Wanderings

Last night at Bazaar Cafe. 

I am so proud of and grateful for Julie Mayhew for doing this series of concerts on suicide awareness. It is so beautiful and brave of her, and also, I believe, what the world needs. Forums where we can go and create together and express and bare our souls and have it be a safe environment. I previously only found that at Omega, where I made so many amazing friends and healed so much of what was at the root of an eating disorder that pretty much defined my life for 10 years. 

Now, even more is coming up that makes it all even more clear. And it is all connected. Food is about nurturing our bodies, our souls. But many times when people get together to eat it is more like a show. Everyone is talking small talk and putting on appearances and trying to impress each other. Meal times were traumatizing for me at boarding school because I didn't relate to anyone, I didn't talk the right way, I wasn't cool enough, there was no table where I fit in. That's where I became bulimic. The only place where it felt safe to eat was by myself. Still is, most of the time. 

But I can eat around people, in situations, where I feel authenticity. When people have seen me break down and cry, when they have acknowledged and loved me in my messiness, and vice versa, I can eat around them. And the reason I'm sharing this right now is because with my own shows, like Julie is doing with this series, I want them to be a safe space. A space for authenticity. A place to go to dark places along with the light. There is no pretense, no way you are supposed to talk or supposed to be to be accepted or cool. It is the surprising, whacky, wild places inside people that are the most interesting. Those are what I want to see, rather than some tape of conversation or jargon that's been played a hundred times before. I don't want to talk to you about the weather. I want to talk to you about your soul, and how THAT's doing. 

And my body, perhaps, being very sensitive, has just been acting like a weathervane, tensing up when there's a lot of pretense and ego at work, and relaxing where there is authenticity. 

Last night at the show I opened up about all of this to everyone. It was probably the first time I've talked about being bulimic in front of so many people where it was not a workshop or healing center. But I noticed something else. Every time I do talk about my eating disorder and then I start to see that I am now identified with THAT, I become resistant again. Because it is deeper than the bulimia and the laxatives and the obsessive exercise and the fad diets. Those were all the behaviors that came out of it. The thing that I am really talking about is anger at the world and not being able to deal with it. Internalizing it. And that is something I'm still struggling with even if it doesn't work its way out through food. The anger is still omnipresent, but after five years of healing, it has a much looser grip around my neck. But I want to be active in changing the world. No longer internalizing my anger at what I see are injustices. I want to be a warrior. But a warrior for hope and healing. 

And those moments like last night in Bazaar Cafe, feeling the love and healing energy of the songs, just letting it course through me and reach the completely silent and receptive and appreciative audience, our energy working back and forth in a dance to create that healing moment- that. That is why the songs came through. They healed me, and they are not stopping there. They are on a mission. They are taking me on a journey. They are opening me up- my entire self, my personality, my energy field- making it safe for me to express what has been hiding all along under what were once layers of pain and anger and shame and what I perceived to be fat- and later, sparkles and wigs and fuzzy legwarmers and banter. Without the pain, and without the sparkles, it's just.... me. That wonky, empty, no-man's land that I don't identify with hardly anything because I'm so used to disassociating. 

But if I learn to see "me" as the rich, fertile soil from where all of the songs, the creativity, the expression is born, nothing more, nothing less, then I can begin to like "me." I can begin to respect "me." I can see that that soil is producing things that make people happy, that make a positive impact in this world, and therefore I should take care of it, I should nourish it, and that has nothing to do with ego and self, in fact it is in a spirit of selflessness, because I am no longer attaching my stories of how awful or how great I am to "me"- I am rather just making room, tending to the soil, so that the spirit can move through whatever needs to be moved through and grown and fed to the world. :)