Buried Treasure

by William R.Morrow, D.Min.,LMFT . Email to:wmorrowmft@embarqmail.com

I recently had to clear out some outdated files of people I saw years ago. Proper protocol suggests

putting them (the files, not the people!) through the shredding machine, to keep confidentiality intact, and

consign all those old stories to the black hole of the universe, where passé information is sent. Probably,

by now, most of those people have forgotten what they had fretted or complained about that long ago

anyway. To keep the finely shredded papers moving in the right direction, I decided to dump them in my

backyard compost pile. Red wiggler worms in the vermiculture love to digest these old stories, as a primitive form of  “reading”. Somehow, it seemed appropriate to recycle all those life stories back into the dust they had been created out of, and put the phosphorous-rich shreds to good gardening use. What had been secrets and sad tales now were on their way to a proper burial, where they could do some good eventually next to the roots of my heliconias.

My professional contact with those struggling folks was a brief time in their lives of relationships. I

think they were unknowingly on safari, searching for themselves. The way I see it, everybody in life is on a journey, seeking and searching to discover the lost continent of the real and pristine self. Christopher Columbus didn’t know what he was going to find, but he knew two things for sure, that he was searching, and that he was on a great journey of some kind. For all of us, self-acceptance of the rough edges of our souls is the goal of the journey.

But, meanwhile, along the way, relationships become a diversion. The search gets delayed, and

becomes tied up in the pursuit of finding someone out there who will affirm us, accept us. It’s like we

budding human beings need the O.K. stamp-of-approval to validate us. But it never quite happens,

because even the greatest human relationship of love can never hope to produce this salvation, this inner self-affirmation that is, when you come right down to it, more like a spiritual experience than some kind of relationship success. This is not a lecture against having relationships, but, hey, let’s get them in perspective.

In a way, having a marriage is only incidental to having a life. I am a bad tour guide if I only work to help with the success of the relationship itself. Since it takes two whole people to have a whole

relationship, I believe it is my job, as tour guide, also to point out a few things along the individual route they each are taking. And, to some of those relationship-desperate people, I would like to say, “Get a

life!”

As the guardian of all those buried tales of old endings and new beginnings, blending of families, and sad relationship failures, I have to think seriously about what has happened to the sojourners I have met in my office. How did the story turn out? I don’t often get to hear the ending. I was just one stopover on their road to somewhere. I’m honored that they consulted me along the way, in their searches for happier solutions to their conflicts, in their searches to find some meaning in their losses, or as they looked to understand and be understood by their partners.

I assume that each one was on that awesome journey. And that each one ended up in a better place than did my files on them.

This was revised from a chapter in my book, “The Rain Doesn’t Fall Straight Down”, which is free for download on my webpage, www.WillimRMorrow.com

Are You Breathing Right?

by William R.Morrow, D.Min.,LMFT . Email to:wmorrowmft@embarqmail.com

I try hard to follow instructions, so when I went in for a medical check up, I marched through the routine obediently. After a few preliminaries, the doctor donned his stethoscope, and said, “Take a few deep breaths” while he listened to my lungs. I guess I passed that hurdle without any heavy breathing in his face, because then he commanded, “Now, breathe normally!”

Although that bit of instruction seemed simple enough, I was confused, because I know that “normal” isn’t what it used to be.

My confusion was because I know the history of human breathing. It has definitely evolved from the days before anyone was really self-conscious about it. The Primitive Human Breather was basically pretty relaxed about in-and-out, unless, of course, he had to fight or flee. But aside from those stress times on the heart and lungs, our guy knew instinctively just what to do, and how to breathe.

In this modern era, we have to restore the God-given natural inspiration/expiration, and learn how to breathe properly.

What we know as the autonomic nervous system had evolved nicely from reptiles to upright mammals. The more oxygen required for the bigger brains of the human types, meant the more our heart/lung function had to work efficiently 

I recently added a new chapter in my understanding of how we breathe from Dr. Louis Damis, a health psychologist, who helps people with headache pain. He presented his findings at a weekend conference of the Florida Society of Clinical Hypnosis.

According to him, many of the pain problems of the upper body are a result of improper breathing. The upper body is connected to the brain by the vagal nerve system. And poor breathing is systemically connected to poor heart function. This can add up to trouble, especially for people who have been subject to excessive stress.

But fortunately Clinical Hypnosis, as a health profession, is geared to restoring healthy breathing through teaching relaxation. Relaxation is already an essential part of hypnosis, (along with inner focus and suggestion). Pain relief is a result of relaxation.

So, if the goal is to promote relaxed breathing, then we have to learn what that looks and feels like. Here’s the spoiler: in the bluster of 21^st century life, WE DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BREATHE CORRECTLY. What I used to think was normal breathing was actually chest breathing. The greater stress of everyday living has trained us into this maladaptive mode for getting oxygen and staying loose and relaxed.

The human body was not designed for continual chest breathing. In order to deal with pain, and the anxiety often connected with it, we have to train ourselves in STOMACH BREATHING or diaphragmatic breathing.

Stomach breathing is associated with the calming effect of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The PNS is essentially the relaxation response of the general nervous system. Proper breathing actually turns on the PNS. But people have to learn this, I should say RELEARN this, since, way back, we once came by it naturally.

The treatment for many upper body pains is learning and practicing diaphragmatic or stomach breathing, employing the diaphragm muscle and the stomach. Follow this link for step-by-step instructions.

http://tinyurl.com/U-Breathe

You can practice this for use in pain problem situations as well as other anxiety effects on the body. After daily practice sessions, of ten repetitions each of the deep breathing, your ongoing regular breath can eventually become more of a stomach breath.  Who knows, you may evolve into the way we were originally meant to breathe. It is easiest to practice lying down on your back.

“OLD PICTURE COULD BE KEY TO MOTHER’S MISSING YEARS”

A work of fiction, which tells an important truth.

“Who was your mother before she was married?” asked the bureaucratic form I had to fill out. The question threw me.

 To be honest, I didn’t have a mother before she was married and I was born. My life with my mother didn’t begin before she gave birth to me, yet incredibly she had a life of her own all those earlier years. I only know her from our shared life on this planet

It all started from the “baby book”, in which everyone (I’m thinking the whole world!) was amazed at my first  hesitant steps and first words( “bring me a pad and pencil”). It went on, as I now remember, from one glorious/scary phase of my life to another, like the unraveling of a ball of yarn rolling downhill.

But, and here’s the intriguing mostly blank prologue, what was her own life like before I came along? I only get this second hand. And it is doubtful my last remaining older relatives are telling me everything they know.

Left to my own devices, I would create a heroic story to fill in some of the gaps in the family narrative. It would be a piece of historical fiction, part true, part embellished, but satisfying my taste for the dramatic: As we all might think, she was no ordinary mother, and I no ordinary child. Fears and flaws linked up in a loving way.

The grief period following my mother’s death (Dad had died 12 years before) was made mundane by the gruesome task of settling her estate and clearing out her things from the apartment. There were scads of her treasures and trash which had accumulated over the years. knick-knacks of dubious value, books and pictures At first I thought the clothing would be the hardest part to deal with, but when I found the old shoe box in the back of the closet, I was in for a surprise.

There it was, partially hidden behind a box of Christmas ornaments, on one of the dusty shelves next to the ancient movie projector. “Grace Ample’s Shoe Emporium” was the colorful label on the shoe box, but with that dusty rose ribbon tied around it, I just  knew it wouldn’t contain shoes.

When I opened the box, I discovered a few old snapshots, mostly discolored by time, and beginning to fade. Nervously, I lifted the snapshots to the light of the bedroom window. These were pictures of my mother I had never seen before! One old black and white deckle- edged Kodak was obviously a much younger version of my mother dressed in dowdy acrobat’s tights, and standing next to an elephant. On the back it simply said “Mason City, Iowa, July 1920”. The other snapshot of interest was a smiling woman, proudly holding an infant child right up next to her own face. Scrawled familiarly on the back of it was simply, “Our precious gift”.

Although I knew she had had several miscarriages, I didn’t know if the baby in the picture was me or not until I read the entry from the journal page that was lodged underneath the pictures: “Until William was born”, my mother had written, “I could never find myself. I never had the courage to later tell him how I ran away with the circus at 17, looking for something-I- didn’t-know-what. I guess I just made up some things about those ‘missing years’ to protect him from my mixed-up past. It is a wonder that I didn’t get into more trouble before I met his father. He was the stable one and told me we were going to get married and settle down. I just trusted him.

“ When I sustained the pregnancy, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. As a young new mother, my life took on real meaning. I finally understood how God sends us children to enlarge our hearts, because mine was wonderfully swelled with love when he was born. Because of everything that happened later, I was just never good at showing him this love, but it was there all the time, whether he ever felt it or not.”

I framed the elephant picture, and keep it around where I can still see it out of the corner of my eye. 

There are three take-aways from this story: 1. The best mystery stories are about mothers. 2.All writers are egocentric 3. Motherlove is usually underestimated.