++ the celebration ++

I woke up wired with excitement on the day of my celebration.  Over forty people; friends, family, and strangers were coming to sit in Ann’s living room, look at my mandalas, and hear me talk about them for an hour.  My body felt like the telephone wires that hummed outside my bedroom window; vibrating with an electric force that shifted between terror and excitement. 

I had spent six years wrestling these images from the monsters that lived in the depths of my psyche.  In order to do this, I had to honestly look at the deepest, darkest ugliest, parts of myself and say, “yup, that’s me.”  I went through my boyfriend’s things in order to find incriminating evidence that would give me an excuse to leave him because I couldn’t stand being too close to someone without leaving before they left me.  I put others down in order to feel superior.  I told my loved ones that my shadows were not nearly as dark and sinister as theirs.  I sat in judgment and contempt; ‘how sad and pitiful it was to be them’. The ones I didn’t tell this to directly, I would sit and judge in stony silence.  I threw tantrums when I wanted something and stomped my feet like a child.  I would lie, cheat and steal to get what I wanted; good grades- I wasn’t above stealing the answers.  A man- didn’t care if I dissolved friendships in order to get him.  A job promotion- I told my boyfriend to sit in a car backwards without a seatbelt on and risk his life so that we could get footage of a child crying for a reality show.

I went after these shadows, each one its own battle, until I had trapped them inside a dinner-plate sized circle.  Each shadow had been a violent fight with the unconscious in which I had wrestled away a piece of myself from the monsters in my psyche in order to make them conscious.  When I was able to draw them out of the darkness, they lost their power over my thoughts and actions.  It was a war that I waged for my soul, a war that I had taken on bare-fisted, bloody and for the most part- alone.

Now I was about to stand in front of my peers and tell them what I had done.  Part of me felt a sense of pride and overwhelming accomplishment.  I had hand-sewn the pieces of myself back together and fashioned a life that I was in the middle of actively living as opposed to sitting on the sidelines, numbed out and miserable.  My anxiety and panic attacks were gone.  My paralyzing perfectionism had pretty much disappeared.  The heavy bag of rage and resentment at others that I had been carrying around for decades had been set down and exchanged for a lightness and connection with the universe that I had never experienced before.  This work had been life changing.  It was revolutionary- literally revolution upon revolution around the edge of a dinner plate, and yet, there was the insidious voice in the back of my head that asked, ‘Was my art really worth celebrating? Was I worth celebrating? Will people laugh and think I’m narcissistic and self-indulgent? What right did I have to take on this work?’ 

I felt a heavy dread in my gut that I was going to commit a terrible social faux pas; that I was about to do something deeply shameful and wrong; that I was insane for sharing these deep secrets.  That I should be ashamed of the battles I had fought.  That I should feel an innate sense of shame for simply breathing and being.  I would be laughed out of the room.  ‘Lisa is a an-over sensitive and indulgent girl,’ they would say.  ‘Why did she waster our time with that drivel?’

As I drove up Pacific Coast Highway a dull, blind terror burrowed underneath this new Self like an earthworm pushing deeper and deeper into damp ground.  This worm had the brain the size of a grain of sand.  “No. No, no, no, no, no,” it said. 

“Shut up,” I said back.  “I haven’t come this far to back out now.”

Ann’s house overlooked Zuma beach, and this land, including the surrounding mountains were named from the Chumash word for ‘abundance’ for the perennial streams in the area, as well as the ocean that sustained wild life.  Abundance means overflowing; to come from the waves or from the sea.  As a verb, it means to flow over the rim of the container.  I could not have planned a more perfect image for this celebration; water flowing over the rim of a container.   That is what I had been doing in this individuation process; filling up the container of self, doing this deep soul-work, becoming whole until the psyche overflowed, up over the rim of the container that was my whole being, and I was ready to spill back out into the world. 

I was wearing a red dress because I feel powerful and strong in red.  I wanted to eat beef, flex my muscles and shoot guns whenever I wore red.  I brought heels with me, but I liked the way my feet felt on the ground, rooted like I wouldn’t somehow float away.  There is something special about the light in Ann’s house.  It is luminous in a way that makes everything it touches feel heightened and magical in this sun-kissed, beachy, relaxed kind of way.  If a soul was made up of light, it would be the kind of light in Ann’s home.  There were women already preparing food in the kitchen; strangers that were working to put the feast together in celebration of me.  The reality of seeing them chopping and washing and bustling about was almost too uncomfortable to absorb.   

Rows of chairs had been set up facing the glass windows in Ann’s living room with a jungle of palms and the ocean behind it.  Ann greeted me a warm hug.  She had the weathered face of a woman who had lived and seen things that I could only wonder at.  And yet, there was also absolute joy, which seemed to shoot out her eyes and the corners of her mouth. 

Kate was running few minutes late because she was picking up a strawberry cake that she had ordered for me.  My only job was to tape my mandalas to the glass.  I decided to put six of them on the top row and six on the bottom in chronological order, starting with the bloody eye. I had been worried that the tape would show on the back, tacky, haphazard, amateur, like I was taping my four-year old finger painting up for the world to see. When I stuck the bloody eye to the glass, the sun lit it up from behind, and it glowed with a special light. Every brush stroke became even more vibrant, and the whole circle seemed to have a luminescence, an inner-knowing that kicked the breath out of my chest for a moment.  The tape was invisible- and concerns about haphazard, unprofessional tape lines disappeared.  The eye looked as if it was meant to be here all along.  I carefully placed the twelve mandals on the glass, six on the top row and six on the bottom, evenly spaced out. 

I stood back to look at them all up there, glowing with the sunlight coming through them and the semi-circle of chairs, forty of them filling Ann’s living room and facing the mandalas.  I felt as if my chest would burst open with vulnerability; tenderness and pride that I had never experienced before.  Yes, I was terrified of speaking in front of an audience, but it was about something that I had never been more sure of.  Only I was able to speak about my individuation process and these images.  Like them or not, this work was of me, and completely mine.   

 When Kate came in, she was carrying a cake half her size.  It was like that first session when she looked like a sketch-pad with legs, only now she was a walking cake.  In our first session six years ago, we had begun with a white circle the size of a dinner plate and here she was with another.  Only this one was made of delicious vanilla frosting, stuffed with strawberries, and had ‘Congratulations Lisa!’ written across the top in crimson.   We had come a long way, the two of us.  Her generosity was so great, I wanted to look down as if to avoid direct gaze with the sun, because it is too bright.  You deserve this, I told myself.  Not only did I deserve to be celebrate because of the hard work I had done, but also the hard work Kate had done.  To down-play my accomplishments would have been to down-play hers, and being the beneficiary of those accomplishments, that wasn’t something I was willing to do.  So I said thank you and I looked at those words scrawled across the top of the frosting and decided to become friends with them.

“You look fabulous without any shoes on! You should stay like that for the celebration,” Kate said.  “Don’t you feel good?” She asked. 

“I do,” I said- not realizing that being barefoot was even an option.

It is a sign of purity to go into a religious site, like a mosque or a temple without our shoes.  A person wanting a connection with the divine is no longer separated from the earth and the spiritual world by the barrier of his or her foot covering.  That’s what it felt like to be barefoot in Ann’s house, like I was standing in a place of worship, only the stained glass windows in the cathedral did not depict scenes from the bible, they held images from my unconscious. 

People started to trickle in the front door, some of them I didn’t even know.  They must have been friends of Ann’s.  My mom and her two girlfriends, women in their sixties in tight-fitting dresses and Beverly Hills haircuts came in. I felt the ground tilt slightly as if the center of gravity had shifted. 

“You’re barefoot! Why aren’t you wearing any shoes?” my mom asked. 

I shrugged. “I like it this way.”

“How are you doing?” Kate asked when the women were out of earshot.  “I’m afraid I’m going to lose my words and they won’t come out of my mouth,” I said. 

“Let’s get you a glass of wine and piece of bread to put something in your stomach, Kate said. 

I nodded, and in the two minutes she was gone, I have never wanted her by my side more, until she appeared again with a hunk of bread in one hand and a glass of wine in the other.  I loved this woman with every inch of heart.

One of my mother’s friends made her way over to us while I shoved bread in my mouth and chased it with the wine. 

She directed her line of questioning at Kate.  “So you’re a therapist, right? I’m one too.  I live in Seattle.  My son died last year,” the woman said.  She went on and her eyes were caves of sadness that I feared would swallow me whole. 

Kate managed to do some kind of ninja therapist maneuver where she said, “I’m so sorry to hear about your son,” with sincerity and empathy. Then as if by magic, she got us gracefully outside the front door without the poor woman knowing that Kate had just deflected her conversation.  That was a gift I knew I would never possess, but was deeply grateful for it.

Kate and I took a seat on a bench in the breezeway and welcomed people as they came through the entrance gate from the street.  Friends had come from all over Los Angeles, traveled well over an hour to get here and listen to me talk about these mandalas.  I saw love on those faces.  I saw acceptance without judgment.  It was if they were saying, “Of course we would do this for you.” 

When everyone had trickled in to the house, and settled into their seats, Ann introduced me while Kate held onto my waist in the back of the room.  It felt as if she were literally holding me up.  I held onto her, and she held onto me, and I felt overwhelmed with gratitude for what we had experienced together and I did not want to let her go.  But Kate did one of those magic ninja-therapist moves where she pushed me to the front of the audience at the same time that she was holding me up and before I could resist, I was up there facing them, barefoot in my red dress and thanking Ann for having us all in her home. 

I can’t tell you much about the talk itself, other than I talked for an hour and it went by in what felt like five minutes.  I started by reading a couple paragraphs from my manuscript. I kept looking at those faces in the audience for side-glances and snickering, but there were none.  I talked about each Mandala and asked for questions before moving on to the next.  Questions were asked with sincerity- how did I make them, when did I make them, etc.  What I do remember was what it felt like to up there.  I was honest and open, humble and even funny sometimes too, because people laughed at the times it would have been appropriate to laugh. 

It was at the same time terrifying and exhilarating, peaceful and nerve-inducing.  It was such a relief to have this secret life that I had kept to myself for so many years finally out in the open.  All the people in the audience represented different selves that I had kept separate for so long.  There was the TV producer self, the wife self, the friend self, the family self, the Al-anon self, the writer self, the artist self, and here for the first time uniting all of them was the inner landscape self.  It was as if I had come out of hiding and they were all meeting each other for the first time.  What a relief not to have to juggle them all.  What a relief that the inner self, the true self got to come forward and take over.  She hand-stitched them all together and created this whole person, me.  After a while, I even felt at ease up there in front of all those people. 

When I look at pictures of myself during this talk, I barely recognize the woman in the red dress and bare feet at first.  What a beautiful, poised, thoughtful, articulate, brave and creative woman that is, I think to myself.  And then, Oh my! That’s me!   It gives me such a thrill, I can’t event tell you.  And it breaks my heart at the same time.  Thirty-four years I have picked at, scrutinized, bullied and tossed around with thoughtless abandon that beautiful creature.  What an immense capacity for a wild, creative life she has.  What courageous, bone-breaking work she has done to stand here barefoot in front of strangers, family members, friends, and acquaintances.  How dare she treat herself with nothing less than the utmost awe and respect. 

When I had finished speaking and just before we were going to enjoy the tremendous feast that Ann had prepared for us, Kate spoke.

“I just want to say that Lisa’s husband Brian has stuck by her through this process, which is no easy feat when someone is doing this kind of work,” Kate said. 

Brian’s mouth broke into a smile with this public recognition and his eyes sparkled with the truth of Kate’s words.  In that moment all I wanted to do was run to my husband, take his face in my hands and kiss him.  I couldn’t thank him enough for being a constant anchor through this soul-peeling, dark-night-searching adventure that he couldn’t possibly grasp, but unwaveringly, without fail supported.  That is a love that I hope everyone gets to experience. I saw the faces in the audience recognize it, too.  I could hear the imperceptible sigh of women swooning audience because they wanted that kind of love for themselves. 

I walked through the people in Ann’s house, smiled, made awkward eye contact.  I couldn’t tell if they thought I was crazy or not.  I felt vulnerable and exposed in the most extreme possibly way.  We loaded up plates of the most melt-in-your mouth delicious salad made of goat cheese, walnuts and romaine.  I balanced my plate on my knee in between Ann and Kate.  I just wanted to be with them.  I felt drained, as if I had been standing on a rock in a strong headwind looking out at the sea stark naked for an hour.  I just wanted to curl up in the warmth and comfort of their knowing for just a moment. 

What I remember the most was the difference with which people treated me.  My boss, a champagne blond in her late thirties with the most impressive talons for nails and killer body came up to me with tears in her eyes and gave me a huge hug. 

“You just don’t know about the lives of people you work with,” she said to me.

My Al-anon sponsor just looked at me in awe and wonder, as did her husband and daughter.  I wasn’t a meek sheep that looked to her for direction.  Instead, I had undertaken the individuation process and lived to tell about it.  Some people are so taken back by my honesty that they couldn’t even look at me. 

According to Joseph Campbell, the point of the hero’s journey is to bring back the unrealized potential in yourself and integrate it into rational life. You have to bring back something the world lacks, but the daylight world doesn’t even know that it needs this gift that you are bringing.  It is my humble opinion that the world lacks individuation.  It’s not a particularly sexy topic.  Trust me, I’ve tried to get people interested.  “Excuse me, have you heard of the Individuation process? It’s a Jungian psychoanalytic term that refers to the means by which you make yourself whole.”  It is usually at this point in the conversation that the person to whom I am speaking, ­runs screaming from the room.  Eventually, I gave up trying to talk about it, and resigned to continuing my work in private. 

Yet, this new identity became more and more difficult to contain.  It was as if this new self I had created was a beach ball and I was trying to hold it under water.  It was exhausting to keep these two worlds separate, the conscious world and the unconscious one. This celebration at Ann’s house wasn’t just showing my mandalas and talking about them; it was bringing back the boon that Joseph Campbell talked about.  It was reincorporating the treasure of the unconscious back into the conscious world.  More than that, it was a celebration of my homecoming.

After giving my talk, I felt overwhelming relief that I didn’t have to hide my true nature anymore.  Once more, I felt in the flat-footedness of my sole against the tile, in the straightness of my spine, in the electricity of my eyes, in the openness of my heart, and in the ease of my smile that I was the living proof.  I was the boon.  Trust me, this came as such a delightful revelation as I typed these words.  I could feel the molecules in my body had been rearranged.  My marrow reconstituted.  I was radiant and strong in a way that not many people were, only because they didn’t know how to do it.  And here I was sharing what steps were involved and how I did it.  I knew that my purpose was to say, ‘Hey, there is a way out of whatever broken misery you are living and this is what it looked like for me.’

In the wake of this celebration, I am reminded of Joseph’s Campbell’s words: It is our duty in this life to live one Hero’s Journey after another.  How blessed am I to have found this work, and for it to have found me.  I whisper “thank you” to whatever forces are listening with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, and I buckle my seatbelt for the next adventure.