BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies. The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.

Meditation is the way to be with ourselves and to learn to accept our own aloneness. In aloneness, I experiment with being consciously alone as a door to be egoless. In conscious aloneness, the ego can not function. In aloneness, you are not. I have always been comfortable with my own aloneness as an inner source of love, joy, truth, silence and wholeness. When we depend on other people, it becomes a bondage - instead of a freedom. I took this sunday as a meditation to be consciously alone, and to accept all feelings of pain, of not being loved and the fear of being nobody that would come up during the meditation. This meditation goes up and down during the day: at certain moments, I can totally accept my aloneness. It feels fine to accept that I am alone and that I am nobody. At other moments, I feel the pain of not being loved, when the meditation brings up how dependence on other people is a barrier to totally accept my aloneness. I take a coffee at a restaurant. I am the only person that sits alone in the restaurant, while the other guests are couples and families eating sunday dinner. It brings up painful feelings of not being loved and wanting to be needed by other people, when I see how much people cling to each other in the couples and the families. Escaping your aloneness through relationships and needing other people's attention through being a teacher, a politician or by being rich or famous, are ways of escaping the pain of aloneness. But then the relationships are not really love. Only when you are capable of being alone, you can really love. When we can be alone, we discover the inner source of love, which is our true nature. When we can be alone, it open the door to be one with the Whole.

The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it."The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go on again and finish the story."Is that all?" asked Aglaya."All? Yes," said the prince, emerging from a momentary reverie."And why did you tell us this?""Oh, I happened to recall it, that's all! It fitted into the conversation—""You probably wish to deduce, prince," said Alexandra, "that moments of time cannot be reckoned by money value, and that sometimes five minutes are worth priceless treasures. All this is very praiseworthy; but may I ask about this friend of yours, who told you the terrible experience of his life? He was reprieved, you say; in other words, they did restore to him that 'eternity of days.' What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes?""Oh no, he didn't! I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute.""Very well, then there's an experiment, and the thing is proved; one cannot live and count each moment; say what you like, but one cannot." "That is true," said the prince, "I have thought so myself. And yet, why shouldn't one do it?""You think, then, that you could live more wisely than other people?" said Aglaya."I have had that idea.""And you have it still?""Yes — I have it still," the prince replied.

I believe the perception of what people think about DID is I might be crazy, unstable, and low functioning. After my diagnosis, I took a risk by sharing my story with a few friends. It was quite upsetting to lose a long term relationship with a friend because she could not accept my diagnosis. But it spurred me to take action. I wanted people to be informed that anyone can have DID and achieve highly functioning lives. I was successful in a career, I was married with children, and very active in numerous activities. I was highly functioning because I could dissociate the trauma from my life through my alters. Essentially, I survived because of DID. That's not to say I didn't fall down along the way. There were long term therapy visits, and plenty of hospitalizations for depression, medication adjustments, and suicide attempts. After a year, it became evident I was truly a patient with the diagnosis of DID from my therapist and psychiatrist. I had two choices. First, I could accept it and make choices about how I was going to deal with it. My therapist told me when faced with DID, a patient can learn to live with the live with the alters and make them part of one's life. Or, perhaps, the patient would like to have the alters integrate into one person, the host, so there are no more alters. Everyone is different.The patient and the therapist need to decide which is best for the patient. Secondly, the other choice was to resist having alters all together and be miserable, stuck in an existence that would continue to be crippling. Most people with DID are cognizant something is not right with themselves even if they are not properly diagnosed. My therapist was trustworthy, honest, and compassionate. Never for a moment did I believe she would steer me in the wrong direction. With her help and guidance, I chose to learn and understand my disorder. It was a turning point.

deathAloneness has been my constant companion in life. I lost early the people that I loved: first when my young and unmarried biological mother had to leave me because of outer circumstances. I was adopted by a very loving couple, who could not concieve a child. I have always felt naturally loved by them, and I have never really felt that I was adopted. Instead, I have always felt that I did a little detour to be able to be adopted by my real parents. Then my mother died when I was 15 years old after a long sickness. On her funeral I took the decision to never depend on anybody again. Her death created such a deep pain in me that it was also the death of relationships for me. Then my father died when I was 21 years old – and I was completely alone in the world. This created a basic feeling of being alone and unloved in me, it created early a feeling of independence and self-suffiency in me. It also created a basic feeling of not trusting that I am alright as I am, and of not trusting that life takes care of me. This created such a pain in me that I simply repressed the pain for many years in order to survive. These early meetings with death also created a thirst in me to discover a quality, an inner awareness, that death could not take away. Now I can see that these early painful experiences are a blessing in disguise. It liberated me from relationships. I relate with people, but there is always an aloneness within me. I realize that a seeker of truth needs to accept that he is totally alone. It is not possible to lean on other people like crutches. When we totally accept our aloneness, it becomes a source of love, joy, truth, silence, meditation and wholeness. I shared these experiences with a beloved friend and her thoughtful comment was: “I have my own aloneness.” Aloneness is to be at home in ourselves, to be in contact with our inner source of love, while loneliness is to hanker for other people, to hanker for a source of love outside of ourselves. Aloneness is to come home.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light.While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.