the spiral path 1
relationship patterns, trauma, embodied expression, and new absurd timelines
A memory recently returned to me, of being a very little girl and drawing a huge spiral on the wall behind my bed in blue crayon. It started very small, and circled around the center dozens of times.
I remember the act of drawing it being hypnotic. It felt like magic. Like I was conjuring a portal. An opening, a path into a new reality.
I remember getting in trouble for drawing on the wall and later scrubbing it off with a sponge.
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I walk the Spiral Path. There are many different ways of explaining this. It is a philosophy, a practice, a story to believe in, a map to move on.
To me, it is the path of rhythm, repetition, cycles. We move through life and touch on the same themes, the same circumstances, the same events, the same wounds, until we recognize the unconscious patterns that are running the show, learn how to change our behaviors, and enter a new reality.
If we are lucky enough to recognize the unconscious patterns, and wake up.
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I have been working through the unconscious patterns of how I relate to men. Only a year ago I was willing to stay in a very unhappy, mutually abusive, and toxic relationship with my partner of 6 years, despite him hiding inappropriate relations with his life coach from me.
It wasn’t even the soft-core sexting that bothered me (it was actually rather juvenile and embarrassing to see). It was the lying.
Yet, up until the end of a very slow & painful 4-month break-up, I was begging him, on hands and knees, not to leave.
Despite knowing it was for the best for us both.
But this pattern was older than my lifetime.
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Our bodies have been stuck in some unconscious loops for generations. Scarcity. Fear. Survival. Trauma. War. Violence. Fight, flight, freeze. Passed down through epigenetics. I surely feel my grandparents’ unprocessed grief, without question.
When we inherit trauma, we inherit memory, as it lives in the body. The body IS the subconscious.
Like how a butterfly will still remember being a caterpillar, even after dissolving into a primordial goo. My grandmother’s experiences live in my body. My mother grew in her. And I grew in her. We were all once the primordial goo inside of another being, inside a womb, a cocoon, a cluster of cells, coagulated membranes, molecular stuff, stardust, if you will. Waiting to be born.
Waiting to evolve.
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My father was abandoned in a few different ways. I know my grandfather lost his mother when he was very young. Abandonment is a reality in most lineages.
My father also threatened to leave a lot. I grew up with the constant threat of my parents getting a divorce. It wrecked my nervous system as a young child.
And when my relationship with my ex mirrored that pattern, the threat of constant abandonment - only I was the one making that threat - I thought it was just me repeating the pattern of my parents.
But I often think about how most women didn’t even have the choice of independence up until recent history.
The fear of being alone was in my bones. It was ancient, primordial.
It was so deep that it kept me circling around the same layers of the spiral as my parents, and their parents, and their parents, I’m sure.
Codependency, fear, survival.
And ultimately, self-abandonment.
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We can learn how to move unconscious patterns and inherited traumas through our bodies by expressing our emotions and making them into art.
The tensions, the illness, the disease are often made of blocked emotions.
So we learn how to express the emotions.
We learn how to make art with them
Which is also making love to them.
Artists often tell the same stories over and over again. Directors too, will consciously or unconsciously make the same movie over and over again, with different actors and titles and settings, etc. Each time, descending a layer deeper into the meaning.
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When my ex finally left, I experienced the most catastrophic breakup of my life, aside from what it would have felt like if my parents ever divorced. They didn’t.
I was able to see the pattern through. The abandonment.
But I had the gift of knowing how to lean into expression.
I would fall to the floor multiple times a day, every time the grief of losing my partner, my best friend, my bandmate.
I would touch the center of the abandonment wound in my body with my breath, my voice, my movements.
I would writhe. I would wail. I would pound my fists on the floor. Scream into pillows. I felt how primal it was. How ancient.
And I would write.
And a song would come through.
And when I sang, the melody would touch the insides of me, the raw parts, the wounded parts, like a healing salve.
And a new pathway opened before me.
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Let’s be clear - there is no such thing as being healed, completely.
We heal in layers. When we heal one pattern, a new spiral initiates, one of new unconscious patterns. And we begin again. And again.
We are here to bring the unconscious into the conscious.
We will never run out of unconscious material to process.
It’s a spiral.
And it often gets more weird, absurd, strange, the deeper we go.
We can open portals into new realities.
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I just saw the documentary Lynch/Oz which talked all about how The Wizard of Oz is so deeply embedded in our collective psyche that countless films follow/mirror/mimic the storyline.
This is a story of the girl who enters a portal into a new reality, gets lost, slides into a slipstream, a different timeline, a encounters double, doppelgängers, shadow & mirror worlds. Will either kill or be killed. When all she wants is to get back home. If she’s lucky, she wakes up from the dream, balance is restored, lessons learned. Like Dorothy, like Alice.
This is not always the case. There is always a potential for losing it completely. There is always the taunt of madness. Like Laura of Twin Peaks.
I don’t think there’s anything I ever wanted more as a little girl than to be Dorothy.
As I rewatched the film last night on a video call with my best friend, I noticed how the portal opens: a spiral, a tornado.
“Follow the Yellow Brick Road” also begins with Dorothy, tip-toeing around the center of a spiral in her sparkling ruby red shoes, which unfolds into the path that will lead all the way to the Emerald City.
I think this is true for Alice, too. When she falls into the rabbit hole.
She spirals.
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After my breakup, I found myself in a new timeline, a fantasy world, a surreal landscape which felt like a funhouse of mirrors - wherein I dated three men of the same name, at the same time.
One had my birthday. And the other two had eerie synchronicities in our astrology chart. It felt like the stars turned on their mics and were narrating this new act in my life.
Mars was speaking. The voice of the masculine. Gemini too, the twins. Mars was actually retrograde in Gemini during these 7 months, a rare astrological occurrence.
Each of these men reflected something to me about myself that I couldn’t have seen on my own. It felt like one big cosmic joke. Like the universe was winking at me.
They were my doppelgängers. My Others.
And they, too, initiated me into a new layer of the spiral through the portal of my body.
Where there was more pain, more grief, and so much more love, waiting for me.