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MENDOCINO, MENDOCINO
Steve and I had back-to-back appointments the next day with Mitra, a tall, heavyset man with long, thin, light-brown hair and hazel eyes, that seemed focused on another dimension. Perhaps he could unravel parts of my past and shed some light on my lineage.
Mitra told me to make myself comfortable because this might take a while and he didn't want to be distracted. He settled into a chair in front of me and explained he would be going into a trance but could hear me answer if he asked a question; I should wait until the session was over if I had something to ask, though my questions would probably be answered without my asking. I had brought along a picture of my parents. He initially thought they appeared happy, but then saw something else: my mother looked mean and as he gazed at her image, it confirmed his feeling about her having quite a mean streak.
I was prompted to tell him about a difficult situation that was going on with trying to save some trees near where I lived. I had called the county commissioners and an ordeal developed. He didn't waste any time explaining it from another perspective.
The mind is such that when we get focused on something, we tend to lose the background. We're only focused on the foreground - the object of the focus. In this situation, you were concerned about the trees and what sometimes happens is we lose the awareness of the people involved and the people, however callous they may be, are also living organisms and deserve compassion as much as the trees. So it becomes a situation of how can you show compassion to these people and at the same time get them to be more compassionate about the trees. It becomes a much more complex issue. And one of the things happening here for you is an opportunity to see how you can better show compassion to everything and everyone involved and not just the trees.
Helplessness sets the stage for anxiety, depression, pessimism, guilty thinking and can lead to chronic immune suppression (for ex- ample, making one less able to reject cancer cells). Understanding life's bad events gives us valuable information about where we are psychologically on the continuum between helplessness and the control grounded in compassion and self-knowledge. We can attribute problems to ourselves, to a person or force outside ourselves, or to chance. If we look to ourselves as the cause of our troubles, we can either take responsibility for our actions in a way that leads to in- sight and growth, or we can engage in self-blame. Chronic self-blamers are pessimists. Pessimism reflects underlying helplessness and leads to depression rather than responsible action. If we attribute our problems to others, this blocks responsibility and growth. If we attribute our problems to chance, we side-step the issues of blame and responsibility. While this attribution spares us guilt feelings, it doesn't make us feel any less helpless. In fact it makes us feel even more helpless because there is no way to control, manipulate, bar- gain with, avoid or pray to chance.
Your daughters all have a low self-esteem, something you have lived with and brought to their pictures, a thing that women give to their young, accompanied by the fact that their father never really participated in their growth.
All of the kids are strong-willed. What's going on here is power, their sense of power. Susan has more male energy in her, and her sense of power will come out more aggressively and bluntly. Valerie and Elizabeth are more in touch with their feminine energy. When they manipulate and their will comes out, it'll be in a more passive- aggressive way so it's not as obvious. But they'll get their way more than Susan. Susan has a tough time with life because she makes it difficult as to the way she approaches it. She's too demanding. She is the most receptive and in a sense the most passive although she's not passive. She knows how to get what she wants more easily than the other girls do. She's learned by observing them.
What's going on between your two older daughters and yourself has to do with issues relating to your self-esteem as a woman and a mother. And they know that. And it gives them subconsciously two issues to deal with. One, it gives them a sense of power over you that if they don't give Mom a sense of acceptance and respect, she's going to feel badly and going to feel like she's failed and then that gives them a sense of power. It's like the mother who automatically starts off with the guilt trip on herself and the child sees this and gets everything it wants by just simply playing on that guilt for the next thirty-five years. And there's a little bit of that going on between Valerie and Susan. Particularly Susan. But the other issue that's going on is the degree to which you don't see yourself as a good mother and a good woman in relationship to your two older children. To that same degree they have difficulty accepting their own femininity and their own role as women in relationship to other men and especially to their own future children if they're going to have any. When you deal with your children, you must deal with your own attitude. You have not failed. You are not a failure. You are a human being and you have to give yourself more unconditional acceptance for being human, for being a woman, for having a lot of unresolved issues, for having made some choices that have led to some difficult situations with your ex-husband. And recognize that that's just the way it was, neither good nor bad. In relation to your daughters, recognize that your worth rests with the fact that you are not what you are in the eyes of others. Keep making that distinction for yourself, particularly with your children. You owe them nothing at this point in time. If anything, they're the ones who owe you something. And in your relationship with the two of them, especially Susan, I would point out to them that whatever inadequacies or whatever feelings they have, the strong negative ones of anger and rejection toward others is really what they're feeling about themselves, and they're just projecting their feelings onto others instead of being honest and taking responsibility for it.
The first chakra is related to the earth element [the grounding chakra], the sense of smell, security and insecurity, and governs the adrenal glands, kidneys and spinal column. This center holds the be- lief patterns connected to our biological family. When this connection is violated we encounter the shadow side of this chakra - feelings of being isolated and lost. You were disconnected from your roots. You have no nest because there is a lack of security here. No place on earth really feels like home for you. You have always been able to get up and move easily. You love where you live but you're always look- ing for somewhere else to settle. A law of nature is that adults take responsibility for their young. When that law is broken, the flow of life is shattered within the individual. Your real mother gave you up and left an archetypal wound. You were given a name and a family took you in, accepted the responsibility of giving you a home.
Because you work with the medium of stone [marble], you have a very strong affinity for the earth. It makes you solid and grounded and gives you a wonderful sense of achievement. There's a sense of 'isness,' the concrete, the strong in you, which is very fine and beautiful but at times creates problems. You have a great deal of vitality and energy here. However, you tend to become like a rock, immovable, or you perceive others as immovable. And sometimes circumstances that you're trying to work through become more difficult than they need to be.
There is a lack of security here in your self-esteem and that affects the second chakra, which has to do with the water element. Any problems in your physical body will have to do with the water element - kidneys, circulation, salivation.
The second chakra has to do with sexual energy and self-esteem. In this aspect of your consciousness there is confusion as to where your self-esteem is based. Your first experience of yourself was what your biological mother experienced. She felt she was a rebel and was rejected for being a rebel; she was going to give up this child. Your next experience was being in the arms of a woman [your biological mother] who would not hold you any longer and that rejection got reinforced. Then you went to a mother [adoptive] whom you observed as a confused neurotic woman who did not know how to function intelligently. She always had to be protected from herself by your adoptive father or real father. You did not choose to be like her. There was no real connection there, yet that was the only model you had for most of your childhood. As to how a woman is, therefore, you never really totally accepted your own womanhood. That's why so much of your artwork is on the female. You are still dealing with the issue of what it is to be a woman.
Being a woman is not being stupid. But in your subconscious you associate intelligence with the male, not the female. And there- fore action, activity, aggressiveness, work, doing - all of that is high- ly esteemed because your father was so much more balanced, clear, functional, loving and caring than your mother. You need still to re- solve your relationship to your mother. Female energy is primal and is basically the principle of total receptivity and passive vulnerability. That is why women have greater endurance than men, because when you are totally vulnerable you are invulnerable. You cannot break an open window. Part of the reason that you're so involved in the arts is that you are always exploring your feminine dynamic and energy.
The second chakra governs one's creative attitude in relation- ships, sex and reproduction, attitudes to sin and guilt. It's our survival center. It warns us of dangers we can't see and gives us that extra strength we don't have normally. Each person in our lives is there for a spiritual reason. Negative relationships force us to learn something we need to learn.
The third chakra has to do with the fire element and the sense of power, con