Deep psychic wounding

The night my sister died, she was on all fours, eyes twitching, body circling in place. Her eyes were translucent, seeing beyond this world. Her bedsheet twisted between her legs, cuffed around her ankles and calves, a prisoner to herself.

Her bedroom dimly lit, beige walls and furniture, her three sons, my husband Ron and I, watched her frenzied dance; tears, heartbreak, and grief sucked the oxygen out of the room.

Suddenly she ceased to move, still on all fours; she looked up at her middle son, Mathew, his lips tight, brown eyes swollen, and asked, “Did I do anything wrong?”

Her question was her last word.

Devil Complex

How many of us are attacked by our Inner Devil asking, What am I doing wrong?

Condemned by societal consensus, unconsciously whispering in our psyche that we must perform what “they believe,” what they say is right or wrong, moral, and acceptable.

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés provides insights into the nature of the Devil Complex.

• The Devil Complex involves a sense of entitlement, often linked to a neurotic pattern of “special/worthless, “ a hidden need for approval, validation, acceptance, and belonging, and a fear of exclusion and abandonment by acting puffed up and better than, then collapsing into worthlessness and self-condemnation

• Individuals may feel guilt or shame, complicating their emotional angst and sense of worth

• Estés connects this complex to societal issues, cultural trance of dysfunctional beliefs, and values that shape an individual’s sense of worth and love

• It can lead to self-destructive behaviors or harm to others, reflected through jealousy, vengeance, and abuse

  

My sister’s death impacted me like a speeding train. Her devil complex had swallowed her up like a killer whale. She chose to die by rejecting treatment for breast cancer. She wanted to die. Her pain consumed her soul and heart and ate her up skin, bone, and cells.

Carla was my big sister. Yet, she hated me. She told me on my sixteenth birthday she would never love me, because I wouldn’t wear a blue bow in my hair at her wedding.

I ran after her my entire life, desperate for her approval, validation, and to be hugged. Whenever I’d try to hold her hand or hug her, she’d freeze up like an iceberg.

My mother’s hands were bony; her heart was buried underneath generations of unmothered mothers, traumatized from thousands of years of religious persecution, the death of her father at age ten, neglect, and emotional abandonment.

She never knew the touch of a loving mother. She gave to my sister and me what she experienced.

She died four months before my sister in a psychiatric ward.

My childhood trauma, my mother’s tortured death, then witnessing my sister’s demise, exploded. My digestive system and metabolic system blew up into pieces of terror and grief.

I was diagnosed with PTSD AND GASTROPARYSIS. A paralysis of my digestive tract, a chronic illness with the freeze of PTSD.

Dreams

Dreams are your soul talking to you. They tell you what you need to know, dig deep into, and feel.

Dreams are the door to healing and recovery. They are your generational, mythical, and mystical story. Indigenous tribes, shamans, and medicine women writing on cave walls.

The wordless language of dreams guided us before we were born, before there was culture, society, and who you were told to be.

Dreams are the food for writing, the emotional juice for expressing, the artist’s language

Cooking a brisket with my sister

I dreamt my sister and I were cooking a brisket. The food of my ancestors. I added an onion to make it sweeter and softer.

I did not question how she had returned from the dead or why, after more than thirty years, we are standing together in a crowded kitchen as though death were only a door she had walked through and forgotten to close behind her.

There is no grave between us. No suicide. No terrible ending. No years of silence hardened around everything we never said.

There is only the brisket.

It rests in a large roasting pan, dark and glistening, surrounded by a thin brown sauce. Steam rises from it and disappears into the warm kitchen air. The room smells of cooked meat and salt, of family dinners and Jewish holidays, of kitchens where women stood over heavy pots trying to make something tender out of something tough.

My sister is beside me, holding a spoon.

She looks the way she looked before death took possession of her face. Short light brown hair, black pencil circling her big green eyes.

I cannot say exactly how old she is. In dreams, the dead have no age. She is simply my sister, restored to the kitchen, close enough for me to touch.

“Did you put in an onion?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

There is no defensiveness in her voice. No argument. Just no.

“I’m going to put one in,” I tell her. “It makes it really sweet. Juicier and softer.”

I find an onion on the counter. It is enormous, almost too large for my hand. When I pick it up, my fingers sink slightly into its skin. The onion is soft—too soft. Mushy. It has passed beyond firmness and shape, as if it has been waiting for years to be cut open.

I place it on the cutting board.

The knife slides through it without resistance.

No clean rings inside, no crisp white layers falling neatly beneath the blade. The onion collapses as I chop it. It becomes pulp and liquid, almost onion juice. The smell rises sharply, but I do not cry. Perhaps all the tears are already inside it.

I scoop the pieces into a glass jar. The onion slips and slides against the sides, pale and wet, barely solid enough to hold.

For a moment I look at the jar in my hand.

This is what grief becomes after enough years. Not gone. Never gone. Only changed in form. What was once hard enough to split me open has softened into something I can carry. Something I can pour.

I empty the onion into the pan.

Only then do I really look at the brisket

.

“It’s already cooked,” I say.

My sister does not answer.

The meat is finished. It has already endured the heat. It has already given itself to the fire and become what it was going to become. I cannot season it before the cooking. I cannot go back and add sweetness at the beginning.

I can only add it now.

My sister dips a large spoon into the sauce. Her hand is steady. She lifts the spoon carefully so that none of the liquid spills, then holds it toward me.

“Taste it.”

I lean forward and sip.

The sauce is warm and savory. It tastes good, but it is too watery. It runs quickly over my tongue, carrying flavor without enough body to hold it.

“It’s tasty,” I tell her.

I do not want to hurt her.

“But it’s a little watery.”

She looks into the pan as if considering this. She does not crumble beneath my judgment. She does not strike back. She simply listens.

“I guess if I put in milk, it would get soft too,” she says.

“Yes,” I answer.

But something in me pauses.

Milk and meat.

What was forbidden and what was needed. The law and the longing. The mother and the sacrifice. The white milk of tenderness poured over the dark meat of our family history.

Perhaps that was what we had needed all along—a mothering large enough to soften what happened to us. Milk for the children we had been. Milk for the girls who learned too early that love could disappear, punish, threaten, divide, and devour.

But no one poured it in.

My sister and I had been given the meat without the milk. The wound without the comfort. The family without the safety.

We each tried to survive the hunger differently.

She disappeared into illness, pain, obsession, jealousy, and finally death.

I survived by becoming the one who tasted everything.

I tasted the rage. I tasted the abandonment. I tasted the shame and terror. I tasted what belonged to my mother and what belonged to my father. I tasted what had traveled from my grandmother Sarah, across an ocean, through poverty, vodka, cigarettes, silence, and grief.

I made myself the taster of the family sauce.

Even when it burned my mouth.

Even when it nearly drowned me

.“I think I’ll make my sauce thicker,” I say.

I do not say that hers is wrong. I do not tell her she has failed. I look at the watery sauce and understand that it contains something good. Something worth saving.

“It really is tasty,” I tell her again. “The onion will make it thicker.”

I want to believe this.

I want to believe that tears can become oceans. That sorrow, properly held, can thicken into wisdom. That what has dissolved can be gathered into a story and offered to others without flooding the entire table.

Behind us, the room is filled with guests.

I had not noticed them arriving.

There are people everywhere—sitting, standing, talking quietly, waiting for the meal. I do not recognize all their faces. Some may be family. Some may be strangers. Some may be the dead.

Perhaps my mother is there, though I do not see her clearly. Perhaps my father is waiting in another room. Perhaps my grandmother Sarah is sitting at the table, impatient and hungry, a cigarette burning between her fingers while she complains that we are taking too long.

Maybe all the women of my family are there.

The women who cooked and fed everyone while starving inside themselves.

The women who swallowed their voices.

The women who became hard because no one had taught them how to remain soft and survive.

The women who mistook suffering for love and sacrifice for worth.

The guests wait, but I do not know the occasion. There is no wedding cake, no birthday candles, no prayer book opened for a holiday. No one tells me why we are preparing this feast.

Still, they have come to eat.

I feel their hunger pressing toward the kitchen.

Then I notice a young woman standing in the background.

She was once my client. Her family died. All of them gone. She stands at the edge of the room with the quiet expression of someone who knows what it means to lose her parents too early, too soon, before healing can happen

In waking life, I was supposed to be the helper. She came to me carrying her losses, and I listened. I asked questions. I tried to create a container strong enough to hold what could not be repaired.

But here, she does not need anything from me.

She does not ask me to explain death or help her grieve. She simply stands there, watching my sister and me cook.

Perhaps she is not my client here.

Perhaps she is my witness.

She knows that the dead do not vanish. They stand behind us while we chop onions. They gather at the edges of rooms. They enter our dreams carrying spoons and recipes. They wait for us to taste what they could not finish.

A woman approaches the kitchen. I do not know her. She looks at my sister and me as if she has authority over the gathering.

“Now you will get dressed,” she says.

I look down at myself.

“We are already dressed,” I answer. “Or we would never be here.”

The words come out firmly, almost defiantly.

We are already dressed.

My sister and I have not arrived naked or unprepared. We have not wandered into this room by accident. Whatever clothes are required to stand among the living and the dead, we are already wearing them.

We are dressed in everything that happened to us.

My sister wears the life she could not continue.

I wear the life I continued despite everything.

We are dressed as daughters of the same mother, daughters who experienced her differently and carried her madness into separate rooms. We are dressed in love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, closeness and exile. We are dressed in all the words we hurled at each other and all the words that never found their way out.

For years I believed we could meet only inside the wound. She would always be the collapsed one, the jealous one, the sister who said she could never love me. I would always be the one pleading to be seen, trying to rescue her, trying to prove that my suffering mattered too.

But in this kitchen, neither of us is begging.

Neither of us is winning.

We are cooking

.

The dream brings tears to what was dry and brings language to what was silent. I can bring tenderness without pretending there was no cruelty. I can make the story thick enough to hold grief without letting it swallow the entire plate.

My psyche’s dream guided me toward healing, recovery, and forgiveness with my sister and the generations of women I carry in my blood.

I wake to sadness and yearning. A deeper recovery awakens me to allow the grief to teach me tenderness, compassion, and softness to what is still hardened in me.

Long before MRI scanners mapped the brain, every culture recognized that altered states could reveal hidden dimensions of reality.

Follow the dots. Don’t make sense out of it. Surrender

Inside, she feels a jumble, a prism, a kaleidoscope of unwritten visions and stories

She knows life is a series of mistakes she corrects through trial and error. But there are no do-overs for the mistakes, only reparation.

If she pays close attention to her illusions, her mistakes can lead to some sort of wisdom. Some sort of awareness of why she is here.

And even then, when she looks into a mirror or a window as she casually struts along a crowded street, even then, she sometimes cannot see her reflection. She sees only the lipstick negligently painted on her teeth. My god. She is so like me.

AN INSPIRED WOMAN CAN NEVER REMAIN UNCONSCIOUS

I am telling my story: not as a confession, but as a beginning to share my story

Ancient Greece held the Eleusinian Mysteries

The Hebrew prophets entered ecstatic states through prayer, fasting, dreams, and visions.

The Kabbalists sought union with the Infinite.

Sufi mystics whirled.

Christian contemplatives entered silence.

Indigenous cultures across the Americas worked with sacred plants as teachers, not recreational substances.

ARTISTS ARE THE MYSTIC, HEALERS AND SHAMANS

Talking to animals, hearing windy conversations, an ancient knowing

Smoke the peace pipe and hear the ancestors, kiss the earth, drink the oceans

Eat the flowers, walk the mountains, smell rainbows, sweet, juicy and alive

I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE LANGUAGE, BEFORE SOCIETY, BEFORE,

BEFORE—A Universe existed

The language differs.

The paths cross over

The symbols are in dreams and cave walls.

Yet the descent remains astonishingly similar.

There is usually a death of who you think you are.

A calling, yearning, desire, a hidden vision tugging at your psyche

A dive and encounter with a dream, a vision, an experience

A confrontation with terror. Past lives, de ja vu

A psychedelic experience with buzzing, pulsating light

A return of a strong pulling inward, an initiation story.

The mystical process of healing and repair.

Mysticism is feral, wild, innocent, and free

Carl Jung believed that modern people suffer not because they lack information but because they have become estranged from the symbolic life of the psyche.

There is pain. There are my angels. There is my thinking about my pain. There is acting out my pain.

There is denying my pain. There is my judgment I have on my pain. I am romancing my pain.

PAIN IS MYSTICAL. THE LANGUAGE OF SENSATION, FEELING, WISDOM

Pain is feral, wild instinct, amazing grace, lost and scattered in bodies, shapes, and flesh; it is the broken path to our bodies, where the merging of our neuroses transforms into mystical juice, wild creativity, and true love.

Pain is the doorway to visions, ecstatic, orgasmic tastes of orange, tangerine, cherry, purple, eternal taste buds, and slippery hands stroking my skin in my pain. Pain is awakening to another life, another way, another soul

Dancing at midnight under the moonlight. A soft voice and slender fingers seduce me in the dark. A dream of beauty and the beast. Cinderella, Snow White. Women reduced to cartoon characters. Loss of the feminine soul, her vivid, deep emotions, empathy, and creative visions.

PAIN opened me to the priestess that lives in my blood

You’re too noisy. Shutup! You’re giving me a headache. Take care of me. You’re sick. You’re stupid. Don’t talk back. Don’t breathe. Nazis will kill you. God will punish you. God is a man and judges every move you make. Sex is dirty. You’re dirty. You’re wrong. Imagination will get you nowhere. Don’t trust yourself. You can’t make it without me. Your thoughts are ridiculous. Take sides. Your mother or me. Don’t wear that. I’m busy. Mind your own business. Smack, in your face. Smack on your ass. Smack. Smack. Scream. Scream. I’m drowning. I’ll kill you. Smack, smack, knife at throat…kick down the steps. Head hit against wall.

Mommy, don’t put my head under the water. Knives, knives everywhere. Blood. Daddy, save me. Stand up, sit down, stop laughing; your thoughts are stupid. You can’t survive. Raise your hand. You’re a tramp. Go watch television. You watch too much television. Why do you need to go to college? Get a husband. Make sure he’s rich. Look pretty. Men don’t like smart women. Dreams don’t come true. Rub my back. Do as I say. Girls don’t climb trees. Stay clean. Don’t touch that. Don’t touch yourself. You don’t care about anyone. You’re to blame. You made your father sick. We have problems. Don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself????? Life is tough. YOU ARE SO STUPID!

I’ll hide behind this gate. They’ll never see me. The angels will save me.

Dreams.

Myths.

Visions.

Spiritual imagery.

Nightmares

These are not signs of irrationality.

They are expressions of the Self—the psyche’s organizing intelligence continually attempting to restore wholeness.

Jung once observed that many of his patients over the age of thirty-five were not primarily suffering from neurosis but from the loss of a spiritual orientation.

The soul, he suggested, becomes ill when it loses relationship with mystery.

Modern psychedelic research echoes this insight.

Participants often emerge less interested in dogma and more interested in direct experience.

Many report that they no longer ask whether God exists as an abstract philosophical problem.

Instead, they describe feelings held within a larger reality than themselves.

Whether this reflects metaphysical truth remains beyond science.

Its psychological effects, however, are increasingly measurable.

Trauma, Separation, and the Longing for Wholeness

She yearns for simple things. Sounds of quiet yawns. Smells of baking bread. Creaks of wooden floors. Sunlight touching her skin. Flowers burst into myriad colors. But my head is stuck in the middle of a traffic jam. And there is so much honking. HONK!

Trauma fragments.

It divides mind from the body.

Thought from feeling.

Memory from present experience.

Self from others.

Spirit from flesh.

The traumatized nervous system learns vigilance instead of trust.

Protection instead of openness.

Control instead of surrendering.

One reason mystical experiences may prove so psychologically and spiritually healing is that they temporarily interrupt these deeply conditioned patterns.

Neuroscientific studies suggest psychedelics reduce the rigid activity of the brain’s default mode network—the system associated with self-referential thinking and habitual identity.

For a brief time, the story loosens.

The defensive self relaxes.

New emotional connections become possible.

Individuals often report feeling profoundly loved without having to earn that love.

For survivors of trauma, this experience can be radically corrective.

It offers not merely insight but embodied knowing.

Not an idea of belonging.

The felt experience of belonging.

Perhaps We Remember More Than We Learn

Science is extraordinarily confused about measuring the effects of mystical experience.

It cannot tell us whether God speaks.

Whether consciousness survives death.

Whether the soul exists independent of the brain.

These remain questions of philosophy, theology, and lived experience.

Yet perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking,

“Is God real?”

we might ask, “What happens to human beings when they experience reality as sacred?”

The evidence increasingly suggests that something profound occurs.

Fear softens.

Forgiveness expands.

Gratitude deepens.

Life acquires meaning.

Relationships become more authentic.

Death loses some of its power.

Whether these experiences arise through contemplative practice, creative inspiration, spontaneous awakening, or carefully guided psychedelic therapy, they remind us that healing is not simply the absence of symptoms.

It is the restoration of relationships with ourselves, with others, with the living world, and with the mystery that has always surrounded us.

Perhaps mystical experience does not create the soul.

Perhaps it simply removes, for one luminous moment, everything that prevented us from remembering it.

What is the relationship between trauma and mystical experience?

My mystical experiences did not begin because I sought dissociation through spirituality.

They began when a five-year-old child whose mother threatened me with a knife discovered another way to survive.

Long before I knew the words “complex PTSD,” “polyvagal theory,” or “dissociation,” I entered an imaginal world populated by helpers, dreams, ancestors, biblical figures, and symbols. The imagination became both refuge and revelation.

Donald Kalsched describes how overwhelming trauma can activate an inner self-care system that protects the soul by creating imaginal figures and inner worlds.

Neuroscience tells us traumatic memories are often stored implicitly—in sensations, images, emotions, and fragments rather than coherent narratives.

Jung understood these images as communications from the psyche itself. Jewish mysticism would call them sparks of the Divine scattered into exile.

All these perspectives illuminate part of the mystery.

None of them fully explains it.

The question is not simply whether spirituality can become another form of dissociation.

The deeper question is this:

How do we distinguish between escaping into the sacred and being genuinely called by it?

My six-year-old catapulted into ancient memory, women free, women prophets, women artists, healers, and earth creatures.

I did not know if I was escaping or called.

Some people seek mystical experience to leave the body. Meditation, nirvana, heaven, peace, to override the pain.

Others encounter the mystical because it is the only place where the soul could remain alive until the body was safe enough to return from the trauma.

That distinction matters.

From what I experienced over the years, I don’t think my dreams were merely defenses. They were also acts of creativity.

They preserved imagination before language, relationship, and identity had fully formed. The same psyche that dissociated also continued creating.

While one part of me left the unbearable world, another part kept painting, writing, dreaming, and remembering.

Drawing, painting, making music, journaling, dancing, and other creative arts can help a person express and work through her inner experience.

The language of symbol and metaphor can help integrate what can never be fully verbalized.

Perhaps that is why healing eventually requires something different.

Not abandoning the mystical.

But allowing the mystical child to come home to the body.

Healing was never about giving up imagination.

It was about discovering that imagination could descend, not merely ascend.

Instead of leaving the body, it could illuminate the body.

Instead of escaping history, it could redeem history.

Instead of bypassing grief, it could accompany grief.

This is where trauma therapy, Jungian psychology, Jewish mysticism, and neuroscience unexpectedly meet.

The nervous system seeks regulation.

The psyche seeks meaning.

The soul seeks wholeness.

Each language describes a different aspect of the same human journey.

The traumatized child fragments because fragmentation keeps her alive.

The mystic gathers the fragments.

The artist gives them form.

The storyteller gives them language.

The body slowly learns what the soul has always known:

“I survived.”

Not because I escaped forever.

But because imagination kept breathing for me until I could breathe for myself.

This is why I have become increasingly cautious whenever I hear people dismiss mystical experience as “just dissociation.”

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes meditation, spiritual communities, psychedelic exploration, or ecstatic states become sophisticated strategies for avoiding unbearable feelings. Trauma can disguise itself in white robes just as easily as it can in addiction or perfectionism.

But reducing every mystical experience to pathology commits another violence.

It pathologizes the imagination itself.

It forgets that human beings have always dreamed before they reasoned.

Jacob dreamed of a ladder reaching heaven.

Joseph interpreted dreams that changed history.

Ezekiel saw wheels within wheels.

The prophets spoke in visions.

Mystics from every tradition have entered imaginal worlds filled with symbols that later transformed culture.

Were they all merely dissociating?

Or were they participating in capacities of consciousness modern psychology is only beginning to understand?

Perhaps the answer is both.

Trauma may open the door.

It does not determine what waits on the other side.

Your transcript gave me the sense that this is ultimately the question we should be asking—not whether mysticism is real or whether trauma causes spirituality, but how suffering becomes transformed into wisdom rather than remaining frozen as survival.

That, I believe, is the real mystery.

What if the purpose of mystical experience is not to leave the world, but to teach us how to come back into the body/world— love it- dark, light, mystery, pain, love, hate, grief, sickness, and health until death do us never part. EVER

I’ve lost: My family, my health, my childhood, and myself

My mother was a lost prophet,

my sister was a lost soul

Women calling to stay alive—

I dived, dived, dived down deep

through fire, brick and earth

oceans, galaxies and souls

I have risen from the depths of psychic despair

Awake and hungry for more life

Three generations still stand

Me, my daughter, and my granddaughter

Women resurrecting the feral psychic

I thirst for joy like an alcoholic yearns for the drink

Is it real? Is it real?

Or does joy just fly through my fingers?

An illusion or oasis of nirvana?

I am here. Groundhog Day. Again repeating the prayer.

I am here… a weight sits on my chest… a despair of grief and sadness

Who else is in grief out there?

We are all in stay-at-home orders

There is a spiked menace in the lungs of humanity

Lungs is grief. All the ancestral grief of this planet

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.

The Earth is choking

Set me free. Stop polluting,

stop hating, stop breaking my heart

Grieve dammit!!

Yell, scream, strip your throat of the blood

From the rage, you swallow every day.

We walk around like the living dead.

Ignoring the prophecy, ignoring the signs of destruction.

I wail in grief every night.

Please, Shekinah, save the planet.

But it is not up to the divine

It is up to YOU and ME and

And what have we all done?

Where is the grief that leads to wholeness, and unity?

In the lungs of skin and bones begging for air, begging for life

Begging to be touched,

begging to be seen, heard and

Resurrected into joy…

Joy is so hard for me to say. Or feel

Just like now,

it will be taken away,

stolen if I dare feel joy

For too long

So much grief in joy…

I hunger for joy like the addict who lusts after drugs.

Joy, I swallow it up, and it is gone

Embraced by my grief.

To live again in the cycle of life and death

Joy comes out from the darkness

Amongst the thorns of people

You are young joy

Come play with me

Until my grief is harnessed

With wisdom

THE BIG BANG AND THE OLAM TIKUN

Trauma is a mystical portal. It is the Olam Tikun, a myth that when the Creator imagined an endless universe, it exploded into infinity, and is still expanding and blowing up.

The fragmentation and explosion of our brain and nervous system during trauma is a representation of the “Big Bang” theory of the universe; when in 1927, an astronomer named Georges Lemaître said that a very long time ago, the universe started as just a single point. Then it expanded and stretched to grow as large as it is right now—and it is still stretching!

Tikkun Olam,” “repair of the world,” starts with repairing and mending myself

As I heal, I am called upon to make the world more just, peaceful, tolerant, and equal, through acts of charity, kindness, and political action.

GENERATIONAL TRAUMA OR AM I IN BROOKLYN YET?

Growing up in a home with bones, cells, and blood memory of the Holocaust, generational trauma repeated.

My mother, violent; my father, emotionally absent; my sister, filled with fear and hatred; borderline, depressed and hypervigilant; my brain, nervous system, and basic needs of trust, safety, and belonging, erupted like the “big bang.”

The question I asked myself: How does a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, living on Flatbush Avenue, eating Nathan hot dogs at Coney Island; my grandmother, Sarah, from Russian-Poland, mumbling oye, oye, oye whenever she saw my mother dress up in “fancy smancy clothes,” my grandmother complained, “feh, I can sew those for you, why spend money?”

Sarah crossed the Atlantic alone at sixteen. No photos, no silverware, no napkins, no stories of her family. Grit, survival, and silence were her companions to America. A cigarette dangling between her fingers and her white pocketbook with a bottle of schnapps, vodka hidden in her white handbag.

My father, owning Cousins Deli on Utica Avenue, with the aroma of corned beef and pastrami from his white shirt, self-absorbed, did not protect me from my mother, who was suicidal and hit me with umbrellas and hangers

My sister retreated into narcissism from the abuse, believing she is Grace Kelly.

And my mother, a rageaholic, abuser, borderline personality, dripping in mink and diamonds, driving a pink Cadillac, raged way into her eighties.

How can little me soar into mystical visions, feel the heat of Mt Sinai, remember female ancient prophets, and see auras, feel energy in and around her, hear voices, and dream in panaramic 3D technicolor of aliens living amongst us, angels and fairies flying around me?

Who’d believe me?

Researcher Joan Borsyenko notes that many people severely abused as children carry memories of extraordinary spiritual experiences alongside their abuse. —often out-of-body journeys, or an encounter with vast, all-seeing light

BEAN ME UP SCOTTY

When no one is there to hold us, comfort our fears, and validate our existence, something in us leaves. For some, the inner world becomes a source of intuition, artistic gifts, and healing power.

For others, it also becomes a place of torment, searching for belonging, seeking the warmth and safety in the arms of acceptance and love, finding the way back home.

The abused child splits from the unbearable pain and learns to live in two worlds at once—one visible and one hidden.

Shame, terror, judgement, rejection, inside and out. This is the cost of carrying PTSD and trauma through a lifetime.

For me, I traveled out of my body and pummeled into the mystical legacy of female ancestors—that more than 25,000 years ago, humankind was governed by a matriarchal society.

The feminine intuition, psychic knowing, natural healers, art, images, symbols, dreams, and wholeness existed in this culture way before language or culture.

This was the cosmic doorway that lasted in my psyche when I left my body.

WHO IS CRAZY? CRAZY THE NEW NORMAL?

I was called on a journey, an archeological dig, to not only reclaim the truth of my ancestral legacy, but also to understand the mental illness (fragmentation and split) of my family.

I retreated into this world by the age of six. I did not speak of this experience; I could not speak of this experience.

I had no words; only painting, poems, and dreams protected me in the cosmic world from the “real world” of fear.

In elementary school, teachers told my parents, “I lived in another world.”

At sixteen, I was in therapy. I felt alone, terrified, and wanted to die. In 1966, my family believed, “only crazy people went to a shrink,” and refused to support me.

Yes. Crazy people. HA. Oh. They weren’t crazy!

I worked typing up resumes, and paid for three times a week sessions with Dr. Schulman, a balding, pipe-smoking Jungian therapist. His office was in a townhome basement in Brooklyn.

I was twelve when I first watched Natalie Wood in the movie Splendor in the Grass, featured on CBS’s Million Dollar Movie, a risky 1961 movie about young love, sex, and mental illness.

Natalie played Wilma Dean. I was mesmerized. I wanted to be Wilma. I wanted a psychiatrist. I wanted to be locked up, far away from my parents, so I could paint, write, be heard and seen every day by a therapist, and be cared for by white uniformed nurses.

I wanted to walk out of the sanatorium slim and beautiful, wearing a white dress, with a big white hat, just like Wilma, and marry a wealthy doctor, just like Wilma.

Artist Empaths

When one is pretending, the whole body revolts. Anais Nin

“Whenever you do something that is not aligned with the yearning of your soul—you create suffering Anais Nin

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” Frida Kahlo

Dr. Schulman asked me to draw my dreams and write my poetry. Tell him my story.

He said, “I will never judge you.”

YOU BECOME LAYER BY LAYER WOUND BY WOUND

LIFE IS THE RECOVERY OF THE SOUL

When the soul breaks too soon, trauma isn’t what happened. —it’s what the soul had to do to survive. Overwhelm, fear, and betrayal become too much, and then the nervous system shuts the world down

Eight stages of becoming whole

the fracture

the image

the body

the shadow

the descent

the creative fire

the witness

the soul making

TRAUMA LIVES IN THE BODY BEFORE IT BECOMES LANGUAGE

You are here to be healed. You are here to become whole. Through the soul, through the body, through the image, through the fire, through the witness. Into your own becoming.

You are the Olam Tikun, the explosion from darkness to light

The body held the pain that couldn’t be spoken. Tension is the language. Sensation is the wisdom

Earth remains jagged, and I remain mending. Inside I feel the edges of thorns that silently prick away at my soul. Then the release when my skin embraces the wound with reverence.

I am challenged to find a new light, a new avenue to see the God of delight in my every sight.

I gaze down at the earth and see cracks and pieces of leaves left over from weather change and erosion.

How do you feel complete when around the corner is the unknown, the mystery of death? Yet, I die every day to something new in me.

A new way of seeing my body, not something to pound away at to fit into my clothes, the way it feels, smells, and sees. The skin on my hand, its veins stare at me, blue and pulsing; that is life in me.

The way my husband sighs, my daughter smiles, my granddaughter ravishes a blueberry muffin. The way my son-in-law’s body jives when he eats something he loves. The way the air smells of oranges. The sun sets in hues of pinks, yellows and blues.

What are we hiding from? We are mortal but want to live forever— forever young and alive, newborn, children running and playing in the ocean.

I was flying to New York a couple of years back on a plane that was hitting horrendous turbulence, and the woman sitting next to me raised her hands to the sky and said, “I am in Jesus hands. I am in God’s hands.”

PTSD is my strength to carry on; don’t give up. I pray hands open to God; at times I cling to life in a way that strangles the life out of it.

Then my breath forces me to let go and sink into the earth

At times afraid to go forward in case I die. Because I think that if I let go, all the unfinished life yet to live is over.

They ask, “Don’t you believe in an afterlife? I do, and then who cares?

THE END IS THE BEGINNING, AND THERE IT GOES

I am only beginning to learn to love in this life. I have so much to learn about love. Love is so complex; fragmented, holy, fierce, and wounded.

My heart pumps throughout this life crying, yearning, drinking every last bit of its tigress pull of thunderous energy.

Outside my window frame, palms sway, tiger lilies, and the buzzing sounds of the night.

Inside my body, I walk a jungle, dark, roars of unfriendly terrain under my feet. Step by step, wondering if quicksand will suck me under.

Each moment is stressed with exciting terror that washes away all complacency and beliefs that I might, for one second, know or understand why I am here. I live life awakening in each moment, learning how to be here without reservation.

As a wise Indian teacher asked, “Why are we here?” He answered his own question, “To be alive.”

My outside does not reflect my insides unless I sit very still and never move out of the spot I sit and smell the Febreze in my sheets and the garlic from my stove. Then I am safe.

Only when hurricane sweeps my insides do I wake up, and realize I am here. I don’t know what it means not to be jagged.

I know moments when I am thrilled just to be alive. Life for me is the Olam Tikkum, the Hebrew purpose to mend a broken world.

I step on the jagged pieces and breathe. The earth pierces the soles of my feet. I look up and see the sky with its omnipresent clouds, and I wonder how this life is such a paradox

TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND DIVE TO YOUR UNIVERSE

People often ask when I became interested in spirituality.

They imagine meditation retreats, years studying Jung, yoga beneath ancient trees, dreams interpreted by wise teachers, or mystical experiences that slowly unfold through decades of spiritual practice.

I smile.

None of those places was my beginning.

My first mystical experience began at the edge of a knife

I was five years old, playing wildly with my sister

My mother stood over me, threatening, screaming, “Be quiet or else.”

Memory no longer moves in straight lines. It comes in a flashlight on the kitchen floor; my mother’s face is transformed into someone I no longer recognize, my body frozen in fear.

Then something impossible happened.

I floated.

Not metaphorically.

Not imaginatively.

My small body remained below while I watched from somewhere above, suspended between terror and wonder.

No one taught me how to leave.

My nervous system already knew.

For years, I wondered whether it had been dissociation, imagination, or God.

Today, I believe it was the first language my soul ever spoke.

“The soul leaves because the child cannot.”

Years later, I became a hippie.

A revolutionary.

A dreamer.

I wore turquoise and jade rings.

Scarves wrapped around my forehead.

Long skirts brushed my ankles.

I believed waterfalls hid the Fountain of Youth.

I believed God whispered through tarot cards, dreams, forests, stars, and strangers.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t searching for enlightenment.

I was searching for the place where I had gone when I was five.

I mistook leaving my body for finding heaven.

Carl Jung and the Language of the Soul

Carl Jung believed the psyche speaks through symbols long before it speaks through logic.

Dreams.

Synchronicities.

Myths.

Visions.

Archetypes.

Perhaps trauma makes us fluent in this symbolic language because ordinary language breaks beneath unbearable experience.

But Jung also offered an important warning.

Not every vision is wisdom.

Not every spiritual experience is healing.

The question is not:

“Did something extraordinary happen?”

The question is:

“Did it help you become more fully human?”

“Mysticism without embodiment can become another way of disappearing.”

When Heaven Meets the Nervous System

Modern neuroscience is beginning to catch up with ancient wisdom.

Researchers studying mystical experiences have discovered something remarkable.

Whether through deep meditation, profound prayer, near-death experiences, or psychedelic-assisted therapy, people who experience genuine states of awe, unity, and sacredness often describe lasting psychological transformation.

But there is another truth.

Insight is not the same as integration.

The nervous system must learn what the soul has already seen.

Healing happens slowly.

One breath.

One tear.

One relationship.

One painting.

One poem.

One honest conversation at a time.

The Madwoman Was Never My Enemy

For years I believed the Madwoman was the broken part of me.

The one who cried too much.

Dreamed too deeply.

Loved too fiercely.

Questioned everything.

Now I know something different.

She stayed awake while the little girl disappeared.

She remembered everything my conscious mind could not bear.

She became the artist.

The mystic.

The rebel.

The storyteller.

She carried the map home.

“The Madwoman is not my illness. She is my remembering.”

Coming Home

Today my mystical experiences look different.

They arrive while washing dishes.

Holding my husband’s hand.

Watching my granddaughter laugh.

Painting.

Writing.

Breathing through grief instead of floating above it.

The greatest miracle of my life is no longer leaving my body.

It is staying.

Perhaps this is what every spiritual tradition has been trying to teach us all along.

Not how to escape life.

But how to inhabit it so completely that heaven and earth become one.

Journal for the Journey

The Child

Where did I first learn it was safer to disappear than to remain present?

The Mystic

Have I ever experienced something that changed my understanding of reality?

The Artist

How has creativity helped me return to myself?

The Body

What sensations tell me I am finally home?

Closing Practice

Place one hand over your heart.

One hand over your belly.

Breathe slowly.

Ask yourself:

What part of me still longs to leave?

Wait.

Now ask:

What part of me is finally ready to come home to my body?

Stay with whatever arises.

You do not need an answer.

Sometimes the deepest mystical experience is simply remaining present

Feeling, listening, receiving, sight, smell, taste, sound, intuition.

Staying still. Your body tells the story through memory, feelings, and sensation.

We move in and out of the past, present, and future.

The little girl/boy wants to be alive.

Grief

The Process of Self-Recovery

This Process belongs to: YOU

“Grief is love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson

“Every moment is precious when you grieve. Grief ignites your will to live. You are always grieving and living at the same time.” — Marta Luzim

Yahrzeit- The eternal flame of the soul

You were fifty, I was twenty-four, it was Passover, when you died of a massive heart attack, Daddy.

I watch the blue, whitish flame flicker, remembering. The yahrzeit candle, pray for your soul.

I place the picture of you at ten, dressed in a white shirt, brown tweed knickers, jacket and vest. Your hands in your pockets. Dark black hair slicked back, a smirk on your face. You look like a gangster out of 40’s gangster movie.

Next to that photo, my father is in an army uniform, all Marlon Brandon looking, a GQ street guy man.

Shortly, before you died, you said, “I am sorry for what I did to you.” I was cold and angry at your sudden apology for years of control and criticism.

The flame dances and twists.

I am mesmerized by the light. I feel the flame coagulating my anger and sorrow,

When I was six, you taught me to ride a bike.

You said, “I am right behind you. Look ahead, don’t look back^.

I hopped on and pedaled. Within minutes, I peeked over my shoulder. You were far away, talking to a man and laughing. I panicked, wobbled, fell.

A piece of glass hiding in the grass slit my pinky finger and pulled off the nail. Blood ran down my wrist and arm.

You came to my side. Examined my pinky. “You were riding. You didn’t need me. “I gazed into your deep green eyes. You looked past me, examined the scare. “It’s nothing.

That is what I saw in your eyes. Nothing. An oversight. A dismissal.

My nail was hanging on a bloody thread. I had ten stitches. I will always need you, Daddy.

There is still a scar on my left pinky. My daddy scar Deep Scar. A thin scar that runs up to my nail. A winding road that stays in my memory

The warm, gentle light flickers. Just as you blew out my light, abandoning my needs and ignoring my cries, I light your light to awaken my inner flame

The flame is a tornado of blue twisted in yellow.

I have a YOU’s list of what you didn’t do. I know blame is shame. Staying a victim, the little girl, who was the real victim, holds to her YOUs, crying and missing you.

You’s guys, You’s got to, You’s get out of the way, You’s are never going to make it in the world, my fathers brooklyn words, he had his YOUS as well.

You never read me a bedtime story. You never tucked me in at night. You never sang to me. You never held or hugged me. You never told me I was pretty.You never protected me against the brutality of my mother.

You asked me to take care of my sister’s emotional needs, even though I was the youngest. She was mean and cruel to me as a child. She betrayed me, telling you I hated you and Mom. Which I felt at the time, but my sister said it too, and you believed that I was the only one who said it.

You never encouraged me or believed in me when I dreamt of being an actress, or going to college. You told me you came first over everyone. You confided secrets, telling me you didn’t love Mom. What was I supposed to say or do?

You wanted me to make you happy. You ignored that I was smart. When my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. LaPlace, skipped from second to fourth grade and placed me in Intellectually Gifted classes, you remarked, “I thought she was stupid.”

You never told me I could do anything or be the best at something. You never knew I was an artist, smart, intuitive, a healer, and could be a leader.

You taught me as a girl that I was unimportant and didn’t deserve to follow my dreams, and I wasn’t good enough.

Yet, at the end of your life, you knew how you damaged me.

You asked for my forgiveness, right before you died. I didn’t know what you meant.

I never asked you.

You’re in my blood forever. The Yahrzeit candle burns eternally. The Daddy Scar remains; the Yahrzeit alchemizes my blood into light.

Intrinsic in forgiveness is mourning. Each year, the scar fades.

The light shone on the pictures I kept by the candle. I loved your deep green eyes, your soft features as a young soldier.

Year after year, the yahrzeit keeps you alive. The fire in my heart and soul

Years later, after I was married, living in Florida, my husband and I visited the small town of Cassadaga, where only psychics lived.

We walked amongst the homes, seeing which one would call to you. We walked until I saw a home with a red door and entered.

It was dimly lit, smelled of roses, and had cushioned chairs and a long couch in the middle of the room. A middle-aged woman with dark hair and a lace wrap, who called me in

“I have a message from your father.”

I tightened. My husband furled his lips, doubted.

I had to know “What. What is it?”

He says, when you have become all that you dreamt of, wanted and needed, I know you will have forgiven me.”

I light the Yahrzeit candle each year to say Kaddish, I pray for your soul and mine.

Forgiveness seeps more deeply into my heart.

with Love and Grief

Grief is not a detour from the path. Grief is the path. It is the necessary, unavoidable, deeply human process of moving through loss — not around it, not above it, not faster than it allows — toward the self that exists on the other side of what was lost.

The self that has been purified by the loss into something more honest, more present, more alive.

This article is also a workbook that moves through grief in its full complexity: the grief of death and separation, the grief of the lost self, the generational grief encoded in the blood, the grief of Mother Earth, the grief that lives in the body as hollowness and exile, and the fierce, slow, non-linear process of reclaiming the self through it all.

There is no rush in this workbook. Grief takes its own cycle. No one can tell you how long you need to grieve. Return to these pages whenever you need them. They will be waiting.

Opening to connect and express your despair and grief is a process of witnessing and acceptance. It builds your emotional tolerance muscle and strength to be in the moment with depth and intensity,, without judgment and compassion for your fear.

What We Grieve

Restoring Grief to Soul Work

We grieve more than we know. More than the deaths we have named, the relationships we have lost, the dreams we have let go. We grieve the places in ourselves that do not know love.

We grieved what we expected and did not receive. We grieve the childhood that was taken from us, the self that was diminished, the belonging we never found.

We carry our ancestors’ undigested grief alongside our own. And underneath all of it, we grieve the self we were before we were taught that the self was the problem.

Restoring grief to soul work means refusing the cultural command to get over it, move on, stay positive. It means recognizing that grief is not a problem to be solved but a process to be honored. The indifferent do not grieve.

The uncommitted do not grieve. The loveless do not grieve. We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and valued. Our sorrow restores us to the splendors of our connectedness. It is the eyes of a broken heart.

“Though we encounter it as suffering, grief is in fact an affirmation. The indifferent do not grieve, the uncommitted do not grieve, the loveless do not grieve. We mourn only the loss of what we have loved and what we valued. It is the yes of a broken heart.” — Leon Wieseltier

— WHAT WE GRIEVE: A MAP

Grief is not only for death. Read through the map list slowly. Notice which losses you have named and which you have been carrying unnamed. The unnamed losses are often the heaviest.

WHAT WE GRIEVE — RESTORING GRIEF TO SOUL WORK

1. Everything we love, we lose

2. The places in us that have not known love

3. The sorrows of the world

4. What we expected and did not receive

5. The diminished experience of who we really are

6. Ancestral grief — the undigested grief of those who came before us

7. The loss of childhood from trauma

8. The grief of the loss of self

9. Bearing the unbearable reality of loss and trauma

— ELLEN BASS: BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN

Ellen Bass’s poem does not comfort. It confronts. It places the full inventory of what can and will be lost directly in front of us — your tomatoes, your cat, your mother, your hair, your memory — and then, at the end, instead of a resolution, offers something more honest: the strawberry.

The small, specific, sweet, and tart pleasure of being alive in a body that will lose everything and is still, right now, here.

Bad Things Are Going to Happen — Ellen Bass

Bad things are going to happen.

Your tomatoes will grow a fungus,

and your cat will get run over.

Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream

melting in the car and throwing

your blue cashmere sweater in the dryer.

Your husband will sleep

with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling

out of her blouse. Or your wife

will remember she’s a lesbian

and leave you for the woman next door.

Your parents will die.

No matter how many vitamins you take,

How much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,

your hair and your memory.

There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.

When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine

and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below.

And two mice — one white, one black — scurry out

and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point,

she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.

She looks up, down, at the mice.

Then she eats the strawberry.

So, here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse

in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,

slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel

, and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.

Oh, taste how sweet and tart

the red juice is, how the tiny seeds

crunch between your teeth.

— GRIEF AND IMPERMANENCE

Grief is filled with uncertainty, impermanence, shadow wounds, and trauma. It is the roller coaster of life. You change, grow, shed, and pick up the pieces.

But life is not the same — you are not the same after loss. Grief is necessary for individuation and for reclaiming your feminine truth. It is the road to self-acceptance, self-love, and your primal awakening.

Grief takes its own cycle. No one can tell you how long you need to grieve. It will come and go, be more intense, and then lighten.

Grief teaches you wisdom and endurance, resilience and humility, surrender and gratitude. It can also erupt into rage and heartbreak, terror and survival.

“It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

THE STAGES OF GRIEF: SURVIVAL & THRIVING

SURVIVAL STAGES — Coping, Clinging, Compulsivity

Denial • Rationales, excuses, judgment • Anxiety • Depression • Avoidance

Terror (very physical) Blame and shame • Awareness of uncertainty and survival

Anchoring and grounding into the reality of loss

THRIVING STAGES — Feelings, Self-Forgiveness, Release

Catharsis of feelings • Rage • Deep sadness • Hurt • Heartbreak

Acceptance • Making bearable what is unbearable • Recovery

Refuge • Faith • New choices and direction • Rebuilding

Fully present in the moment

Talking to Grief
by Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.

And this one by David Whyte:

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief

turning down to its black water
to the place where we can not breathe

will never know
the source from which we drink
the secret water cold and clear

nor find in the darkness
the small gold coins
thrown by those who wished for something else

Five Stages of Grief - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Interpretation

1 - Denial

Denial is a conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, or reality relating to the situation in question.

It’s a defense mechanism and perfectly natural. Some people can become locked in this stage when dealing with a traumatic change that can be ignored. Death, of course, is not particularly easy to avoid or evade indefinitely.

2 - Anger

Anger can manifest in different ways. People dealing with emotional upset can be angry with themselves, and/or with others, especially those close to them.

Knowing this helps keep detached and non-judgmental when experiencing the anger of someone who is very upset.

3 - Bargaining

Traditionally, the bargaining stage for people facing death can involve attempting to bargain with whatever God the person believes in. People facing less serious trauma can bargain or seek to negotiate a compromise.

For example, “Can we still be friends?” when facing a break-up. Bargaining rarely provides a sustainable solution, especially if it’s a matter of life or death.

4 - Depression

Also referred to as preparatory grieving. In a way, it’s the dress rehearsal or practice run for the ‘aftermath,’ though what this stage means depends on who it involves. It’s a sort of acceptance with emotional attachment.

It’s natural to feel sadness and regret, fear, uncertainty, etc. It shows that the person has at least begun to accept the reality.

5 - Acceptance

Again, this stage varies according to the person’s situation, but broadly it indicates emotional detachment and objectivity.

People dying can enter this stage a long time before the people they leave behind, who must necessarily pass through their own individual stages of dealing with the grief.

Your Grief: The Process of Self-Recovery

—

How to Use This Workbook

Grief is not a detour from the path. Grief is the path. It is the necessary, unavoidable, deeply human process of moving through loss — not around it, not above it, not faster than it allows — toward the self that exists on the other side of what was lost. The self that has been purified by the loss into something more honest, more present, more alive.

This workbook moves through grief in its full complexity: the grief of death and separation, the grief of the lost self, the generational grief encoded in the blood, the grief of Mother Earth, the grief that lives in the body as hollowness and exile, and the fierce, slow, non-linear process of reclaiming the self through it all.

There is no rush in this workbook. Grief takes its own cycle. No one can tell you how long you need to grieve. Return to these pages whenever you need them. They will be waiting.

Opening to connect and express your despair and grief is a process of witnessing and acceptance. It builds your emotional tolerance muscle and strength to be in the moment with depth and intensity without judgment and fear.

✍️ Go through the nine categories of what we grieve. Which one holds the most unacknowledged weight in your life right now? Write about the loss you have never fully named — not the death, but the thing underneath the death. The self that was lost. The love that never arrived. The belonging that was never given.

✍️ After reading Ellen Bass’s poem — write your own inventory of what is going to be lost, what has been lost, and then — at the end — write your strawberry. The small, specific, sweet and tart thing that is still here right now, in this body, in this breath.

✍️ Where are you in the grief stages right now? Write honestly about which stage you are in and how long you have been there. What would it mean to move from survival into thriving? What does the body need in order to begin that movement?

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE BODY OF GRIEF

🌿 Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Take seven slow breaths. Bring to mind the grief that is most present in your body right now. Not the story of it — the physical experience of it. Where does it live?

The chest, the throat, the belly, the shoulders? What is its weight? Its temperature? Its texture? Place your hand there. Breathe slowly into your hand.

Do not try to move the grief.

Do not try to resolve it, interpret it, or make it stop. Simply be with it as a companion. As something that has been living in your body and deserves, finally, to be felt. Stay for two full minutes.

Then write: what did the grief feel like when you finally stopped moving away from it?

🌟 Draw what grief looks like in your body. Not as a metaphor — as a physical map. Where does it live? What color is it? What weight? What shape? Let the image be as specific and honest as the body’s knowledge of it.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw everything you have not yet grieved. Give it a form on this page.

Generational Grief

Mother Ghosts, Genetic Osmosis & the Inherited Wound

There is a grief that arrives before we have a name for it. A grief that is not ours alone but belongs to the long chain of women before us who carried what could not be spoken, who transmitted through the blood what could not be processed through the voice.

This is generational grief. The grief of the grandmother who crossed the Atlantic alone.

The grief of the mother who wanted to be a Hollywood star and ended up throwing her daughter down the stairs.

The grief that teaches the Kaddish to a three-year-old before the child has language for death.

Generational grief is not a metaphor. It is cellular. It lives in the DNA. It shapes the nervous system before birth.

It is transmitted through touch, tone, silence, and the quality of a mother’s gaze. And it is waiting — in every woman who has been brought here by this work — to be finally, consciously, compassionately mourned.

“Homesickness for a woman is for the loss of herself. Real homelessness is not knowing who you are.” — Adrienne Rich

MEMOIR 1 — MOTHER GHOSTS

The piece below is a portrait of generational grief — the haunting of the female lineage, the hunger for a mother’s love that was never freely given, and the long work of becoming a mother to oneself. Read it slowly. Let what it says about inheritance and longing land in your own body before you write.

Mother Ghosts © Marta Luzim, MS

Night whispers. Translucent veils. Shadows sweep across my eyes.

Short legs and long hanging breasts.

My mother and grandmother haunt my every cell.

Women of my loins: grandmother and mother:

they are the memory ghosts that walk across my mind’s eye;

a reincarnation of every woman’s soul who has come to earth to heal.

My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all died

without me knowing them, without me touching them, without me smelling them,

and without them knowing me.

Chicken fat, potato latkes, brisket runs through my veins and fills my thighs.

I hear their cries and hunger for their arms to hold me.

My grandmother crossed the Atlantic alone

and carried to America her silent fear of Jewish pogroms.

My mother’s father died of pneumonia when she was ten,

which left my mother lost and broke.

My grandmother and mother never spoke in detail of the family that was left behind.

There were no pictures, silver candles, or ancient lullabies.

And so there is an empty longing space in my heart for them.

Most people cannot understand

the conflict and torment of loving a mother for

her beauty, creativity, and drive

while also resenting her cruelty and emotional distance.

Her children and grandchildren hungered for her love, her touch

and whatever kind words we could get from her.

In the last year of my mother’s life

I lay in my mother’s arms and sobbed with deep hurt, rage, and despair.

She held me and said she was sorry.

That hurt me so much.

Even though she never remembered hurting me.

I never loved my mother. And I still hunger for a mother.

I am a mother to myself, my daughter, and my granddaughter.

MEMOIR — GENETIC OSMOSIS

Genetic Osmosis Marta Luzim, MS

Through genetic osmosis, by the time I turned three,

I was learning the Kaddish — the Hebrew prayer for the dead.

I did not memorize it by rote, by book, by verse, or any other schooled route.

My grandmother’s grief and my mother’s pain taught me this foreboding and solemn melody.

They survived war, poverty, and death.

The two women I yearned for, who believed would show me the magic of life,

pointed their fingers toward death.

Like them, I too survived.

But unlike my foremothers, I lived to write my song, my story, my journey into the deep.

Now I have the courage to tell it.

Now I know they led me down the path I needed to go.

In writing my ode, I can rise like the Phoenix

and kiss the souls of all the grandmothers and mothers

who led their daughters toward death

and unknowingly awakened them to eternity.

✨ GENERATIONAL GRIEF — WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ After reading “Mother Ghosts,” write about your own mother ghosts. The women who haunt you. Who appears in your body, in your reactions, in the way you love and withhold love. Write them honestly — what you loved in them, what you could not forgive, what you are still hungry for.

✍️ Write about the grief you inherited that was never yours to carry alone. The grandmother’s grief. The mother’s wound. The family silence. What was transmitted through the blood without a word being spoken? What are you still mourning on behalf of women who could not mourn it themselves?

✍️ Write about the grief of becoming a mother to yourself. What has that required? What have you had to give yourself that was never given?

What is the hardest part of being the one who finally breaks the chain?

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE ANCESTRAL GRIEF IN THE BODY

🌿 Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Feel your feet on the ground. Bring to mind the woman in your lineage whose grief you carry most heavily.

Your mother, your grandmother, a woman whose name you may not even know. Feel her presence in your body. Not as a thought — as a sensation.

Where is she?

What does her grief feel like in your body?

Place your hand there. Breathe slowly. Now say to her, silently or aloud: I see what you carried.

I see what you could not put down. I am carrying it consciously now, on behalf of both of us. And I am beginning to set down what was never mine to hold.

Stay for two minutes. Write what arose.

🥊 INTUITIVE MEDITATION — THE PHOENIX

🥊 Close your eyes. Breathe slowly. Imagine yourself standing at the grave of every woman in your lineage who pointed her daughters toward death rather than toward life. Not in judgment — in compassion.

They were shaped by forces larger than themselves. They were also carrying what they could not set down.

Now: imagine the Phoenix rising from those graves. Rising from yours. Rising from every woman who survived what should have killed her, who lived to write the ode.

Feel the Phoenix in your own body. The fire does not destroy but transforms. The resurrection that is not above the wound but through it. Stay for five minutes. Write: what rises from the ash?

🌟 Draw your female lineage as a landscape of grief and resilience. The graves and the Phoenix. The haunting and the rising. Let the image honor both what was lost and what survived.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw the mother ghosts and what rises after them.

The Trusting Heart

Hollowness, Exile, Galut & the Slow Building of Faith

Michael Aanavi writes about grief from the inside of addiction and intergenerational trauma — from the body’s experience of rupture, hollowness, and the insatiable seeking that comes from not belonging anywhere, even to oneself.

His work names something that most clinical frameworks miss: the root of addiction is not pleasure-seeking but the unbearable experience of being exiled from the self and from the ancestral ground.

Galut — the Hebrew word for exile and disconnection — names the experience of being severed from belonging.

Not only from a place or a people but from the deeper ground of the self, from the body’s wisdom, from the ancestral root that gives the self its direction.

Galut is the grief beneath the grief. The hollowness that cannot be named and cannot be filled.

The chronic feeling of “Who am I, and where do I belong?”

“In the loss of ancestral belonging, there is an insatiability, an unquenchable seeking of yourself, of your belonging and home. It is a constant feeling of grief and emptiness. Who am I and where do I belong?” — Michael Aanavi, The Trusting Heart

— RUPTURE, HOLLOWNESS & THE INSATIABLE SEEKING

Rupture is the experience of being disconnected from personal and ancestral roots. It is the loss of embodiment, the severing from the ground of the self.

As Aanavi writes: this hollowness is at once an experience of this life, a somatic reality, and a story of your ancestors. A rootlessness in the psyche.

This rootlessness is what sets the stage for the lifelong struggle simply to be alive, to be in the world. Although it never actually fills the empty space, addiction allows the person to tolerate the void without feeling constantly like they will fall into it.

The insatiable desire that drives compulsive seeking is often not induced by childhood injuries alone, but from the inherited, embodied experiences of one’s unsettled ancestors: the death throes of someone murdered, the grief of someone who died thinking of a lover they’d left behind.

FROM THE TRUSTING HEART by Michael Aanavi

“In the experience of rupture, in the loss of embodiment and the disconnection from both personal and ancestral root, lies a kind of self-centeredness and self-determination.”

“This experience of rootlessness set the stage for a lifelong struggle with simply being alive, being in the world, which emerged for a time in my profound affection for heroin. Although it never actually filled that empty space, heroin allowed me to tolerate the void without feeling constantly like I would fall in.”

“The insatiability, the unquenchable seeking — it arises from unresolved experience, from the death throes of someone murdered, or dead of starvation, or bloody on a battlefield, or dying while thinking of a lover they’ve left behind.”

— Aanavi, The Trusting Heart: Addiction, Recovery, and Intergenerational Trauma

— GALUT: THE INNER EXILE

Galut describes a kind of inner exile transmitted intergenerationally — an experience of darkness, of silence, of disconnection, of not knowing why the feelings of distance, deprivation, and longing for connection are so pervasive.

It is more than a metaphorical or even mythological description of psychological experience. It is a bodily experience. A somatic reality. Something felt in the gut and the bones before it is understood by the mind.

Recovery from Galut — from this inner exile — is not a leap. It is not an act of will or faith. It is a slow process of feeling your way back, step by step, following the red thread of the psyche through the darkness, until reconnection itself feels like home. Not a destination. A direction.

“There’s a moon in my body, but I can’t see it! A moon and a sun. A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can’t hear it!” — Kabir

— FEAR, FAITH & THE ESCAPIST PRAYER

Aanavi writes about the danger of the common spiritual phrase “fear is a lack of faith.” The implication being that if you have sufficient faith, you will no longer fear — and therefore if you are in fear, you have somehow failed.

For trauma survivors, this is not only unhelpful but harmful. It re-enacts the shame of inadequacy. It suggests that feeling fear means something is wrong with you.

The escapist prayer — the prayer that asks for everything bad to stop, that seeks relief from the present experience rather than full entry into it — is itself a form of dissociation.

It is born of fear and the need for relief, of desperation and the fantasy that something will magically make everything bad go away. Prayers that flee from the present re-enact the trauma-addiction dynamic.

But fear that fully enters, without the intent to be elsewhere, can itself be a source of faith.

Not the leap of faith that bypasses the human experience of fear and trembling, but the slow, embodied trust that is built by being willing to stay in the darkest, most eschewed aspects of one’s own being.

The trust that comes before faith. The trust that is only available by leaning in.

FROM THE TRUSTING HEART by Michael Aanavi

“There are steps between fear and faith, a process that cannot be bypassed: the development of trust through engagement with the darkest, most eschewed aspects of one’s being.

Trust is so important as a precursor to faith — and so essential for post-traumatic recovery — it is, in my experience, not a leap.

Rather, it is a capacity slow to develop, and one which requires acceptance of the natural ebb and flow of fear and faith, without the intent of being elsewhere.”

— Aanavi, The Trusting Heart

✨ TRUSTING HEART — WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ Tell me about your experience of grief from the perspective of: Loss of self • Homelessness • Not belonging • Hollowness • Void • Emptiness. Choose the one that resonates most deeply. Write from inside it, not around it.

✍️ What is your galut? Your inner exile. The specific way you have been disconnected from yourself, from your body, from your ancestral ground. Write about the quality of that disconnection — when it began, how it feels, what it has cost you.

✍️ What is your escapist prayer? Write it down honestly — the prayer that asks for everything to stop, for the pain to go away, for the void to be filled by something outside yourself.

Then write: what would a prayer of full entry look like? What would it mean to pray by staying, rather than by leaving?

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — LEANING INTO FEAR

🌿 Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Recall the fear that lives most chronically in your nervous system.

The one underneath the grief. The one that has been driving the escapist prayer. Instead of moving away from it — lean in. Slightly.

Not dramatically. Just a slight inclination of awareness toward fear rather than away from it. Notice what happens in the body when you lean in rather than flee.

What does fear feel like when it is met with attention rather than avoidance?

Stay for two minutes. Write: What is the fear made of when you stop running from it?

🌟 Draw your galut — the inner exile. The disconnection from root, from ground, from belonging. Then — on the same page — draw the red thread leading back. The direction of return. Let both images exist: the exile and the path home.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw the hollowness, and what begins to fill when you stop running.

The Poems of Grief

Levertov, Whyte, Thompson & the Blessed Unborn Son

Poetry is the language of grief. Not because it beautifies the loss but because it tells the truth about it in a form the body can receive. The poem does not explain the grief. It creates the conditions under which grief can finally be felt. It is called grief without reducing it. It gives it a home on the page.

The poems in this lesson are four different faces of grief: Denise Levertov’s address to grief as a living presence who needs a proper home;

David Whyte’s invitation to descend into the well of grief to find the gold at the bottom;

Mary Thompson’s grief for Mother Earth and the body’s longing for the ground from which it was torn, and

Marta Luzim’s elegy for the unborn son whose loss was dismissed before it could be mourned.

Read each poem slowly. Aloud if possible. Let the body respond to each one before you write.

POEM 1 — TALKING TO GRIEF, DENISE LEVERTOV

Levertov’s poems do something radical: they give grief a body, a name, and a proper home. Not the back door and a meatless bone. A corner. A worn mat. A water dish. The right to warn off intruders. The right to consider the house itself.

This is what grief asks: not to be a guest at the back door, tolerated and fed scraps, but to be acknowledged as a permanent and necessary inhabitant of the self.

Talking to Grief — Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

✍️ Write to your grief as Levertov writes to her as a living presence you have been treating as a homeless dog. Where has your grief been living — under the porch, at the back door, shut outside? What would it mean to give it a proper home? Write the invitation.

POEM 2 — THE WELL OF GRIEF, DAVID WHYTE

Whyte’s poem makes the invitation explicit: to slip beneath the still surface of the well of grief, down to the black water, to the place where we cannot breathe — and find there the source from which we drink.

The secret water is cold and clear.

The small gold coins were thrown by those who wished for something else.

The gold is not above grief. It is at the bottom.

The Well of Grief — David Whyte

Those who will not slip beneath

the still surface on the well of grief

turning down to its black water

to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink

the secret water cold and clear

nor find in the darkness

the small gold coins

thrown by those who wished for something else.

✍️ Write about your well of grief.

What is at the bottom of it?

What gold have you not yet reached because you have not yet been willing to go all the way down?

Write about what you are afraid you will find there — and what you suspect may be waiting that you don’t yet dare to name.

POEM 3 — GRIEVING MOTHER EARTH, MARY REYNOLDS THOMPSON

Thompson names the grief that has no language: the loss of the Mother’s heartbeat, the severing from the earth’s body, the deep yowling grief of separation from nature that lives in the layers of being we can barely name.

We commute for hours to sit in cubicles before flashing screens.

We are too tired to lift our faces to the sky. And somewhere in the deep layers we sense the primary loss.

A loss in truth that we can barely name and have no language for.

FROM GRIEVING MOTHER EARTH by Mary Reynolds Thompson

“The deep, yowling grief of separation from nature cannot be underestimated. The loss of the mother’s heartbeat, the way we once lay our bodies upon hers and were held, the way we once knew her as kin — now a distant memory.

We have been ripped from the great mother and often do not even know we are grieving. Whether we know it or not, the feeling is that we are banished from the loving embrace of the sacred garden and sent out alone.

We hold the grief, tight and close, often unaware of it — until, looking at a sunset, or being surprised by the scent of roses, we find tears streaming down our face and wonder, ‘Why?’”

— Mary Reynolds Thompson

✍️ Write about your grief for Mother Earth. The last time you stood in nature and felt something in you release that you didn’t know you were holding.

The last time the scent of something brought unexpected tears.

Write about the body’s grief for the ground it was torn from.

POEM 4 — BLESSED UNBORN SON

This poem was written in response to the loss that was dismissed before it could be mourned. The miscarriage that the doctor said, “It just happens.” The grief that had no ritual, no ceremony, no prayer. A loss that was cleaned up and named nothing. The unnamed losses are often the ones that calcify into stone — a single tear turned to stone, an empty box where a memory of life once lived.

The poem below is also a permission slip: to mourn what was never given a funeral, to write the prayer that was never spoken, to finally receive the grief that has been sitting in the body as a hollow where a child was once imagined.

Blessed Unborn Son Marta Luzim, MS

At first, the seed slid off my egg

down the drain of my uterus

I could not hold that life

it bled to death right under my eyes

Doctor Man said with empty eyes and a soulless face

it happens, it happens, it happens

an echo of a thought that left me cold, alone, and dry

A ritual of mourning was robbed from my soul

because it happens, it happens, it happens.

I want to cry first

I want to mourn first

I want to throw up your words in your face

It happens, it happens, it happens

I didn’t get to hold that child

Where are you taking him?

Baby doc scoots on by

Wipe those tears, young woman

You look a mess

comb your hair

open your legs, NEXT!

I had to forget the lingering loss

the vacant hole where no one thought

anything really existed in time, in place, in me

The funeral in me had to march straight to hell

no ceremony, no prayer, no ritual, a wisp of nothingness

that turned a single tear to stone

I still pray for my little son

the one that never got to be a lover, a father, a friend

the one who runs through the sun’s rays and calls my name

and lives among the stars where a twinkle of light once shone

I never got to hold that son

I never got to sing a prayer

I never got to be by his side

I never got to share my grief

because it happens, it happens, it happens

✍️ What grief in your life was dismissed with the words “it happens,” “get over it,” or “just move on”? What loss was given no ritual, no ceremony, no permission to be mourned?

Write the grief that was cleaned up before you could cry.

Give it the funeral it never received. Write the prayer that was robbed from your soul.

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE RITUAL OF MOURNING

🌿 For this practice, you will need a few minutes of privacy and quiet. Light a candle if you have one. This is a small ritual of mourning for the losses that received no ceremony. Sit quietly. Take five slow breaths.

Bring to mind the loss that received no ritual. Hold it consciously.

Say its name — aloud or silently. Say: I name this loss. I witnessed this loss. This loss was real, and it deserved to be mourned.

Let whatever arises arrive without management. The tears, the anger, the numbness, the strange relief of finally acknowledging what has been waiting to be acknowledged.

Stay for two full minutes in this witnessing. Write: what happened in the body when the loss was finally given its name?

🌟 Draw the grief that received no ritual. The empty box. The stone where the tear should have been. The unnamed loss. Then — on the same page — draw the ceremony you are giving it now. The candle. The prayer. The witness. Let the image be both the wound and the ritual.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw the grief that deserved a funeral. Give it one here.

Reclaiming Through Grief

The Full Inquiry & the Path of Self-Recovery

Grief is the most important part of recovery. Not the endpoint of recovery — the engine of it.

The process of moving through grief is the process of individuation, of reclaiming the feminine truth, of returning to the self that existed before the wound reshaped it. You cannot skip this step.

You cannot think your way through it. You can only grieve your way through it.

Reclaiming through grief means recovering your birthright of self-worth and self-love. The generational loss, tribal loss, family loss, and personal identity loss that was taken from you.

It means going back, piece by piece, into what was lost — and finding there, not the empty box, but the gold coins. The source from which we drink. The secret water is cold and clear.

The questions in this lesson are not assignments. They are the full inquiry of grief — the questions that, answered honestly and over time, lead back to the self. Return to them over weeks and months.

Let the ones that make you want to close the book guide you deepest.

“Grief is the roller coaster of life. You change, grow, shed, and pick up the pieces. But life is not the same — you are not the same after loss. And that is not failure. That is how grief teaches wisdom and endurance, resilience and humility, surrender and gratitude.”

— Marta luzim — THE GRIEF STEPS

Grief Steps Marta Luzim, MS

Grief is loss. Whether it is a friend, a family member, a pet, a home, or any kind of relationship.

However, the greatest loss is of yourself. This loss is from trauma.

This loss results in unworthiness.

This grief is the lack, shame, and terror of trauma.

Going through the stages is a healing and a practice of radical self-acceptance.

You cannot forget or ignore the past.

The past needs to be integrated through grief,

all of who you are, in present time.

Navigated, redirected, reshaped, and reinvented

to who you want to be, who you can be,

who you can’t be,

and how you can create wholeness through your past and present.

Futurizing and skipping over the past and present is trauma and anxiety twofold.

You can set intentions and then surrender and accept the road

you will be guided through.

instinct, intuition, sensations, and feeling.

This is what you lost as a child.

And then you lost your true self.

Reclaiming your heart, soul, and purpose of living is new, raw, original,

and emotionally grounded.

It is in your body, not your head.

Your body and emotions will tell you the truth in the moment.

Grief is the most important part of recovery.

— THE GRIEF QUESTIONS: FULL INQUIRY

These questions are organized into two groups: the grief questions that invite you into the interior experience of grief, and the reclaiming questions that ask what is being recovered through the grieving.

Work through them slowly, over time. Let each one sit in the body before you write.

Your Grief

1. Do you need time to grieve? Do you need time to hold your heart? Do you need time for silence? What does the body need right now to grieve?

2. Where do you live — inside of your grief, or outside looking in?

3. What is your wall of grief? What have you built to keep the grief at a manageable distance?

4. What is unbearable to you in your grief? How have you been trying to make it bearable?

5. How is your hollowness connected to faith? Can the emptiness itself become a doorway?

6. What is your escapist prayer? And what would a prayer of full presence look like instead?

7. What is your Galut? Your disconnection and exile? From yourself, from your body, from your lineage?

8. How is your faith connected to your fear and your grief? How do you grieve the loss of faith?

9. Do you need to work on judgment and shame in your grief? Do you need to forgive yourself?

10. Do you need to practice staying with the pain and discomfort with loving kindness?

Reclaiming Through Grief

1. What was the most tragic loss in your life? How did you express this loss — or not?

2. What haven’t you grieved from childhood? What part of your life hasn’t been fully mourned?

3. Does grief seem never-ending? How do you ignore and avoid grief?

4. What were you shown or taught about grief? Is grief only for death, or can you grieve while still alive?

5. What is the language of your body, memory, sensations, and instincts with grief?

6. What is your solitude in grieving? Where do you go when you need to grieve in private?

7. What can you say, teach, scream, write, move, or advocate with grief?

8. Do you feel a loss of safety? Explain how and the effects of that loss.

9. What do you feel about teaching impermanence to the next generation?

10. How has grief changed you? What has it taken? What has it given? What have you reclaimed through it?

— ORIGINAL POEM: THE YES OF A BROKEN HEART

Leon Wieseltier wrote: “ Grief is the eyes of a broken heart. The yes of connection. The yes of love. The value of having valued something enough to mourn its loss. This poem was written in response to that, yes — and in response to the long, non-linear, imperfect, necessary work of recovery.

The Yes of a Broken Heart — Marta Luzim

I did not choose grief.

Grief chose me.

Arrived without announcement

and moved in without permission

and has been redecorating ever since.

What I thought was weakness

turned out to be the body’s wisdom.

What I thought was falling apart

turned out to be falling open.

The well of grief is not the bottom.

The well of grief is the beginning.

The black water is cold and clear.

The gold coins are real.

They were thrown there by the ones

who loved and lost before me,

who survived the unsurvivable

and left something behind

for the ones who would come after.

I will come after.

I am still coming.

Every morning I wake up

and choose to be here.

Every morning, grief is still here too,

curled up in its corner,

with its collar and its tag,

It’s right to warn off intruders,

It’s right to consider this house its own.

And every morning I say yes.

Not because I am healed.

Not because it is easy.

But because the yes is how I know

I have loved.

And the yes is how I know

I am still

alive.

✨ RECLAIMING — WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ What birthright of self-worth and self-love was taken from you by the generational loss, tribal loss, family loss, and personal identity loss?

Write the full inventory

Then write: What are you claiming? What is being returned to you through grieving?

✍️ Write about the yes of your broken heart. The grief that proves you loved. The mourning that proves you were alive enough to lose something.

Write the yes — not as triumphant, not as resolved, but as honest. As the simple, daily, ongoing yes of a woman who is still here.

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE FULL GRIEF MEDITATION

🌿 Find a quiet space. Light a candle if you have one. Sit comfortably. Take seven slow breaths.

With each breath, feel the body settling deeper into itself. Recall everything you have learned in this workbook.

the named losses and the unnamed ones. The ancestral grief and the personal grief. The loss of self and the grief for Mother Earth.

The unborn son and the losses that received no ceremony. Hold it all without trying to manage any of it.

Simply be with the full weight of what has been lost, what is still being lost, and what is always being lost in a life lived with an open heart.

Notice what the body does with the full weight. Where does it settle? Where does it resist?

Then, underneath the grief, notice what else is there. The love that is still there. The life that is still there. The yes.

Stay for five minutes. Write: what is on the other side of the full weight of grief?

“A piece of glass hiding in the grass slit my pinky finger and pulled off the nail. Blood ran down my wrist and arm.”

✨ WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ Go through the nine categories of what you grieve. Which one holds the most unacknowledged weight in your life right now?

Write about the loss you have never fully named — not the death, but the thing underneath the death. The self that was lost. The love that never arrived. The belonging that was never given.

✍️ After reading Ellen Bass’s poem — write your own inventory of what is going to be lost, what has been lost, and then — at the end — write your strawberry. The small, specific, sweet and tart thing that is still here right now, in this body, in this breath.

✍️ Where are you in the grief stages right now? Write honestly about which stage you are in and how long you have been there. What would it mean to move from survival into thriving?

What does the body need in order to begin that movement?

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE BODY OF GRIEF

🌿 Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Take seven slow breaths. Bring to mind the grief that is most present in your body right now. Not the story of it — the physical experience of it.

Where does it live?

The chest, the throat, the belly, the shoulders?

What is its weight? Its temperature? Its texture?

Place your hand there. Breathe slowly into your hand. Do not try to move the grief. Do not try to resolve it, interpret it, or make it stop.

Simply be with it as a companion. As something that has been living in your body and deserves, finally, to be felt.

Stay for two full minutes. Then write: what did the grief feel like when you finally stopped moving away from it?

🌟 Draw what grief looks like in your body. Not as a metaphor — as a physical map. Where does it live?

What color is it?

What weight?

What shape?

Let the image be as specific and honest as the body’s knowledge of it.

[ space for your art ] — Free Art Space: Draw everything you have not yet grieved. Give it a form on this page.

Generational Grief

Extended Mother Ghosts, Genetic Osmosis & the Inherited Wound

“Homesickness for a woman is for the loss of herself. Real homelessness is not knowing who you are.” — Adrienne Rich

Through genetic osmosis, by the time I turned three, I was already learning the Kaddish—the Hebrew prayer for the dead.
I did not memorize it from a book or classroom. I learned it from the hidden grief in my grandmother’s silence and the volcanic rage in my mother’s voice.

They survived war, poverty, exile, and death.
The two women I longed for would show me the magic of life, pointed instead toward self-hatred and disappearance.

Like them, I survived.

But unlike my foremothers, I lived long enough to write my own songs, to descend into the deep, and to rise again.
Now I dare to tell it.

I know they led me down the path I needed to walk.
In writing this ode, I rise like the Phoenix and kiss the souls of the grandmothers and mothers who unknowingly led their daughters toward death—and awakened them to life.

And yet—

I lied.

I do not dare to tell my story.
I judge my life.
I am ashamed of where I come from.
I hate my Jewish body.

Where is home?
What is home?

I drove home after my suicide attempt. But what and where was home?

I imagined a faraway place—somewhere in the clouds, another planet, another galaxy.
Instead, I drove back to my family’s house, a place of chaos and anxiety that twisted my stomach into knots.

By the age of ten I had a spastic colon. They gave me medication to quiet the pain.

No one asked:

Marta, why are you so terrified?

Home is where rupture began.
Where disembodiment began.
Where disconnection from my personal and ancestral belonging split my heart open.

The tantrum of PTSD lived in my blood—what I once called a Jewish DNA virus traveling from Russia and Poland into America, into my bones, into the accelerator of a Chevrolet racing toward death.

Who is home?
What is home?

Learning the long-term effects of trauma and childhood abuse became the bridge across my black hole. It paved the first road toward refuge—the place where the terrified child inside me could begin to feel safe.

Brooklyn smelled like safety once.

But bloody vines of rage, grief, and hurt choked that joy out of my veins.

Brooklyn rain.
Earth and soul.
The dirt smell rising from sidewalks after storms.
Climbing oak trees.
Talking to angels.

Ices Queen.
Coney Island.
Tag. Hopscotch. Stoopball. Jump rope.
Red light, green light.
Manhattan Beach. Chinatown. Broadway lights.

Horns. Screeches.
Street vendors calling, give me your hunger.
Oil frying in hallway air.
Dreaming of fat anything, fried anything, juicy pot roast drying slowly in the oven.

Jewish grease food. Addictive. Sacred.

Why do I yearn for all this and feel no joy?

Only terror.

Terror of being Jewish.
Grief of being my mother’s daughter.
Rage of suicide living in my bones.

1267 East 55th Street, Brooklyn, New York

Step by step up the brick stairs.
Ghosts of childhood playing stoopball.
The crack of a Spalding against cement.

The small garden in front—oaks and bushes locked together like conspirators.
Smells of pine.

I am home.

The porch.
Green and blue chaise lounges.
A striped awning blocking the summer sun.

I am sweating. I need water.

I am home.

The half-open glass panels of the front door.
The storm door whining as I enter.

I tiptoe upstairs.

Plastic covers the beige carpet—no footprints allowed. No path permitted.

The master bedroom.
French décor.
Yellow sheets.
White lace drapes.

The small bathroom smelling of purple suds and Colgate toothpaste.

My sister’s room—tiny red roses climbing the wallpaper.
White demure furniture. Twin beds. Echoes.

My mother’s hairspray.
My father’s laughter and his tears.
My sister’s bright lipstick.

Ghosts.
Unfinished memories.

I was born January 1, 1950—Marta Joy Goldstein—crushed inside the box of a patriarchal decade that warned:

No man will marry a woman who isn’t a virgin.
Wear your apron like Donna Reed.
Father knows best.
Keep your legs closed.

Then the sixties exploded.

ERA. Roe v. Wade. Burn your bra. Love and peace and revolution.

But liberation did not free me. It tangled my nervous system further—between good girl and bad girl, saint and prostitute, special and worthless.

I was born a Jewish American woman inside myths that staged a private terrorist attack on my heart and soul.

Somewhere in my ancestral roots, my malach whispered:

Your life will be a difficult story.

Born five pounds.
An incubator baby.
Glass walls. Tubes and wires.

Those wires were my first touch.

When I left the hospital and entered my mother’s thin, cold arms, they felt strangely familiar.

In my baby belly, an emptiness opened that would never close.

My mother said I never stopped crying.

My grief was generational.

Clarendon Gardens Apartments were my first home—from infancy to age seven. Six-story buildings circled playgrounds and tree-lined walkways.

Inside that apartment:

my mother tried to drown my sister and me in the bathtub
turned on the gas at two in the morning
threatened to jump from windows
beat me with hangers
overdosed on Valium
held knives over our heads

Later we moved to East 55th Street.

A better neighborhood.
Brick houses.
Trimmed bushes.
Tall oaks lining the sidewalks.

But terror moved with us.

My manic mother screamed:

“Water stains the floor!”

She slapped my face more times than I can remember.
Pinched my arm until one day I grabbed her wrist and struck back.

“If you ever touch me again, I’ll throw you down the steps.”

Something ancient entered me that day.

My grandmother Sarah escaped the Russian pogroms at sixteen.
The only survivor of eleven siblings.

Or so my mother said.

Sometimes I wonder if even that story is true.

She told me once she arrived in America hidden inside a pickle barrel. I never asked if it was real. I wanted the myth.

She sat on her blue velvet couch in Miami, smoking Camels, drinking schnapps.

“Feh,” she said. “Who talks about such things?”

She spat into her palm.

Silence was her inheritance.
Silence became mine.

She brought no photographs.
No silverware.
No tablecloths.
No stories.

Only grief.

And chicken soup.

Latkes.
Blintzes.
Gefilte fish pulled from a bathtub.
Brisket rich with memory.

She gutted fish the way she gutted her past.

Everything erased.

Everything unsaid.

This is how I knew I was Jewish.

I come from empty picture frames.

From relatives whose faces I never saw.

From temples destroyed and people scattered to the four corners of the earth.

I come from Passover tables and shofars calling the heavens to forgive my sins.

I come from warriors who walked into ovens.

I come from the pickle barrel crossing the Atlantic.

From Cossacks throwing stones.

From knives.

From exile.

From prayer.

From desert wandering.

From the burning bush.

From terror and resurrection.

I come from a mother who tried to kill me
and tried to kill herself

from fathers who abandoned their wives to earn approval from their own fathers

from cousins shouting loud enough to drown out annihilation

from dreams of the golden medina

from the hope that America would save us

And still—

I come from writing on cave walls.
From dust and wind and water.
From the hunger to create and be free.

I come from an ancient knowing that hides in my body like a buried language.

I keep digging toward the other end of nowhere, searching for ground to stand on.

Sometimes I think I come from another galaxy.

Sometimes I think my body is the transmitter.

Sometimes I think my story is the signal.

I come back to hunger.

The need to be held.
The stomach that twists toward milk that never came.

I eat.
I diet.
I binge.
I purge.

I want life.

Then I throw it up.

I paint my nails pretty colors so no one will see how hungry I am.

Still—

I am here.

Still—

I breathe.

Still—

I rest inside my own home.

Inside my own body.

Little Marta,

you are loved.

You can come home now. ✨

.

MEMOIR 1 — MOTHER GHOSTS

The piece below is a portrait of generational grief — the haunting of the female lineage, the hunger for a mother’s love that was never freely given, and the long work of becoming a mother to oneself.

Read it slowly. Let what it says about inheritance and longing land in your own body before you write.

✨ GENERATIONAL GRIEF — WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ After reading “Mother Ghosts,” write about your own mother ghosts. The women who haunt you. Who appears in your body, in your reactions, in the way you love and withhold love. Write them honestly — what you loved in them, what you could not forgive, what you are still hungry for.

✍️ Write about the grief you inherited that was never yours to carry alone.

The grandmother’s grief. The mother’s wound. The family silence.

What was transmitted through the blood without a word being spoken? What are you still mourning on behalf of women who could not mourn it themselves?

✍️ Write about the grief of becoming a mother to yourself. What has that required? What have you had to give yourself that was never given? What is the hardest part of being the one who finally breaks the chain?

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE ANCESTRAL GRIEF IN THE BODY

🌿 Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Feel your feet on the ground. Bring to mind the woman in your lineage whose grief you carry most heavily.

Your mother, your grandmother, a woman whose name you may not even know. Feel her presence in your body. Not as a thought — as a sensation. Where is she? What does her grief feel like in your body?

Place your hand there. Breathe slowly. Now say to her, silently or aloud: I see what you carried. I see what you could not put down. I am carrying it consciously now, on behalf of both of us. And I am beginning to set down what was never mine to hold. Stay for two minutes. Write what arose.

🥊 INTUITIVE MEDITATION — THE PHOENIX

🥊 Close your eyes. Breathe slowly. Imagine yourself standing at the grave of every woman in your lineage who pointed her daughters toward death rather than toward life. Not in judgment — in compassion.

They were shaped by forces larger than themselves. They were also carrying what they could not set down.

Now: imagine the Phoenix rising from those graves. Rising from yours. Rising from every woman who survived what should have killed her, who lived to write the ode.

Feel the Phoenix in your own body. The fire does not destroy but transforms. The resurrection that is not above the wound but through it. Stay for five minutes. Write: what rises from the ash?

🌟 Draw your female lineage as a landscape of grief and resilience. The graves and the Phoenix. The haunting and the rising. Let the image honor both what was lost and what survived.

— Free Art Space: Draw the mother ghosts and what rises after them.

TRUSTING HEART — WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ Tell me about your experience of grief from the perspective of: Loss of self • Homelessness • Not belonging • Hollowness • Void • Emptiness. Choose the one that resonates most deeply. Write from inside it, not around it.

✍️ What is your galut? Your inner exile. The specific way you have been disconnected from yourself, from your body, from your ancestral ground. Write about the quality of that disconnection — when it began, how it feels, what it has cost you.

✍️ What is your escapist prayer? Write it down honestly — the prayer that asks for everything to stop, for the pain to go away, for the void to be filled by something outside yourself.

Then write: what would a prayer of full entry look like? What would it mean to pray by staying, rather than by leaving?

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — LEANING INTO FEAR

🌿 Sit quietly. Close your eyes. Recall the fear that lives most chronically in your nervous system.

The one underneath the grief. The one that has been driving the escapist prayer. Instead of moving away from it — lean in. Slightly.

Not dramatically. Just a slight inclination of awareness toward fear rather than away from it. Notice what happens in the body when you lean in rather than flee.

What does fear feel like when it is met with attention rather than avoidance?

Stay for two minutes. Write: What is the fear made of when you stop running from it?

🌟 Draw your galut — the inner exile. The disconnection from root, from ground, from belonging. Then — on the same page — draw the red thread leading back. The direction of return. Let both images exist: the exile and the path home.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw the hollowness, and what begins to fill when you stop running.

The Poems of Grief

Levertov, Whyte, Thompson & the Blessed Unborn Son

Poetry is the language of grief. Not because it beautifies the loss but because it tells the truth about it in a form the body can receive.

The poem does not explain the grief. It creates the conditions under which grief can finally be felt. It is called grief without reducing it. It gives it a home on the page.

The poems in this lesson are four different faces of grief: Denise Levertov’s address to grief as a living presence who needs a proper home;

David Whyte’s invitation to descend into the well of grief to find the gold at the bottom;

Mary Thompson’s grief for Mother Earth and the body’s longing for the ground from which it was torn, and

Marta Luzim’s elegy for the unborn son whose loss was dismissed before it could be mourned.

Read each poem slowly. Aloud if possible. Let the body respond to each one before you write.

— TALKING TO GRIEF, DENISE LEVERTOV

Levertov’s poems do something radical: they give grief a body, a name, and a proper home. Not the back door and a meatless bone. A corner. A worn mat. A water dish. The right to warn off intruders. The right to consider the house itself.

This is what grief asks: not to be a guest at the back door, tolerated and fed scraps, but to be acknowledged as a permanent and necessary inhabitant of the self.

Talking to Grief — Denise Levertov

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

You think I don’t know you’ve been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

✍️ Write to your grief as Levertov writes to her as a living presence you have been treating as a homeless dog. Where has your grief been living — under the porch, at the back door, shut outside? What would it mean to give it a proper home? Write the invitation.

— THE WELL OF GRIEF, DAVID WHYTE

Whyte’s poem makes the invitation explicit: to slip beneath the still surface of the well of grief, down to the black water, to the place where we cannot breathe — and find there the source from which we drink.

The secret water is cold and clear.

The small gold coins were thrown by those who wished for something else.

The gold is not above grief. It is at the bottom.

The Well of Grief — David Whyte

Those who will not slip beneath

the still surface on the well of grief

turning down to its black water

to the place we cannot breathe

will never know the source from which we drink

the secret water cold and clear

nor find in the darkness

the small gold coins

thrown by those who wished for something else.

✍️ Write about your well of grief. What is at the bottom of it? What gold have you not yet reached because you have not yet been willing to go all the way down? Write about what you are afraid you will find there — and what you suspect may be waiting that you don’t yet dare to name.

— GRIEVING MOTHER EARTH, MARY REYNOLDS THOMPSON

Thompson names the grief that has no language: the loss of the Mother’s heartbeat, the severing from the earth’s body, the deep yowling grief of separation from nature that lives in the layers of being we can barely name.

We commute for hours to sit in cubicles before flashing screens. We are too tired to lift our faces to the sky. And somewhere in the deep layers we sense the primary loss. A loss in truth that we can barely name and have no language for.

FROM GRIEVING MOTHER EARTH by Mary Reynolds Thompson

“The deep, yowling grief of separation from nature cannot be underestimated. The loss of the mother’s heartbeat, the way we once lay our bodies upon hers and were held, the way we once knew her as kin — now a distant memory.

We have been ripped from the great mother and often do not even know we are grieving. Whether we know it or not, the feeling is that we are banished from the loving embrace of the sacred garden and sent out alone.

We hold the grief, tight and close, often unaware of it — until, looking at a sunset, or being surprised by the scent of roses, we find tears streaming down our face and wonder, ‘Why?’”

— Mary Reynolds Thompson

✍️ Write about your grief for Mother Earth. The last time you stood in nature and felt something in you release that you didn’t know you were holding. The last time the scent of something brought unexpected tears. Write about the body’s grief for the ground it was torn from.

— BLESSED UNBORN SON

This poem was written in response to the loss that was dismissed before it could be mourned. The miscarriage that the doctor said, “It just happens.” The grief that had no ritual, no ceremony, no prayer. A loss that was cleaned up and named nothing. The unnamed losses are often the ones that calcify into stone — a single tear turned to stone, an empty box where a memory of life once lived.

The poem below is also a permission slip: to mourn what was never given a funeral, to write the prayer that was never spoken, to finally receive the grief that has been sitting in the body as a hollow where a child was once imagined.

Blessed Unborn Son © Marta Luzim, MS

At first, the seed slid off my egg

down the drain of my uterus

I could not hold that life

it bled to death right under my eyes

Doctor Man said with empty eyes and a soulless face

it happens, it happens, it happens

an echo of a thought that left me cold, alone, and dry

A ritual of mourning was robbed from my soul

because it happens, it happens, it happens.

I want to cry first

I want to mourn first

I want to throw up your words in your face

It happens, it happens, it happens

I didn’t get to hold that child

Where are you taking him?

Baby doc scoots on by

Wipe those tears, young woman

You look a mess

comb your hair

open your legs, NEXT!

I had to forget the lingering loss

the vacant hole where no one thought

anything really existed in time, in place, in me

The funeral in me had to march straight to hell

no ceremony, no prayer, no ritual, a wisp of nothingness

that turned a single tear to stone

I still pray for my little son

the one that never got to be a lover, a father, a friend

the one who runs through the sun’s rays and calls my name

and lives among the stars where a twinkle of light once shone

I never got to hold that son

I never got to sing a prayer

I never got to be by his side

I never got to share my grief

because it happens, it happens, it happens

✍️ What grief in your life was dismissed with the words “it happens,” “get over it,” or “just move on”?

What loss was given no ritual, no ceremony, no permission to be mourned?

Write the grief that was cleaned up before you could cry.

Give it the funeral it never received. Write the prayer that was robbed from your soul.

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE RITUAL OF MOURNING

🌿 For this practice, you will need a few minutes of privacy and quiet. Light a candle if you have one. This is a small ritual of mourning for the losses that received no ceremony. Sit quietly. Take five slow breaths.

Bring to mind the loss that received no ritual. Hold it consciously.

Say its name — aloud or silently. Say: I name this loss. I witnessed this loss. This loss was real, and it deserved to be mourned.

Let whatever arises arrive without management. The tears, the anger, the numbness, the strange relief of finally acknowledging what has been waiting to be acknowledged.

Stay for two full minutes in this witnessing. Write: what happened in the body when the loss was finally given its name?

🌟 Draw the grief that received no ritual. The empty box. The stone where the tear should have been. The unnamed loss.

Then — on the same page — draw the ceremony you are giving it now. The candle. The prayer. The witness. Let the image be both the wound and the ritual.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw the grief that deserved a funeral. Give it one here.

Reclaiming Through Grief

The Full Inquiry & the Path of Self-Recovery

Grief is the most important part of recovery. Not the endpoint of recovery — the engine of it. The process of moving through grief is the process of individuation, of reclaiming the feminine truth, of returning to the self that existed before the wound reshaped it.

You cannot skip this step. You cannot think your way through it. You can only grieve your way through it.

Reclaiming through grief means recovering your birthright of self-worth and self-love.

The generational loss, tribal loss, family loss, and personal identity loss that was taken from you. It means going back, piece by piece, into what was lost — and finding there, not the empty box, but the gold coins.

The source from which we drink. The secret water is cold and clear.

The questions in this lesson are not assignments. They are the full inquiry of grief — the questions that, answered honestly and over time, lead back to the self. Return to them over weeks and months. Let the ones that make you want to close the book guide you deepest.

“Grief is the roller coaster of life. You change, grow, shed, and pick up the pieces. But life is not the same — you are not the same after loss. And that is not failure. That is how grief teaches wisdom and endurance, resilience and humility, surrender and gratitude.” — Marta Luzim

— THE GRIEF STEPS

Grief Steps © Marta Luzim, MS

Grief is loss. Whether it is a friend, a family member, a pet, a home, or any kind of relationship.

However, the greatest loss is of yourself. This loss is from trauma.

This loss results in unworthiness.

This grief is the lack, shame, and terror of trauma.

Going through the stages is a healing and a practice of radical self-acceptance.

You cannot forget or ignore the past.

The past needs to be integrated through grief,

all of who you are, in present time.

Navigated, redirected, reshaped, and reinvented

to who you want to be, who you can be,

who you can’t be,

and how you can create wholeness through your past and present.

Futurizing and skipping over the past and present is trauma and anxiety twofold.

You can set intentions and then surrender and accept the road

you will be guided through.

instinct, intuition, sensations, and feeling.

This is what you lost as a child.

And then you lost your true self.

Reclaiming your heart, soul, and purpose of living is new, raw, original,

and emotionally grounded.

It is in your body, not your head.

Your body and emotions will tell you the truth in the moment.

Grief is the most important part of recovery.

— THE GRIEF QUESTIONS: FULL INQUIRY

These questions are organized into two groups: the grief questions that invite you into the interior experience of grief, and the reclaiming questions that ask what is being recovered through the grieving.

Work through them slowly, over time. Let each one sit in the body before you write.

Your Grief

1. Do you need time to grieve? Do you need time to hold your heart? Do you need time for silence? What does the body need right now to grieve?

2. Where do you live — inside of your grief, or outside looking in?

3. What is your wall of grief? What have you built to keep the grief at a manageable distance?

4. What is unbearable to you in your grief? How have you been trying to make it bearable?

5. How is your hollowness connected to faith? Can the emptiness itself become a doorway?

6. What is your escapist prayer? And what would a prayer of full presence look like instead?

7. What is your Galut? Your disconnection and exile? From yourself, from your body, from your lineage?

8. How is your faith connected to your fear and your grief? How do you grieve the loss of faith?

9. Do you need to work on judgment and shame in your grief? Do you need to forgive yourself?

10. Do you need to practice staying with the pain and discomfort with loving kindness?

Reclaiming Through Grief

1. What was the most tragic loss in your life? How did you express this loss — or not?

2. What haven’t you grieved from childhood? What part of your life hasn’t been fully mourned?

3. Does grief seem never-ending? How do you ignore and avoid grief?

4. What were you shown or taught about grief? Is grief only for death, or can you grieve while still alive?

5. What is the language of your body, memory, sensations, and instincts with grief?

6. What is your solitude in grieving? Where do you go when you need to grieve in private?

7. What can you say, teach, scream, write, move, or advocate with grief?

8. Do you feel a loss of safety? Explain how and the effects of that loss.

9. What do you feel about teaching impermanence to the next generation?

10. How has grief changed you? What has it taken? What has it given? What have you reclaimed through it?

TOPIC 3 — ORIGINAL POEM: THE YES OF A BROKEN HEART

Leon Wieseltier wrote: “ Grief is the eyes of a broken heart. The yes of connection. The yes of love. The value of having valued something enough to mourn its loss. This poem was written in response to that, yes — and in response to the long, non-linear, imperfect, necessary work of recovery.

The Yes of a Broken Heart — Marta Luzim

I did not choose grief.

Grief chose me.

Arrived without announcement

and moved in without permission

and has been redecorating ever since.

What I thought was weakness

turned out to be the body’s wisdom.

What I thought was falling apart

turned out to be falling open.

The well of grief is not the bottom.

The well of grief is the beginning.

The black water is cold and clear.

The gold coins are real.

They were thrown there by the ones

who loved and lost before me,

who survived the unsurvivable

and left something behind

for the ones who would come after.

I will come after.

I am still coming.

Every morning I wake up

and choose to be here.

Every morning, grief is still here too,

curled up in its corner,

with its collar and its tag,

It’s right to warn off intruders,

It’s right to consider this house its own.

And every morning I say yes.

Not because I am healed.

Not because it is easy.

But because the yes is how I know

I have loved.

And the yes is how I know

I am still

alive.

✨ RECLAIMING — WRITING PROMPTS

✍️ What birthright of self-worth and self-love was taken from you by the generational loss, tribal loss, family loss, and personal identity loss? Write the full inventory. Then write: What are you claiming? What is being returned to you through grieving?

✍️ Write about the yes of your broken heart. The grief that proves you loved. The mourning that proves you were alive enough to lose something. Write the yes — not as triumphant, not as resolved, but as honest. As the simple, daily, ongoing yes of a woman who is still here.

🌿 SOMATIC PRACTICE — THE FULL GRIEF MEDITATION

🌿 Find a quiet space. Light a candle if you have one. Sit comfortably. Take seven slow breaths. With each breath, feel the body settling deeper into itself. Recall everything you have learned in this workbook.

the named losses and the unnamed ones. The ancestral grief and the personal grief. The loss of self and the grief for Mother Earth.

The unborn son and the losses that received no ceremony. Hold it all without trying to manage any of it.

Simply be with the full weight of what has been lost, what is still being lost, and what is always being lost in a life lived with an open heart.

Notice what the body does with the full weight. Where does it settle? Where does it resist?

Then, underneath the grief, notice what else is there. The love that is still there. The life that is still there. The yes.

Stay for five minutes. Write: what is on the other side of the full weight of grief?

🥊 CLOSING MEDITATION — THE PHOENIX & THE GOLD COINS

🥊 Close your eyes. Breathe slowly. Imagine yourself standing at the edge of the well of grief. Looking down at the black water.

You have done this work. You have gone down. You have stayed with the grief instead of feeding it scraps at the back door. You have named the unnamed losses.

You have given ritual to what received none.

You have leaned into fear instead of away from it. Now: feel the gold coins in your hands.

The ones at the bottom of the well. The wisdom that is only available by going all the way down.

The resilience that comes not from avoiding grief but from surviving it. The self that is still here — still recognizable, still alive — after everything that tried to extinguish it.

Feel the Phoenix rising. Not above the grief. Through it.

Write: What are you carrying out of the well? What have you recovered that you did not know you would find?

🌟 Draw the Phoenix rising from the well of grief. Both images — the descent and the rising. The black water and the small gold coins. The grief and the yes. Let the image hold the whole of the journey.

[ space for your art ]

— Free Art Space: Draw what you are reclaiming through grief.

A Closing Word

You have walked through grief in all its forms: the grief of what was lost, the generational grief encoded in the blood, the hollowness of galut and exile, the four great poems of grief, and the full inquiry of reclaiming through the mourning.

Grief is not the opposite of healing. Grief is healing. The willingness to feel the full weight of what was lost, to give it a name, a ritual, and a proper home in the psyche — this is what allows the self to begin to reassemble on the other side of the loss. Not the same self.

A self that has been purified by grief into something more honest, more present, more capable of the love it was always trying to protect.

You are not behind in your grieving. You are not grieving wrong. You are exactly where you are. And grief — that faithful, persistent presence living under the porch, waiting for its proper place — is your companion on the path.

Give it its corner. Give it its water dish. Give it the right to consider the house itself.

The gold coins are real. The source from which we drink is real. The secret: cold, clear water is real. It was always there, at the bottom of the well, waiting for you to be willing to descend all the way down.

“In writing my ode, I can rise like the Phoenix and kiss the souls of all the grandmothers and mothers who led their daughters toward death and unknowingly awakened them to eternity.” — Marta Luzim

With deep love,

Marta Luzim

www.womenswayin.com

I learned that love and terror could live in the same room.”

My mother stood in the kitchen holding a knife. The evening lamp light came through the window and struck the blade. I remember the smell of boiled hot dogs. The yellow curtains. The sound of my own breathing.

My sister and I had just finished eating dinner, franks and beans on white plates, and the smell of mustard hung in the kitchen air. My mother stood at the sink washing dishes. Soap bubbles climbed her thin wrists as pots clanged against enamel.

Cling. Bang. Slam.

She scrubbed the pans with a fury that frightened the walls themselves. Her face twisted and tightened as though invisible insects crawled beneath her skin. That night, my father was at the Deli he owned, Cousins.

The dining room was elongated into the living room, and the kitchen was to the right of the dining room. The entire area was decorated in an Asian motif. Fringes dangling from lamps, dragons and moons embroidered on the couch and chairs. Being Jewish, it was odd that my mother chose furniture that looked weird.

My sister and I ran from my mother’s scowl and incoherent babble.

Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour blared from the television. We laughed too loudly, wild little-girl laughter burst out of us like fireworks. We did not know yet that joy could be dangerous.

Our happiness awakened the demon in my mother.

“Shut up! I’ll kill you two—then myself!”

I saw a flash of platinum blonde hair, then the gleam of a butcher knife flew toward me. Time froze inside my body. Terror exploded through my stomach, and I vomited onto the oversized Asian armchair I clung to for safety.

Hotdog bile. Beans. Sourness. Terror.

My throat locked shut.

The harder I held my breath, the deeper I thought I could disappear.

My mother’s shadow stretched huge across the wall as she held the knife first to her own head, then pressed it against my temple.

Her ruby-red lips trembled. The black penciled beauty mark at the corner of her eye twitched like a dying insect. Her arm jerked violently as she plunged the knife toward her chest—stopping just short of her heart.

I gasped.

Covered my mouth.

Reached for my sister.

But she sat frozen on the green carpet, paralyzed in terror, and strange wheezing sounds bubbled from her nose.

In that moment, I felt myself leave my body. I looked from above. I floated near the ceiling. The little girl below stood frozen. Stiff and Helpless.

The room split open

Far away, somewhere beyond the room, I heard myself gag and cough. My eyes fluttered. The apartment drifted farther away until a voice called to me through the darkness.

“Fly away. Fly away.”

And I did.

I squeezed out of my skin.

My ears popped as if another universe had opened. Suddenly, I soared above the two-bedroom apartment, above the six-story building, above Brooklyn streets and trees and playgrounds.

The stars rushed past me. I circled the moon. I flew into galaxies.

My terror became a portal.

Something ancient opened.

Desert winds swept through me, carried prayer, blood, bone, chanting, dust. Forgotten Jewish women rose from the shadows of history and entered my body.

Miriam’s tambourine rattled in the night. Sarah wailed her grief into the wilderness.

Rebecca and Leah tore at each other with jealousy and longing

I saw shattered statues of Asherah, the Hebrew Goddess, buried beneath centuries of silence.

The dead were speaking.

The women were returning.

Then—

SLAM.

The heavy apartment door crashed shut, shattering the vision.

My father had come home from work.

“Ray!”

He grabbed the knife from my mother’s hand and dragged her into the bathroom. The door slammed behind them. Their screams echoed through the apartment while the toilet flushed over and over again like some violent baptism.

Time stretched endlessly.

My sister and I did not move.

The knife lay abandoned on the floor for hours.

Later, men came and took my mother away.

Years later, I would learn the language of trauma, dissociation, nervous systems, hypervigilance, attachment wounds, and epigenetics. But at five years old, I only knew one thing: love was dangerous.

And if love was dangerous, then being alive was dangerous too.”

______________________________________________________________________________“I kept returning to empty wells, convinced that if I figured it all out hard enough, water would come from stone.”

One day, for maybe the millionth time, my daughter screamed, with tears in her eyes, her lips tight, and her voice shook. I heard with my head, not my body. Guilt and shame were my refuge from the pain.

“Mom. Hear me.” Her sad blue eyes were searching for my eyes to listen. “As a child, I was terrified of you. And I always loved you. Why can’t you receive I love you no matter what”

This time, “I knew” I felt, I ate her words. They penetrated my soul, my skin, bones, and my psyche. My heart was broken; my daughter’s heart pain was the pain I gave her.

After forty years of my deep, relentless, fierce relationship with my daughter, the generational trauma that she inherited from my grandmother, my mother, and me boiled over in years of therapy. I became a therapist desperate to understand my mother’s mental illness.

But my daughter reflected the knowing finger; the road led back to me.

The trauma that my daughter wrestled with her whole life, the karmic, magnetic, healing that swirled in us and around us, for generations, back, back, back, even before my grandmother, Sarah, escaped from Russia [Poland from the pogroms. I had to say the real thing.

Not the defended version
Not the protective story.
Not the excuses and explanations

Not what I thought was the motherly thing, which was to veil the damage with words, books, concepts, stories.

The scholarly thing to allow her to “feel,” educate her, and convince myself that I protected my daughter from my family’s mental illness. In truth, I protected my daughter from me.

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord. Holy, holy. The trauma would never touch my daughter. Yeah, not really.

With all the guided imagery, metaphysics, spirituality, and psychology I taught her, her heart was filled with glass shards.

I pushed my daughter away, disguised in a dress of disassociation, and blah, blah, blah. A head trip and intellectual rhetoric, that froze her words and feelings in mid-air and turned them to vapor before they could touch my heart.

She felt betrayed. That I could not receive her love. That she was not worthy. That I could not simply give her my warmth when she was scared and hurt, instead of ice cubes of bullshit.

“I was raised to repair what I did not break. My daughter inherited the genetic family blood crap.”

Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew teaching, is humankind scattered across the universe, and for us to repair the scattering of light into the darkness of the universe. The human condition is eternal; the flame, the soul of every human being, is the eternal flame.

My life, family, daughter, husband, and granddaughter are my Tikkun Olam. A commitment to repair generations of grief.

I have been seeking answers all my life.

That has been my true occupation.

More than any title, more than any role, I have lived inside the questions.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Why was I made this way?

Why does this life feel so hard, so holy, so broken, and so impossible to understand?

The older I get, the less interested I am in easy spiritual language, in platitudes, in the surface version of healing. I do not want inspiration that floats above the body.

I want the truth that trembles in the nerves, the truth that lives in the cells, the truth that drags itself up from the underworld with dirt under its nails and grief in its mouth.

And then, the thunder of “wake up” from my daughter.

I gasped. I’ve known this truth, and yet, at that moment, I felt the truth in every cell, skin, and bone in my body.

It was time to rip off my shield and breathe through the guilt and sorrow and love

I inherited my mother’s rage and my father’s fear, my grandmother’s disassociation from death and loss, and was handed down to my daughter.

“Trauma is not in the story. Trauma is in the body waiting for the story to become safe enough to be told.”

Because trauma is not an idea.

It is not a concept to be discussed over tea and then folded neatly back into theory.

Trauma lives in the body. It lives in the heartbeat, the gut, the breath, the guarded shoulder, the tightened jaw, the startled nervous system, the ancient alarm that rings even when no one else hears it. It lives in the epigenetic river.

It lives in the family line. It lives in the child who learned too early that love could turn, disappear, humiliate, and wound.

And so, I find myself, in this late season of life, still asking the same burning question in different forms:

Are we here to learn unconditional love? And if so, what does that mean for those of us whose hearts were shattered before we even knew we had one?

I have had to claw my way back from severe trauma, chronic illness, and post-traumatic stress. A lifetime of terror.

Then I had to learn how to enter the world again. I have lived like a woman in a cave—protective, guarded, hypervigilant, watchful. And only now, after all these years, am I truly beginning to feel the original pain of my childhood.

That is the shock.

“I was born with gifts. I inherited shame.”

The deepest pain waited so long to be felt.

I see now how defended I have been all my life. How expertly I learned to protect the heart. How I built a self around alertness.

How I mistook vigilance for identity. My husband and my daughter—my greatest mirrors, my greatest teachers—have loved me through layers of trauma I did not know I was still wearing. They have shown me what love looks like when it stays. Yet even now, I struggle to receive it.

That is one of the great griefs of trauma: not only that you were not loved well, but that when love finally arrives, your body may not know what to do with it.

Sandra Ray, spiritual teacher and author, said: “When you first start to love everything, but love will come up first.”

Mistrust is a banner that wrapped around my body and tangled my heart, a tightly knotted gold necklace strangled my throat.

That suffocation developed into a spastic colon and gastroparesis. Shame, terror, and judgment warped my decisions with undetected complex PTSD.

Throughout my life, I confided in a myriad of therapists. Growing up in my home was living in the shadows of the holocaust.

In the fifties, no one asked a six-year-old white Jewish girl if she was happy. Teachers reported that I had a mental block, wasn’t present, and my words were trapped. Yet, I was an advanced student. I skipped from second to fourth grade and was placed in an intellectually gifted class

My parents believed the teacher made a mistake

It is only in the last thirty years that trauma research has reached the masses, let alone generational trauma

In the book Trauma and the Soul, Donald Kalsched, a Jungian therapist, writes, “survivors of early trauma often report that an essential part of themselves retreated into a spiritual world to take refuge and support when there is the absence of such a human person in their lives. Sometimes, this spiritual world gives the trauma survivor privileged access to immaterial realities that remain inaccessible to people who live mostly in one world.

Many of these patients have mystical connections to animals, natural access to healing capacities, psychic powers, intuitive wisdom, and artistic talent. On the other hand, sometimes the spiritual world also torments the trauma survivor in ways that better-adapted people never have to worry about.”

As a child, I was confused and scared when I heard and saw what was underneath. I felt the split between words and energy.

I knew when someone performed kindness, borrowed sincerity, and arranged themselves into goodness for effect. I do not say this with any sense of superiority. I say it with exhaustion and terror that remained in my body.

I have watched relationships become theaters of repetition. I have watched old family wounds show up wearing new clothes.

I have been cast again and again into triangles, manipulations, projections, and emotional confusion. I have had to end bonds that were too enmeshed, too toxic, too drenched in unmet need

There are so many people living at the level of performance, and I auditioned for and played the role of teacher, therapist, healer, wife, mother, and Oscar-winning perfectionist

But I have never been built for that altitude and loftiness.

What others step over, I feel in my flesh.

Betrayal is not a social inconvenience to me. It is an event in the body. A heartbreak is not just an emotion. It is a physical condition.

Exclusion, dismissal, false intimacy, manipulation, all of it lands in me as sensation, ache, contraction, grief. I do not know how to “just move on” from what was never merely mental.

Everything in me has always gone deeper than I wanted it to.

And so the question arises: Why did God make me like this? Why this sensitivity? Why this intensity? Why must everything pass through me as pain before it becomes understanding?

And every time, beneath the pain of the rupture, another question opens: Why does this keep happening to me? What am I meant to learn from this suffering?

“Before I learned to trust myself, there was a voice that kept saying, ‘Stop asking them for what they cannot give.’”

“Perhaps healing is not becoming someone new. Perhaps healing is gathering the pieces of the woman who never stopped waiting for herself.”

My life has been devoted to the psyche, the soul, the mysteries of Love. I have had dreams, inner knowing, and visitations from realms that most people either cannot access or do not trust.

And yet I have also been a woman who protects myself from humans.
A woman who questions whether I am lovable.
A woman who still struggles to feel fully received by the very people who love her most.

This is what trauma does. It makes the sanctuary feel suspicious. It makes love feel conditional, even when it is not. It makes the heart believe it must earn what should have been given freely.

I did not receive unconditional love as a child. Many of us did not. We received some version of love braided with demand, control, instability, projection, neglect, criticism, silence, or harm.

We were told to be good, better, quieter, prettier, smarter, less needy, less visible, and less ourselves. We learned to bend toward safety. We learned to adapt to the weather of other people’s damage.

And then, later, we are told to heal.
To forgive.
To open.
To trust.
To love ourselves.

As if loving oneself were a simple instruction.

As if self-love were a cosmetic ritual instead of a descent.

No. Learning to love yourself after trauma is not a slogan. It is a long and brutal apprenticeship. It is body work.

Soul work. Grief work. Rage work. Boundary work.

It is learning that your “no” is not a sin

It is learning that protection is not the same as numbness.

It is learning that you can stop trying to make everything right for everyone who has injured you.

It is learning that compassion does not require self-betrayal. Nor seek revenge

That has been one of the deepest knots in me: How do I keep my heart open without abandoning myself?

How do I create boundaries without becoming stone?

How do I stop repeating the childhood assignment that told me I had to fix what was done to me, soothe those who hurt me, earn back my place, and make myself more lovable through self-erasure?

That assignment damaged me.

It damaged my self-respect.
It damaged my deservingness.
It damaged my belief that my voice mattered.
It damaged my right to take up space.

And beneath all of this, I see now, lives the wound of worth.

Not just heartbreak.
Not just betrayal.
Worth.

I was mirrored as nothing. Zero. That was the psychic inheritance.

My mother, my father, my sister, whatever their own wounds, their own limits, their own damaged histories, they did not reflect my value.

I had no true ally in that original house of becoming. No one to say: There you are. I see your gifts. I see your intelligence. I see your soul. You are not too much. You are not wrong. You are real.

So, I discovered myself in the dark.

I found my intelligence alone.
I found my intuition alone.
I found my gifts alone.
I found my calling alone.

And because they were not mirrored, some parts of me still struggle to fully inhabit them. The inner child is still waiting for permission. Some broken part still asks, Am I really worthy of what I have been given?

This, I think, is the deeper sorrow beneath many of my conflicts. That when others treat me poorly, dismiss me, betray me, manipulate me, or fail to see me, the old wound flares and says, See? There it is again. Proof that you are not worthy.

But perhaps that is the lie I am finally here to break.

Perhaps the real work now is not to keep proving my pain, but to stop using other people’s behavior as evidence against my own value.

Perhaps this is what age is asking of me:
not to chase belonging where there is no true meeting,
not to explain my soul to those committed to surfaces,
not to force a connection where there is no integrity,
not to keep standing at the altar of rejection, hoping it will finally bless me.

Perhaps this is the deeper teaching:
That pain is not always punishment.
That sensitivity is not weakness.
That discernment is not cruelty.
That boundaries are not the opposite of love.
That the heart can remain open without remaining unprotected.

I believe awakening happens by descending into it.

By feeling what is there.

By allowing grief to have its language.

By letting rage become information.

By letting heartbreak turn into consciousness instead of self-annihilation.

To me, trauma is a spiritual initiation into the body.

It is the soul being forced to choose:
Will I leave myself now?
Or will I begin, slowly, painfully, imperfectly, to come home?

And home is not a fantasy.
Home is not perfection.
Home is not the absence of pain.

Home is the place in me that no longer requires self-betrayal in order to belong.

What has saved me, again, has not been certainty. It has been spiritual work, writing, art, deep conversation, and helping another human being when I can.

This is my prayer. My medicine. My proof that even a broken heart can become a vessel.

I do know, I am not alone in this path of turning darkness into light. Billions suffer and struggle daily in a world that can be cruel and terrifying.

And I know:

My task is not to close my heart.
My task is not to leave it defenseless either.
:My task is to learn the holy tension between openness and protection.
To say no without hatred.
To grieve without collapsing.
To love without self-abandoning.
To honor the wound without letting it become my only name.

And perhaps unconditional love, for those of us who were not given it, begins here.

Not in loving everybody.
Not in tolerating abuse.
Not in spiritual bypass.
Not in becoming endlessly available to those who injure us.

But in refusing to make love dependent on our own disappearance.

In learning to love the soul without denying the body.
In keeping boundaries without closing the gates of the heart forever.
In believing, at last, that worth is not something handed to us by those who failed to see us.
It is something holy, inherent, and waiting beneath the damage.

After all these years, I am still gathering the pieces. Still making sense of what childhood did to my worth, what trauma did to the nervous system, what spirit has been trying to teach me through all this breaking.

Still trying to understand what it means to stay human. Learning who my daughter is with warmth and compassion, not language and false ideals.

But I know this now:

I was never zero.

I was injured.
I was unmirrored.
I was betrayed.
I was flattened.
I was made to doubt the very gifts that were trying to save me.

But I was never zero.

Underneath the damage, underneath the vigilance, underneath the heartbreak, underneath the old command to make everything right, there is still a self. A soul. A woman. A flame.

And she is still here.

Still burning.
Still asking.
Still becoming.

Closing Invocation | Cry Kali

“The little girl left through the ceiling. The elder woman returns through the body

May the woman be reading this stop mistaking her wound for her worth.

May she know that trauma may live in the body, but so does truth.
So does instinct.
So does memory.
So does the wild God-light that refused to die.

May she stop begging to be chosen by those who could never see her.
May she stop translating her depth into a smaller language.
May she stop confusing endurance with devotion.

May she learn the fierce holiness of the boundary.
May she keep her heart open but not unlocked for thieves.
May she grieve what was not given.
May she rage where she was silenced.
May she descend into the body and find, buried under generations of shame, the original gold.

And may the Madwoman in her rise not as pathology,
But as a prophet,
not as wound alone,
but as wisdom,
not as exile,
but as the one who finally comes home to herself.

The wound was never that people left. The wound was believing their leaving meant there was something wrong with me.”

I spent decades trying to earn what should have been given freely.

My art became the witness my family could not be.

Every time life knocked me down, something in me stood back up holding a pen.

“Beneath the damage, there was always a soul.

A voice.

A purpose. And so do YOU YOU AND YOU

A woman.

A flame.

And she is still here.

Still burning.

Still asking.

Still becoming, and so are YOU AND YOU AND YOU

Wild Iris / Madwoman Method — Marta Luzim

INTRODUCTION: YOU ARE NOT HERE TO HEAL—YOU ARE HERE TO BECOME

There is a moment when healing as you were taught it… fails you.

Affirmations feel thin.
Positivity feels like betrayal.
And something deeper—older—begins to stir.

Carl Jung called this the beginning of individuation—the unraveling of the false self.
James Hillman insisted the soul does not want to be fixed—it wants to be imagined, deepened, lived through image.
Marion Woodman brought the body back into the psyche: if it is not in the body, it is not transformed.

And the Archetypal Artist—
the feminine creator inside you—
does not heal by thinking.

She heals by creating from the wound.

CORE PRINCIPLES Of BECOMING

• The psyche speaks in image, symbol, and sensation

• The body is the archive of the soul

• Creativity is not expression; it is transformation

• Descent (not ascent) is the path of the feminine psyche

• Healing happens when image + body + emotion meet

  8 ARCHETYPAL DESCENTS

• Teaching (Jung / Hillman / Woodman)

• Visual field (image immersion)

• Somatic practice

• Creative ritual

• Madwoman inquiry

LESSON 1: THE FRACTURE — WHEN THE SOUL BREAKS THE STORY

6

Teaching

Jung: The persona must crack for the soul to emerge.

Narrative

The life you built begins to feel… false.
You don’t fall apart.
You fall inward.

Anxiety. Rage. Illness.
These are not symptoms.

They are doorways.

Somatic Exercise

• Sit in stillness

• Feel where tension gathers

• Name it without fixing it

Creative Ritual

Draw your “fracture”—no words, just an image.

Inquiry

• What identity am I outgrowing?

LESSON 2: THE IMAGE — THE LANGUAGE OF THE SOUL

9

Teaching

Hillman: “Stick with the image.”

Narrative

Your dreams are not random.
Your fantasies are not meaningless.

They are the soul speaking in picture form.

Somatic Exercise

Close eyes, recall a dream image—track body sensation.

Creative Ritual

Paint or write the image without explaining it.

Inquiry

• If my pain were a creature, what would it be?

LESSON 3: THE BODY — WHERE THE SOUL HIDES

6

Teaching

Woodman: The body holds the unlived life.

Narrative

Your body is not betraying you.
It is remembered for you.

Tight throat.
Frozen belly.
Numb limbs.

These are stories without words.

Somatic Exercise

• Track one sensation for 5 minutes

• Let it change or not change

Creative Ritual

Draw a body map: mark where emotions live.

Inquiry

• What does my body know that my mind avoids?

LESSON 4: THE SHADOW — RECLAIMING THE FORBIDDEN SELF

7

Teaching

Jung: The shadow is your rejected vitality.

Narrative

The “good woman” was constructed.
The wild one was buried.

Your rage…
Your hunger…
Your sexuality…

These are not flaws.

They are life energy.

Somatic Exercise

• Pound a pillow

• Let sound emerge

Creative Ritual

Write a letter from your shadow self.

Inquiry

• What part of me was made wrong?

LESSON 5: THE DESCENT — ENTERING THE UNDERWORLD

7

Teaching

Hillman: “The cure is in the depths.”

Narrative

You thought healing meant rising.

But the soul…
calls you downward.

Into grief.
Into memory.
Into the place you avoid.

Somatic Exercise

Lay on the ground—feel gravity pull you down.

Creative Ritual

Create a “descent map” of your life.

Inquiry

• What am I afraid will destroy me?

LESSON 6: THE CREATIVE FIRE — MAKING FROM THE WOUND

8

Teaching

Creativity is a soul metabolizing experience.

Narrative

You don’t create because you’re inspired.

You create because something inside you refuses to die.

Somatic Exercise

Breathe into the belly—exhale sound.

Creative Ritual

10 minutes of uncensored writing: no stopping.

Inquiry

• What truth is trying to be born through me?

LESSON 7: THE COMPASSIONATE WITNESS — HOLDING THE PSYCHE

6

Teaching

Healing requires a witnessing presence.

Narrative

You are not only the wound.
You are also the one who can stay.

The Madwoman feels.
The Witness holds.

Somatic Exercise

Place hand on heart—speak gently inward.

Creative Ritual

Dialogue: Adult self + child self.

Inquiry

• Can I stay with my pain without abandoning myself?

LESSON 8: SOUL MAKING — THE ARCHETYPAL ARTIST EMERGES

9

Teaching

Hillman: Soul is made through lived experience.

Narrative

You are not here to arrive.

You are here to become layered, textured, and real.

Your pain becomes an image.
Your image becomes art.
Your art becomes soul.

Somatic Exercise

Move your body freely.

Creative Ritual

Create a final piece: poem, painting, or voice.

Inquiry

• Who am I becoming through all of this?

THE ARCHETYPAL ARTIST

You are not just healing.

You are becoming the woman who can:

• Feel deeply

• Imagine wildly

• Create truth

• Hold paradox

The Archetypal Artist is not separate from your suffering.

She was born from it.

Choose a word, sentence, paragraph- Write, draw, journal, collge

“The heroine’s journey did not begin in books.
It began in children’s bodies.”

“Before instinct became shameful.
Before intuition became pathology.
Before power became silent.”

“The blood I once wanted to pour across the world
became ink.”

“Recovery did not arrive as peace.
Recovery arrived as courage.”

“Transformation is not enlightenment.
It is recovery of the body that never stopped telling the truth.”

“Every woman carries a forgotten scripture in the child’s body.”

“My Madwoman did not arrive as revelation.
She rose howling.”

“She eats her wounds until they become medicine.”

“The wound was never trying to destroy me.
It was trying to return me to myself.”

“Your story did not begin in the Garden.
It began in the womb of the universe.”

Somatic Exercises for Readers

(Madwoman Body Entry Practices)

Exercise 1: Remembering the Child Through Sensation

Pause.

Place one hand on your heart
and one hand on your belly.

Ask quietly:

Where does the child in me still live?

Do not answer with words.

Wait for sensation.

Warmth
tightness
fluttering
pressure
numbness
heat
movement
stillness

Let the body speak first.

Then write:

The child in me lives in…

Continue for five minutes without stopping.

Exercise 2: The Ink Was Once Blood

Close your eyes.

Think of something you survived but rarely speak about.

Notice where it lives in your body.

Chest
throat
stomach
jaw
back
pelvis
hands

Now ask:

If this sensation had a voice, what would it say?

Write exactly what you hear.

Do not correct it.
Do not soften it.
Do not explain it.

Let the wound become language.

Exercise 3: Excavating the Forgotten Scripture

Sit with your spine upright.

Imagine a line of women behind you:

mother
grandmother
great-grandmother
the unnamed women before them

Feel their breath moving through your back.

Say silently:

I take back my body.
I take back my voice.
I take back my story.

Now write:

What ends with me begins with me.

Complete the sentence.

Exercise 4: Returning From Disappearance

Ask yourself:

Where did I leave myself in order to survive?

Wait.

The answer may arrive as:

a room
a relationship
a silence
a year
a belief
a memory

Write:

I left myself when…

Then write:

I return now by…

Closing Invocation

Before you leave this page,

pause.

Place one hand on your heart
and one hand on your belly.

Not the breath of performance.
Not the breath of control.

The breath that says:

I am here now.

Feel where your body tightens as you read these words.

That place is not resistance.

It is the doorway.

Your Madwoman lives there.

She does not arrive through logic.

She arrives through sensation.
Through memory.
Through grief.
Through laughter.
Through instinct.
Through the electric knowing that something inside you has always been waiting to speak.

Stay with her.

She is older than your fear.
Older than your training.
Older than the voice that told you who to be.

She is your original voice.

And she is already returning.

Final Blessing

You do not need permission to become yourself.

Your body already remembers the way home.

You cannot reconcile creativity with technical achievement.

Creativeness is not found through technique. If you have something to say, you create your own style, but when you have nothing to say, even if you have a beautiful style, what you write is only the traditional routine, a repetition of new words of the same old thing. When we have lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn the song’s technique from the singer, but there is no song. And I say the song is essential; the joy of singing is essential. The technique can be built up from nothing when the joy is there. You will invent your own technique. You won’t have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is art.

You may be perfect at playing the piano and not be creative; you may play the piano brilliantly and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, put paint on canvas, and, most cleverly, not be a creative painter. We have techniques. how to put up a house, build a bridge, and educate our children through a system. We have learned all these techniques, but our hearts and minds are empty.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Remember when we were children and wanted to grow up.

Now, when we grow up, we spend our lives trying to remember who we were before we disappeared.

Somewhere inside us, the inner child is still calling for freedom.

She is innocent.
She is brave.
She is suffocating under expectations she never chose.

An unseen burden presses on her chest.

And still she waits.

The heroine’s journey did not begin in books.

It began in children’s bodies.

Before instinct became shameful.
Before intuition became pathology.
Before power became silent.

Children live in rhythm with dreams and prophecies.
Their bodies are scripture.
Their cycles are calendars.
Their voices are laws of delight.

The real self is the child who never disappeared.

She returns when we are painting.
Writing poetry.
Playing music.
Laughing without permission.

She returns when time dissolves.

She returns when we remember how to live.

My life began as a cry:

Save me.

The little girl who whispered this believed she would live forever.

She daydreamed galaxies.
She floated through myth.
She traveled through imagination like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

As a child, ecstasy lived in the body.
Life tasted limitless.
Sticky with syrup.
Bright with M&Ms.
Golden with possibility.

And yet—

so much of what I write now is about the trauma.

Body after body piled onto my back.
Chains.
Sacks of heartbreak.
Generations of silence.

Joy is my middle name.

Strange, since my parents rationed it in crumbs.

Even now I search for her—not as memory, not as image, but as sensation:

goosebumps on my arms
a snowflake touching my nose
dirt on my skin as I rolled down a hill

anything that whispers:

Do you remember her?

Because laughter was dangerous.
Fun was disorder.
Wildness was betrayal.

And yet—

I remember Brooklyn.

Clarendon Gardens

.

Six-story buildings breathing around parks and trees.
Monkey bars and see-saws.
Grass and dirt under my feet.

Coney Island Nathan Franks

My father showing how to slurp down a clam

The Roller Coaster _ Cyclone made of wood and steel

My pink four-wheeler.
Rainbow streamers in the wind.
Steel skates with a heavy key.
Freedom rolling beneath my ankles.

Sunday night Chinese food.
Egg rolls dipped in mustard.
Soup noodles floating in water glasses.

Betty Boop.
Mickey Mouse in black and white.
Cherry ices.
The Good Humor truck singing its invitation into summer air.

Red light, green light.
Stoop ball.
Punch ball.
Rain darkening the red bricks.

The first storm I ever felt entered my body like electricity.

Even then I knew:

I was only visiting this planet.

Children understand the endlessness of sky and water.

They know eternity before anyone teaches them fear.

I wrote poems about fishermen
though I had never seen the sea.

I drew women in straw hats
though I did not know their country.

Charlie Chan solved mysteries for me.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced on clouds.

I wanted to be carried into an exotic world of pink and purple fields.

I wanted—

just once—

to be a child again.

Divine knowledge is self-knowledge.

And self-knowledge lives in the body of the little girl.

It took me a lifetime to find her again.

Because first I had to survive the world that tried to bury her.

I crawled through a mother’s madness.
Through a family’s silence.
Through a culture that taught me to fear my body, distrust my instincts, and apologize for the heat in my soul.

I had to become sick enough.
Broken enough.
Lonely enough.
Desperate enough.

To stop performing goodness in exchange for love.

My Madwoman did not arrive as revelation.

She rose howling.

Through grief.
Through illness.
Through shadow.
Through art.
Through the animal need to tell the truth.

I did not find her in the light.

I found her in the underworld—

buried in my bones—

waiting for me to come home.

There was a time I wanted to disappear completely.

To be nothing to no one.

To cry my blood-tears without interruption.
Without interpretation.
Without instruction to forgive.
Without instruction to move on.
Without instruction to be strong.

I wanted silence wide enough to hold my grief.

Do you understand?

I am a wounded soul.

Not metaphorically.
Not poetically.

A wounded soul.

There was a time I wanted my wound to flood the world.

To crash against mountains.
To pour down waterfalls.
To drown the silence that surrounded me.

Because I had been

beaten by silence
raped by expectation
kicked by indifference
burned by betrayal
alienated from my own body
exiled from belonging

Until all that remained was

a perfect smile
painted skin
and a skeleton where a girl once lived

A wounded child does not walk upright.

She drags herself forward.

She hides in closets.
She digs her nails into the desert just to keep moving.

Her mouth dries.
Her eyes dry.
Her skin cracks under survival.

She does not know where she is going.

She only knows she cannot stay where she has been.

So she searches for caves.

Forests.

Jungles.

Any place where her grief can exist without explanation.

But something unexpected lives inside a wounded soul.

Something that refuses extinction.

Instinct.
Voice.
Memory.
Fire.

Slowly—

without permission—

my wound began to speak.

Through dreams.
Through illness.
Through rage.
Through art.

The blood I once wanted to pour across the world

became ink.

The scream I thought would destroy me

became language.

The exile I believed would end me

became a doorway.

Recovery did not arrive in peace.

Recovery arrived as courage.

Courage to stay in my body.
Courage to feel what I survived.
Courage to name what had no language.

Courage to believe a wounded soul could still live.

I am still a wounded soul.

But now I understand something I did not understand before.

The wound was never trying to destroy me.

It was trying to return me to myself.

And the blood I once wanted to drown the world with

became the river that carried me home.

To survive my house, I left my body.

I traveled into visions.
Into imagination.
Into invisible worlds that could hold me when the visible one could not.

Outside our walls, we looked perfect.

Inside them, a war was happening.

So I learned to disappear.

And then—

through art
through story
through feeling

I learned to return.

Transformation is not enlightenment.

It is recovery.

Recovery of instinct.
Recovery of voice.
Recovery of the body that never stopped telling the truth.

Most people believe awareness changes them.

It does not.

Feeling changes them.
Expression changes them.
Truth changes them.

Our emotional beliefs live in our organs.

In our cells.

In our DNA.

Family history breathes through the nervous system

until we feel it
until we name it
until we transform it

This is the work of the Madwoman.

She eats her wounds

until they become medicine.

So write.

Dance.

Howl.

Tell the story buried in your bones.

No one else can name your myth.

Your story did not begin in the Garden.

It began in the womb of the universe.

And it is still being written

inside your body

right now.

What is this letter, Marta?
What is this letter?

I was five.

I clung to my Tiny Tears doll. She peed and cried real tears when you filled her head with water. She was the only doll that was alive. The only one who cried like me. The only one who wet herself when she was afraid.

AAA.

What is this letter?

My father and I stood in an Asian-decorated living room. Tasseled lamps. Black lacquered end tables. Lazy sun rays softening the green carpet. I dug my toes into the thick weave for security. Tiny rested in my arms. Her soft, pliable body kept me anchored to the earth.

I remember standing like a soldier.

Was I wearing pajamas? Shorts and a frilly shirt? A dress?
Was my hair in a ponytail? Pigtails? Wild around my face?

Was it morning or afternoon?

I only remember this:

I was shaken. Confused. Trying to please him.

Why was my daddy yelling at me to repeat letters on a piece of cardboard? I couldn’t get it right.

He held up the card again.

“A.”

His green eyes glared. His thick hands clutched the cardboard like a weapon. His nose—flat, punchy, handsome—breathed hard with impatience, like a bull ready to charge.

“A,” he said louder.

The A’s came out of his mouth like bullets.

The sapphire-pink ring his father gave him caught my eye. A diamond in its center glittered like a faraway star. Its light pierced my heart. A tiny flame rose in me—rage I was not allowed to express. Rage that belonged to my mother. Rage that lived in our house like weather.

There was my father beating the A into my brain.

There was my mother beating her fury into my bones.

I hated this letter.

The ring moved with his pinky—up, down, around. I loved that ring. A warrior ring. A lineage ring. A ring passed from father to son to father again. Sometimes I would sneak into his bedroom when he removed it to shave. I’d slip it onto my finger. It was far too big, but I held it there anyway.

Inside the blue sapphire I felt warm. Protected. Claimed.

My father carried my ancestors on his pinky.

“Marta! What is this letter?”

I squirmed.

“C?”

Storming, huffing, he grabbed Tiny Tears and threw her out the open window.

And something inside me followed her.

“I read today that all addiction is a form of misplaced worship.
I get that. And I’ve certainly done that.
I’ve mistaken the delivery device of heavenly pleasure for heaven itself.
And thus I have worshipped so many things— and so many people, too.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, All the Way to the River

Addiction and co-dependency are air without oxygen.

They begin here.

The moment you learn that who you are is wrong.

Addiction is the temporary fix—food, drugs, sex, work, pleasing, performing—anything that freezes the pain of not belonging inside your own skin.

Co-dependency is the empty oxygen tank we keep breathing from:

people-pleasing
blame
shame
control
avoidance
withholding
fantasy
manipulation
denial

We believe love will come if we just try harder.

We believe someone will hand us back the doll.

We believe someone will say the letter differently.

But these patterns are inherited languages. Passed down like rings. Like rage. Like silence.

Generations teaching us the alphabet of survival.

The list goes on and on.

So how do we stop the cycle?

We begin by learning a new letter.

Not A for ache.
Not A for approval.
Not A for addiction.

But A for alive. 🌿

And we speak it in our own voice for the very first time.

Co-dependency is not weakness.
It is devotion gone feral.
It is love that forgot its own name.

Before she learned to speak, the child learned to listen.

She listened for footsteps in the hallway.
For the weather inside her mother’s face.
For the silence after a slammed door.
For the invisible rule that said:

Be good, and you will be loved.
Disappear, and you will be safe.
Fix them, and you will survive.

So, she became nervous with her legs.

She became radar.
She became apologetic.
She became anticipatory.
She became the bridge that no one thanked her for building.

And they called her caring.
They called her generous.
They called her strong.

No one saw her for what she painfully needed---a soft, warm body to curl into like a cocoon

That would make her co-dependent

The Madwoman knows this secret:

Co-dependence is the body remembering a contract it never signed.

It is the child standing guard at the door of chaos.
It is the daughter translating rage into responsibility.
It is the woman confusing intimacy with rescue.

She learns early:

If I hold everyone together
No one will leave.

If I understand everyone
Someone will understand me.

If I sacrifice enough
I will finally belong.

But belonging built on self-abandonment is a haunted house.

You can live there.
You cannot breathe there.

She stopped drawing big red monsters

And bright green fingers

She stopped slurping her soup

And she started to cry- she cried too much

Stop, they screamed. You cry too much

Inside the co-dependent woman lives a holy hunger.

She does not want control.
She wants safety.

She does not want admiration.
She wants recognition.

She does not want to fix others.
She wants someone to finally say:

You can rest now.

Instead, she becomes the Compassionate Witness for everyone else
and forgets she deserves one too.

She becomes the altar.
She becomes the offering.
She becomes the priestess who never leaves the temple.

Until her body revolts.

Until fatigue becomes prophecy.
Until anxiety becomes language.
Until illness became a boundary, she never learned how to speak.

The body always tells the truth first. 🔥

So she gets sick.

A spastic colon at ten

Diabetes

High blood pressure

Anxiety that grew, pumps, and sores in her skin

Nightmares of Nazi’s, gangsters, zombies

She prays, the escapists’ prayer,’

the one that didn’t seem to get answered at fiv

e

her small hands to her chest

knees to chest

head hidden in despair

The escapist prayer—
The prayer meant
to make it all stop—

was answered
eventually,

at least
for a while.

But before that answer,
there was silence.

The silence was evidence.

No one was listening.
No one was coming.
Nothing was turning toward me.

So later,
When she prayed again

The prayer sounded the same—

born of fear,
born of desperation,
born of the child’s fantasy

that something
someone
somewhere

would make everything bad
disappear.

Even in prayer
She was leaving herself

Even in prayer

She was fleeing the body.

Feeding the shadow
instead of letting it feed her.

They say prayer does not require belief—
only the willingness
to suspend disbelief.

But prayer requires intention.

And her intention
was an escape.

So they returned to her to

shame.

More distance.
More silence inside the bones.

The old addiction-trauma spiral
turning again,

like an echo from childhood—

Save me.

Take me elsewhere.

Make me disappear.

SAVE ME! Please save me

Until THE PRAYER IS NO LONGER

HER ESCAPE

BUT THE DOORWAY INTO HER BODY

Co-dependency lives in the nervous system.

In the tightening jaw.
In the smiling when she wants to scream.
In the instinct to explain herself before anyone asks.

It lives in the sentence:

I’m sorry.

before she even knew what she did wrong.

It lives in the miracle and the tragedy of her empathy.

Because the Madwoman does not just hear feelings.

She inhabits them.

She walks into other people’s storms
and calls it home.

So, she stops feeling her own sadness

She laughs when she is afraid

Hides when she’s heartbroken

Then she awakens- to the real imposter syndrome

It is not wanting to be someone else

It is knowing that she is enough with

all her cracks, flaws, and hanging limbs

One day, something shifts.

Not loudly.

Not heroically.

Quietly.

She notices she is tired of rescuing people who never asked to be saved.

She notices her kindness has edges.

She notices her silence has a pulse.

She notices a voice rising from her belly saying:

What about me?

This is the beginning of the return.

Not to independence.
Not to be separated.
But to embodiment.

Because the Madwoman does not stop loving.

She stops disappearing.

She starts to paint bold faces, with turquoise eyes and black lips

Once upon a time, awakens- her fairytale, night stars whispering her name

A hand stroking her head, tapping her lips, and kissing her forehead calms her fear

Her story is rewritten in her body, her past lives, back to the Garden

Healing co-dependency is not learning how to say no.

It is learning how to feel yes inside your own body.

It is letting grief move through the places where loyalty once lived.

It is mourning the fantasy that if you were good enough
Someone would finally choose you first.

It is discovering:

You were never meant to earn love.

You were born worthy of it.

Before the warriors, the demons, before words were ever written

The Madwoman rises when she understands:

Her sensitivity was never the problem.
Her devotion was never a mistake.
Her longing was never too much.

She was simply trained
to give her life away
before she learned how to live inside it.

Now she breathes differently.

Now she waits before answering.
Now she listens to her stomach instead of their expectations.
Now she lets people carry their own weather.

And the world calls this selfish.

The Madwoman calls it sacred.

Because the moment she stops abandoning herself
the lineage shifts.

The daughters feel it.
The mothers feel it.
Even the grandmothers who never had permission to rest feel it.

Something ancient loosens.

Something unnamed returns home. ✨

The dancing scarves fly around her feet

Fire and light awaken her fire and soul

Her belly fills with sun juice, moon rock, and songs

The ancestors did their job without her knowing

She is home

My dad was the first man I loved. He was a man of his history and time…. sexist, macho, controlling, obsessed with the American dream, but also spiritual, funny, creative, and loved to talk about UFOs, which he swore he saw while on an airplane.

We shared the experience one summer day in Maine, when I was ten, on the lawn of a hotel in the mountains. Setting sun, up in the sky, it wasn’t a bird or a plane, it was a floating, round lightning object. It hovered above us for a moment, then shot up into the cosmos. We glanced at each other in shock… and never talked about it.

The many thousands of things we never talked about.

He died when I was twenty-four. Two weeks before he died, he apologized for what he did to me. I never asked, “What do you think you did to me?”

Still, at that time, filled with anger and resentment toward my father, the apology fell like a dead fish in my belly

Years later, my husband and I visited the small town of Casadaga, Florida, where psychics and healers live and work. I walked into one of the houses, and a woman with long black hair and dark eyes ran towards me and said, “Your father wants me to tell you he will know you have forgiven him when you do what I never allowed you to do.”

The deep father wound lives in my heart and teaches me how to love myself every day

Literature, movies, books by women such as Frida Kahlo, Virginia O’Keeffe, Anaïs Nin, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and many more were my ancestral trees that grew my roots into my soul.

Before psychiatry named her, before husbands locked her away, before doctors diagnosed her wandering womb, the Madwoman already existed.

She was the woman who felt too much.
Saw too much.
Refused to stay small enough to survive inside the architecture of obedience.

They called her hysterical.
They called her dangerous.
They called her unmanageable.

But what if she were never sick?

What if she were awake?

What do Bertha Mason, Edna Pontellier, Esther Greenwood, and Britney Spears have in common? Only one has a fourteen-times platinum record—but all of them crossed the invisible boundary where a woman stops performing acceptability and begins telling the truth with her body.

And that is where culture panics.

For centuries, female madness has not been an illness. It has been a diagnosis placed upon women whose inner reality contradicts social expectations. The “madwoman” is not simply unstable—she is unbearable to systems that require silence.

What has never been? What is wrong with her?

The question has always been
What did she see that others could not tolerate?

The Wandering Womb and the Wandering Woman

The ancient Greeks believed hysteria came from a uterus drifting through the body like a ghost animal.

Imagine that.

A body part refusing containment.
A feminine center refusing its assigned location.

Hysteria eventually became shorthand for everything men could not categorize, control, or cure in women: grief, desire, refusal, rage, exhaustion, sexual autonomy, spiritual vision, depression, rebellion.

Even as recently as 1980, hysteria still appeared in psychiatric manuals.

For centuries, a woman could be perfectly healthy and still declared ill if she did not behave correctly.

If she spoke too loudly,
wanted too much
or left the script.

The diagnosis was never about pathology.

It was about obedience.

The Woman in the Wallpaper

r

“I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief!”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not write fiction.

She wrote a testimony.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, a woman is prescribed rest. Silence. Stillness. Confinement. She is forbidden to write. Forbidden to move. Forbidden to think beyond the limits her physician-husband sets for her recovery.

So she begins to see another woman trapped behind the wallpaper.

Of course she does.

Because when the body is imprisoned, imagination becomes the escape tunnel.

The creeping woman in the wallpaper is not madness.

She is the narrator’s double.
Her shadow.
Her buried voice.
Her refusal to disappear.

By the time she crawls across the floor, something sacred has already happened:

she has stopped asking permission to exist.

Gilman herself underwent similar treatment after childbirth. She wrote this story not as a metaphor, but as a protest.

And it worked.

The Madwoman had spoken.

The Woman in the Attic

Before Jane Eyre arrived at Thornfield Hall, Bertha Mason was already there.

Locked upstairs.

Hidden.

Erased.

Bertha is the original literary Madwoman—the blueprint for what happens to women who cannot be contained within polite femininity. She burns the house. Interrupts the wedding. Refuses invisibility.

And so she must be called monstrous.

But what if Bertha is not the villain?

What if she is the truth Rochester buried?

What if she is the colonial wife displaced, racialized, silenced, exiled, and then renamed insane so her story could disappear?

Jean Rhys understood this when she rewrote Bertha’s life in Wide Sargasso Sea. Suddenly the attic door opened.

Suddenly we saw the violence required to create a “madwoman.”

Bertha was never mad.

She was imprisoned.

The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea

Edna Pontellier did something unforgivable.

She wanted a life that did not revolve around motherhood.

She wanted erotic freedom. Spatial freedom. Psychological freedom. A room not defined by duty.

So society called her unstable.

In The Awakening, Edna withdraws—not because she is broken—but because she is awakening to the impossibility of surviving inside a life she did not choose.

When Robert leaves her, when her husband pathologizes her independence, when her children are removed from her orbit, the world closes around her like a tightening cage.

So she walks into the Gulf of Mexico.

Not as a surrender.

As a refusal.

If she cannot live freely, she will not live falsely.

Her death is not madness.

It is an indictment.

The Woman Under the Bell Jar

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell.”

Esther Greenwood cannot breathe inside the future offered to her.

Marriage.
Children.
Compliance.
Smile politely.

Meanwhile she carries grief, sexual trauma, ambition, intelligence, hunger.

The Bell Jar is not simply a story about depression.

It is a story about suffocation.

Esther’s treatment—electroshock therapy, institutionalization, male psychiatric authority—reflects a world unable to tolerate a young woman who refuses its script.

Even Sylvia Plath herself was dismissed as overwrought when she published the novel.

Weeks later, she was dead.

Sometimes the Madwoman is not destroyed by her illness.

She is destroyed by disbelief.

The Pop Star in the Conservatorship

And then there is Britney Spears.

Not fictional.

Not Victorian.

Not symbolic.

Real.

A girl who became a global spectacle before she became an adult. Hypersexualized, surveilled, exhausted, commodified—then declared unstable when her nervous system finally broke under pressure no human body could survive.

Her punishment?

Legal containment.

A father controlling her body, money, reproduction, and movement for over a decade.

Hysteria has simply changed its costume.

The attic became a courtroom.
The wallpaper became a contract.
The asylum became a conservatorship.

But the pattern remained the same.

An “unmanageable” woman must be contained.

The Madwoman Is Not the Problem

Across two hundred years of literature and lived experience, the same story repeats:

When a woman cannot survive inside the structure she has been given, she is renamed the structure’s failure.

Hysterical.
Depressed.
Erratic.
Neurotic.
Toxic.

But the Madwoman is not broken.

She is the nervous system refusing captivity.
The imagination refuses anesthesia.
The body refuses obedience.

She is the signal.

And she is returning.

Today, women are still medicated for grief.
Still dismissed for intuition.
Still punished for desire.
Still pathologized for leaving roles that erase them.

But something has shifted.

Women are reading these stories differently now.

We recognize Bertha.
We recognize Esther.
We recognize Edna.
We recognize the woman behind the wallpaper.

Because she lives in us.

And she is no longer willing to stay upstairs.

If Madwoman storytelling and art calls to you as a path of healing and change please share and sign up for more more and more thank you

🔥

I came into the room tired.