February 22, 2004
Hola
Hola means "hi there" in Spanish, and it's what you say in the Yucatan when you pass a Mayan on the trail. I'm back simply spilling over with information, misinformation and commentary.
Here's the overview. It rained from Saturday, when I arrived, until Wednesday. That never happens on the Mexican Riviera. Rather than bitching about it, (thank you, Esther Hicks, channeling Abraham ), I prefer to think that the weather allowed our group to coalese, huddled together inside, instead of disbursing onto the endless beach with the endless waves. I never laughed so much, but I am not tan, and I have neither photographed nor personally sucked energy from any Mayan temples - we will have to rely on the vast resources of the net for that. I did get a taste for working with "my parts" which will no doubt be reflected here from time to time.
I went to Mexico to be trained in something called Internal Family Systems . Let me see if I can do a little in vivo using the IFS Model that I almost learned. Maybe you can do it yourself, if you order the spiral bound book on the website. Maybe it would be better to find someone that knows how to do it, and pay them to teach you. That was not an ad, since I have hardly left "the trailhead", (an oft used metaphor for finding a "part of yourself" that cries for deeper exploration).
We all have "parts", not to worry, and they are multiplicitious, and infinite, like a fractal . Here's a great Richard Schwartz line. (He's the modest and kindly creater of this stuff) "To which vegetable is psychotherapy often compared ? An onion, (if you didn't know) because of all of its layers. IFS is more analogous to a head of garlic, many individual cloves, each with layers." So here goes.
Many of my parts are very happy to be home, especially my "manager" parts. Manager parts are there to control the world, so that the frightened, hurt little parts of self, known fondly as "exiles", never have to experience being frightened, hurt and little again.
For example, there are many parts of me who think that my hair is my true self. (Didn't I promise to get in touch with my demon hair parts before I went?) My managers try very hard to keep them happy (when an exile isn't happy, ain't nobody happy) and the hairdryer is one of the managers' main tools in this endeavor.
I asked those manager parts of myself to "step aside". I did not use my hairdryer once on this trip. It was fine. I let the saltwater have it's way. It was fine. My "firefighters", those parts of self that come in to protect the exiles from feeling all the awful feelings, after the world has done it's dirty deed, were quite calm too. They might have acted out in the moment, like firefighers will, by overdosing on hair products, or cutting off my head --- you know, something that is usually not helpful in the long run, but they didn't. Now all I have to do is bring "self" (read life force energy, spirit, higher self) to those exiled parts of me that think my hair is all of who I am. I shall try to do just that in the near future.
Frankly, my managers cannot wait to feel the heft of the hairdryer in the palm of their hand, and to hear the familiar whir --all the sensations of getting a great coif -- temporarily pumping up those little demon hair exiles. The real cure will not come until the little ones truly know that their hair is not them, and they are not their hair alone. I thought this week of abstinence would do it, but it will clearly take some time. Never rush an exile.
Posted by Dakota at February 22, 2004 07:39 AM