I CAN LIVE MY LIFE By Caroline Mackenzie from UK

I came on the retreat apparently because of a depression. I am an artist aged 55 years old. I am a single lay woman. I lived in India from age of 24 to 36. Since 2003 I have been coming to India regularly. In 2006 I got a one year visa. The trigger for the crisis was that the person who had written an invitation refused to renew it. This meant that I would have to return to UK and live in my mother's holiday house as I do not have a house of my own. Although my mother was not living in this house all the time she came regularly for visits. My relationship with her was very stressful.

She feels she cannot understand or appreciate my interests and way of life. She behaves in a very dominating way and expects me to do many practical works. She very rarely expresses appreciation and more often finds fault. I thought that this irritation was caused because I was born eighteen months after my oldest brother died at the age of three. I had read a lot about the "replacement child". I thought she wanted me to be a boy to replace the dead one. This perception turned out to be inaccurate.

After the refusal of the visa letter I developed a terrible cough. It was so loud that one night the neighbours were woken up and came to see what was happening. I could not breathe. I am renting a room from someone who has done the Inner Freedom Retreat. She suggested I try some of the exercises for going into my negatives. I found this gave me some relief. I decided to go on an eight day retreat. I found this helpful. However the short time meant that I jumped to some conclusions that on the longer retreat turned out to be wrong. Between the two retreats I went to U.K. and met my mother. On my return I immediately went to Belgaum.

I came without booking my return ticket. This allowed me to extend the time from 30 days to 6 weeks. This was very helpful. The focus of the retreat was the relationship with my mother. As soon as I started to work on my angry feelings the cough gradually faded away. After this Fr. Vijay asked me to enter into my feelings of love and dependence on my mother. Here I got a lot of constipation. The most difficult and finally most liberating part of the retreat was this sudden switch between these opposite feelings. I thought that by being physically thousands of miles from my mother and by living by a very different set of values that I had separated myself from her. It was a world changing shock to discover that in reality I am dependent on her as if I were still a tiny child.

I can write this sentence so easily - but entering these feelings was very hard. I felt it was impossible to jump from hate to love. I felt like running away from the place. I got as fare as the road. But then I reflected that my life is in a mess. So even though it seemed so irrational and I felt incapable, I gave it a try. After a lot of fruitless effort one evening after supper I decided to walk up and down in my room in the dark. I looked for a candle but could not find one. I was too lazy to go and search for one. Somehow the darkness helped me and at last I got into the experience of being adored by mother and enjoying it. I hugged a pillow and imagined my mother kissing me. I got into the feelings of total involvement with my mother. She was delighted to have a girl baby after two boys.

Then in the fantasy of her appreciation an unexpected memory came up. She started to say "You are to be my mother. You must never have your own children. I will be your child." She had lost her mother when she was aged three years old, coincidentally the same age that my first brother died. My second name is my grandma's. I felt totally upset. I howled and vomited. I had always old myself that I was unmarried because I wanted to dedicate myself to art. While it is a visible reality that on the whole I is very difficult for women to combine a family with a full time career, this experience shocked me. Another aspect that I worked on was how my mother had wanted me to cut short the grief and failure that she felt about losing the first child.

A large part of my depression was a feeling of failure. To be successful as an artist is of course very difficult. However I began to understand why my mother feels so disappointed of me. None of her unconscious wishes have been fulfilled. On my side the effect has been an inability to live the images of life and freedom presented to me in my pictures. In each place I've lived I have parasitically joined myself on to some other person's vision. Then I have got into a quarrel and left the place. I have not been able to assert myself and to live my life, my vision.

Since coming out of the retreat I feel various aspects of my life are beginning to change. Two weeks after the retreat I led a workshop on "Gender and Ecology using Masks and Music". This had been scheduled much before going on the retreat. I felt a lot of ease and enjoyment in taking a leadership role. I felt supported by the institution where it was held by the professor in charge of the students. Previously I have often felt paranoid about taking a leadership role. I felt I was being undermined by the people I was working with or the institution. I now feel that unknown to myself, I have been carrying all he negative feelings of my mother and projecting them into the environment around me. Well, I have to yet to see if this positive leadership experience was a one off fluke or whether the changes in myself can enable me to function like this in other situations.

After coming out of the retreat I did feel the need to make pictures of my dead grandmother and older brother in relationship initially to my mother and myself. After getting this outside me I moved on to my relation to these dead ancestors. The pictures followed in a visual way the process of the retreat. I began to realize that I was unnecessarily carrying these ancestors who themselves were quite happy. I found a poem by Rainer Maria that struck me in a new way although I have read it many times earlier.

"In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned on earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth-: could we exist without them?

Duino Elergies 1 Translated from German by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage International, N.Y. 1989)

Yet now I feel that in fact I do not need to use my time thinking about my grandma or my brother. Now that I have felt as far as possible how their deaths affected my mother and myself I can let them go. In he series of pictures the one that makes the most impression on me is the one where I meet myself carrying an empty coffin. It reminds me of the story where Jesus heals the bent woman.

I have also noticed that when I receive a letter from my mother I do not react emotionally. I am beginning to see that she is quite separate from me. However I still have a lot of work to do in my reactions to certain people, especially powerful men. I can understand now that my emotional reactions follow similar patterns to the relationship with my mother. I feel upset when they seem to feel threatened and negative towards my creativity and power yet I am still hanging on their approval and affection. When the negative feelings come up now I admit them to myself. I find if I spend time with the feelings they gradually subside.

During my sixteen years back in U.K. I did seven years of weekly psychotherapy. I found this illuminating and helpful. I also made the 30 days Ignatian Spiritual Exercises in Wales in 2005. The Inner Freedom retreat uses many insights from western psychology. It is very striking that the work is done in a Christian retreat centre where there is a contemplative atmosphere and the exercises are also done there. In the West I have seen Buddists who make a connection between spirituality and psychology. A good example is Core Process Psychology at the Karuna Institute, Devon, U.K. I have not come across it with Christians. It was a privilege to be able to focus on my inner blocks and patterns in an uninterrupted manner. This is not to say that the restrictions of staying in the room and keeping silent were all that easy. However I feel that this discipline plus the direction of Fr. Vijay enabled me to dive deep into myself.

At present I feel very focused and energized. I am looking forward to the coming year to see how I react to the situations as they arise. I am eager to see where I just go back into my old habits and where I can already perceive a change. As stated above when I do get upset, hurt and angry, I now try to give time to feeling my feelings. My whole focus now is in living my life. The more I disentangle my self from other's expectations, especially those of my inner mother, the more I can feel free and able to contribute my art and creativity. I will also be looking out for where I use my art as defense against living my life.

Another poem by Rilke sums up my experience of the retreat.

……………………." Let my joyfully streaming face make me more radiant, let my hidden weeping arise and blossom.
How dear you will be then you nights of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
Inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair.
How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end.
Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year-,
not only a season in time-, but a place and settlement, foundation and soil and home."

Duino Elergy 10 - details as above.