Doctortayria's Blog

I literally fell asleep last night writing this piece. There must be a message in that, as I never, ever just fall asleep; falling asleep is generally a project. Maybe anxiety that keeps me awake is dissolving!

I’m noticing the wild generosity of the universe these last days. The harshness of nature is a fact, the pain of loss, death of loved ones, heartbreaking challenges, difficulties, uncertainties have to be tolerated, even embraced. Yet nature also compensates in such touching and extraordinary ways. I want to honor her for that, shout to her my thanks.

My friend who just lost her husband is shattered, yet what I heard in her voice last night was amazement at the most indefinable comforts that are pouring through to touch her tired spirit with the sweetest love. And what I witnessed is a woman breaking out, like a birth, an emerging power coming into the world as she lives into this challenge.

I see it everywhere. Nature takes away, but never withholds her showers of compensations. Her heart is fully generous. I love her so much in this and want to say thank you.

The gospel stories of the New Testament have informed Western thinking, philosophy, music and art ever since the time of their recording. In these last days a remembrance of the story of the transfiguration of Jesus keeps coming to mind, an event reported to have been witnessed by some that were with him on Mount Tabor.

Transfiguration. What is this concept? What does it want us to know? The figure of Jesus was transfigured right before the eyes of those with him. Is it possible for us to become transfigured like that? Do we also experience the kind of transfiguration this scripture refers to? I feel a transfiguration coming on but not anything anyone can see, just a change from the inside out, a vibration at a different rate, a mysterious charge of energy the universe chooses to deliver. I’m very intrigued with this, and that strong word keeps passing through my mind.

I have done many vision quests over many years, in different traditions and nations. Two of them were ten-day quests. Today I did a 40-minute quest as part of a teaching event by Muriel McMahon, a Native-American teacher from the Six Nations in Canada and a Jungian Analyst.

I think often of William Blake’s words that “the universe is in a grain of sand.” It doesn’t take hours of meditation to go to where you need to go, that journey can happen in a split second. It doesn’t take a 10-day vision quest, or days of fasting to get your vision either. It can happen in an instant.

Today as I lay on the land, loving the blue sky and watching the spiders and little bugs crawl up the reeds and fly about, spider webs glistening, and the sounds of leaves being moved by wind, I was resting and not worrying or straining for anything, but was just there, intentionally listening, feeling quiet. Then a cloud of energy moved into me as distinctly, clearly and as sweetly as anything I have ever felt. I have worried and felt intense concern for our young men and women coming home from war, suffering the effects of trauma and a psychological disorder called PTSD that can overwhelm a life, while almost no one knows how to treat it. I was diagnosed with this disorder after some serious traumas in my life by three doctors, but it’s just a name they throw out. Not one knows how to treat it apparently. I have lived painfully inside of it, I know it from the inside. I am a doctor of depth psychology who has been treating herself as an experimental patient for a decade, and have learned very much.

Today’s vision that moved into me clearly, strongly and sweetly said, simply , “Do it.” Find the way to help these young men and women and work with them. It didn’t give details or say how to find the way, but only moved into me the sturdiest sense of – just do it. That’s your answer. The ancestors have spoken. It’s is a mission. A calling. It came from this quest.

I call for the inspired, deeply loving helps of ancestors and spirits who can help me find the way to answer such a call. I have much to learn but it feels like what I am trained, destined and desirous of doing.

Listening to the body. Have never experienced pain like I am experiencing which seems to be what they call “heartburn” – not sure. Like fire and knives. I finally gave the whole experience to the elements today – I offer burning love to you, whatever is on fire right in the center of me. I think my heart has been toolong  protected since devastating heartbreak and is starting a revolution. I know heartburn is about the stomach, it must be called that for a reason. I think my body is finding a voice, and I want to listen.

I recently told the Universe that I want to be useful, I would like to useful in the causes closest to your heart and mine; thinking I don’t want to waste away over here in a little eddy of my own making or incompetence. I am realizing that the universe is very willing to take me up on that, and I am grateful. But I forgot to mention that I need to make a living. I need to be more specific when I ask. Dear Universe, please find ways for me to be useful in the causes of heart that my skills might be best put to use. And please support me too, abundantly, as you do this. Thank you.

I forgot to write last night, which is unusual. Actually I thought about it so many times that I must have finally thought I did it. I had to check this morning.

I’m readying myself to be at a conference this week that I am assisting with, lists of things both personal and part of the conference effort sit on every counter and swirl in my head that the dizziness feels unhealthy. Literally like I’m sick. I wonder about these things. I look out at the changing colors across the mountains from my window and the birds flying about and I don’t feel part of it. I feel dislocated.

For any rite of passage, severance from all that is familiar is the beginning stage. Ok. Here I go. Not even close to packed and out the door and I feel severed already. We’ll see how this goes.

I read Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation this past summer and was extremely moved by it. I just now finished watching HBO’s movie about her. She is an autistic woman who had the right kind of support and encouragement in her life, as well as spirit and intelligence, to become a voice so that the rest of us can learn the inner life of an autistic person. She achieved a Ph.D. and has become an authority in her field of translating the needs of animals, particularly cattle, for humans to comprehend. When I read her book, and then watched the movie, I felt so much resonance with the importance of what she has to say to us collectively, and to me personally. I’m going to list personal reasons.

#1 Before I had ever heard of Temple Grandin a couple of years ago I caused some friends of mine to have a reaction of curiosity, maybe some concern, when I told them I wanted to invent a “hugging machine.” After living in a family of origin who were very free with tactile expression, then having been married with children in a tactile family-  living alone has been difficult. As humans I think we are meant to be touched and hugged regularly – and I am not talking about sex. The sex part mixes it up, turns it into something else, very unfortunately much of the time. I refer to the general expression of children, friends, families who touch each other regularly. I felt the absence of this presence in my life hugely after living alone, and told my friends I was thinking of how to develop some pillowy thing that actually closes in and hugs; it would be so helpful. Well, Temple Grandin developed a hugging machine after she saw how cows were calmed by a contraption that held them tightly. She came to need her hugging machine as much as oxygen. I felt amazed and validated when I saw this!

#2 Temple got respect enough from some men at a ranch who had refused her entrance, where she needed entrance in order to do her research to write her articles, when she told one of them she had eaten bull’s testicles. That was enough for them to respect her and let her become one of them. Well, I have eaten bull’s testicles here on the mountain. Respect, please!

#3 Temple thinks in pictures, not words or concepts. She is a visual thinker. I had a dream once that told me that “the heart thinks in images.” Much of my work in the last decades has been about recovering the indigenous mind. Indigenous people the world over will tell you that they think with the heart. The heart thinks in images. Temple is an indigenous thinker, and I want to learn from her.

#4 Much of the confusion Temple expressed in this movie was in regard to trying to answer the question, when she saw animals and humans die, of “Where do they go?” I’ve been on that same line of inquiry lately myself in a huge way.

#5 Temple’s motto, and that of her wonderful mother, seemed to be “different but not less.” Recent news reports, including tonight’s, has told stories of the torture and murder of young gay people by people who feel threatened, for some unfathomable reason, by them. Why does “different” mean automatically “less” or “bad” to some people? WHY are we instinctively afraid of it? WHY? This is an enormous question that needs very immediate and considered reflection.

I am so appreciative of what I am learning from Temple Grandin right now. God bless her work.