Paula Houseman's Blog, page 3
November 1, 2015
Going Down. Are You Doing It Regularly?
Mostly, though, ‘down’ gets short shrift.
Up and Down Are Not in Opposition
With our leaning towards one part of a pairing over and above the other part, ‘up’ gets a thumbs up. Add to this Western society’s upward-looking spiritual orientation, and I learned to fear down. But I also learned you can’t get to the bottom of something by looking up.
Even so, going down meant visiting the lizard brain and the immoral, uncivilised parts of the psyche (soul). It was a damned dark and scary experience … until I came across these eye-opening words from author and activist, Parker Palmer:
‘I had always imagined God to be in the same general direction as everything else that I valued: up … I had to be forced underground before I could understand that the way to God is not up but down.’
‘If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going,’ Said Winston Churchill. Why?
If you go on regular excursions into Hell—it’s a free trip—you’d already know that a taste of Nirvana awaits you beyond the fire and brimstone. If you don’t, then getting your head around Palmer’s flipped focus might be an issue. It’s not all that controversial, though, when you consider the often-quoted words, ‘At the darkest moment comes the light.’ Or, to take it all the way back to The Creation Story, ‘Let there be light’ saw light emerging from the dark, formless earth.
Still, words might convince us of the value of going down, but words don’t console us when we’re being assailed by, well, words!
Those words and a billion+ others that have constructed and shaped our realities make up our stories. Our lives are a series of these: dramatic, romantic, tragic, comedic, ridiculous; sagas and short stories; poetic and prosaic; fact and fiction. We might not be familiar with or even aware of the very early ones—the bizarre ancient stories, but they’re still imprinted on our psyche and encoded in our DNA. When something shakes up our existence, we time-travel back through the layers of stories (think of the flashes of memories that emerge on the way down). And we can end up crash-landing in these raw, uncut ones.
Giving the Right Brain Its Due
Personally, I don’t think trying to think your way out of the badlands of psyche is all that helpful when you’re feeling insane and confused. Overthinking used to be my knee-jerk reaction. But when I’ve lost my mind, intellectualising is useless. It feeds the voices. If I ignore them or try scramble up and out, they bite me on the bum. And wrestling with them is just shadow-boxing. It weakens me, strengthens them.
Imagining takes me part of the way.
I imagine I’m just passing through this village of crazies (like a long transit stopover as a necessary evil on the way to a holiday destination).
Letting myself ‘feel down’ takes me the rest of the way.
Feeling breathes life into the starving, discarded-but-not-dead low-lifers of the psyche. Then every subsequent descent feels less unnerving and less murky. And results in less stagnancy. With more movement, as impulses and emotions become resuscitated, it’s better for our well-being.
What I’ve learned is that in looking up, we perceive our spirit. In going down, we retrieve it.
Maybe, one day, when many willingly undergo what is essentially a healing journey, Down will be the new black.
October 6, 2015
Digging up the Dirt on Happily Ever After
This blah-blah tagline that full-stops fairy tales embedded itself in the fantasy-loving part of my brain when I was a kid.
Years later, I devoured adult fairy tales—romance novels. My hippocampus hankered for that HEA ending, which, for a multitude of women was, and still is, the most gratifying denouement of a stereotypical plot line: hero overcomes evil and rescues damsel-in-distress from its clutches. And they lived happily ever after. Ahhh.
An alluring finale, yeah. Particularly for baby boomers, because most of the fairy tales fed to us when we were little had us pegged as the damsel-in-distress—the nauseatingly passive, small-waisted goody-goody.
Of course, there were some powerful female characters in the stories, viz. the fairy godmother. But she et al were supporting characters with bit parts. And as I recall, they got the short end of the stick in the looks department. The damsel, on the other hand, was fetching/comely/winsome. But it’s little wonder she ended up in distress. She was naïve and she wasn’t educated in the ways of the ancient goddesses*.
Modern woman also has some catching up to do.
Searching for the Holy Grail?
It’s only in the last fiftyish years (since the advent of second-wave feminism) that the goddesses have become unearthed. But because womankind has been estranged from them for so long it’s not surprising that a lot of us girls related more to the Snow White/Sleeping Beauty/Cinderella template.
Feminism has helped shift the focus. Womanhood is constantly being updated. And much as I’m loath to return the focus to the hero—because God knows this knight in shining armour has been the headliner for way too long and way too often—paradoxically, he needs to be exposed.
Our understanding of ‘hero’ needs an overhaul!
he·ro noun 1. a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealised for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. Idol, perfect type, paragon, martyr, megastar, deity. 2. another term for submarine sandwich.
Definition 2. doesn’t tell us anything about the sandwich, but it does convey that in the modern world, ‘hero’ has become de-personified and commercialised. And the commodified ‘hero’ comes in many forms: overhyped vitamin supplements, miracle diets, superfoods, best anti-ageing skincare products, get-rich-quick schemes, maximum fat-loss exercise workouts …
In all of these, the ‘hero’ that’s going to save us from our (perceived) not-so-ideal realities is marketed as perfect: The One. Until we learn that magic bullets aren’t permanent and that they can have negative side effects—toxic ones, even. Yet still … the hippocampus drives us to quest after another. Out there.
But what we continue to find are merely vestiges of that which constitutes the original hero.
The Ugly Truth
A good example of the archetypal hero from ancient stories and pre-dictionary days is Achilles. He possessed qualities like those of our contemporary romanticised hero, but if dictionaries were around back then, a translated definition might look something like this:
he·ro noun 1. a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealised for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. Idol, perfect type, paragon, martyr, megastar, deity. 2. ruthless brutal blowhard, unapologetic psycho.
Definition 2. would be considered complementary to Definition 1. Not a negative.
Sheroes
Today, there’s a psychological and spiritual push to find the hero within. If you think it’s inconceivable that the female psyche is imprinted with this ugly Achillean aspect to the hero, consider your knee-jerk reaction when your children were young, and were bullied at school. Ask yourself what you would’ve been capable of if your child’s life were threatened (doesn’t mean you’d act on it; you’re civilised)
So, when you feel disillusioned on your internal pilgrimage to locate the clichéd hero because base thoughts and impulses seem to be blocking you, instead, congratulate yourself! You’ve actually awakened the hero that inhabits the lizard brain. In that moment, though, you’re only seeing one side that makes up the real archetypal hero. Push through the temptation to avert your eyes and you’ll see the whole. Otherwise, the hero you keep cultivating is a cardboard cut-out. And everyone knows that no matter how reinforced it is, cardboard eventually folds.
*see next post: Women with Balls https://paulahouseman.com/woman-balls
September 23, 2015
Insanity and Other Gods & Monsters
A word is dead when it is said
Some say –
I say it just begins to live
That day.
Nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson wrote this. If eighth century BC Greek poet Homer were here today, his knee-jerk reaction to this might be, ‘Ochi! (No!). A Word is eternally alive—spoken or unspoken.’
‘Insanity’, for example, is alive and well! But it’s not just a word; it’s not just a condition ... it’s not even an it. In Homer’s day, Insanity was a ‘person’. Back then, all conditions, emotions, actions, qualities were considered the stuff of soul. The ancients respected these, brought them to life in their stories. All aspects of our humanness were given their due in personified form as gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, monsters, or a bunch of weird creatures. And all were important. Pain, Hate, Hopelessness, Revenge, Weakness were just as valued as Pleasure, Love, Hope, Forgiveness, Strength. In those days, the ugly aspects weren’t shoved into the backwoods of psyche and left to fester like rotting corpses as they have been over the centuries. But RIP? Hardly. They can erupt from the depths into open war during meditation.
A Need to Deepen Our Horizons
The Law of Attraction states that ‘what you focus on grows’. True. ‘Think Positive’ and ‘Transcend the mind’. Sound advice. So why even consider giving the dark aspects any attention at all? It’s about equal rights. All people have the same rights, even the ‘peoples’ of the psyche. Let them be heard (at least by us, safely), then they don’t have to find ways to express through other avenues: through our organ systems or through immoral behaviours. Better to own our Insanity et al than have them own us.
One way Insanity drives us is through our pursuit of perfection. The idea that we are made in the image of God has us striving for the impossible ideal, which degrades the not-so-perfectness of our dark depths. In the face of this push for purity, the many gods populating ancient mythology got bad press. Understandable. They were divine but they also displayed the worst of human traits. False gods, though? Ochi! Many facets to the human psyche = many gods.
It’s Just Child’s Play
As little children, we kind of made like the ancients. We uninhibitedly displayed soul (a hissy fit in the middle of a supermarket ... ‘Oh, she’s going through the Terrible Twos’). And everything came to life! That adored teddy bear we dragged everywhere was real. He had feelings. And nobody labelled the authors of our books certifiable—an athletic cow hurdled the moon; a dish absconded with a spoon; a teapot identified itself as a teapot and issued ‘how to use me’ instructions. Personifying things invited a connection with them. What joy we found in all of this, and frustration. Just like you find in relationships. Our ancient consciousness was plump and full. Still, acquiring strong morals was important. But when instilling morals entails eliminating the negative or shaming our base feelings and impulses, we lose soul. We stop living the deep life.
Could it be that our children wouldn’t be so afraid of the monsters under the bed if we ourselves weren’t so afraid of the ‘dark’?
Women with Balls (updated)
Once upon a time, goddesses were important. By the time our stories began with ‘Once upon a time’, goddesses had become unimportant. Womankind kinda got hidden from view as man played God, and systematically worked at guiding our mindsets into an oppositional arrangement:
Science over art
Fact over fantasy
Thinking over feeling
Reason over intuition
Light over dark ...
These are all offshoots of the primary configuration:
MASCULINE PRINCIPLE
feminine principle
And today, man is mostly still on top.
A lot has changed, but you can’t scrub out an ideology that’s been around for eons, and assumes so many clever disguises.
Even so, when all is said and done, it’s just a man-made social construct. The goddesses may have been overshadowed by this erection, and they might have disappeared from our modern narratives, but girls, take note and take heart: They did not disappear from our psyches; there’s still meat on their primitive bones; they are no shrinking violets!
Male Never Came Before Female in Mythical Reality
A case in point in the ancient stories is Gaia, the sublime, wide-bosomed earth mother who got it on with Uranus, the sky god. These two produced some very ugly children. Horrid. The Hecatoncheires were fifty-headed, one hundred-handed giants, and the Cyclops were shifty one-eyed monsters with crappy social manners. Still, Gaia loved all her children dearly. Uranus, on the other hand, was ashamed of them. (Really? Like having 'Uranus' for a name was something to be proud of?) He was so embarrassed by their looks, he hid them away—the first lot in the depths of earth; the second lot even deeper, in Hell. And he rejoiced in this; had a ball!
Not for long, though.
Sore and Raw
The Mother of All was good and mad. She hatched a plan to avenge her man. Gaia convinced one of her sons, Cronus (only one head, two hands, two eyes—still bloody ugly), to castrate his father. She even made the iron sickle Cronus used to carry out the deed!
Extremes in behaviour, granted, but ancient myths are jam-packed with extremes of everything. They’re our raw, uncut stories representing the roots of the many themes of the human condition (Love, Death, War, Misogyny etc). Just look at myths if you want to understand the deepest patterns of your psyche and what drives you. The characters personify and bring to life all the aspects of it. And in each story, we can pinpoint many archetypes of character. Amongst the possible archetypes in this myth:
1. The man with no balls
2. The woman who has a man by the balls
3. The ball-breaker
4. The woman with balls
All, (mostly) metaphoric in a civilised society. Skip 1. — 3. Go to 4.
It takes balls for a woman to forge a path for herself in a society built on patriarchal lines. Gaia had them (not just her husband’s). The primeval mama obviously wasn’t just a fluffy maternal sort. She was an awesome combination of nurturer and fierce protector who didn’t suffer fools or subjugation. And she could teach us a thing or two about (self-)acceptance. She loved all her children equally—‘children’ symbolising all the (often underdeveloped) facets of our innermost nature: the divine and human; the male and female; the good, bad and downright ugly. Complementary, not oppositional.
With that sense of Gaia-empowerment, when you see yourself as a woman with balls—a woman of substance—there’s no need to vie for the upper hand.
August 24, 2015
Paula Houseman’s Odyssey in a Teacup takes readers along ...
Paula Houseman’s Odyssey in a Teacup takes readers along with protagonist, Ruth Roth, on a brilliantly crafted, classic hero’s journey. From her initial stirrings, awakenings, and blaring Call to Adventure, through her protracted Initiation of descents and dashings upon the rocks (during which phase Ruth’s internal “bullshit detector” becomes a well-oiled, exquisitely adept machine), to her ultimate, victorious Return to the Self, Ruth encounters and defeats a series of soul-sucking harpies, who time and again try to bite off more than they can chew.
The decided “black sheep” of her family, the ruthlessly undermining treatment Ruth endures as a child is almost too terrible to see … Almost. If it were not for Houseman’s brazen wit, keen understanding of the ancient, universal forces at work in the very roots of humanity, and magnificently bawdy humor, Ruth Roth’s Odyssey would be little more than a lonely trek. Instead, in the very first chapter, when Ruth triumphs in an unfortunate, embarrassing modern-day encounter with a “Cyclops”, we rush to back our champion with an unprecedented resolve—never leaving her side for the duration—and we are rewarded over and over with wretchedly wonderful, belly-shaking laughter, and liberating tears.
Houseman resurrects from the darkness (of fundamental, moralistic terrorism) the human soul, which we learn as children to regard as too grotesque as to be worthy of sight. In relating one such example of our conditioned belief in the shamefulness of our own humanity, she astutely observes the collective sentiment, “A cloud passed in front of the sun as if to stop it from seeing. Even nature was mortified”. But as the story progresses, such sentiments prove to be nothing more than our fearful, self-defeating human projections onto Nature, and Houseman’s heroine shines brightly—with moxie, and with the categorical approval of the gods and goddesses—in the sun.
Paula Houseman writes with all the verve, aplomb, and wisdom lauded of veteran authors. With rare authenticity and vigor, Houseman reveals the formative events of Ruth Roth’s life in a series of vignettes that infuse the pandemonium of Jackson Pollock expressionism with the clarity of purpose of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. We sense in each instance that Ruth ought to be asking herself, incredulously, How can this be my life? How can Nature permit another day of this existence to unfold? We feel we ought to avert our eyes, but we are captivated by a truth which strikes close to home for us, because it so aptly mirrors that most basic of human truths: we are not born knowing how to recognize, much less question, the aberrations of dysfunctional family life, as they comprise our normal experience.
Yet, despite the mythical monsters’ best efforts to thwart her, Ruth Roth prevails as our champion. She becomes our mouthpiece, articulating for us the question that has always been lurking there, beneath the living room’s imitation woodgrain wallpaper, by exposing the fantastic lie that has surreptitiously enlisted our complicity in maintaining others’ fragile illusions at the expense of our realities.
Odyssey in a Teacup is epically defiant, bold, painful, hilarious, soul-fortifying, and a must-read for anyone who has ever dared (or hoped) to look at themselves in the mirror and ask the question, How in the hell have I survived?
— Stephanie L. Harper, author
August 23, 2015
Paula Houseman’s Odyssey in a Teacup is an inspiring, fun...
Paula Houseman’s Odyssey in a Teacup is an inspiring, funny story of an Australian woman’s journey, or rather, a series of journeys of self-discovery that will resonate with women—particularly those of the baby boomer era.
Odyssey in a Teacup’s main character, Ruth Roth (single syllables, deprived of a middle name) takes us through the ups and downs, madcap recollections and zany characters she encounters from a young age. You find yourself laughing aloud at some of the hilarious situations to which any woman can relate.
From an early age, Ruth struggles to deal with an overbearing, mordant mother, Sylvia, and a flatulent father, Joe, who diminish her confidence by telling her she’s a ‘mistake’, because she was conceived just two months after her brother was born. And as a girl, Ruth’s not encouraged to aspire to anything more than finding a nice Jewish boy to marry. The diminution of her spirit is further compounded by a bitchy mirror that slaps her down at every opportunity, as well as bullying doctors, teachers, colleagues, and cousins.
Ruth’s cousin Ralph Brill (also single syllables, no middle name—but he “doesn’t give a shit”) and her two close friends, Maxi and Vette, are her mainstay, while her irreverent humour, smart mouth and canniness also keep her buoyant, even though they sometimes get her into trouble.
Inevitably, the unpleasant people and disastrous experiences she has to contend with during her odysseys see her develop a number of phobias, not least cacomorphobia (a fear of morbidly obese people), and an insidious dread of Sundays, when as far as Ruth’s concerned, God invariably goes AWOL.
Ruth realises her life closely resembles a Greek tragicomedy, and with a passion for ancient mythology, it’s little wonder she relays her story through an anthology of Greek myths, identifying with the ancient gods—not least Baubo, the hideous goddess of bawdiness, who she comes to acknowledge as her protagonist.
Ruth does eventually marry a nice Jewish boy and has two children, Hannah and Casper. At first, she revels in their spirited personalities and irreverence, yet at the same time she struggles with disapproving teachers and the ubiquitous competitiveness of other mothers, causing her to regress and her confidence crumble. Until a disastrous function becomes the panacea when she finally recognises she needs to change course and begin a new journey—alone. But just as her latest odyssey begins, something happens that changes everything …
Odyssey in a Teacup is an uplifting, hilarious, yet at times, sobering story of how bias, religious and superstitious mores, bullying and self-doubt can hinder personal growth, but also how the love of close friends, a sense of humour, and above all, determination can help us to embark on new adventures throughout our life.
— Sally Asnicar
August 19, 2015
Ruth Roth takes on the world! This feisty little girl who...
Ruth Roth takes on the world! This feisty little girl who becomes a spirited woman takes us on a rip-roaring journey on which she takes no prisoners! This cleverly written irreverent book allows us to share Ruth’s trials and tribulations with incredulity and laughter and, in the end, witness her personal growth.
— Suzi Braddic
