She’s not exactly sure what’s causing the anxiety that hit a few weeks ago, but she finally has come up with one way she can deal with it.
Write. But not just any kind of writing. She’s got to write very, very slowly reaching deep into her body for feelings and sensations, letting them bubble up in whatever form -- sketches and scribbles -- that they happen to appear on her journal pages. Like yesterday, when she found herself cupping her open palms on either side of her neck. Then she caressed her breasts by resting them in the inside crease of her elbows.
What emerged from this writing surprised her. She wrote as though she was being nursed by her mother.
In other journal entries, she writes about feelings in her belly, her arms and thighs and hands.
Mary says this body-centered writing is teaching Claudia to comfort herself. Which is a good thing, except sometimes the writing takes her to very strange places she isn’t expecting to go. Yesterday she wrote:
“Count breaths. Count veins and capillaries. Be happy. Feather your fingertips up and down your thighs. Let warmish blood swell and rise and wash into arms and fingertips. Smell the sweat in your armpits. Linger in lower blood pressure, let your legs go limp. Let your lips sag and feel yourself drooling.”
One journal page was devoted to the words written in giant letters: “BE IN GOD.” The next page read: “BE NOW.” And “FEEL PRESENCE NOW.” The word GOD appears between the letters, as do the words ART and TOUCH!
At that point, she needed a break. She closed her journal and got up from the meditation bench. She needed fresh air so she put on her white cotton summer bathrobe. She picked up Poco and carried her outside. Together she and the dog – God spelled backwards -- walked through the sunny yard, smelling the grass and the flowers and listening to the birds.
When she came back into the house, she wrote one more page in her journal: “Don’t be SCARED, BE SACRED!” She made note of the fact that her initials, CR, sit right in the center of the word sacred. “CR BE SACRED!” she concluded.
All this writing makes her feel like she’s melting. She thinks about Leah so many months ago, walking around the yard in February in her pale blue bathrobe, tramping through the snow. Leah – who was frozen – has given way to Claudia, who is anything but frozen. She is spilling over every which way, melting with words, with sensations, and sometimes with tears. The anxiety can be so incredibly painful.
Claudia wrote to Peg a week ago and asked her, “Do you think God in My Body Writing is connected to the book, Angels Keep Whispering in My Ears?” Peg said she was pretty certain that there’s a connection.
It doesn’t hurt to explore that connection, Peg says. Claudia agrees. Her challenge, though, is to make sure that every time she gets scared she will flip the word into SACRED!
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