Finally righting (and writing, and riting) myself.

I believed in the last few years that I could find a way to be of service through writing as I once served daily in the classroom.  I had to believe I could make this transition because, like it or not, my life was demanding that I find the way.  With two small children (one of whom has the energy of two or three children combined) I was faking it and clearly not making it.  I was getting super sick and I wasn't willing to do what needed to be done to adapt to my radically changed, almost unrecognizable, new life.  So, as I've witnessed happen to hundreds of women before me, my most rough and tumble coping mechanisms volunteered as "the heavies" and arrived to change my life for me.

Dissociative episodes returned first and even though in the past I've been really good at duping those around me that "no, no, nothing's wrong" either the episodes got worse or the people around me, students included, got better at sensing when my authentic self was on a walk-about.  No one was buying it anymore.  Especially me.  My shame arrived next to "save me" from being exposed by the episodes and like a black curtain it started closing up all my work opportunities in mid-run.  I let my jobs drop to the floor like dead leaves.  So quiet, no one even heard it happening really.  I just evaporated from life outside of our children's lives.

I placed the blame on easy scape goats; my cancer scare, my severe anemia, or whatever else my tanking immune system let in the front door.  With all resources being shunted to a nervous system stuck in sympathetic overdrive, I was a physical mess.  Which, sadly is so much easier to own than being a psychological mess.  As I stayed on the path of denial more of the usual characters started invisibly shuffling in to have a talk with me.  I listened but didn't act.  My self-injury thoughts are so familiar now that their shtick is almost boring and I know better than to work with my thoughts when it comes to severe anxiety. I relied on breath, the last few friends who knew how to navigate my PTSD mine-field without detonating anything, and lastly but there in a pinch, I had Xanax.

I managed for about a year this way and then that shred of "healthy self" that I had locked away inside  made an unsanctioned call and brought in the big gun.  I heard its heavy footsteps coming and, as anyone with it can attest, I could do nothing to stop it.  Major depression arrived and sat on me until I cried "uncle."  (Actually, I cried "Mom!") And, then it was all over.  The next thing that I remember I "came to" under the tattered and familiar fabric of my personal red tent.  Not the luscious and lively tent I'd been raising for a decade for other women.  But my own, profoundly personal, red tent made up of five women, that when called, rally.

It was decided that I was bleeding out and it was time for a bolder step.  It was time to go.  Like now.  To get the hell out of hell, entrust myself and my children to mother nature, lick my wounds, and begin again - walking my own talk and teachings..

I told no one else of my plan because I knew that the plan was right, and I knew that it would work, and I knew that it was crazy, and most importantly I knew that I wouldn't survive anyone's doubt.  Not this time.  So, I quietly vanished.

We are settling in close to nature on a small island an hour ferry ride from the mainland.  I can tell that this self-sequestering was one of them most important decisions of my life.  I can also see the disappearing act that got me here as an abandonment of my students, of many friendships, and of the red tent values of connection and community around which I have encouraged so many women to congeal.  From the outside, my middle of the night departure looks more like something from the life of a carnie than a community instigator.  It smells sharp, it feels a little creepy, and it is full of shadows all of which make it the perfect first experience for me to catch RedHanded.

RedHanded is obviously a play on the old phrase about "catching someone in the act" (usually a questionable act).  If anything my goal with the blog is to inspire us to maintain playfulness, levity, candor, humor, and hope while doing the difficult and essential work of catching ourselves, each other, and our over-culture in some of our most complicated, controversial, and important acts.  I've quoted Pema Chodron many times in my teaching women in recovery.  One of her simplest quotes, "We must practice non-aggressively catching ourselves" has long guided my teaching and it will continue to guide me through this blog.  It is my goal to catch myself gently; where I am in denial, where I am not living authentically, where I am hiding in the shadow.  I want to catch our culture too, by questioning patriarchy and what it continues to do to women, children, men, and the earth itself.

Over the last decade I often told clients that the mission of my little red tent was to "reclaim the curse" and challenge the messages we receive as women about our bodies.  When I suggested that rather than being a broken, bloody mess of a burden, our bodies just might be our greatest blessing, I was most often met with the spontaneous laughter of disbelief.  Over time, however, if a woman kept at least one foot under the tent, that blurt almost always steeped into the long rolling laughter of excited, deep belief.  Such authentic laughter was the tell for me that we'd gotten another one back.  Another woman had recovered her original self and was seated again in her power with her funny bone mended and her wish-bone nestled again close to her heart.

It took motherhood to help me fully understand the dynamics of laughter and power.  As a mother (physical tickling excluded) any instigator of laughter is my greatest weapon in parenting power struggles.  Levity trumps the iron fist every time and when it comes to power it turns out that humor and playfulness are much more fun and effective than guilt and shame.  My findings in parenting my children are converging with my observations of women re-parenting themselves - our best hope is to find the humor in it.  Like environmental educator David Orr suggests - we can choose to live a comedy or a tragedy as we confront and hopefully attempt to change our ecological fate.  Like Dr. Anita Johnston has the courage to suggest in her professional trainings for eating disorder specialists, "we know how serious this is, we know women are starving themselves to death, it is our job to help them lighten up about it."  It seems that the old adage is true, if you can't laugh about it you definitely aren't taking it seriously enough.

Under The Red Tent we found that storytelling was an excellent way to catch ourselves taking things too seriously (in the unproductive way) - especially our shame.  So many times I saw a woman start to narrate her rock-bottom moment in a shame-spiral and then, aided by the natural shift into witness consciousness that so often occurs with storytelling,  she would pull herself right up and out into altitudes of wisdom, and even gratitude.  The spontaneous buoyancy usually came from the moments of absurdity, or hidden beauty and strength, that are often uncovered in a retelling.

I spent a decade listening to, learning from, and guiding women in this unfolding of their personal "herstory".  And then, I became a mother.  And, I promptly lost my own way.  As soon as I realized I was adrift and no longer tethered to my practices, I dropped the burden of being "a teacher".  

Now, I am here.
It is my time to focus on healing and writing with courage.

RedHanded is starting off with the mother-lode as I am catching what feels like the shamiest experience of my shame riddled life.  I am "catching gently" something about my life that for two years I've denied, and hid, and hated until last week I seemingly effortlessly admitted.  I am a mother who suffers and grapples with mental illness.

While writing a piece for thewarthogschool.blogspot.com I finally coupled together the two internal experiences that up until that moment had repelled like magnets: "mothering" and "mental illness".
They reacted with force.   Harsh judgments like: crazy, undone, untrustworthy, dangerous came first to mind.  Then, a full color image was fleshed out that was, in my best summation, the soccer-mom-anti-christ.  The mother doing everything wrong, the mother ruining her children's chances, the mother who can't be trusted with anyone's children, including her own.  That was just the beginning of the culturally condoned judgment I've internalized and unleashed upon myself.

In our harsh and misunderstanding culture, when it comes to the stigma of mental illness there is a special hell reserved just for mothers.  It's walls are covered with impossibly idealistic advertisements of modern day motherhood and yellowed newspaper clippings vilifying the most mentally ill mothers of our recent history.  The walls also hold photos of the childhoods that are slipping away like sand while a mother struggles to recover her healthy self.

It is a scary place.

Long before I visited it myself I counseled other mother's as they struggled with their mental health.  They were giving up meth, giving up binging 6 times a day, giving up an affair... they were giving up "giving up".  I feel a wave of sheepish flush at least once a day as I recount the days of counseling those mother's before I myself had felt the weight of the mantle.  (How could I know, just how much I couldn't know, until I'd stepped into those particular red shoes?)  It is my hope that in my non-initiated way I did more good than harm.  One thing I can say for certain, and with great relief, it is that I saw them as heroines.  I didn't see them through the same harshly judgmental lens that has shamed me into hiding over the last few years.

So, as I launch Red Handed, I launch myself into my own recovery (again) by gently catching myself, with my own motherly love and saying out loud that I will no longer be silenced by shame.  So I've got a bag of hammers like the rest of us and some of what's clanking around in there can be labeled by the DSM-V.  I am still a safe person with whom you can leave your child and last I checked my own kids are turning out pretty neato and whole.  Yes, I cancel appointments sometimes because my PTSD is triggered, or I have to take a personal time out, call in back up, and cry really hard to a friend for a while so my past childhood doesn't get tangled up with their present.  But, all in all, my mental wellness far outweighs my mental illness.  For me, when I'm not living in shame induced denial, my experience of mental illness is like a cold.  When I come down with it,  I stay away from others, I protect my children from catching it, I blow my nose a lot, and then I'm usually on my feet again in a day or two.  That's really it.  I'm not the image our culture has affixed to the label.  I'm not limping down the street, yelling obscenities, hair matted and mouth foaming with my children long lost to the gutter.  Yet, let yourself be silenced by shame long enough and who knows what is possible….the cold becomes severe anemia…and so forth…

It is time to be brave again.

Autumn has always been my favorite time of year, and has become even more so since my years with The Red Tent on Rose Avenue. Within that womb-like studio autumn was the season of women showing up to be the heroine.  They lined up at the door ready to face their own shadows, to kiss themselves awake, and to save their own lives.  This first autumn on the island my harvest is from that heirloom seed;  The heroine.  My harvest is also a new understanding of enough.  It's more like a expletive than a measure of bounty this year.  "Enough!"   I've had enough of denial and shame.  I've had enough of what is happening to women, and children, and the earth.   It is my hope that Red Handed will inspire and assist women to continue the work of saving their authentic selves and the earth itself.  It is also my hope that after some time in the woods, I will write, and rite, and right myself to the point of being ready to raise the red fabrics and gather again, in person, in circle.

A Thank You to the Heroines of The Red Tent on Rose Avenue (Originally published August 2012)

The Red Tent on Rose Avenue
Venice,  California    2006-2009

The red tent that I’ve been raising for women in the last seven years has served as both medic tent (in the battlefield of women vs. the female cultural “ideal”) and mystery school.  The general flow has been: women stumble to its shelter, they find and tend to the spark of authentic self, and when sufficiently healed they charge back out into the world eager to share the gift that they’ve recovered.  It is an experience that, without a doubt, is “the heroine’s journey”.

In 2005, before I knew what I was doing (in the truest sense of that saying) I had just a skeleton of a seasonally inspired curriculum and a fixer-upper studio space where I leapt into the experience of “build it and they will come”.  It took that first draft attempt to find out that what I was doing was actually playing with fire (a woman’s creative fire to be exact).  I saw this reflected back to me by the alchemy that happened under our humble tent as well as the reactions created outside of it.  We were incendiary.  We were into something powerful and taboo.  There was a naturally arising sense of mystery that both spooked and excited us.  We were finding that not only did we have the courage to speak our truths, but as Eve Ensler had reminded us at that time, we were finding the endurance to stand in it.  For two years we spoke and we stood.  And, through those two actions the vision embroidered itself into being around us.  

We found ourselves standing together under a red tent.

I remember the morning that I realized, “I now know what we are doing. We are resurrecting a menstrual hut in the middle of Los Angeles.”  I laughed out loud.  It was absurd.  It was too important.  It would cause problems in my life.  At that moment I took comfort in a story that I had once heard Eve Ensler tell at a book signing.  It was about the morning that she woke up and realized that she had to write a book.  She said that the feeling of gravity was profound, “Not only did I have to write a book, it was going to be a book about vaginas.”  Eve Ensler is one of the biggest heroines in my own life and at that moment she felt like an ally.  That was how I realized that I was on the path myself now.  I was entering the forest adventurous at my own unique point.  I told myself what I commonly told the women in my classes, “Buckle up.”

We fared pretty well in those first years.  Inside the tent women inquired, rested, tended, cried, meditated, moved, occasionally played dead, and eventually found themselves.  It was a sense of self that many had feared was lost forever and others still felt tethered to, yet watched go into hiding every time that they engaged the over-culture.  We called it “original self”, “True self”, “authentic self” and then we just started describing it in detail whenever we spotted it in our lives.  Like a muse we became enchanted by it and it inspired us.  Which was good, we needed the encouragement to deal with the reactions we were catalyzing in the outside world.  The list of offenses from those first years seems longer than it should have been and some were comical enough to treasure; the perimeter of piss left around our brick and mortar, and the half-eaten Kielbasa sausage in the mail box.  While others were dangerous enough to always remember; the monthly papering of hate literature about God’s alleged opinion of lesbians, and the stake that came through the window and landed inches from where I sat typing in the office one day.  Did they think we were vampires because we revered a woman’s bleeding?  If so, was that intended for my heart?  The reactions to our tent left me questioning just what cultural nerve (or maybe more appropriately what cultural vein) we were tapping into with our re-embrace of the female blood mysteries.  I started to foresee just what kind of trouble we would be getting into by celebrating a woman’s “wise wound” amidst a very wounded culture.

The tension was summed up best when Yogi Times Magazine headlined an article they wrote on us as, “The Red Tent, a place for troubled women.”  After the shock wore off, we were incensed.  How could they, a magazine devoted to enlightened living, perpetuate the idea that women who were embracing their bodies and its cycles were trouble(d)?  We raged a bit and after we burned enough copies of the article we finally saw the light as well as the humor.  We were all troubled women.  The headline was exactly right in that we were deeply troubled by what we saw around us and determined to gather and do it differently moving forward.  

Undoubtably, the women who were willing to come through the front flaps of our menstrual hut were ready for an adventure.  They wanted to tap the inner warrior.  They wanted their chance.  They were tired of waiting to be kissed awake.  I saw it in the skewing of class attendance towards our fall curriculum - the season we dedicated to exploring “the heroine”.  Women were ripe and ready for the fall and stepped right off the edge of comfort without a second thought.  I was awed by what I witnessed.  Women were daring the night sea journey, reclaiming their sense of authenticity, and to my greatest delight not stopping there, but rather charging back out onto dry land to try to be an agent of positive change.  Every autumn since those early years it remains my honor and fortune to play midwife to the birth of the brave one.  Again and again.

Through my calling to resurrect the red tent I’ve seen what happens to a woman and to her world when “the curse” is reclaimed into a blessing.  What I have witnessed has changed my life and will change the lives of my children.  I’ve seen women move from feeling awful to feeling awe-filled about their bodies and I tell you that the transformation is nothing short of miraculous.  They step into the most grounded power.  Divine feminine becomes a verb and they begin handcrafting a life with purpose guided from within rather than without.  In short, I’ve seen the mythic female blood mysteries at work in modern times and it is amazing.  And, probably should maintain its clandestined status, come to think of some of the things I’ve seen...

It was in exchange for raising a red tent, that I was given first hand experience of the blood mysteries.  As ridiculously mystical as it seems, the women in attendance seemed to channel the wisdom from some old place beyond my four walls and tell it through the lens of their current lives. It is from that experience I can attempt to capture the blood mysteries in essence: they are the old ways that deem a woman blessed by the very thing we’ve been mistakenly duped into thinking is her curse - that is her body’s affinity to cycle along with all of nature. 

Mythologist Joseph Campbell talks about women being the lucky ones because of this very phenomenon - he says women are fortunate because nature overtakes them.  It sounds scary and it is.  Menarche comes and so does menopause and they don’t care much what you think about them.  I’ve found it helpful to find scholars who frame that experience of no escape as a benefit.  Campbell points out that whereas men’s rites of passage traditionally came from the tribal culture, women’s have come from an inevitable embrace by nature. Women succumb and nature grows them up whether they feel ready or not.  The blood mysteries are an embrace by nature that initiates us into our personal power.  We have no a choice.  Period.  Through the onset of menarche nature begins pulling us towards maturity.  And the initiation is the true kind that leaves one saying breathlessly somewhere in its midst, “If this doesn’t kill me, it will certainly make me stronger.”  And, what most of us are able to say in the end is, it doesn’t kill you.  It does make you stronger.  You realize that you are a woman, and by nature, “she who bleeds but does not die.”  In fact, it is the other initiations, the one’s that come from the culture that in my experience prove much more fatal.  At just shy of forty years old I’ve already personally known two handfuls of women who have succumbed to disordered eating and chemical dependency.  It is my experience that the over-culture’s rites of passage are much more brutal and fatal than nature’s.  It is a wild ride, but where the mystery does leaves us with personal choice is: As initiates what do we do with the gift of such maturity and power?  How do we channel it, if we pick it up at all, or will we curse it and walk away? Will we celebrate it or dam(n) it?  Will it make us into a heroine or bring us to our knees?

In yoga, hero’s pose is done on one’s knees, often with a hand gesture that conveys deep reverence while directing one’s attention to the home of the True self.  Like other women I know, I spent much of my young womanhood on my knees.  I was subjugated.   I was praying, often begging, for things to be different.  I was tired out already at the start of life.  Patriarchy brought me to my knees at an early age.  So for me, hero’s pose as an adult woman, is a posture of standing on my own two feet.  I stand and I keep standing.  Come stakes, come kielbasa, come fear, come fatigue. That’s all I know to do, to endure, and to remember, “The hero is no braver than the average person, just braver 5 minutes longer.”

We are well past the five minute mark.  We are past 5 years.  And from where I stand under this tent, I am humbled, sometimes scared, and ever inspired by the women gathered together to do this work of celebrating the blood mysteries and living authentic lives against all the amazing odds and obstacles imbedded in patriarchy.    Every one of them is my heroine.

Love Note

I spent tea time last Sunday writing a few spontaneous love notes.  The effect was immediate (even though the notes still would not be received for many days after).  I felt LOVE just at the moment that I desperately needed to feel loved.  I noticed how depersonalized (in a good way!) it felt.  Each note I began, "Here is something I love about you…" and I very quickly noticed that it wasn't about me.  It was liberatingly universal rather than self-referential. It "filled my cup" better than any champagne could have - and thank goodness for that because I had no idea the struggles that I would face in this week that has followed:

This past week it seems that my son has (temporarily) succumbed to a slow and steady poisoning from patriarchy.  Much of the week my son has been lost to me.  As if lost to a fever dream, he is fitfully angry, violent, confused, and sad.  

For his first four years of life I sheltered him. I protected him. I believed we could live differently even in the city and that I could keep him safe. Then I wore down.  I gave up in little bits.  I let in the common advice, "You can't shelter him forever." I started to expose him to the over-culture and to children who hadn't been protected from it.  I convinced myself that it would be like an inoculation.

It has been more like a toxic shock syndrome.  

I feel devastated by the outcome.  I feel panicked and scared about our present and his future. I feel horrified by what my culture and my society have deemed as acceptable messages for my son about his masculinity and its gifts.  I thought I was angry for the decade that I worked with women cutting, starving, and killing their bodies in the name of patriarchy.  As it turns out, that was just preparation for the rage I would have to be able to endure and eventually channel upon experiencing the poisons that patriarchy offers to our sons.
I feel rage.
And with it, a tremendous responsibility: I have an opportunity to teach my son about a life beyond violence and a world that will cherish his gifts of passion, boldness and action.

Today is not only Valentine's Day, it is also V-day's annual "One Billion Rising" event. www.onebillionrising.org  It is a day that, worldwide, individuals are rising up against violence. Its founder, Eve Ensler, has been a long long time heroine of mine.  I wrote a piece in 2012 that highlights just what she has helped me to brave in my own life and work: http://www.redtentrising.com/The_Red_Tent/Heroines__ckeating.html). I re-read the piece today and I melted like chocolate.  Just re-reading about the days that we all used to gather under The Red Tent on Rose Avenue made the oxytocin begin to rise in my blood…  I remembered what I so fervently believe in: in women not just surviving but thriving by going beyond violence to align with and protect our innate "affinity for life."  

For the past few years the red tent has been folded up and collecting dust.  Once "the mistress of all things menstrual" lately I've been busy drowning in the mystery of the masculine.  And, although I tried once last fall to ressucitate our community (and fell flat on my face) - I am now distanced and desperate enough to try again…

So, I am officially putting out the call to coagulate, because once again the wound that I'm bleeding from isn't mine alone.  It is cultural.  Everything in my life is telling me that it is time for a tending tent.  Time for communal oxytocin surges to quash some of this off-the-charts cortisol.  It is time to mourn.  Time to sing.  Time to move.  Time to act.  Time to rise.

Today.

I am rising.  

For my son.

For all children.

For the planet.

For all our destinies intertwined and hanging perilously close to a future of either extinction or sustainability.

I am refusing to let my son be swallowed up by our culture of violence and our horrifically limiting definition about his divine masculinity.  

Today.

I will be heading to the beach at sunset with both my children.  We will be offering to the ocean whatever we cannot hold and dancing to a simple song to claim our new beginning.  A future for them - free of violence.  We will be at the ocean just by the Venice Beach sand dune if you want to join us. 

We will be singing:

We are rising up

Like a phoenix from the fire

Sisters and brothers 

spread your wings and fly higher

We are rising up, We are rising up, We are rising up!, We are rising up…

Maybe you will light a candle, make a declaration, or mark in your own way this day of rising…  If you do, will you tell me, please?  I want to share the experience together because today, I am trading in solitude for solidarity.

I will be following through with my own personal need for a weekly tending tent.  Maybe you feel the need too?  Would you join me?  Virtual.  Physical.  Whatever we can muster, let's make it happen again. 

It is time.

Yours always, in the blood,

Caroline