Internal Family Systems and Medicine Buddha.
I had my first IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapy today with my BFF Tamara Lebak. She’s been at me for a while to try it, and this is the first opportunity she and I have had to sit and do something more than focused, and intentional than just our fleeting hash-outs and updates, about our current lives, in the few minutes we can eek out of our busy schedules to chat.
At his point Tamara asked me to address my overthinking part of my brain (oh she knows me well) and that I try to visualize how that would look. I got a bluer, more energy-swirly version of Joy from Inside Out. She was easy to visualize, and she flitted and danced around until I asked her to sit quietly and just observe. Which she did demurely from a rock in the sidelines of my mind.
This first session was more about familiarizing me to the system and how it works. Essentially, the therapist (Tamara) leads the therapy-subject through a series of visualization steps to identify and address different “parts” of the therapy-subject’s (Me in this case) system (psyche, mental attitude, you know the YOU no one gets to see). My session started painfully, I have a lot of anger and emotional pain right at present that I’m trying to push through. So it was no surprise that when she asked if I had any discomfort, I immediately identified both nestled cozily around my heart chakra. The visualization exercise asks you to identify in some manner, then remove that so it can be fully examined. In my mind I imagined a small green rock.
We continued to look at the little green rock and began to identify how it felt. Further into the exercise, my brain created an angry scribble. Here’s where tings got weird(er); Tamara asked me to visualize this “scribble” outside my body. It kept getting bigger and angrier, and I was immediately thinking about that SpongeBob episode Frankendoodle where SpongeBob (it is not ironic that most of my creative visualizations come from cartoons) acquires a magic pencil that brings to life anything it draws, which you can imagine creates all sorts of tension and plot devices. SpongeBob Doodle-pants was only fleeting, left in it’s place was a large angry graphite heavy scribble. Full of frustration, and anger that seemed to want to keep me from fully exploring the little green rock (my heart; 4th chakra). This angry scribble just pulsed and moved around growing like a storm. When asked to describe the emotions of it frustration and anger that “I am not good enough; that I am unwanted; or that I will fail. That I will somehow disappoint myself or my someone else. That I am not good enough.”
This is where the family integration comes in, and I am paraphrasing the session (maybe we’ll video one sometime). From here, Tamara asked me to imagine my parents behind me, their hands resting gently on my shoulders (Mom on left, Dad on right). It was hard, as they have both passed, and I have a LOT of angry scribbling around that (my metal image actually got larger and more angular at this point). But I managed to summon up their warmth enough to imagine it with me (the overall point). Tamara, continued that I should visualize this line of ancestors branching off from my shoulders, as though I am the figurehead of a great ship, and all these people, are supporting and connecting, flowing back from me to and through my parents, and their parents, and so on all the way back to a sort of “beginning. ” “Sometimes it’s a light, sometimes a personification of a person..” she encouraged.
For me, it was, Medicine Buddha.
Medicine Buddha is a healing meditation to “purify karma and cultivate well-being.” I have practiced it in the past, and return to it regularly when I have friends, or family (or feel for the greater whole) in need of compassion and healing energy during times of illness or crisis. “The practice purifies and removes the underlying, karmic causes of disease and cultivates the causes for holistic well-being.” A great image to feel is the source from which you originate. In my imagination, then, at Tamara’s coaching, I was see how this visualization viewed, related, and reacted to my large angry storm-like scribble. It was then that I flashed on the image of a yellow tape measure I use regularly. Somehow, the Buddha pushed the button on this cosmic tape measure and like a great unwound mess of a tape measure, the giant, angry scribble just zipped right up neatly into the yellow tape measure. I laughed out-loud at this, and again as I was describing it to Tamara.
I have a lot of pain. Pain for myself. My son. My family and friends. Our World. Sometimes it is overwhelming feeling it all. But is reassuring (for lack of a better word) to feel that you are from something bigger than yourself. No, I don’t (entirely) believe that I am a descendent of Bhaisayaguru or the historic Medicine Buddha- but what I am is the descendent of compassion and love and greater vision for both of those things, and my angers, pain, and frustration, can be sucked up and away, when I return to this Source, or what I perceive of as “Source.” Conscious energy and effort put forth for the health, love, and well-being of all. Pretty good .
Thank you Tamara- LYLAS 4 eva.