Finding Room...In from the Deep

By Marcie Ryan

"When I made love with him, I used a great deal of energy and afterwards I felt and started not to care about anything that would normally bother me. I allowed myself to feel the joy inside of myself. I felt renewed every time I had experienced deep passion with the man he was. Obviously, there was a direct link between chastity, religion and political orthodoxy. I began to realize that in order to sustain fear and lunatic madness that one has to 'bottle' some powerful instinct and use it as a driving force. This was my mother still alive within me pushing and forcing me to honor the faith and cultural imperatives. ...from "The Affair". This is a gutsy revelation, raw yet tender. We know whereof Sandra speaks. This author belongs to her work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669864011

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Copyright © 2023 by Marcie Ryan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 05/18/2023

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"I t is stories that women need because stories give us hope, guidance, and bravery. That is why I am sharing my stories through poetry and prose. I hope that this book will walk you through your own journeys as you reflect on mine.

I hope this book will illumine your life passages and it will reassure you at the same time. I want your heart to throb and cause you to see the things you may have hungered for in your own life as a woman. Sameness is discovered in shared stories. We find out that we are all women, and that most of us have a deep ache for what we have lost. We need to trust a feminine source of wisdom. We long for models of a whole empowered woman who wants a birthing in us.

I hope that this book illumines your own life passages and that you will be reassured and challenged at the same time. I challenge you to offer your experiences to other women and learn to celebrate one another."

— Marcie Ryan

How To Use This Book

H old the book in your right palm and place your left hand on the top with your thumb free to flip through the pages.

Ask for guidance in terms of where your edge is in your personal evolution.

Thumb the pages until you feel it is time to open the book.

Read both pages aloud or to yourself, then choose the poem and prose that resonates with you at this point in time.

Now choose a word, a line, a phrase or a section that carries the most energy for you.

Write about it and/or share it with another who knows you.

This process speeds up the process of re-discovery of the authentic Self, encourages you to look deeper within yourself, to share with someone you trust or to journal.

Introduction

T his book is written from a female perspective in that Marcie has drawn from her experiences as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, divorcee, teacher, psychotherapist, and registered international movement educator and therapist. She is one of a generation of women who have been part of tremendous social upheavals and are now just beginning to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

Presently, women are in a constant state of confusion. Many would like to be living a larger life but are held back by their lack of self-worth or a support system as well as historical prejudice. This book holds just those stories—the stories of a young girl trying to mature in a family, in religious and educational institutions, and in a culture that gives lip service to interest in a woman’s individuation process.

Marcie has come to know and believe that an examination of a woman’s life is imperative if one is interested in global change.

The first step is for a woman to find her spiritual home, religious, or otherwise—that place where she knows that she is respected and admired. No longer interested in the sublimation of her talents and need to please in a patriarchal society, she begins to value her feminine qualities and to be proud of being a woman.

In stories that expose the dark side of humankind, in beauty, sex, relationships, children, and career, Marcie’s pen gives paint to a colorful life of pain, pleasure, and continual blossoming. These stories are about the re-emergence of a woman who contributes to the healing of the world.

W e must not stop to perfect our work as women - just get it down! We must write our stories. We must learn to appreciate the spirals of our journeys and relax into that knowing.

This poetry reflects my psychic journey to healing. The pieces are about the drama of my soul in process. As I wrote them, they served to soften old scar tissue and salve old wounds. The poetry is about medicine, repair and reclamation: all my sadness, longings, fears, questions and understandings.

In working the soul, I continued to find more and more of myself. The poems represent the knife of insight, the breath of speaking my truth, the courage to withstand what I saw without looking away.

I have been on both sides of the counselling room. This creative work that came out of my personal pain is any and every woman’s story. The poetry is for you to read and follow toward your own natural freedom and soul recovery. I hope the poems will spur you to further care for your self, children, sisters, lovers, men and the earth. The door to recovery has to do with the deep scars that we all share as women. The door is your yearning for a deeper life, a full life and a sane life full of personal growth and development.

I hope that this collection will serve to embolden you and will fortify those of you who are on your way. Our souls need to grow in their natural ways and to their natural depths.

A culture that does not encourage every individual’s unique development makes a slave class of certain citizens. Many women know that constriction in their bodies, souls and spirits.

We must learn to abandon enforced political correctness and worn-out paradigms that serve to keep us stuck in our own psychic pools of glue. Fresh insight and self-integrity are the keys to groundedness. As women, it is a must that we return to our instinctive lives and our deepest knowing. This will require questioning the status quo with confidence but thriving means just that. The self must have the freedom to move, speak, be angry and create. The self is truly durable, resilient and it possesses high intuition.

Read, enjoy and create!

Process

I have divided this work into sections that represent my own process in the retrieval of lost parts of my self and I chose to label these divisions as Descent, Patriarchy, Integration and Ascent. I do not wish to imply that this journey is in any way a linear one; that is not woman’s way.

In my life, I recognized a spiral logic where ideas and feelings are connected, resolved, and used as building blocks. Then I would find myself, from time to time, re-examining those thoughts and feelings from a different perspective. I would be at a new level of the spiral where I had new information, new feelings about old thoughts, and new insights; or I had reconfirmed my previous idea.

Remember believing that you had resolved an issue, only to have it recur? Well, this is the spiral at work. It gives us the opportunity to examine the old from a new perspective, from a new point on the spiral, and I demonstrate this very process in my poetry; you will notice that I come back to some of the same issues over and over again.

I encourage you, the reader, to have deep respect for your spiralling process and to travel inward on your own creative journey so that you will ultimately know yourself better.

My Psychoanalysis and Tribute to

Dr. David Heilbrunn, M.B.Ch.B., F.R.C.P.(C)

Psychoanalyst

This work is about a woman developing her own voice, entering into creation and claiming originality. It is about forming a sense of pattern from the random things that come from deep within. It is a process subject to familiar obstacles, resistances, diversions and hesitations. I had to hold myself as the young woman steadily before my gaze in order to reclaim the powerful life force that was in her.

The poetry behaves psychoanalytically, flowing in a seemingly lawless way; the very writing reflects my psychoanalytic process. The girl was very unhappy; it was my hope to find out why. I felt limited by prose; it felt as though it were an imposition of form onto a rapid outpouring of ideas, memories, thoughts and feelings. Poetry is about impulse toward a wild flowing of words and ideas, memories, thought and feelings. The conflict was about a part of me that wanted some kind of sequence; another part supported the muse meeting surrender. The more that I came to terms with what it truly means to be woman, with our distinctive creative process, I found myself surrendering to fragmentation.

Psychoanalysis recognizes wildness and order and allows room for the struggle at centre stage. I found that something had to bubble from deep inside, be recorded and days, weeks, even months later, my experiences would begin to match the written metaphor. Then I would be touching my truth.

I found that this knowing was a prelude to an action that led the way to overcoming the obstacles to my growth and development as a fully functioning woman. Naming the pain became a way of overcoming for me.

My writing reflects the surges and retreats of the mind and the psychoanalytic session. I give place to that struggle in the poetry. The analyst named the subtle inner states that I would struggle to survive. He taught me to endure, and as a result, open the space where I might choose an alternative way of behaving, should I be willing to suffer.

It would be a while before I would move from enactment and discharge to struggle within myself. My creative work maps the shift.

As I learned to engage my will with tremendous acts of courage, I began to feel the loneliness that I had avoided for too long. I began to engage in a very peculiar struggle as I had to pit the power of analytic naming against the power of emotions that were being called up by the analytic work of memory and introspection. It was a strange work of self-creating. At times I felt that I couldn’t distinguish between what could be called self-evolution and disintegration. Free association led to memories of the past, generating feelings that created meaning, thus explaining the patterns from which I might be freed.

In an effort to get back to the young self in the fullness of its potential, we make and lose many selves. Each life is a necessary life and is a part of the cycle in the self’s experiment to give shape to its potential. My psychoanalysis promoted my quest for the hidden truth that lay beneath superficial forms.

I have worked at probing the deeper meaning of dreams, the true significance of symptoms, the repressed wishes that govern the shapes of thought, and the essential structures that organize mental behaviour. My quest was about retrieving all of the selves that had been hacked to bits, gathering their lost potential, launching once more into the cycle of integration and self renewal.

I extend profound gratitude to Dr. David Heilbrunn who supported me into coming into my full power as a woman without helping himself to power.

Though she suffered...

she was never destroyed

We all come to maturity in our own time, in our own way. This is about process and not about ideals of enlightenment ... this is feminist spirituality and the gift of maturity is the potential it offers for recognizing and reclaiming our feminine nature. We need to celebrate, as women, a spirituality that comes from our direct experiences.

Contents

How To Use This Book

Introduction

Process

Poetics

Opening

Sunshine

Dark Mother

Denial

Patriarchy

Mourning is Nigh

Changes

Lost Sisters

Groomed

Devalued

Virtue

Tarnished Angel

Defeated

Fed-Up

She Figures It Out

The Legacy

Resentment

She Lies Dying

Goodbye Kate

Wondering

Repeats

Lost

Doctor ... Please

Loneliness

Courage

Sister Friend

Buried Alive

Old Guard

Changed

Auntie

Forgetting

Priests

Descent

Muted

Gone

Lost Maiden

Where?

Inner Barriers

Mix Up

Finding Peace

Death-Life

Materna Introjecta

Come Here Go Away

I Remember

Cruel Priestess

Puffed

Symptoms

Heroics

Comfort

Growth Juncture

Seduction

Stopped

Confusion

Aftermath

This Pain

Letting Go

Alone

The Trap

Father Talk

Loss

Moving Out

Moved

Depression

Tied-Up

Injustice

Struggling

Miss Perfect

Trapped

Go Away

Guano Stare

Dark Goddess

Dark Side

Integration

Immortality

Fine Tuning

Desperation

That Beast

Outside Myself

Stuck

Older Now

The Challenge

Ambivalence

Integration

Resilience

Holding On

Ritual

Fragmented

Distortion

Warrior

Oak Tree

Spilling Out or Spilling Over

Get On

Possession

Two Score and Four

Determined

Holy Maiden

Endings

Harlot

Coming Out

Moving In

Facing Truth

Be Quiet

Ascent

Trying Easier

Time Out

Realing

Look Up

Outcast

Outsider

Dancing

Slowly

New Life

Lover

Body Work

Maiden Fair

Shadow Prince

My Beloved

And I love

Medicine Woman

Disillusioned

Her