Nothing happens by chance and yet somehow, I still find myself thinking ‘if only I had done…..’. But then I’m reminded of the card that fell out of a drawer for no reason the other day, when doing an early spring clean, which said as if divinely offered, ’what if nothing is wrong’. What if I could truly believe that everything was just perfect even all the shocks and nightmares that have taken place in my life, especially these last fifteen years or so? What if to reach the diamond that we all are, it is necessary to smash and drill to get beyond the crusts and debris that is blocking the brilliance of who we really are? Sometimes gentle, kind routes do not wake us up, sometimes we do need a lorry to hit us head on, as agonising as this can feel at the time. Becoming a spiritual warrior is a courageous and treacherous path and it’s easy to fall back into feeling victimised or punished. After all this is how our culture is set up, it’s our default as well. But what if it was brutal grace? What if the universe really did have our back? Do we stop enough to consider this, do we look deeply at the end of the year to honour the alchemy and divine blessings that have really taken place? And do we recognise that whilst the ego is looking for comfort, the soul is looking to evolve and grow, that we need to look at what has happened with ‘real eyes’, to call it instead soul esteem?
I’m going to share just one small story to do with one my own dogs and it’s because my daughter is currently being challenged with behavioural problems with a dog she rescued a dog from Portugal recently. She is currently very stressed trying to navigate how to go to work and leave him, since he is completely attached to her and totally traumatised, ripping up things and howling when she isn’t in close vicinity. It’s because we have been talking these last days about how nothing happens by chance and it’s dropped me to think about the beautiful young dog I had to give back to the breeders, as a result of his aggression and the dog fights that kept on traumatising me over and over. I’ve learnt so much from all the dogs I’ve had in my life who have been my greatest teachers and dearest companions, I could write a book but this is just about dear little Joffie, who I named after Jophiel the archangel (he is the black puppy in the photo). This is what he taught me in the short time we were together. I learnt from experience and from dog trainers, that all dogs are wild animals and mostly we humans live in illusion around this, not recognising that they can turn in an instant for a variety of reasons. In my case, my little dog was attacked by a rescue dog and from that moment he became a killer and his mother joined in, since I also learnt that dogs act in tribes. Two is a tribe. I learnt that people lie and withhold to serve their agenda even if they know it's wrong. I kept learning this. I had been adapted and brainwashed to mistrust myself and defer to outside authority and I lived my life with blind faith without any discernment. In this case, the breeders lied to cover up that Glenn of Imaal Terriers were bred as fighting dogs and the boys in particular should not be left of the lead, since they will attack any small mammals. My dogs tried to attack badgers, small wild boar, squirrels and dogs yet they denied the rumours I heard early on from people who decided not to buy my male puppies and then subsequently denied any responsibility, when I experienced the trauma of repeated dog fights mostly started by my own dogs (mother and son). I learnt that I was not the only ‘ignorant’ owner who lived in illusion about this and who didn’t have strong, healthy boundaries. I walked around the cliff one day in Devon and watched a similar story to my own, where suddenly a small terrier took it upon himself to chase about 30 sheep towards the cliff edge. It was a horrifying sight happening in a flash, where the owners had absolutely no control as their dog was in automatic and instinctual mode. Luckily the sheep didn’t go over but it was not as a result of anything the owners did to get him back and afterwards I heard them talking about how strange it was since their dog had never done anything like this before. I realised I wasn’t alone, mostly we bring up babies and dogs without any understanding of how to do it, we learn on the job and then project our own dysfunctional behaviours onto them, children and animals alike. I was not alone in this even if I felt intolerable guilt. I learnt that even though I had given so much to one particular friend, spending hours of my time in supporting her through a divorce, giving her skills to get through that I wish I had known, that when it came to me asking for some help on the day I gave Joffie away, since she lived en route to the breeder, she was not prepared to defer seeing her boyfriend for one night. I learnt there and then, how I was over-giving and that I desperately needed to receive at times, to choose wisely what friends I had in my life and even more importantly, to look at the reasons for my over-giving. I learnt that muzzles can come off especially in a dog fight and that a collar is essential. Here in Italy too many dog owners leave their dogs out in the countryside and in Dolceacqua with New Age owners, loose without a collar and like I was, they act entitled, absolutely sure that their dogs will do no harm. When Joffie was in a fight with a bulldog who suddenly appeared and his muzzle came off, there was no way to restrain him without a collar such that the owner of the bulldog got badly bitten, trying to separate the dogs as I couldn’t let go of my other terrier who would have joined in the fight. I have finally learnt that I didn’t fail and that I wasn’t bad and un-redeemable. As a perfectionist, I suffered horrendous guilt and shame but in truth I now see that I did my absolute best. I paid for dog trainers, I tried to manage by taking only one dog at a time for a walk, by thinking positively but in truth the fear got the better of me. Dog fights or vicious fights with badgers literally traumatised me each time. I didn’t have a nervous system that could manage it, for reasons that I simply didn’t know back then. I didn’t know that I wasn’t in my body, that I had a dis-regulated nervous system with no buffers to serious stress and shock. I learnt that other people can do what I cannot do, that I truly don’t have to be superwoman every time. I learnt that sometimes I have to surrender and let go, I cannot get it right with everyone and everything. This situation was beyond me. I have finally seen that the level of my anguish in losing Joffie, was not just because he was a beloved dog that I watched being birthed into this world and that we chose to keep. It was because I lost my son at age 12 who went to live with his father post our separation and never got to finish taking care of him through to his university years. That still guts me when I write the words, tears welling up and spilling over like the floods we had some years ago that wiped out my dry stone walls. I also learnt that Joffie triggered an even deeper core wound, of not getting to be born with my beloved twin Graham who died in utero, feeling split in two and with a deep ache in my heart, always missing my other half. I learnt that I don’t do well with loss because of severe abandonment issues, that come not just from the mother wound in this life but passed down through inter-generational trauma as well. Joffie was just a catalyst, something to show me all these things such that I've learnt to be kinder and more self compassionate. I learnt as a result of the serious dog fight in my village where one man had to go to hospital with stitches and I was badly bruised and cut, that I didn’t recognise when I was in trauma because of a life long pattern with disassociation. I learnt how I would self abandon and in this case have sex with my partner only one night later, when I was out of my body and deeply traumatised and needing just holding and tender loving care. He had offered me this but I learnt something even more horrifying about one of my engrained patterns. I learnt that the Aphrodite character, this self in me who was born very early on in my life, would come out and offer sex in all situations regardless, since her job was to get love by offering sexual favours. I didn’t know that I had rights to being cared for without sex, I was so habituated to prostituting myself in this way for reasons of my own abuse but also as women, culturally we have to challenge this constantly in ourselves. I learned that having sex when I was traumatised and not embodied, looking down on this much older man, shot me straight back to the original abuse and sent me into a repeat re-enactment which was absolutely horrific. I learnt after a month of intense therapy to get me through this period, just how I had self abandoned and betrayed myself all my life and in particular with regard to having any needs. I learnt a little more how love and abuse were twisted and intertwined. Who knows what would have happened if little Joffie hadn’t been in my life. It was a shattering period with so much drama and ironically I so nearly chose his sister. But Joffie is who I chose, who we all chose. Undoubtedly the universe would have brought me other incidents to help me wake up out of my anaesthetisation but as I look at it today with the benefit of hindsight, I realise how beauty and the beast go together. Joffie was adorable and he was a killer, this was passed to him in psychic dna, something we humans should be ashamed of. The light cannot exist without the dark and I for one have learnt the most by being forced kicking and screaming into the dark night’s of the soul, feeling out of control and powerless, only to find the treasures that exist in this place of en-darkenment. I have learnt that everything is energy, here to help us return to love . It’s time that I stop giving my power to the victim patterns and take radical responsibility to honour all the brutal grace that I’ve experienced in my life. And in the words of Robert Ohotto recently, to shift from the Shadow Victim and move to the Mystic Victim, to see that the alchemy that takes place, is not about the lead or the gold in itself, not about seeking this black or white solution, this pathology to fix everything, but about how in facing the truth and looking at reality head on, we are forged and changed in ways we could never have envisioned. We become resilient survivors for all we have endured and we see how adverse situations really have served us well. We come home to the heart and shared humanity with acceptance of it all. Bless you dear little Joffie.
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