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PHA Newsletter: Making a Human Heart
Sent Monday, December 5, 2011
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By: Marta Luzim, M.S.
mluzim@martaluzim.com
www.martaluzim.com
Primal Living
Primal Living - A Lighthouse of wisdom that shines through the dark.
It is Exciting to Free Yourself. It Takes Courage to Be Yourself.
In This Newsletter:
1. Video: The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes
2. To Change the World...We Need to Feel and Heal
3. Video: Excerpt - I am an Emotional Creature - Eve Ensler
4. Poem: Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
5. Link to article: Women more likely to have 'Broken Heart Syndrome'
6. Poem: Making a Human Heart by Marta Luzim
7. Resource: Darrell Hammond's new book God, If you're not up there, I'm F*cked
The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes
As young as six, I escaped into a world of imagination and fantasy to protect myself from the pain of abuse. I traveled to many universes, encountered ethereal angels and beings and envisioned a world that would love the children, the animals and nature. I worried for the fate of the world at that young age. I knew, as my innocent heart was broken, that I wanted to feel safe and experience joy in my personal world and in the global community. To reclaim joy was not an easy task. Recovering from trauma and abuse led me into the depth of my soul...and into the soul of the world.
My lust for human relationship, intimacy, creativity and love challenged me to learn to love myself. This hunger awakened me to the spiritual process of healing. In order to care for a world that desperately needs healing, I needed to learn radical self-care, radical self-acceptance and mend myself. Blessed with a range of creative gifts, writing, painting, and spiritual desire saved my life. A friend asked me, "You must have had someone in your family who supported you?" I thought hard about that question, but unfortunately, my family was plagued by mental illness and abuse. I had no one to turn to as a child. So I turned inward. What I did find was the strength that my grandma Sarah had to survive the Russian pogroms and come to America without any family. I found the strength of my mother's rage that she used to destroy, and thus I found the way to transform this powerful energy to heal. From both of them I found a strength to face my dark night of the soul...so, although they struggled to feel joy, they gave me the strength to carry on where they could not.
Today, the challenge to bring personal and global peace still plagues the human condition. We need to heal what ails us, what fragments us and makes us afraid of love. To heal ourselves, we heal the world. This video says so much on healing from one so young.
To Change the World...We Need to Feel and Heal
For most of my life, I was told that I'm too sensitive, too deep, too intense. My father once said, "Your altruism isn't practical in the world." I smile now as I write that statement. In truth, he had no idea who I was. He died too young to get to know me, or me him, which left me deeply heartbroken, and at the same time determined to understand the meaning of life -- particularly my own.
The depth of my emotional nature, and the way my body reacts to my environment and relationships are a hot iron for me. I feel everything around me, which has been both a gift and a curse. Mostly, I feel blessed that my emotional and feeling body/mind has led me to self-healing, deep intimacy, creativity and helping others find their truth and authenticity.
There has always been controversy, debate and argument about human feelings and emotions in psychology, spirituality and consciousness wisdom.
According to Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a 46-year-old neuroscientist at New York University who pioneered the study of emotions as biological phenomena, cognitive scientists have tended to confuse emotions and feelings. LeDoux says that emotions are hard-wired, biological functions of the nervous system that evolved to help animals survive in hostile environments and procreate. The emotional systems underlying fearful, sexual or feeding behaviors are pretty similar across species, though each emotion may have its own separate neural wiring.
Feelings, in LeDoux's scheme of things, are "red herrings," products of the conscious mind, labels we give to unconscious emotions. "Since feelings are subjective", he said, "they are very difficult to study objectively."
Creativity, intimacy and spirituality are part of our feeling nature, are mysteries and challenges in living life. A part of the brain, the limbic mind, carries a large weight in our feeling capacity. We try to separate our feeling mind (limbic) and thinking mind (neo-cortex). But in fact, they work together, like yin and yang, So, is it 'I think therefore I am', or is it 'I feel therefore I am'? What matters is that both parts of the brain are intimately involved in each others' lives. As LeDoux states, feelings are subjective, but emotions can be studied in the brain. Primal Healing explores personal feelings, creativity and passion as a journey to relationship with ourselves (body/mind/spirit), others (relationships and intimacy), and the world (global awareness).
What will save the world is healing ourselves first and having the courage to speak, having a creative voice and a passion for life. Courage is a key to self-healing and helping to heal the world.
Watch Below: Excerpt of 'I am an Emotional Creature' - Eve Ensler
I have posted this video in the past, but this always strikes a deep chord.
Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Women more likely to have 'Broken Heart Syndrome': CLICK HERE for the article
Making a Human Heart
Details of instruction:
Full breaths
A heap of deep feelings
A globe of compassion
Endless stars for wishing
Tons of compassion to hold what needs to mend
Ingredients to open the heart:
Breathe. Deep. Sit. Feel your feet on the earth, your perineum rooted.
Sit, breathe, sit.
Let the breath take you inside. Feeling the body as your lover, arms embracing you, thighs open, belly and gentials awake. The body is the container of your heart, your soul.
Breathe, sit, deep, feel, locate .
Where you are?
What beats inside of your heart?
What is happening in you heart?
Where are you right now?
What does your heart need?
What does it want to say?
Open, feel the edges.
Are they soft or hard? Smooth or round, hot or cold?
What makes it ignite or close down?
Where was your heart birthed from?
Come back, be to the breath. Sit, breathe, deep. Go in. In--side. Layers of the heart. Aeons of time and generations.
Who is in your heart?
What do you feel about your life?
Feel the heart, not imagine it or conceptualize. Feel it. In your chest, your lungs breathing into the heart. Make it hot, make it on fire, make it feel passion.
Breathe, sit deep.
Is your cracked, soar, aching?
Is it hungry, full, weak?
It is fragile or strong?
Where is the warrior in your heart? t
he child in your heart, the woman in your heart?
What did you shut out? Leave behind?
Answer your heart as it reveals itself to you. It has been hidden or lost or afraid to beat loud, strong heavy and secure. The heart is a mystery. Magical and filled with wonder. A heart grows. It contracts and expands It opens and shuts. Arteries, veins, blood. It holds the organs to the brain. It is a flower of will and strength, fragile, power and heat.
What are the pathways, doorways to your heart?
Making a heart is a choice to be human.
What is human about your heart? Take all your sorrows, joys, disappointments, passions, hurt and fear of your heart and mix into a cauldron. Make a heart soup. Drink it. Mix it. Sitr it with compassion, patience, loving-kindness and wisdom. Touch your heart with tenderness and strength. Light a fire in it. Let that flame grow as an eternal flame that reaches backwards and forwards.
Sit with your heart. In the present
Breathe sit, deep.
Accept all of it's feelings. All of it's desire. All of its will and vulnerability.
Have courage, faith and determination.
What stops your heart from beating?
What stops your heart from bursting with life?
What painful, memory holds it closed.
Breathe, sit, deep.
Beat, Beat. Beat. Alive.
Recommended Resource
Click the book titles for Amazon links:
God, If You're Not Up There I'm F*cked by Darrell Hammond
Send in your writings to be posted (with or without
your name) on the Give Her A Voice blog or newsletter to primalhealing@aol.com.
Please feel free to drop me a line and let me know your thoughts, comments or
questions.
Warmly,
Marta
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