Gwynn Raimondi, MA

A prayer

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To my ancestral mamas,

I forgive you.

I forgive you for being human. I forgive you for clinging to your own hurt, terrified and lonely little girls inside your souls. I forgive you for not being able to pass on the love, the acceptance, the connection, the beauty that you wanted for your daughters, for yourselves.

I forgive you all for thinking you were terrible mothers. I forgive you all for being terrible mothers at times. I forgive you the hurt, the pain, the loneliness that you all passed down, generation after generation, all the way to me.

I send you love. I release the heavy burden you passed down to your daughters because you didn’t know what else to do with it. I’m setting it down for us all. 

I send you freedom. All of you I carry not only in my DNA, in my blood, I carry you in soul. As I repair and grow and transform and heal, you do too.

I give to us all a beautiful relationship with my daughter. The pain, the fear, the loneliness no longer serve us. It is time to connect, to bask in the joy and beauty of motherhood, to release the fear of fucking it all up. 

I soak in your strength. I bask in your love. Together, we will start to enjoy today, to enjoy our beautiful children, one moment at a time.

 

Nourishment

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There’s been a lot of talk about support in my world lately. I have a big issue with the word support. Support to me, is about others helping you stay right where you are, not having someone who helps to grow, helps you change, helps you look deep inside of who you are and how you want to change.

Sometimes I need those pats on the back and those you-go-girls. Most of the time however, I need nourishing: I need people who will gently point out my role in the dance I’m frustrated with, who will gently, yet firmly, shift me from a place of blaming the other towards looking inside myself and how I have contributed to the relationship.

There’s a phrase, it takes two to tango. And it certainly does.

The thing is, we can’t control the other dancer. We can’t make the other take the steps we want him or her to take and we can’t make him or her dance a waltz if they are determined to dance a polka.

We can look at ourselves. We can determine how we want to enter the dance floor. We can breathe in our own truth and recognize the truth of another. We can enter the dance with an open heart, or not.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in blaming the other. It’s easy to see all the faults and mistakes of our dance partner. What’s hard stopping and looking deep within. Sometimes we need another person to help us with that.

My husband seems to have this all figured out. He knows when I need someone to simply love me, to give me space to cry and be sad and have a little temper tantrum about how life is not fair. And he has a special knack of reigning me in when I start to board the Blame Train. He does more than support me, he helps me grow. To paraphrase a line from a movie “He makes me want to be a better person”. And he helps me be that better person.

He nourishes me.

I have friends who do this too. Who gently point out when I’m being a wee bit crazy, when I’m totally off my center, when I’m looking outside for truth and not inside. These women are my sisters, one of them in blood and all of them in my Soul. They live in different parts of the world and my contact with them all varies. And yet I know they will always be there for me, to help me be the person I want to be.

These Sisters nourish me.

They will be there in times of crisis too. When it really is just about support, having someone to keep me safe, someone who can help me hold my life together. Times of crisis are not times for growth, they are truly times for support, times of being stable.

Every day life isn’t crisis. Everyday life is about growth and being that person you are deeply called to be. Are you surrounded by people who help you reflect and look deep inside yourself? Or are you surrounded by people who keep you stuck in patterns and behaviors and relationships that don’t nourish you?

I’m here to provide nourishment for you. Nourishment for your soul. Nourishment so you can grow and become the beautiful and amazing person you are called to be.

 

The last session of Centering in Community starts in just a couple days (February 5), and registration closes that same day. This is an amazing program that provides you with exercises to get back in your body and back to your center and reflection topics to look deep at who you are truly called to be. It’s pay-what-feels-good and go at your own pace. I would love to have you join our growing community. 

Healing in Community

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Community is such a large concept. Often we hear people talk about the lack of community; the lack of communal support he or she feels. Looking at society I can see this lack of support as families have pared down to the “nuclear family,” losing the beauty of multiple generations and extended family under one roof or at least within close proximity. Neighbors no longer knowing each other’s names. There is a great tragic loss in this lack of community. Honestly I see this loss of community as a trauma in itself – isolating us more and more, having us burrow further into our own pain and not being able to look out at others and notice theirs. Not being able to reach out for support, love and healing.

Peter Levine writes about how healing trauma must always happen in community, with at least one other person present to bear witness to the traumatized person. The reasoning for this is simple: trauma happens when we are alone. This is not to say there are not other people physically present, or there is not another person or persons actually creating the trauma event in our presence. It is to say that we are alone – the only witness to ourselves in the trauma. Our bodies absorb the trauma and we tend to isolate after – either by choice as a survival mechanism or because we are manipulated to by an abuser. Trauma equals isolation. In order to come out of the trauma, to come out of the isolation we need a safe community.

This community can be one person. It could be a hundred people. It could be a therapist or counselor. It could be a spouse or partner or close friend or other family member. It could be a teacher, a mentor. It could be a stranger. It could be anyone. However that other person or persons, the one who is to bear witness to our trauma, needs to be firmly grounded or else he or she will do us no good. James Finely describes bearing witness to a traumatized person as keeping one foot firmly grounded outside the circle the trauma, and the other foot firmly yet gently steps inside the circle. The traumatized person needs the other to be grounded, this is possibly the only way the traumatized person can find her or his own grounding, perhaps the only way he or she can get back into her or his own body. The traumatized person also needs to feel the other person within her or his trauma, to feel truly heard and seen and understood.

We need community. However we need that community to be grounded. Knowing the extent of trauma in our world, finding these people who are firmly grounded can be a challenging task. So what do we do?

We seek. We look for those who have gifts to offer to help us in our own grounding process. To help us get back into our own body. To help us heal. Then we pass these gifts on. The beauty of these gifts, of learning how to become mindful, how to ground and stabilize our body, mind and soul, is that we can pass the gifts on AND keep them forever. It is the non-dual beauty of healing – realizing life isn’t about either or, rather it is about and. It is raining and cold  and I can be warm and cozy. It is dark and I can see light. I can be angry at you and love you with all my soul.

We can heal ourselves and heal within community. As we shift, as the trauma releases from our body we will be able to see more and more community available. In the beginning though we have to be vulnerable and risk further hurt. Not further trauma, but potential pain. And in being vulnerable and open, we can see the pain in others and perhaps give them some community to heal.

Bearing witness to our own pain. Becoming and remaining grounded. Healing ourselves. Being healed by our community. Healing our community. Finding strength and grounding. Offering strength and grounding. Offering and receiving in the same breath.

I’m thankful for my ever-expanding community. Many of the people in my community are strangers. Strangers who probably don’t know how much they have impacted me, how much their existence has helped me heal. Others are close friends, my husband, my daughter. And a wide range of friendships and acquaintances in-between. Each person giving light to my darkness, whether he or she knows it or not. And hopefully, prayerfully, I give a little light to their darkness too.

Fall Sun, photo by me

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