May I Be Frank?

I just discovered another impressive indie film today! It's wonderful to watch the trailer(s) on so many levels, so go ahead and do that now! Then, come back and let me tell you about my own physiological transformation experiences once mirroring the impact of parental mental illness on my own childhood!

About twenty-three years ago, I was a new client in the talk therapy game. At that time, I was embarking on the culmination of a journey that my whole life had been leading up to, since I was a very little girl. "Something" had always been wrong where I grew up in my mother's house. By the time I was age twelve, I had realized that if I wanted to survive, I was going to have to move as physically far away from my mother as I could get myself. I recognized at that point it wasn't an internal escape I expected, and time has certainly continued to show that internally is where the work must originate. What I was seeking in geographic distance was the opportunity to feel physically safe, to do the "work" that I intuitively knew I was going to have to do, in order to uncover the "something" that was always wrong in my mother's house.
Throughout life right up to the time I began talk therapy, I was not entirely certain that I was not the something that was wrong.

Suffice it to say that in the first years of my talk therapy experiences, there developed an increasing physically painful response to only talking about past history and patterns within emotional/psychological family structures. This unyielding physical pain up and down my spine resulting in continued extreme and frequent headaches, pushed me to find deep relief again. This time I found yoga and over a two-year period, worked with what I call a gifted physical guide. I transformed many things about the way subconscious responses had gradually built up life-holding patterns in the body; transformed how a digressed functioning had taken up residence. With a lot of hard work and an open willingness, I transformed the deep muscular holding that had for years impacted my skeletal alignment to the point that I held one hip forward and one rocked back and out to the point of chronic and frequent migraine headaches each month. I transformed near-sightedness and the need to wear prescription glasses to read. Transformed hearing issues that really interfered with the mind's ability to stay focused on what was being said at any one time, and instead kept the nervous system in a constant agitation. There was greater diet change, chanting, breathing exercises and meditation. There was also deep frequent tissue massage, and healing touch practices known as Breema, which I experienced as vehicular for constructing self-valuing on a cellular level, though this practice did not sustain itself in my life with right teacher/guides, as long as I needed. As for diet growing up, I was extremely under-weight until I confronted that at age thirteen with a marked common sense over a very focused and motivated thirty-day period. Without downplaying healing possibility within the human body whatsoever, all this is to say that physical transformations like Frank's are not really a miracle in the spiritual sense. However, in coming to consciously recognize what our bodies do and are capable of, on a regular basis and then cognizantly working with that, the first encounters with healing longtime, life-responses that do deposit themselves in our own physical frame and recognizing those results within our own selves on all levels_ deconstructing how they occur is mind-blowing! A set of transforming morhphological experiences of intimate proportions!

I want to say that in my own physiological experience, the tinnitus, near-sightedness and alignment all balanced out. Showing up throughout the entire frame of the body from the way my teeth closed, to how the hips, shoulders and knees all began to re-settle. Re-settle in ways natural to the earliest experiences in the body of a small child, when life was still a new experience over all! I could hear with no ringing at all, I wore no reading glasses anymore as there was no need for them, and I slept deeply and restfully again throughout the night.

Paradoxically, "May I be Frank" comes out at time when my life does again find me in need of transformation of these same proportions. Though, not for the same reasons to be sure. While it's true I did sustain the benefits I gained, and have lived now for over a decade and a half, simultaneously life has run away with my emotional ability to keep up, in the major transformation I seem to be experiencing at midlife. Yet, just like the opening lines in Frank's movie when he says, "I thought_ this is it! This is how to live life!" Unlike, Frank's mistaken association that drugs were the way, I do know the difference of deep healthy transformation in my own body. Yet simultaneously, I recognize that the last twenty-two, twenty-three years away from society, (remember needing safe space?!) away from community_ is the reason I find myself in this inner space of unbalance as I write this post.
During those years, some things about my own individual needs could not get addressed adequately. I pushed so much forward simultaneously for my daughter's benefit, during those full-time, solo parenting years. Now out from under earned exhaustion, I am looking for a courage that is reflective of renewed physiological energy deep inside the body again. Courage to get back in the saddle of life. To take a new set of paths out into the world of work and adult relationships, from inside a renewed body and frame of mind. If you can help, please let me know. As an artist and one who wishes to participate as a healer, I do need to hear from you. This is the remarkable aspect about the body; it is does begin again!

Now after reading my cameo life transformation in the body; in case you need to hear this let me recommend that you watch "May I Be Frank." Watch it for inspiration about a life full of possibility for you! This is the field of our birthright during this lifetime, each and every one. Share this film with everyone you love.