C/TW: childhood sexual assault (CSA); medical trauma; psychiatric trauma; domestic violence – NO DETAILS

After nearly 8 years of therapy, I have finally accomplished something I thought would never happen: I am all in one psychospiritual piece.  I am a single, complete unit for the first time in my life.  It feels amazing.  I’ve spent my whole life broken into three major pieces due to childhood and medical trauma: my upper body above the waist, my lower body from the upper legs down, and my pelvic region.  As a result, I’ve always been strangely uncoordinated, unable to do things like dance because I was energetically disconnected between my head and feet in two different places.

No more.  The primary way I can tell that I am complete is how music affects me now.  I don’t just hear it, I feel it in my body, vibrating within my torso all the way down to my toes.  And I can finally dance.  It’s wonderful to feel my spine as a single unit from my sacrum up to my skull.  I’m also not in pain anymore.  My pelvic region carried a tremendous amount of emotionally, spiritually, and physically painful baggage that caused a lot of pain which has been released now that I’m one complete system.

However, while I may finally be complete, I am not yet whole.  The difference between completion and wholeness can be illustrated in the difference between a puzzle and a photograph.  Both are images, but you cannot handle the puzzle without it falling to pieces again.  It is complete, but not whole.  It is still fragile in a way that the photograph is not.

Right now, I’m a fully assembled puzzle, but one that is still prone to falling apart if I’m mishandled.  Hence, I stay at home most of the time and try to avoid stimulus that makes me crumble.  That’s why I declared a sabbatical year until at least next Spring Equinox: I need time to integrate my remaining puzzle pieces in such a way as I become as whole as possible so I don’t fall apart anymore.

Fortunately, I have identified the parts of myself that need healing, and I have a good idea of what they need from the Internal Family Systems work I have done.  I have 7 remaining parts of myself at different ages, and they correspond to the 7 chakras.

Age 7: root chakra – CSA

Age 11, 16, 31: sacral chakra – CSA, near-fatal birth trauma

Age 14: solar chakra – bloody domestic violence

Ages 16-17: heart chakra – CSA, hospitalized, kicked out

Age 31: throat chakra – near-fatal birth trauma

Age 39: third eye – diagnosed bipolar, prescribed “blinding” meds

Age 47: crown chakra – psychiatric trauma

I find it miraculous that I have reduced the seemingly infinite number of shards that my psyche shattered into 8 years ago down to a mere 7 inner personas that still need healing.  Looking at that remaining list of 7, I also find it miraculous that I’m aboveground, breathing, and relatively sane.  Those personas themselves had to be spiritually reconstituted, for lack of a better phrase, then set back into place in my psyche and my subtle body, where the chakras live.  From the perspective of my inner visions, until quite recently, my Seven Selves were living comfortably at our Home By the Sea, safely recuperating from their own spiritual reassembly.  I was letting them all rest because we had been through so much.

However, when I look at my Inner House now, I no longer see my Seven Selves: they are now a part of me.  Now I see what I saw at the very beginning of my Awakening journey eight years ago: Myself in the Present Time, an external Observing Self, and a Forward-Looking Self.  In the context of Tibetan Buddhism, this is what happens when one is in the bardo: the liminal space between planes of existence.  As an avatar of Hekate, the liminal crossroads Goddess, this makes perfect sense, especially since she has three faces.  As what some spiritual traditions refer to as a “walker between the worlds,” I now live in a permanent state of liminality, with one foot in this realm of existence, and the other in the Next.

It doesn’t keep me from thinking and researching, though.  Past Me unknowingly bought a gift for Present Me 3 years ago: a book entitled Yoga For the Subtle Body.  It is precisely what I need to address any healing these remaining Selves need that correspond to my chakras.  It is also what I need to get my body moving again.  I’ve been still for far too long, and I’m too old to be sedentary like that, it will kill me faster than almost anything else.  However, I’m getting the message these days that there’s no need to rush anymore, to just let things unfold at their own pace, so I’m trying to do that.

As I said, though, that doesn’t mean those Seven Selves don’t still need some healing.  They are still autonomous psychic entities, and as such I don’t always have control over them, which can be problematic.  It’s no good to have the 7-year-old driving the bus, as it were.  At present, my complex PTSD and tendency to dissociate under stress mean that at any given time, I can immediately become one of my other Selves and not be able to do a damn thing about it.  This happened at the clinic I was going to, and as a result, I had a panic attack that outwardly appeared to be rage, and I was fired as a patient.

I’d like to say that there’s someone I can write to somewhere to change The System, because that shouldn’t have happened to me, but there isn’t, so my only recourse is to try to heal myself as best I can so that I don’t suddenly become the equivalent of a frightened, barking dog with its teeth bared like I did at the clinic.  Until then, I’m continuing my personal Hermit year and hiding from stimulus as much as possible while I continue healing to wholeness.