BREATHE

Sometimes there’s a beckoning voice inside that can pull my mind away from worry, croon my fear out of its cage, or coax my ego off her pedestal and, instead, get me to pay attention to my breathing. Oh if I could only hear that calming hum every day, 24/7, asleep or awake. God, could I even stand it, that much peace? The breath can be like a well-varnished cherry wood canoe carrying me back to my very own best self. All it takes is attention – some days that’s the same as saying all it takes is a million dollars.

It seems to me my breathing was shallow in childhood. I don’t remember thinking about breathing back then. I did think about running away or at least hiding. I didn’t learn to breathe for health and well-being until I was in my fifties. Breathing used to be the last thing on my mind, which is, come to think of it, lucky for me since my breathing didn’t need me to keep going.

It seems to me, back then, I held my breath more than let it out; each breath never went deeper than the top of my lungs before it turned around and left.

What changed my breathing? Dad dying, for starters. And writing. When I write about my childhood – the trauma years, the traumatic era, the fear infested decades – the deeper my breath travels into me. Writing has a pulse and it seems to me my lungs get exercised by the push and pull of the pen. Is that why I seem to write more about feelings when I write longhand? Tap, tap, tapping on a keyboard does nothing for my lungs.

It seems to me my fear of breathing is connected to all the times I had pleurisy – from age 10 to 17. I never had pleurisy after I left home.

Yoga changed my breathing. Every teacher has been hell bent on the breath. Last week Lisa told the class, “Send the breath to a tight place in your body.” I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that 60 years ago. Thinking my breath was a thing to be directed somewhere. Lisa acts like the breath is some kind of miracle medicine. Maybe I do too, now.

I just stopped writing, closed my eyes and let my mind ride down with my breath, curving up my nostrils, twisting down the back of my skull, down the back of my neck, take a left turn at the top of the spine over to that sore muscle under my left shoulder blade. And the breath circles round and round the muscle like a stream of water shooting out of a faucet turned on full, I hold it there a little while then have the breath trace its tracks back out again.

It seems to me it would have been a comfort, maybe even a healing, if I had known how to do that when I was eight years old and nine and ten and, and, and.

I didn’t know then but I know now. Lucky me.

The Gym and the Church

This posting was to be about yoga with a great quote from Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk about the study he talks about that showed greater progress in healing from trauma with yoga than drugs, for some.  But then pop, pop, two stories jumped out of my NPR app – stories I’ve known about but, seeing one sitting on top of the other in the newsfeed pushed yoga aside, for now. Story #1 is about Attorney Deborah Daniels’ 70 recommendations resulting from her investigation of USA Gymnastics on how they can prevent the sexual abuse of girl gymnasts. And #2 – Cardinal George Pell has been given a leave from his service as finance advisor to the Pope to return to Australia to testify to his innocence for the large number of accusations of the sexual abuse of children dating back to the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.

Now – we could go down a whole lot of different paths about the parallels of these two stories. The power dynamics between children and their elders – coaches and priests. The similarities of both these cultures being closed as apposed to open and transparent.

I just got stuck. The pen stopped, I laid my head onto the back of my rocking chair and the voice of my inner critic, Pacasandra, rose to the surface, chortling, “Blah, Blah, Blah. There you go again – same rant as always. You are boring me to pieces and you’re only going to upset people with this constant complaining. Can’t you think of anything nice or funny or positive to say for a change? This dead horse of yours has been beaten enough, Jenson.”

Well, actually that’s the problem, the horse isn’t dead. It’s not even lame or starving or half blind or looking like it’s so old it may die out any day now.

No, this horse is alive and kicking. And what keeps gnawing at me is the spot-on certainty I carry that it’s all still happening right this very minute. Two things are for sure – these crimes don’t get looked at unless a victim speaks. And, by and large, if victims speak it’s not until long after the fact. Take me for example – my abuse stopped when I was 12 years old but I didn’t speak of it until I was 32. Not surprising – I needed those twenty years to gain enough steam to take the plunge into the deep waters of truth telling. I needed to build a life jacket from hours of therapeutic relationships with both personal and professional healers.

Let’s get back to USA Gymnastics. The CEO resigned and one molester is up on charges. Yay! Over 100 girls have slammed through the closet doors they’ve been protecting their sanity with. One guy did harm all those girls. But I don't believe there is only one person harming girls in this organization. And there isn’t just one administrator in one town’s gym that fired one guy so he could go to a new gym and start all over again.

Attorney Daniels was right to say in her report that they’ve got a culture of non-protection, which is exactly what the Pope is sitting on top of, too.

I want to say to the board of directors of USA Gymnastics – don’t anybody give a sigh of relief, the worst is not over – it takes a whole lot of time and energy to change a culture.

Now I just want to cry. I HATE getting to this rant and rave place that’s wallpapered with rage and carpeted with hopelessness. I want out of here. I want to take this god-awful heightened consciousness, throw it in a lake and run for the hills. I don’t want to know any of this anymore. I don’t want to feel this anymore. I want all of us to know we are beloved and belong.

Look, that culture change is not going to happen quick enough to stop the crimes of today. Except – there is JFK High in Northampton MA. A group of  students, girls and boys, staged a sit-in in the principles office – YAHOO! – because one of the girls was told, in response to her claim of sexual harassment in her class, “boys will be boys.” And instead of going to that class they’d let her spend that hour in the library for the week till the incident cooled down.

A teen fueled sit-in. NOW you're talkin’!

Deep Secrets

I stood at the podium and said, “My stake in being here is rooted in being a woman who survived the childhood sexual abuse of incest. We in MERGE for Equality believe boys are born naturally loving, life affirming and sustained by connection. Had my father been raised to be his natural authentic self I’m certain I would have had a completely different father, a loving protective father and therefore a completely different childhood.”

As the Board President I got to welcome the participants to our 4th Summit, two hundred souls interested in spending a day riding on our mission of transforming masculinity to advance gender equality; what a dance to be doing to the thump, thump, thump of Trump, Trump, Trump.

And our keynote speaker, the brilliant, sassy, Dr. Niobe Way took us on a journey through her discoveries in studying adolescent boys for the past 30 years. “Listen to the boys,” she said, over and over. No boring power point just quotes from the boys. “Read along with me,” she encouraged, “Here’s what Jessie had to say.” And up would come Jessie’s words as Niobe morphed into a twelve year old; right foot pigeon toeing in, left knee bending, right fist on hip and read aloud:

            “(My best friend) could just tell me anything and I could tell him anything. Like I always know everything about him…. We always chill, like we don’t hide secrets from each other. We tell each other our problems. If I’m having problems at home, they’ll like counsel me, I just trust them with anything, like deep secrets, anything.”

In fifty-five minutes she showed us the big damage done to all our boys as they get robbed of these close friendships on their way to becoming a man, a “real” man. To “man up” - to get independent and competitive and oh so isolated. Homophobia is one big cultural bulldozer over close friendships between adolescent boys as they age. Here’s a typical quote from an older boy:

“Like my friendship with my best friend is fading, but I’m saying it’s still there but… So I mean, it’s still there ‘cause we still do stuff together, but only once in a while. It’s sad ‘cause he lives only one block away from me and I get to do stuff with him less than I get to do stuff with people who are way further so I’m like, yo. …. It’s like a DJ used his cross fader and started fading it slowly and slowly and now I’m like halfway through the cross fade.”

She showed a clip of the film: The Mask You Live In. Check out the trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc45-ptHMxo or watch the whole film free on Netflix.

Niobe’s work is so important, so instructive, in understanding what’s got to change to bring up boys to be loving, non-misogynist, non-violent males. It’s radical – let them keep making close friendships where they can share their “deep secrets.”