November 8, 2010

Jen, the masseuse, was here again today. I recognised that somewhere in the past few days I have passed over an invisible watershed. I have a certainty, and unmistakable feeling of knowing who I am. I am a warrior. I was a warrior and I continue to be one.

I’m not entirely happy about this. In the moments when I was barely in my body or when I was blissed out with unattached energy the question before me was more like: “Will I live and if so will I be able to just be simple and happy?” Clearly I am living. But the capacity to lie down and be happy has faded away.

Again I am full of energy and passion to do as well as be. Today we have already had our WPIT meeting and it is just gone 5pm. Our whole evening of activity, full of potential, awaits. In the previous few weeks the people who have passed through my apartment have come from Phoenix, New York, Halifax and many parts of Ontario.

Today 4 of us are planning the next World Peace through Inclusive Transformation tour. Clearly I have not been able to cease to imagine that somehow my body, my energy and my drive will align once again, and very soon.

What sort of warrior have I become? I don’t like the idea that I am at war. At the same time I am culturally and genetically aligned with generations of warriors – both men and women. I know that warriors are not necessarily people who bring harmful fights into being. I know that Shiva includes both destruction and creation. Yet it is challenging for me to face that I am not simply a “nice guy”, although I know perfectly well that I have never been such a person.

As I lay in the arms of my masseuse my understanding of my body is shifting. Layers and layers of stories and memories emerge from me as she finds the places that have been locked up and injured. Typically, Jen will say something is painful moments before I notice the agony. Somehow she keeps the experience from being truly agonizing and I can remember and tell the story, sometimes even with humour, and always with a distant perspective, while she moves through the pains, the blocks, the anger, the frustration and opens spaces that I never knew could exist. In fact I am certain that even Jen doesn’t always know that they can exist.

The majority of my wounds are warrior wounds. My battles have not been in a field of combat. My battles have been with a world that could not appreciate either my body or my perspective. My wounds are from scalpels that were either experimental or careless and from my own unwillingness to notice the scars and bruises.

But deeper than this – I believe potentially the deepest of all – is that I was born into a world where my mother herself lived in frustration, depression and anger. She felt herself thwarted in expressing her creativity, her strength and her vision. The world of women in those days was far too narrow for her. Response was to live in a slow burn of rage. My body carries, or has carried, that template.

Today Jen and I began to separate the template from the essential Judith. The obvious truth is becoming clear with the simplicity that makes it believable – I have always believed in the light, sought the light and somehow or other found the light. My stance in life from the very beginning separated me from the world my mother understood to be true. In some ways I sharpened her rage. In other ways I gave her an opening to express her creativity and strength. In yet other ways I was her guide and anchor in her worst days.

What is healing now is for me to just let it go. This is not yet done but I can conceive that I will succeed. I do not belong to the narrow vision of myself and my body that I inherited even into my cellular levels.

So I am a warrior – a warrior for light. It seems so perfectly obvious now that I chose to connect Inclusion and World peace.

I still must await the healing of my body. Today, even with Morphine I could sit barely two hours. God grant me a pathway to move forward in my dream.