RETRIEVED FROM DRAFTS: WHAT DID HELEN'S INTUITIVE MEMORY REMEMBER?

During the summer, several posts published had been devoted to Helen Keller, who, having lost her sight and hearing to grave illness at the age of two, felt inspired at the age of seven by Anne Sullivan's positive attitude to enthusiastically soak in everything that her mind, as thirsty as a sponge, could 'touch', so eager was this child to experience the miracles that life has to offer, and here am I, a woman named Annie, who has spent the past two and half years utterly mesmerized by everything Ravi's bright young mind naturally absorbs from one week to the next, suggesting that before the age of three, Ravi's mental awareness and sweetly inquisitive nature have actively recorded a wealth of sights, sounds and emotional reactions so as to have stimulated our sunshine child's memory to parrot back more of our words, attitudes, facial expressions, body language and behaviors (positive and negative) than we, who make up her doting family, can believe as each of us marvels at the charming (classic) nature of this small child's innate ability to fill the mental capacity of her processor with everything she sees and hears and has begun to comprehend as has been shown by her verbal voice tones, responsive facial expressions and reactive body language, all of which mirror ours just as had proved true for Helen before fate had severed her connection to sight and hearing, daughting her personal sense of safety for five years until Annie's persistent yet gentle guidance took Helen's hand within her own, reconnecting this desperately lonely child with the heartfelt delights of life and love and personal safety, all of which had been traumatically lost once her sight and hearing had been tragically severed from her processor leaving her to experience a world limited by fear and frustration, feeling all alone—though her family was always nearby.  And though separated from sight and hearing, thank goodness Helen's active processor had not been severed from early experiential memory and intuitive imagination ...

Has your intuitive perceptiveness begun to catch my drift?
Under Ann’s tutelage, Helen was able to retrieve memories of life independent of her present world, which had inexplicably changed from sunny and safe to dark and lonely once daily life had transformed into the silent endless night that had engulfed her every waking hour for five years until her memory of waterspilledfrom her hand into her conscious mind—and from that amazing moment of spiritual grace a child's starved and deeply tormented spirit and mind, which had languished in a tomb with only confusion for company, turned the corner whereby Helen’s years of mental starvation was fed bite-sized portions of knowledge by Ann, and as their heartfelt connection deepened Helen's resourceful sense of personal safety reclaimed her lost sense of existential self worth, which upon growing ever more mindfully peaceful, swept fear of failure aside in favor of freeing her intuitive imagination to be off and running, eagerly grasping the names of everything inside the house, then outside, naming everything that made up the landscape and ultimately, Helen’s courageous soul made its way through the world, where the incandescent endeavors of 'the power of one' inspired people of all ages and walks of life to seek the key to their lost sense of existential worthiness, as well.

Below, let's consider several photos (not arranged in order) of Ravi's imaginative mind recording snapshots of family life between the ages of one and two.  In addition to having absorbed 'the rules' of playing hide and seek before turning two, Ravi had begun to exhibit her heart's delight, early on, by hugging, kissing and tickling her adoring family as much as we adore hugging, kissing and tickling her.  In one year's time, this bright, lovable child, whose intuitive intelligence has been readily absorbing a fledgling awareness of need to tether human nature’s natural demonstrations of frustration by asking for help, has openly and freely chosen to activate her membership in our family's mutual admiration society.

Papa's 74th birthday

D

Ravi fearlessly wandering onto center stage before a city-wide performance of Billy Elliot begins

Vacationing on the west coast with her adoring extended family

Adventuring through the pumpkin patch

Celebrating Passover at Gramma Annie's house

Halloween—The Cradle Rock'in Band

Just toddl'in about the house, septre held high

Christmas Joy at Nani's house

Celebrating Independence Day with Mickey

Pondering upon how best to dance her way through life

Swinging up to the stars on the wings of love

Climbing onto the princess throne for her first princess haircut

That lasso is getting mighty close to the 'horsey' resting on the floor

Enjoying breakfast with Papa after a sleep over is lots of fun for everyone!

Princess Elsa wishes Papa a very Happy 75th Birthday!

Ain't life grand before one's free spirited, childlike

(Not to be mistaken for childish) imagination has been

Locked within a box and the key to figuring out

How best to think out of the box has not yet been found?

Imagine my smile sparkling each time I hear

Ravi's gently guided, effervescent enthusiastic approach to life exclaim:

I can help you!  or  Can I have a turn, peez!  or  I can do that, myself!

And now, having compared Ravi’s earliest ‘memories’ of family life with much of what had been true for Helen before fate had harshly challenged her spirit’s fledgling connection to personal safety to change from fearlessly light and sunny to starkly dark, silent and confoundedly scary until the teacher (guidance counselor, friend or therapist) appeared, we come to see that t'was heartfelt love intertwined with Ann's positively focused attitude that had kindly and persistently guided Helen’s natural sense of insight-driven intuitive energy to fuel her youthful spirit’s existential quest to retrieve positive memories stored ever so deeply within the fearless portion of her innately-intelligent-perennially-eager-to-absorb-knowledge mind just as is possible for every child, who having grown to adulthood, can also retrieve a fearlessly independent sense of personal safety regardless of having experienced sound reason to have felt terrified by fate, early on.

October, 2017
Sometimes a subconscious sense of anxious dread is based in the fact that a child had been fated to experience debilitating illness or the death of a loved one, early on.  Sometimes terror is exacerbated by failing to please an authority figure, whom a child idolizes, whose choice of words, facial expressions and body language casts negatively focused judgments as furiously as my Grandma had believed God had cast a lightening bolt directly at our family when Janet failed to awaken from her nap, and suddenly the safe haven of a sweet three year old child, named Annie, turned as dark and silent as a black cat, walking under a ladder at midnight—except for those moments when agonized arguments, fueled by undeserved guilt, let loose arrows of blame, which zinged through tension, so thick as to  deprive my heart and brain of oxygen—creating a world class peace keeper, who'd feared nothing more than rocking boats until she, having been properly diagnosed with PTSD, reclaimed her existential freedom to free her intuitive voice by engaging in sessions of EMDR therapy, which offered up the set of missing keys that had, one by one, unlocked a series of interrelated subterranean cells, freeing all sides of me to breathe so freely as to become wholly, existentially ME, at long last  ...  and with so much discussion of sexual abuse in the air, I can't help but wonder which missing key might be dangling just beyond my conscious reach, right now ...

And tis good to know that even with that personally cofounding thought in mind, I feel at peace with the fact that this post had not been published, last summer when originally penned, because the paragraph penned above is brand new, clarifying this fact:  This is the first time that thoughts of sexual abuse have not stimulated my anxiety to spike—smiting my inner strengths with undeserved guilt—and this change for the better makes me wonder if my intuitive intelligence had a hand in setting this post in drafts until such time as my brain felt clear of muddled emotion so as to review insights, which had begun to emerge around the time of Jeremy's passing, offering my subconscious memory reason to review the very first, gravely sad time that I'd experienced a confounded sense of emotional turbulence in the aftermath of Janet's death when I, having lost sight of my self worth, could no longer hear my assertive voice attempting to speak aloud, because the original key to unlocking deeply buried secrets that I'd kept from myself could not be retrieved until this student's intuitive readiness sought out the teacher, whose knowledgable, patient guidance and love appeared, just like magic, several years back—and hopefully, this post and those to follow, which will also be retrieved from drafts, may lead my inner sense of wholeness toward inviting you to enjoy the magic carpet ride that will open our hearts and minds to absorbing early adult experiences, which had been mine in the distant past, and as you shall see—when undeserved guilt makes a child fear that survival depends upon swallowing one's assertive voice, subconscious need to quest toward retrieving the key to free one's fearless independent spirit awaits intuitive readiness ... forever.    

  

FIRST GAME—FIRST GOAL!

SIX YEAR OLD RAY'S VERY FIRST SOCCER GAME AND GUESS WHO SCORED A GOAL!

Our little star, wearing yellow with green sleeves ... explains the game (during the game) to Barry

LOL!

1467NN MORE ABOUT THE STRING OF INSIGHTS PUBLISHED YESTERDAY

Monday, October 23, 2017
Once creativity served to regulate the font of yesterday’s post, additional insights emerged that the logical portion of your processor may find as intriguing to consider as did mine.

BTW:  Are you aware of the fact that mental stress feels exacerbated whenever the dynamic duo of logical intelligence and emotional (intuitive) intelligence are at odds for dominance inside our brains?  At times when deeply complex dilemmas demand the release of a buildup of inner pressure that’s when thinking creatively out of the box comes into play, because marrying that dynamic dueling duo serves to brighten our solution-seeking prowess, significantly.

No one said subscribing to personal growth is easy
If personal growth, regarding calming
Mixed messages that drive our processors crazy, was
Easy to embrace, we’d just do it and
The world would be an idyllic place where
Contrasting ideologies would exist peaceably
Side by side; however that pretty picture cannot be
Realized so long as both sides of human nature reside within
Every brain, which has need to embrace the greater good that
Thinking out of the box invokes each time a narrow mindset, defying
Every person’s on-going need for personal growth, remains
Blindly stuck to defensive attitudes, which subscribe to:
Take it or leave it; it’s my one way street or the open highway for you ...
And voila, today’s stream of consciousness has just simplified
The complex nature of the primary power struggle that serves to
Tear at least half of our love relationships apart, because
Creating a harmonic sense of change for the better requires
Willingness on the part of both people to muster the courage and
Humility to place both defense systems in time out in favor of
Embracing each other’s need for personal growth in hopes that
With positive focus intact, a relationship that had once felt so
Magnetic as to have enriched two lives with the potential to
Inspire one another’s love for each other to grow into
A many splendored thing will figure out how to sustain
It’s heartfelt strength, and now that my insight-driven power of
Intuition has clearly stated my position, perhaps
Your intuitive powers will choose to scroll back to see how
A font, which had remained stubbornly unruly, absorbed
A peaceful cadence once my sense of intuitive logic chose to take
A leap of faith out of the box in hopes of employing creativity to resolve
A problem that normal channels of thought had refused to repair

1467N WHAT CATALYZED THIS STRING OF INSIGHTS TO EMERGE, TODAY?

This post was retrieved from those left in drafts during the weeks preceding Jeremy’s passing.

Solitude, being one of my brain's best friends, has

Recently had reason to offer my processor downtime to
Dive so deep into my mind as to stimulate my intuitive powers to
Emerge with this next string of insight-laden thoughts intact ...

August, 2017

Over these past several weeks, several distraught members of our extended family have been phoning, daily, to vent, and knowing each one to be in need of compassionate trains of thought, eventually, my spirit felt sluggish from lugging around a painful sense of heaviness as though knots, tied around my heart, were severely constricting the free flow of oxygenated blood that energizes my brain to function at its optimum, and with those insights in mind, my memory unleashed visions of my experience with Takotsubo, stimulating these words to fly out of my mouth:  Oh no!  It's happening, again!  My pattern of empathetic sensitivity has been absorbing my loved ones' pain as if it is my own—suggesting my need to consciously unhinge each reactive eruptive episode of PTSD from igniting my subconscious fear of being unworthy of love unless my processor is healing the ills of the world!

So, first and foremost, I charge myself with not believing that my processor can heal the pain that my loved ones’ defensive attitudes defensive attitudes have been flinging back and forth at each other for decades in the same way that I, at the age of three, was unable to stop my grandmother's defensive processor from flinging insults at my precious mother each time my mother did not respond with subservience to her mother's dominating attitude as in:  You'd better agree with everything I believe and say and do or you’re against me, through and through—accept my opinions as facts or be cast out of my heart.

Across the spectrum, there are many ways to love.  Loving, as described above, exists at the loving-poorly end of the spectrum.  In another post, I'll describe the entire spectrum from loving poorly to loving purely (one end being heavily populated, the other not so much).

Over my lifetime, I’ve made an art of mediating between warring relatives in hopes of reconciling that which all too often proved to be irreconcilable differences.  And here’s why I never felt like a meddler:  Invariably both sides invited my objective perspective, which, more often than not, calmed both minds until the next time that one dynamic duo or another challenged each other to set foot on the warpath, again, and you can believe me when I say that heart piercing arrows, flying back and forth, had naught to do with cupid's quiver  ...

Though today's insights are not new to me, here is why I felt need to review each one:   I stand before you clearly declaring myself free and innocent of undeserved (survivor's) guilt, straight into my core!

You see, I've come to realize that retiring The Fixer depends upon freeing my think tank from feeling sucked back into yesteryear’s anxious bouts of patterned hyper vigilance, regarding peacekeeping for this reason:  If my hyper vigilant pattern of empathetically absorbing the pain of others does not change for the better, I'll never experience inner peace for very long, because I'm one of those people who love people, and life is such that at least one of my peeps will be laboring through unresolved pain at any given time.  And now here it comes—the intuitive insight that's been attempting to emerge from subconscious storage ever since the conscious portion of my brain awakened this morning:

*Ever since I'd witnessed terrifying arguments between my mother and her mother concerning blame, during the traumatic weeks following Janet’s unexpected death, I've unwittingly felt personally responsible for mending torn relationships before they succumb to a sudden, terrifying demise, as has true of so many of the couples whose weddings Will and I stood up for, who are now divorced!

*Suddenly, I come to see that over most of my life, my heart constricts with fear each time fate offers my adult intuitive powers a sense of deeply repressed memories of anger arising to haunt my well being anew, as though reviving a three year child's failure to heal her severely depressed mother's heart-piercing pain each time my grandma's mean-minded, power-struggling, tongue lashings disrespectfully whipped her grief struck daughter's dispirited lack of self respect to a pulp while my dad was at work ...  and just imagine my confusion when a temporary truce dictated an icy cease fire throughout our electrified apartment right before Dad's key unlocked the front door, and my emotional safe haven gathered me into the safekeeping of his embrace  ... 

No wonder why I can't read the newspaper or watch cruelty reported on the news.  No wonder why I cringe at the ringtone of the phone (unless caller ID reveals the caller to be Will or one of our kids):  All I need to hear is a downcast tone of voice in need of a sympathetic ear, and my entire being feels stimulated anew to commit myself to saving the world from enduring an unending sense of heart piercing pain before the voice on the line even has time to convey:  Annie, I have a problem in need of your empathetic and yet objective ear ... and the fact that I facilitate classes in family communications, suggests that lots of those SOS ASAP calls seek me out at home, which wouldn't have been true had I'd earned an advanced degree in psychotherapy, because an imperative portion of my training would have required me to set boundaries around my sensitivity to empathy—of which I had set none.

Over these past twenty-four years (beginning when I walked into a classroom where fate offered me a confounding, impassioned experience, which offered my intuitive powers sound reason to get to work dismantling my many-layered wall of denial), I've been puzzling my way through the fact that love and brutality, cruelty and all forms of human misery prove to be defensively intertwined, and the harshness of that reality served to ignite my self-empowered short fuse to light the wick that inflamed my mind, body and spirit with subconscious frustration, which has fueled my passion to understand the true nature of relationships that had, over time, shockingly burned out my spirit so that, finding myself utterly devoid of energy, nothing about life served to inject my conscious awareness with even one drop of joy!  All I could do was stare at the wall wondering at the non-stop flood of unshed tears that wet my cheeks, because I'd not yet learned that depression (professionally defined as anger turned inward) had stolen my appetite for nourishment of any kind, and in the absence of joy, twenty pounds fell off my flesh in a matter of weeks—causing my sons to fear that I was hiding something to shield them from pain, and the only something that they could think of was cancer—and they weren't far off the mark, because deeply repressed anger is as harmful to a person’s mental health as a malignant carcinoma in need of total extraction ...

Ooof! As you can see, I certainly had my work cut out for me so—thank goodness my processor was practiced at employing my Line of Control while my intuitive powers worked day and night to name the traumatic source of my hyper-vigilant empathetic reactions, based in eruptions of PTSD, so as to create a rebalanced, healthy sense of compassion each time the pain of others called me to the phone, and though it took years to peel the onion before the latest layers in my wall of denial came down, all the time devoted to freeing the tsunami-sized waves of emotional pain (which had knocked my spirit as flat as a pin pops a balloon filled with hot air) was worth it, and that was most especially true when Will’s cancer surgery loomed overhead, and my conscious mind could not function with anything close to clarity, at all.

For those of you who are new to my blog, the story of my grandma's war of wills with my mother and my bout with PTSD during Will's cancer scare have already been written and posted.  So if you're intrigued about a little girl, who'd lost her assertive voice at the age of three, suggesting why she blocked all memory of the sexual abuse that began several years later, followed by being bullied by a gang of mean-minded boys ... may I suggest that you think of my blog as a saga and scroll back to review my posts from the beginning, as though reading an autobiographical novel.  You see, I chose to write this blog for several reasons:
People I love begged me to reveal insight-laden lessons that changed my life for the better
Most people can't afford the amount of therapy that I've chosen to engage in
I'm a teacher, who loves people, and what I learn, I care to share

Thank goodness, I know my brain is up to today's task of consciously differentiating the pain of others from my own as soon as the misery of a loved one seeks my ear ...

I'm sure you'll agree with my rebalanced sense of clarity when I state that my growing ability to offer a compassionate ear will be all good and well once my lifelong pattern of absorbing the pain of others as my own has had time to change for the better.  And now, on that positively focused note, tis time to pull today's train of thought into a rest station where my think tank plans to relax—unless the phone rings—Uh—hold the phone, please, because common sense is suggesting that I concentrate my energy on my choice to relax, so let's delete every word written after 'unless'  ...

PS ... Have I mentioned that this post identified the series of events that catalyzed my dread of answering the phone?  Here's a hint:
IF I'M NOT WORTHY OF LOVE THEN I MAY BE NEXT IN LINE TO BE LEFT BEHIND!

PSS

Though I’ve clicked on ‘select all’ in hopes of regulating the size of the font, so far, this post remains stubbornly rebellious beyond my brain’s computer savvy.  Not to worry.  Once my positively focused connection to creativity comes up with a proactive plan, this unruliness will be a thing of the past.

PSSS
Ahhh!  Problem solved!  How?  By thinking out of the box, I copied this post to a blank file, clicked on select all, clicked on normal size font, and copied that corrected version to a new post, after which I deleted the post that had proved beyond my control.  Amazing what a difference, concerning change for the better, a few clicks out of the box can make!

AN ESSENTIAL STRING OF INSIGHTS

As one string of insights ignites another to process through our minds, you may choose to scroll back to review yesterday’s post, because, upon awakening this morning, yet another string of insights, essential to maintaining peace of mind, was added to that stream of conscious thought ...

RECOVERED FROM DRAFTS: PRIVACY IS A MYSTERIOUS THING

If you think I post every thought, belief, feeling or
Memory that comes to mind, please think again, because
Your right to privacy is also mine ...

Even if I’d wanted to divulge my every belief or
Fleeting emotion, I could not for two reasons:
My every waking hour would be consumed with
Writing rather than embracing my youthful sense of
Investigative adventure, and secondly
My defense system refuses to clarify everything that
My subconscious 'knows' is true of me to me!
Seriously, if I say:  I feel this way, today
And then change my tune, tomorrow
That's not hypocrisy speaking with forked tongue
That’s actually my processor’s way of alerting me to
Remain fully aware of my need to give voice to
The complex nature of the human condition, which harbors
One inner conflict after another throughout
All four stages of every person’s life, which is why tis wise to
Identify, work through and resolve each conflict as it arises so
As not to overwhelm my aging processor with mental confusion that
Tends to become ever more anxiously combustible once we grow old
And with thoughts of continuing to carve out my very own
Existential path until my body has exhaled its very last
Life sustaining breath do I consciously choose to grow ever more
Attentive to my intuitive powers guiding my intelligence toward
Calming my defensive reactions in hopes of listening attentively
When a mindful sense of insight-laden readiness shines
It’s spotlight on my heartfelt need to resolve
A long standing, inner conflict while my heart, mind and
Spirit remain wholly (thus soulfully) intertwined on
This side of the grass ... Swoosh!  Aha!
Did you feel whose spirit just winged down from on high?
‘Twas Eleanor ... [not Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), who, having
Grown up to be Queen consort of France (1137–1152) and
England (1154–1189) and Duchess of Aquitaine in
Her own right, led her armies into battle] but
Eleanor Of Washington D.C., who stated (and I paraphrase):
We must do that which we’d thought ourselves incapable of doing.

If you can do or say, today, that which you’d felt incapable of
Doing or saying at an earlier time then your conscious awareness
Concerning every person’s on-going need to embrace personal growth has
Inspired your intelligence to develop the readiness to
Venture courageously forth into unexplored territory now that
Childhood’s most fearsome experience no longer wields
The subconscious power to arouse spikes of yesteryear’s anxiety, based in
Undeserved guilt, which had forbidden your heartfelt spirit from
Freely (thus soulfully) respecting your brain’s innate ability to
Intuitively express existential unmet needs that your defense system had
Denied as your own until your intelligence had reason to grow so
Calmly attentive to details as to patiently conjoin flashes of
Intuitive insight, spotlighting one deeper truth after another so as to
One day, comprehend the significance of this bigger picture:
With freedom comes responsibility to carefully reconsider
The welfare of every person involved as flashes of insight reveal
That every person includes you and me, and if a lasting sense of
Inner peace is to be yours and mine then keeping that deeper truth in
The forefront of our minds is essential every time life offers us
Sound reason to respectfully honor our heartfelt existential need for privacy ...

N. WITH SO MANY WAYS TO OFFER LOVE, LET’S ...

My first thought was to post two poems penned years before I’d ever considered writing a blog, both being odes to enriching our lives by loving each other wholly and purely rather than defensively and guiltily due to feeling deeply conflicted; however my first thought is not always my best thought, so rather than publishing one of those poems, today and the other, tomorrow, stimulating my processor’s productivity center to consider need to deepen my absorption of strings of insights penned more than a decade ago, here is how that plan has changed for the better:

Rather than posting those poems at this time, stimulating my processor to swing away from relaxation toward productivity before a re-energized sense of mental readiness is mine, I’ve decided to publish the rest of the posts, which had accumulated in drafts toward the end of the summer in the aftermath of my brother-in-law’s death, and in this way, my proactively productive processor will procure the down time necessary to refuel my brain’s primary source of energy, more commonly referred to as my existential spirit.

In relation to my current state of mental weariness, you may have noticed that I’ve chosen to relate nothing about what’s taken place in my life over these past few challenging days whence certain experiences felt mentally exhilarating while others felt emotionally draining not to be confused with debilitating, because, over all, peace of mind, concerning my current connection to personal safety, continues to feel intact, suggesting that while certain events catalyzed my memory to unpack another one of yesteryear’s self-conceived misperceptions (which had once caused my self worth to feel squeezed between a rock and a hard place), I’m aware of undergoing a growth spurt, during which my conscious awareness is realizing a self confident gain while my defense system is not experiencing even a hint of an anxious eruption of unidentified and thus unresolved subconscious pain ... Hooray!

And here's why that's reason for spiritual celebration:  Though personal events stimulated yesteryear's files to fly open within my subconscious, suggesting that scary memories are lumbering around inside my head, none are empowered to catalyze anxiety to strike down my adult self confidence, at all!

I know those scary memories are lurking near the surface, because my frontal lobe feels a sense of dour heaviness, suggesting subconscious processing is taking place right now as I pen this post; however, this week’s obvious leap of faith suggests that an inter-related set of memories, which had once overwhelmed my adult sense of personal safety, are presently advancing through a natural state of mental reprocessing that will convey my sense of wholeness to a better place once my brain's filtering system senses intuitive readiness powering up to release that matched set of related memories into my conscious awareness by way of a flash of insight, which, as of today, remains defensively blocked from the conscious portion of my think tank behind my subconscious wall of denial, and once that memory is released, another negatively focused, false belief about myself will be revealed, relieving today's sense of emotional maturity of lugging around another slice of self-conceived guilt, unnecessarily.  And as nothing feels as spiritually uplifting as declaring one’s innocence free of undeserved guilt, you can see why, with all of this going on, deep inside, my mental processor feels tired, and if there’s one slice of wisdom that I’ve thoroughly absorbed it is to listen to my body while trusting my brain to know what it's doing each time intuition suggests not pushing myself to work proactively at anything other than relaxing—which does not come easy to a highly productive, over-achiever such as I know myself to have become at the tender age of three!

PS
Ciao e grazie to those of you whom I believe are
Introducing my posts to family, friends and colleagues
Please note that each time I click on stats and see how
Readership in Italy continues to increase, day by day
My pleasure center sends each of you a heartfelt smile
A heartfelt smile across the miles ...