The first time I remember losing control to my rage was when I was about ten years old.  I have no idea what I’d done to be sent to my room but I do remember running to my door like my feet were on fire, opening it and then slamming it shut, and throwing anything I could all the while screaming at the top of my longs, whirling like a mad animal both arms akimbo, breaking things, throwing all my clothes in the closet into the middle of my room and pretty much doing whatever I could figure out to do physically to release the tremendous explosion of fire from within.  Looking back on this incident now, I can’t imagine how either of my parents could have stood my ranting and raging like that.

After I was spent, my throat was scratchy from screaming, but I felt like I had taken a drug.  I cleaned up my whole room and put everything back in place as if I was in a fog. I’m sure I slept for a few hours that afternoon.  This pattern of out of control rage would return over and over again through the years until I began to get help from therapy, 12-step programs, etc.

Over the course of discovering who I am and how I show up in the world, I know now that I have wrestled with severe anxiety and panic disorder most of my life.  When something or someone says or does something to flick my fear switch, instead of running I would often rage like a fire breathing dragon cornered in the bowels of a dungeon.  Because I was also smart, as a kid with this way of reacting to the world I often melted hearts to black ashes of many people who might have become my staunch ally--or at least a friend--- if I had, had it within me to allow for the space and time. But my fear was so big and all consuming that all I believed was possible, most of the time, was fight back to survive.  I didn’t understand their were other possibilities.

When I was in my forties, my mom shared with me that she really hadn’t understood how to be the kind of mother I needed until she had a wolf.  Because of her wolf, she learned how to respond to her wolf with respect, understand what she was fearing and give her what she needed.  Evidently there was something in the mechanics and spirituality of their relationship that helped mom to see me more clearly.

As someone who has been both the giver and receiver of rage like this, I can say that it is truly a chemical/hormonal nightmare.  For me, even therapy, getting sober, getting off of flour and sugar, meditating and exercise could not squelch the raging fire if it needed to surface. Only medication for those chemicals that I am missing has sufficed.  I have suffered through decades of guilt and shame for the way my mind, mouth and body has responded from fear at the world.  There is nothing worse for me especially since deep inside I really am a very loving and peaceful person. Just ask any animal who has ever been my friend, or my husband most of the time.  

On top of this shame about this uncontrollable rage, I live in a culture where anger is really not an okay thing, not really. And certainly if you’re female. Still in this day and age!  I remember years ago reading an article in Psychology Today (probably available on some ancient microfiche from the early 80′s) about how humans were basically made to be warriors and there were some examples of how we humans learned to vent our warrior-energy through sports such as football.  What I can remember about that premise does ring true for me because I also have a strong sense of justice and the desire to right any wrongs.  But here I sit at my PC in our home with our dogs laying about with nary a warrior-venting-opportunity about and even if there were, my values have fine-tuned me into a much more peaceable being. That, and I also have absolutely zilch desire to play football!  Gradually, I can create a way of looking at this chemical imperfection in my brain as being similar to a physical vestige like the appendix.  At one time in mans’ creation an appendix was a really good device to further screen out poisons from the raw foods we ate but today it is pretty much obsolete.  Maybe at one point in my DNA I would have made one helluva fine warrior. Probably not lived much past 25, but perhaps died a champion for the fight in a blaze of glory.  Or, perhaps I’m dealing with a biological transference of memory (http://themindunleashed.org/2014/01/scientists-found-memories-may-passed-generations-dna.html).

Whatever the case, I do believe that you and I can learn to train our minds and therefore choose our responses rather than allow our minds and reactions to dictate how we live our lives.  

As the Buddhist Monk, Jack Kornfield says, “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

The water is great, let’s go catch a few!

The first time I remember losing control to my rage was when I was about ten years old.  I have no idea what I'd done to be sent to my room but I do remember running to my door like my feet were on fire, opening it and then slamming it shut, and throwing anything I could all the while screaming at the top of my longs, whirling like a mad animal both arms akimbo, breaking things, throwing all my clothes in the closet into the middle of my room and pretty much doing whatever I could figure out to do physically to release the tremendous explosion of fire from within.  Looking back on this incident now, I can't imagine how either of my parents could have stood my ranting and raging like that.

After I was spent, my throat was scratchy from screaming, but I felt like I had taken a drug.  I cleaned up my whole room and put everything back in place as if I was in a fog. I'm sure I slept for a few hours that afternoon.  This pattern of out of control rage would return over and over again through the years until I began to get help from therapy, 12-step programs, etc.

Over the course of discovering who I am and how I show up in the world, I know now that I have wrestled with severe anxiety and panic disorder most of my life.  When something or someone says or does something to flick my fear switch, instead of running I would often rage like a fire breathing dragon cornered in the bowels of a dungeon.  Because I was also smart, as a kid with this way of reacting to the world I often melted hearts to black ashes of many people who might have become my staunch ally--or at least a friend--- if I had, had it within me to allow for the space and time. But my fear was so big and all consuming that all I believed was possible, most of the time, was fight back to survive.  I didn't understand their were other possibilities.

When I was in my forties, my mom shared with me that she really hadn't understood how to be the kind of mother I needed until she had a wolf.  Because of her wolf, she learned how to respond to her wolf with respect, understand what she was fearing and give her what she needed.  Evidently there was something in the mechanics and spirituality of their relationship that helped mom to see me more clearly.

As someone who has been both the giver and receiver of rage like this, I can say that it is truly a chemical/hormonal nightmare.  For me, even therapy, getting sober, getting off of flour and sugar, meditating and exercise could not squelch the raging fire if it needed to surface. Only medication for those chemicals that I am missing has sufficed.  I have suffered through decades of guilt and shame for the way my mind, mouth and body has responded from fear at the world.  There is nothing worse for me especially since deep inside I really am a very loving and peaceful person. Just ask any animal who has ever been my friend, or my husband most of the time.  

On top of this shame about this uncontrollable rage, I live in a culture where anger is really not an okay thing, not really. And certainly if you're female. Still in this day and age!  I remember years ago reading an article in Psychology Today (probably available on some ancient microfiche from the early 80's) about how humans were basically made to be warriors and there were some examples of how we humans learned to vent our warrior-energy through sports such as football.  What I can remember about that premise does ring true for me because I also have a strong sense of justice and the desire to right any wrongs.  But here I sit at my PC in our home with our dogs laying about with nary a warrior-venting-opportunity about and even if there were, my values have fine-tuned me into a much more peaceable being. That, and I also have absolutely zilch desire to play football!  Gradually, I can create a way of looking at this chemical imperfection in my brain as being similar to a physical vestige like the appendix.  At one time in mans' creation an appendix was a really good device to further screen out poisons from the raw foods we ate but today it is pretty much obsolete.  Maybe at one point in my DNA I would have made one helluva fine warrior. Probably not lived much past 25, but perhaps died a champion for the fight in a blaze of glory.  Or, perhaps I'm dealing with a biological transference of memory (http://themindunleashed.org/2014/01/scientists-found-memories-may-passed-generations-dna.html).

Whatever the case, I do believe that you and I can learn to train our minds and therefore choose our responses rather than allow our minds and reactions to dictate how we live our lives.  

As the Buddhist Monk, Jack Kornfield says, "you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."

The water is great, let's go catch a few!

It's crazy out there I tell ya!  but you don't need me to tell you that.  Today Tom Ashbrook, host of "On Point" on NPR (http://onpoint.wbur.org/2015/12/28/medication-and-female-moods) interviewed Dr. Julie Holland and Dr. Crystal Clark with various guests calling in about the pros and cons of medication.  I understand both points of view.  On the one hand we in the U.S., especially in big modern cities, are living at a much higher level of stress than older generations.  Dr. Holland leaned towards our culture of over medicating in lieu of removing and healing the stress factors first such as eliminating flour and sugar from our diets (eating healthy), getting plenty of exercise and getting enough sleep.  For many, just taking care of ourselves in this manner will put safety mechanisms in to place for us to learn how to handle our mood swings and emotions (also recommended was therapy for those who need extra help).  Although Dr. Clark acknowledged the importance of taking care of ourselves she also stressed the importance of well thought out medication for those of us who have a pathology or disorder. In other words, we've done all we can to take care of ourselves and the chemicals our bodies create are not doing what we need to thrive in life.

I find it ironic that for many of us who find ourselves on medication are still facing a battle of prejudice about them.

For me, I've been sober (off drugs and alcohol) for 25 years, off flour and sugar and eating very "clean" food (plain veggies, salads, rice or potatoes and protein) for 12 years, I meditate regularly for at least 30 minutes a day, I check in regularly with a 12-step meeting 3 times a week, I have a mentor in a spiritual program that I check in with at least once a week and I exercise daily. And yet even with all of this good taking care of myself I still take Effexor to help with my anxiety and panic disorder.  I've been taking Effexor for about 13 years now and along with the other things I do to care for myself, I am able to live a life second to none.  I am not apathetic about life, I still feel deeply but what Effexor has done for me is to take the tremendous debilitating fear away so that I can make good choices on how I want to live and show up in the world. One of the most shame-filled traits that exhibit itself when I am NOT on Effexor is rage.  I lived with a parent who spontaneously raged which filled me with constant fear about the world. It's nice to be given the gift of pausing when agitating before I act. Even on Effexor though, I sometimes do feel anger which is a natural part of being human.  Today; however, I am more apt to respond appropriately rather than to fly off of the handle.

Of course those of us who are considering medication should carefully weigh the pros and cons of what would be the best path for us.  We should also have a good psychiatrist AND a therapist to help us evaluate if we need medication and to help build our arsenal of tools for living in the world.  I do not agree with friends that I know who merely go to their GP to have their prescription filled.  A well-trained Psychiatrist will know the nuances of various brain chemistries, whether if what we are going through is a once in life time kind of thing or if we're missing some chemicals in our brains that makes our dopamine, etc. low or non-existent which then alter our view of the world.  

For someone like me who needs medication to live a better life, I need all the support from the outside world. I don't need your judgement that I'm on it. I don't need insurance companies tracking me so that future employers may be prejudiced to hiring me because of it, I need your support that me and my doctors are doing all that we can do so that I can live a better life and be a contributing member of our society.  For years and years I've shared my life experiences in rooms of people in recovery and am now putting together a series of exposes about them.  I've earned my place in line to accept a well-thought out, consciously prescribed medication and thank God for it every day.

We swim into this world through the placenta of our mothers’ wombs gasping for breath into the unfamiliar.  And when we die, at least from the perspective of someone who has witnessed many deaths, it seems that many of us are swimming back through the placenta of our understanding of this life gasping for breath into the next reality.

And in between there is all this life.

All this experience.

All this witnessing of everyday miracles that tumble around our lives like shiny polished minerals as we explore this rock we live upon hurtling through space as far as the eye cannot see.

Just think about how each of us are but blinks of God experiencing God’s self as you, as me, as the tree.  No one quite sees what each other experiences about life in quite the same way. Which makes it all so fantastic no matter who we are or where our travels have taken us even those whose life postcards may only come from the well trodden wooden porch teetering off of a worn down house somewhere off of IH-10 in West, Texas.  The clouds you have watched rolling across your sky ushering in the latest cold fronts will never be seen again in quite that mix of creme, purple and aqua sculpted by the winds into fantastic shapes and sizes that artists will try to tame again and again to the tarmac of their special papers.  

And oh the love we have felt.  Fantastic warm beams of honey sprung forth from the eternal well within.  I had a conversation with an angel once when I was feeling especially pitiful and miserable with my human life as I drove through a beautiful sunbeam streaked park on an everyday morning carrying out everyday mundane chores.  “Don’t you realize, Lynn” he said, “how fantastic it is to be human? How envious we, who are not in human form, are even as glorious as our life is in our realm?”  “Your lives are all definitions of love from the brightest into the deepest shadows.” He took me on a brief ride seeing my everyday life through his eyes, feeling the warm breeze tickling my skin as the sun teased my neck and chin.  I could just barely grasp the edges of beauty surrounding every single experience, good and bad, watching them all sing together like dust particles gleaming off light in the beam through a window.  For one minute, everything seemed to make such perfect sense on this ordinary morning.  How in the world are we humans able to experience ourselves in this constant world of wonder without overdosing on it all and splitting apart into molecules and disappearing into the ethers? I suppose many have done just that never to be seen again but for those who remain it is our challenge to navigate this wonderment of riches resisting the urge to foil over the windows of our worlds from fearing the beauty of it all.

We’re just blinks of God, you and me each of our stories weaving into one great tapestry of being.

The thing about writing about my life experiences is that for a human being who lives in such a duality-driven time, my world has multiple points and divots. Even though for the first 27 years or so I was known as someone who could react loudly and aggressively towards anyone or anything that I felt threatened by, I was very good at keeping the secrets that threaded all throughout my family tree on both sides inside and out.  Keeping them was relatively easy since I learned to take my catalyst self and spin inside of the maelstrom that was my life until the broken shards of stories stuck to me like duct tape on a shoe wrapping around and around evolving me into a scape goat for all so that any words that did come from me were often hard to hear because of the level of their sound and timbre.

Even before I took a little bit too much homemade LSD that seemed to find every nook and cranny of my consciousness revealing all my hidden fears ripping aside any filters I had left for comfort and peace which sent me running into years of individual psychotherapy, I also had the ability to see perspectives from many angles if I chose to do so.  

For a child who is a keeper of seekers and is sensitive, intuitive and aware, being able to see many points of view but still function from the child-ID ego is painful at best.  I often wondered if I had grown up in a distant country and served at the feet of a saint or guru daily who I might have become with such a potential of spirit.  Maybe I would have found more pockets of golden beaming love and striven for Divine connection much earlier.  But I grew up mostly in the U.S. and did a whole lot of living in Texas which meant, like all of us, I did the best I could with what I had.  Often the outcome of a terrifying event such as my mother raging at me long after the sun had set would mean me visiting my heart for only a little space of time and then pushing it aside to see the perspective from my mom's point of view so I could understand why she sometimes acted the way she did.  I imagine what kept my heart from petrifying to a flimsy hull of not feeling were the animals in my life and my love of nature which both of my parents taught me well how to see and love.  That soft part of them was what was so confusing in comparison to the raging or shutting down because I knew even then that they were people just like you and me, doing the best they could do that couldn't quite fit into just one category of good and bad.  Like some amphibians and fish, I liken my response to this world of mine as one of morphing for self preservation to whatever "being" was safest for me to become at any given moment.  

No wonder when someone asked me in my early twenties what my favorite color was, I had no clue.  It's amazing to recall that many of the messages I received from the adults at that time about myself were that I was very opinionated and strong headed.  That's how my defenses looked back then.

The good news is that today I've learned how to be softer in the knitting together of the safety net that is my life.  The yarns I twist and turn in the telling of my story have been softened with the love of understanding of what it means to be human in this world.  I'm grateful to have learned that while memories of childhood will definitely make one hell of a bodacious story in the telling someday that I have a right to feel every feeling and do not have to raise shields and swords when I have them.

What's even sweeter is that in the telling of the secrets in the net of love, others may be helped in their journey through life as well.

I've often blamed my Dad for being the reason that I have never published any of my writings beyond the blogosphere.  You see, there are so many very good reasons that he so generously gave me over the years for me to use to prove that I did not receive the love, the attention, the support or the belief-in-me from him.  It's all his fault I would say, my dear father who was a Colonel.

But low these many decades later of being an adult and having the perspective to realize where my Dad was when he was 35, 45, 55 and remembering what was going on in his life much less the world in which he worked and played and I realize there was about a 2, maybe 3 year period when I could have "legally", in the value system of personal growth, blamed my father but after that...blaming him was like throwing water against a mirror.

One image sticks in my mind in the autumn of my ninth grade year.  Dad is going up the stairs in our foyer and I'm heading down to watch tv.  I think he's trying to engage me in conversation about what I want to be when I grow up and to take school seriously and during the course of wanting to find any reason to disengage from talking to him about it because I had no idea who I was or what I could do so I said I wanted to be a writer because that had been one thing that I had done on a fairly regular basis for the past two years. I don't remember his exact words but I do remember feeling like hopeless about being a writer, or at least making a living at it.  I also remember this was the first time he let me know in no uncertain terms that where I should focus my energy was to become a high level executive secretary in the government.  I knew then in my heart, if not my head, that in my Dad's world there really wasn't much I could do well enough beyond the basics in life.  If I give him a bit of latitude today, I can guess that he was trying to give me the best advice he could at the time for how I could prepare for the world and take care of myself.  Volumes later, I sure had a lot to learn.

I often wonder about that time in 1972 when my brother and I lived with my Dad and his new beautiful young wife who was just 12 years my senior.  He had only been back home in the States for a little over a year and had convinced Jan, my step-mother, to move out of there sexy condo near the hustle and bustle of Washington D.C. to a split level in the burbs of Virginia.  Everyday my Dad would leave for work at the Pentagon, usually in his dress blues and often taking the bus.  I can't imagine what flack he must have received for wearing that uniform in our country at that time.  And then there was me, a budding hormone laced teen of 14 heading off to a big new high school. Dad had threatened mom for being an unfit mother because she was "queer" (this was the 70's, that was his term) and so my brother and I had been whisked away from an older rental home with three dogs and a cat, my mom and her girlfriend and thrown into what looked like the perfect life on the outside.  Thank God I got to bring my cockatiel, Charlie, with his big home-made cage that my mom's girlfriend had made him for Christmas one year.

Maybe it was all of those things that influenced my Dad to speak so harshly to me, helping to create the toughened heart that had to be broken over and over again to find the release.  Or maybe he was so caught up in the edges of the worlds he was trying to recover to even think about what was coming out of his mouth much less the effect of his words on me.  Whatever the case,  there is always today, right now, this minute for me to write down the memories of my life and in the unveiling find pieces of the gold uncovered from the dross of erroneous beliefs.  

Writing today. Publishing, if not for you and me then certainly for the was.

Two more holes to stand underneath and be beamed up into the bowels of waiting space ships when our planet collapses.  Two more sun tunnels to let in light.  Two more holes in an otherwise perfectly good roof.  Two more holes to help me breath.

When I'm outside, I like to climb on top of the highest point so that I can spread my soul out to flow and bounce off the landscape for miles and miles feeling the freedom of stretching out after being folded up into the nooks and crannies of my inner world.  Long ago, I volunteered for a woman who was born to a Navajo father and a black mother and had found her passion in rescuing hybrid wolf/dogs from around the country. The first time I met her in-person was at night.  She lived in a house with five acres outside of southwest Austin that had a windy, gravelly driveway framed by giant elderly cedars. As I drove down her drive to the house, I didn't smell the wolves located in various holding pens just on the other side of the cedar trees, I didn't hear them--even though there was a hush as big as a black hole, I didn't smell them although dogs do carry a scent even if the wolves normally don't....but I sensed them from the bottom of my toes up through every hair follicle on my body to the top of my head.   Later, during a visit during the day, I was made aware of how I spread out my soul to my surroundings to sense what was okay and what was not, by a large alpha male wolf hybrid.  As my friend and I were walking out for her to introduce me to the pack,  the male bristled up as big as all 150 pounds of him could and growled lowly under his breath.  I knew the minute my soul-sensing had touched his pen boundaries without asking or receiving his permission because he was the first being that had ever stopped me/it from flowing over and through, recoiling my sense energy and throwing it back at me.  Who knew there was such a thing as grace and manners about matters of the psyche? Thank you wolf friend for teaching me.

Today, although I'm most grateful for shelter from the elements, people, nature and for having material boundaries of it all, I do welcome all chances to open up freely and connect with the natural world whether it when I'm in a car and allow my soul to fly with the unfolding landscape for miles and miles or simply laying at night flying up into the never ending sky.  Two more holes in my roof helps my soul feel just a little less anxious when it surfs along the claustrophobic roof and finds pools of light to swirl with.

It's kind of funny that as I sit here in the free expansive place of contemplating my insides well-worn trucks full of dedicated roofers are parked in our driveway, their tools strewn around the outside of our house on all sides. They arrived early this morning along with the morning sun while I sat inside of a warm home, drinking coffee and contemplating my navel from yet another angle with my Creativity Coach via Skype.

And my ego throws out a pleated costume of perfection disguised as worry for placing an "and" incoherently in my writing

or asking how important could my writing possibly be to anyone much less myself

wandering thoughts swirling off to focus on the blowing tumbleweeds of dog fur that need sweeping up. 

Now

While others do the serious work of using their minds and bodies to pay for the bills, I sit here double guessing myself, my craft, my weaknesses.

Oh to be so full of self and yet yearning to be better than this,

this person who has a life on the outside that begs for the negative judgement of many

but stalls because of the negative judgement from within.

And yet, very grateful for those writers who I love to curl up and read who have gone through this same process with their own ego-twist decoration of perspective and wit.

Thank you for keeping on, thank you for overcoming, thank you for believing in that often times, small small voice deep inside that gives you just the briefest spurt of hope that someone, somewhere will benefit from what you put to the page.

We are out here.

Just believe.

I love to watch my husband's lips and listen to the sound of his voice when he says the word, "strength" as if he was some pupil in a grammar class out of the 1950s keeping the "g" silent.  It occurs to me that silent g is really the verb form of actualizing the strength inside. Not like some gangly g-sounding s t r e n g t h that goes boasting about with unfelt bravado trying to prove that as it reverberates through the air the decibel level of fear cannot be discerned by any listener nearby.

The quiet strength to overcome ourselves in overcoming others.  The willingness to accept what is and surrender about what isn't.  The courage to ask our higher selves for a change in our perspectives, a map for a different pathway rather than taking the well worn smoothed out path that our synapses have always travelled.

Inside strength waits quietly within our hearts to be activated from the depth charges of releasing our ego.  Trusting that in the quiet, quiet hush of darkness a light will dawn, stairs to climb out will be found, strength to go on will be given even as the storms outside rage on in their convincing ways.

My favorite Yoga teacher used to tell us to breath into our "mula bandha" or root lock of our chakras and bodies to bring strength up and out through our entire bodies so that we could have a sense of really being rooted as we stretched up and out to the sky giving us strength and flexibility to move into whatever pose was next. In this way, we become rooted in our strength yet flexible enough to bend and allow the wind to flow through and around us instead of knocking us off balance.

Strength with a silent "g", ever flexible and able to blow in the wind but staying rooted in our sense of being-ness.

A cacophony of shadows, and all I feel is fear as I sat waiting in the wings for our showcase showdown to begin. For who am I? Who the hell am I at this supposed late age in the game of life, old enough to have given birth to the entire improv class, to slam my feet forward into the center spotlight of the stage with fierce verve and trust in whatever impulsive reaction which spews forth from the nether regions of my unconscious?  

It is I, the restless, trouble-making kid that compelled teachers to huddle together and draw straws about to see who ended up with my needy, intelligent, disobedient, hilarious, disruptive, breaker-of-rules student-self who had burst forth into the quiet obedient classroom from the collective nightmares of newly minted teachers off the vine.

For why wouldn't those of us who began breaking the rules before we were even born, blazing a new pathway into the world by creating bread crumb trails that made the most sense to us, enter our later years, in our rule-breaking ways.  Flouting our wrinkles, dawning our grey.

Still, when sitting alone in the shadows of my mind I fear for my sanity in spite of years of therapy and spiritual spelunking. Improv is for the younger crowd with flexible bones and nimble feet, skin still tough enough to ward off the sticks and stones thrown at us by those who are too scared to show their bellies. Like a giant fish with crooked scars running out of my mouth and down my side, evidence of surviving the many tangled hooks that tried to take me down, I swim on to the stage into the middle spotlight, in spite of my fears, and allow the natural unfolding from the shadows to begin.

For just a moment, a very sweet moment, I feel free and my fins become wings to fly my spirit out of my tired old body and remember, ahh, we are deep down inside who we always thought we could be free and easy, free and easy, simply free.