Different Ways: Revealing the Feminine

By Cile Stanbrough

This is a narrative about taking off the mask, leaving roles, and surrendering to one's authentic life. Human lives unfold in a myriad of different ways revealing truths to be shared. This story is one woman's confessional. It is a memoir about the importance of being broken and the ways a life can be navigated as such. While it is, essentially, the story of one life, it invites a heightened perspective of what is nested within evens and choices in anyone's experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cile Stanbrough
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781734763126

Cile Stanbrough

Cile lives in the Pacific Northwest. She writes things down. Please visit her website where she maintains a blog that includes mixed media audio excerpts of this book.

Book preview

Cile Stanbrough

Copyright © 2020 Cile Stanbrough

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permit ted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-7347631-2-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 0000000000 Cover Artwork © Steven J. Yazzie;

The Profound Misunderstanding of Horseback Riding, 1998 https://yazziestudio.com/

Book Design by © Rachel Johnson Printed by Village Books Publishing First printing edition 2020

E-book Publication 2023

Village Books 1200 11th Street

Bellingham, WA 98225

This book is dedicated to all who seek the right question.

Introduction

This memoir was written as a living testament. That is to say it is my story and some of the depth of it unfolded as I    wrote it. Once I stepped into the endeavor, it took on a life of its own...my life came into sharp relief and I realized that I was facing a need to share my narrative.

I strive for an honest and truthful telling. I know these thoughts go only as far as I can manage my memory and memory can be fickle; likewise, all truths are subjective. Some things I recall acutely how I felt and others with aging and new understanding have been tempered. Narratives change with age. Absolute truth or no, a life that has been a teacher can be valuable in the telling.

I suspect there are going to be some unhappy readers regarding my sharing. I suspect, as well, there will be friends feeling betrayed for not being privy to some of these thoughts and feelings I have harbored for so long. I needed all of my life lived to this moment to find my voice to tell what I need to here. I am rising to meet these times. This is not the season for polite refrain and delicate détente. To heal, humanity has rolled over and exposed its most vulnerable bits. Big and needed changes are the new normal and true stories are necessary medicine. Authenticity is the gold standard; negotiating and navigating in lies and delusion, treacherous to love.

I began writing this as I was studying evolutionary astrology as a patterning game with archetypes. Essentially, I was puzzle building, enjoying mythological character analysis  and it was not a serious undertaking. I did not really notice, initially, that astrological consideration and application demands the development of a certain universal scope to truly appreciate its subtle nature. Thus I tricked myself    into a spiritual study in contemplating soul when I had  quite intentionally avoided that for decades. I have  surrendered to this focus. I’m, ironically, more grounded for the counsel of the stars. I let them guide me through this book.

I do not have a lot of experience living unapologetically. I was born into a generation of white girls who were loaded with expectations of maintaining the protocol of politeness, obtuse desires and unsupported ideas fated to the dust bin. I was groomed to support the patriarchal system as it stood to protect me. Then came the women who dared to ask, Protect me from what? I have a debt to answer to in this. I owe so very much to the thousands of people who have courageously stepped out of that covenant to explore life beyond it. Those who have, generation after generation, made time to share their stories and, in doing so, constructed a foundation for all who were to come after them seeking a place to stand. I lay this story down with the millions of others in building the support for better understanding for all genders, orientations and dispositions...for now we are legion.

Chapter 1

The Beehive

DARKNESS STALKED THE light of day. That’s the way of it when summer lumbers south to abandon Oregon to its torrential rainy seasons. I was taking a theater arts class at Portland State University. This was during my time of hysteria. The fall of 1978. I had been living on the streets. Hope was a schedule of classes to keep. All of what I knew   of life pressed and pinched on me in uncomfortable ways; like an ill-fitting suit. I intended to keep true to what I said I was going to do. I was going to university. I was going to improve myself. After a summer of drifting homeless and    a stint living at the YWCA, I found enough waitress work to afford a place to live. I was on my way to my intention. This was what I told myself. The universe leaned in. Prometheus, seeing what I could not, wept.

The theater teacher mentioned that there was an unprecedented event happening at a college in the area and if anyone was willing to go, she would appreciate a report and she’d give credit for attending. I had to work around a wall I had built between this teacher and myself. I had tried out for the role of Cassandra (or was it Desdemona?)... It was for the school production and she was decidedly    

not impressed. I recited the soliloquy and even though I recognized myself madder than any female in the entire state of Oregon at the time, she passed on me without a breath of consideration. The woman didn’t know crazy; not to my mind - though her decision was prescient. So    when she made this event sound like the arrival of Haley’s Comet, I didn’t pay much attention until I saw the poster. Something in me snapped to attention. I felt deeply that I had to attend this. As I recall, I told myself that it was   because the word GROW was embedded in the name of this person... and the poster was green. This is how I made most of my decisions regarding my life in those muddled days. I was deep in unfamiliar territory; a sighted blind person. Groping. I needed to feel around the world via clues for my way-going. I actually did fairly well applying this sloppy logic. My vibration from a transformative   experience earlier in the year had something to do with my success, no doubt. Fools and drunkards.

The event was a lecture and an entire weekend with Jerzy Grotowski. He had written a book on theater called Towards a Poor Theatre. I hadn’t read it. I had no idea what I had signed up for but I was game....intuition... green...grow. The admission was paid and we were given strict rules of conduct and expected behaviors. The lecture would be in French and translated. No questions until the end of the weekend when there would be interviews to request admission to The Grotowski Institute of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

Within these directives were a decidedly odd set of instructions regarding our sleeping and what must happen when we stayed there overnight. The heavy- handed aspect of the lecture and the dire warnings of the coming night caused some people to bow out of the event. I recall sitting outside having a smoke and talking to a woman who was a little younger than I. She was trying to reason out if she should stay or not. She felt a deep foreboding she told me. She looked worried. I wanted her to stay, of course. She called her mom to come pick her up... I recall how she looked at me over her shoulder with so much fear in her eyes as she left for her mom’s car that waited by the curb. I saw something of my younger self in her. Me, before marriage and babies... before escaping. I remember wondering briefly if I should be scared, too.

We were assembled after the lecture to do movement and we were guided into doing something called ‘negative movement’ which is basically a practice of undoing the mind’s connection to dictate the physical response of the body. This is to release the more natural, primitive aspects of movement uninhibited by the minds interference. I would find out later that this was an introduction to what   is referred to as a beehive. So on a darkened stage we all went about our business of unlocking our minds from our bodies. I spent most of my time looking for my body. One of Grotowski’s assistants came by and examined my movement. He physically pushed me - hard. I guessed he   didn’t approve of what I was

doing. All of this movement   with wild abandon proved to be a rather dangerous   enterprise as one fellow was the unlucky recipient of a  flailing foot that actually broke his jaw. I heard about this during the break when the ambulance came. Apparently, civilized humanity is not necessarily gifted with an ability to control unleashed creative abandon. I was lost in my movement undoing/body finding and missed the entire catastrophe.

Then we were sent to bed. Sleeping bags on a big open floor in a locker room. We were told to keep your shoes next to our pillow. This was the instruction...and No talking! EVER! No matter WHAT! I fell asleep.

II WAS SLEEPING OVER at Thad’s after one of those high school rock-and-roll parties that were so common then. I was in a sleeping bag on the living room floor when I awoke to someone unzipping my bag and gently rubbing the length of my body. As I roused, he stopped. It was Thad’s Dad. He motioned for me to shush (there were others crashed on the floor with me, I think) and he directed me to follow him upstairs to his room. He said there was something he wanted to discuss with me. I did this. I followed him up the stairs. I was naked. It actually wasn’t very uncommon for us all to be running around nude in those days– it was1970.

I remember thinking in a fog, I wonder if he wants to talk to me about Thad? When we reached his room, he pulled me to him and tried to kiss me. I was confused. It was so absurd to me to be kissing Thad’s Dad that I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. I pushed him away. He grabbed me and threw me on the bed. I moved to get away and he dragged me back, pinning me with his weight. I was thinking there was some mistake. Weren’t we supposed to be talking? Didn’t he say he wanted to talk to me about something? When I felt him enter me I panicked! I still had words! I was still in my mind! I was still in my body! I can’t be in my body! I was feeling a claustrophobic panic with him on top of me like that. Everything was closing in. I was terrified. I tried to push him off and began to scream for Thad. I wanted Thad to come help me. Come straighten this out. I’m not sure how much screaming I did but Thad’s Dad saw fit to cover my mouth with his hand and when he did, his meaty paw slipped up over my nose as well, smothering me. I couldn’t breathe. To this day I don’t know if I passed out or I cracked in some fundamental way because all I remember is Thad’s Dad sitting next to me on the bed cradling me trying to calm me down as I trembled, crying and gasping for air; his hand holding mine over his flaccid penis and him nervously saying "See? It’s*a*l*right now. It’s all over. You’re okay."

THE NEXT THING I KNOW there is a gentle shaking of my shoulder and I focus to find one of Grotowski’s assistants quietly rousting everyone and employing the international sign for quiet with the fingers to the lips. Shush. No one spoke a word as we disconnectedly slipped back into our loose fitting, movement clothing and put our tennis shoes on.

We were lined up and led outside into the night. It had been raining and it was chilly. A long solemn line of us were led down an extensive switchback path further and further from our warm little sleepy nest. I remember thinking in my torpid stupor as I examined the long line I was in, This is what it was like being led to the gas chambers. I felt a small knot of fear rise in my spine like the mercury rising to record a heat. It felt frightening, our heads bowed and stumbling ahead into some unknown place we were told to go without protest. Something was bleeding though time. It’s hard to say how many folds of time.

We stopped at the edge of a great muddy area in an athletic field. We were instructed to begin our exercise once more in releasing the mind from our bodily reactions. Silent and slow we moved at first and then momentum began and the movement became more and more primitive as people fell in the mud and recovered to keep moving and moving and moving – sometimes interrelating with others; sometimes cavorting alone. The beehive. I felt something in me snap and I moved in a strange new unity with the earth itself. As the earth and kundalini energy surged up through me, I was transported. I remember being

emotionally and physically drained and my body feeling wonderfully liberated from some kind of shackling. We were led back up to the locker room where our previous sleeping lives awaited us on the floor; a hazard of spent cocoons...to shower – to sleep. As if one could one sleep in the same way, after such an experience.

The next day included lectures and exercises. In the afternoon the staff of the Institute were getting ready to go so they could leave for the next city right after the evening lecture. I came upon the assistant that pushed me. He was struggling with a washer in the utility room. He was aggressively spinning the dial and throwing up his hands in frustration and cursing in Polish. I sidled up to him and whispered, Push it which he did. His hands flew upward and he rejoiced at the sound of water filling under the lid of the machine. He didn’t get the joke about pushing and he looked past me as he moved on to his next task, sadly. In my mind we spent the rest of the day together in a sweet nonverbal discourse, pushing and pulling.

I received a similarly cold response from Grotowski himself as I waited to be the very last person to be interviewed to attend the institute in Poland. I waited until the last in case he wanted to have a deeper conversation with me; we wouldn’t be tying up the line...because, of course, the magnitude of my experience there had to be so obvious. He would see that, surely.

Grotowski was clearly tired and by the time I reached him. He had lost all of his patience for us strange, fawning Americans. I witnessed this building as I waited and studied his responses to people. When it was my turn, my request to be included in the list of people to attend his school was translated to Grotowski. He blinked once looking at me, waiting. I had nothing more. He rolled his   eyes and turned to his interpreter as he stiffly rose to his feet and told him, Tell her thank you. That we will send   a  letter. They did. I still have it somewhere. Basically, it said, We are sorry but we cannot use you at this time. Good luck with your future or some such... pauvrebébé.

I was empowered for days by the beehive experience and when I went to the theater arts class, I was called out by the teacher to share with the class about the workshop. My head was so full of wonder and I felt so giddy that I just laughed and shrugged, It is hard to explain I said, grinning - not explaining. The teacher, already not thinking much of me, scowled. I suspect she thought I was high on something. I was high all right. I was high on that entire experience. My mind had been fucking BLOWN! I dropped out of university. So much for holding on to my thread of intention. I was gone again.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop  Out.

Grotowski...brilliant, unsung and timely. Part of his teaching, as I understand it, was to remove the distance between the audience and the theatrical

performance. Destroy the role and let the authentic personality exist on its own to embody the telling. Let the pure human story emerge naturally as mythos on an unquestionable human level that would resonate and move the audience into their own sense of self and dissolve the divide. I’m not sure if he questioned humanity’s need to leave the truth of who they are for adopting a role to play in society, but that seed was planted in me via this experience. At that time, this kind of lucidity was considered unstable–certainly no kind of goal for an actor who sought a role in conventional theater. All of this was beyond my ken. My experience with the beehive was, however, locked into the cellular   memory of my body.

I secretly believed myself unfit for whatever kind of normal lives people lived. Determined to be safe, I was like a wild thing released from its cage and as the cage door stood open, I would pace in a circle within. I could not perceive anything beyond the cage as being real and I hadn’t the courage nor the strength to recognize it...not yet. Much later I would develop critical thinking skills but it was this time of naive openness and vulnerability that I had found my spirit/body/mind connection and I certainly received a measure of feral abandon and alternative connecting in that beehive to let me know a reservoir of wild existed in my body and within it was my real seat of power

There is an addendum to this story and it came years later   when I sat down in the eighties to view a video

cassette of a movie called "My Dinner with Andre". Surprising to me, it was about relationships, theater, roles, and Grotowski. I had picked this film up by chance and after watching it, I was shocked and spellbound as I reflected upon what an enormous yet mysterious influence that experience still had on me so long after the fact. All the facets...Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and my obsession at one time with Findhorn not withstanding; the beehive really had taught    me how to disentangle from many unfortunate projections and trajectories of my ego mind by allowing me to utilize my body consciousness. It played a large part in my being able to navigate my life and heal wounds through acknowledging and validating my gut instinct despite what my mind was insisting upon and filtering. Within that beehive experience, along with a spiritual emergence that I experienced prior to that, the seeds were planted to consider doing things differently. An authentic life, one hidden from myself, is in my body’s voice; the voice I use to talk to myself with and hide when it does not comply with my design of what I decide I want for myself in any given moment.

In retrospect, I think of the beehive as a kind of medicine. By rights, even though the violence I experienced as a teen was deeply suppressed at this time, psychology would suggest the locker room scenario should have triggered that traumatic memory in some form. The fact it didn’t, proposes that a shocking experience from my past was beginning to heal naturally through new events. It

appeared that healing of certain kinds of human wounding is done by doing it over with a positive outcome. This supported what I was learning at the time regarding other lives and reenactment, too. Could we heal multiple life wounds in one life? In reflection, years later, I began to wonder about walking