindset is exactly what is required to experience something better. 

See if you can notice the advent of ear aches with a chaotic household of anger and yelling.  What did you not want to hear? 
Like I said there are very few linear exactitudes in spiritual work.  Its always an inside job—but so is taking a pill.  You must BELIEVE that the pill is the answer for it to work.

Take some time to explore the concept of placebo and nocebo.  

Take some time to inquire within. Is the pill working? If you stop taking the pill is your problem solved? Does your problem solving require that you ingest pills for the rest of your life? 

What does healing mean? Maybe you will recognize that you never thought about medicine as healing, you were just trying to rid yourself of something inconvenient, or painful, or even life threatening……. 

I am asking you to consider healing. Grace is found in allowing the body to serve up its infinite wisdom.

On the road to consciousness, peace is found.  And whether one reaches radical remission or not, the quest for peace will be the salve.  

If we want to heal we must learn to exchange with our life in ways that bring about the transmutation of energies we have held in us. Our pain is our medicine. Our life is our medicine.  And our healing is what we are willing to exchange for our medicine. 

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