Alysse Aallyn

Category: #PersonalChange

  • The Language of Butterflies – Walking the Path of Attachment with Alysse Aallyn

    CONFLICT – “The Storm”- “Triggers & Pushback”


    How good are we at facing bad news? Do we even want to know what it is? It’s impossible to plan for the future if we don’t intelligently strategize the things that COULD go wrong. We must weigh up our assets and debits – some of which are certainly emotional.

    Are we self-sabotagers? Do we quit right before the final push? Do we make alliances with untrustworthy people? Do we make ourselves vulnerable to dangerous people? Are we secretly hoping for “rescue” – that someone all-powerful and all-competent will sweep in and take our “mess” away? Remember back to our inner power principle, the person we want to be. Maybe we get discouraged far too easily by the negative voices in our heads. The path of lifetime self-improvement after all, started with our neither being able to talk or even stand up! Practice, practice, practice: forming “muscle” – even spiritual muscle – takes a lot of time.

    Then we must face up to fearful destruction we had no part in; perhaps caused only by the principles of waste, loss and entropy to which the entire universe is subject. We need a philosophy to carry us through these times that helps us strategize thrifty methods of maximizing and healing what resources we have left. We need to know the difference between “value” and “price”. We need to recognize the outright gifts we have been given – such as the courage and determination that brings us to this place – and give thanks for them.

      Conflict is an inevitability. No heat without friction, no forward movement without energy expenditure, no flight without first shedding our comfort carapace. When we want change, we are inviting conflict.


      The question is how much in control we feel. Triggers “set us off”; i.e. trigger any chain of events we may feel helpless over. But are we? Can the chain be arrested at any point? Let’s bring our mind to focus on the problem. Human history is created by human intelligence; let’s problem-solve. “I will arrest and re-direct this change.”

      Whore De Combat

      My sutures hurt; I’m
      Completely unavailable,
      Unsheathing your ambition you
      Laced up my body like a jerkin
      Cut my breakfast with your corkscrew
      Swiss Army
      Doubled up and put away.

      I’m fasting now
      Bracing for the worst
      I can’t eat anything that won’t
      Look right at me
      And want to know the truth;
      Who’s for real?
      What’s the state of play?

    1. The Language of Butterflies – Walking the Path of Attachment with Alysse Aallyn

      Creativity : “Harness your Uniqueness”

        When searching for your soulmate this is no time to “blend with the crowd.” You need to discover exactly who you are so you can seek your complementary and missing elements. If you are uncertain or mistaken about your essential self, you won’t even recognize The One. You will be guaranteed to choose a partner based on false considerations of status or appearance. This requires you stop hiding your true self and allow it to emerge. Easier said than done! Turns out we all have been babying the shyly unique aspects of ourselves that don’t win instant recognition from the crowd. Well, we are going to have to experiment with taking Baby out for daily strolls and develop a bit of muscle. Don’t worry if the “likes” fall away – you are not trying to appeal to everyone. The creativity card means you will need to become imaginative in how you present yourself. You want someone accepting? Be accepting. You want someone brave? Be brave. You want someone who looks deeper? Look deeper.

        Fire In the Dust

        In photographs
        The ladies scream or laugh
        It’s hard to tell
        Heads back they bare their
        Grief or joy or
        Agonized relief
        It’s hard to tell.
        All that remains of them
        Tattered icons growing ever dim.

        The fountains of our fear
        Leap high at first, like dancers
        Frozen at first burst
        Of freedom
        Paralyzed abreast
        The arc
        We cannot see
        What tortuous sign these fossils
        Meant to be.

        In that first winter
        We thought the earth was dead
        Statues mated
        Trees erupted dragonflies
        The angry lonely
        Sang and cried.
        Somewhere some fetus twists and jerks
        Convergence of dynastic quirks

        So drop the toxic cloak of bitter spite that
        Melts the flesh and terrorizes night –
        Waiting out a cycle’s sum
        Spinning down to kingdom come.
        For nothing vain, came nothing plain
        This world was born
        To live again.

      1. The Language of Butterflies – Walking the Path of Attachment with Alysse Aallyn

        REGRET feeds DOUBT

          As soon as we begin refining our list in search of The One, we are filled with doubt. Fear of Missing Out dictates that even as we are talking to a Possible Soulmate our eyes search out the door to see what new person is coming in. There is a glorious book, essential to artists, called The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) which is actually about self-sabotage. In the very moments when we are trying to build something critically important to our emotional, psychic and spiritual health, a demonic voice comes out of Who Knows Where, whispering, “It’s the wrong thing and you’re doing it wrong.” According to Steven Pressfield, if you listen to this voice you will never accomplish anything, because Honest, Committed Effort is required to get your project off the ground, even if it ultimately fails. And if it ultimately fails, it will turn out to be the very project that helps you see what is Really Important, and understand What to Do Next. Choose wisely; searching for a relationship that is restorative, not exploitative, a partner who is complementary and complimentary, and push doubt aside.

          Cloverleaf


          Some roads lead nowhere;
          They’re my favorites.
          I held my breath while
          You drew my face in
          Blinding strokes
          Creamed my mouth with curling lines
          Destroyed one picture; then another
          Never let me see. You
          Left at dawn while I
          Ran in circles, calling
          Raging, spending blackened
          Nights without you,
          No blue thigh to guard
          My trusting heart while yours looks out
          To gauge the coming storm.
          Trapped in cloverleaves,
          Sentenced to school by
          Streams of angry judges –
          Balked by
           The enervating past
          Of unlived lives
          Every face I paint is yours.
          Open up the chilly ruffles
          Of my breasts
          One more time –
          To beauty; yours and mine
          Electrify your
          Eldritch spine –
           Your body so much lighter
          Than the mountain that you loved
          Better than you loved me –
           The course you learned
          Better than you learned me – so
          Overconfident that
           you’ll come back
          I float across the powdered snow
          In bird-winged silence
          All-enveloping
          Unless I’m
          Lost?

          Lost and frozen like your heart?

        1. The Language of Butterflies – Walking the Path of Attachment with Alysse Aallyn

          MELT into the space your desire creates: “You Got This”


          You’ve realize the immensity of your need and the enormity of the challenge. You’ve looked into your capacities and they just don’t seem to match your expectations. Now you’re scared and feeling hopeless. I’m here to remind you to “relax.” Melt into the space your desire has created. Untense those muscles because fear and hysteria, rage and feelings of worthlessness all work against us.

          Realize somewhere out there your Soulmate is feeling all these things also. This is a process you need to go through, in order to recognize the vastness of the challenge ahead. This is your time in the desert, where you will be tested. This guarantees that when your and your Beloved melt together your success will be all the sweeter. Of necessity to valuing the Other is the realization that, although there may be plenty of fish in the sea, you need a very particular fish.


          HAUNTED WEDDING
          The pregnant car disgorges
          Only us. It’s winter.
          Drunk as silver fish
          We beat our gills as light
          As hummingbirds.
          In an amethyst ring
          Of drypoint trees
          The half-built house
          Gapes and swells
          Its timbers stink of sap.
          Windrill fields occlude
          Our crossing, so you carry me
          High above the thorny osiers.
          We sleep aloft for safety
          Locked and levitating
          In this space of air
          One season only,
          Unseen by angry outriders;
          Bloodless in our wedding robes
          Like the doubled membranes
          Of the frozen flowers.

          1. The Language of Butterflies – the Path of Attachment by Alysse Aallyn

            POWER: “Doubling”

              We are filled with the excitement and power of acquisition and multiplicity. We will finally have a helper, an interpreter, an enabler, a sharer. A Second Self with its rich promise of Difference – different memories, body type, fantasies, wishes, dreams – we can indulge ourselves in. We can’t wait to get going and find this person who promises us wings and immortality! The potential sexual ecstasy alone is keeping us up nights. Imagine thoroughly exploring another and being thoroughly explored yourself – with a lifetime to do it in. We can’t yet speak the language of butterflies, but we can imagine it. We are giving ourselves wings. With such commitment, every moment becomes a lifetime. We think we may have discovered the secret of eternal youth, to see and be seen through the eyes of love.

              Angel Clothes

              You are like a ripe peach
              Swollen in the summer of your life
              And as the peach surrounds its stone
              Your skeleton enwombs your soul
              But thinly.
              I often see it shining
              Through the hollows in your cheeks.
              I need your body
              Need to know its shadows
              Sound its pleasures
              But as the stone
              Though small at first
              Must grow; feeds off the dying peach
              So your spirit will transhume your flesh
              Disgorge it in
              A thousand peaches a thousand summers a
              Thousand eternities more beautiful than
              You or I

            1. The Language of Butterflies – the Path of Attachment by Alysse Aallyn

              The Life Force – “Why do we need each other?”


              Parents can watch this need for The Reciprocal Other awaken. At about the age of two the infant, who has belonged to the parents and who has felt like part of them, begins to show a lot of interest in the outside world. But when she sees a pint-sized someone exactly like herself, a certain sparkle comes into her eyes. She wants to clutch, bond with, play with that person. Hang on, because now the thrill-ride is beginning, the search Plato described as our search for our Missing Half. Mating behavior is an even more powerful driver in biology than feeding needs. Mating drives species to extravagant displays of seemingly dangerous behaviors, obsessive building, fighting and positioning. Species who mate for life put themselves through complex effort to secure The One. So this is biology, folks. You are in the grips of an instinctual drive it is pointless to resist. Hang on, and let’s make sure your brain becomes engaged.

                Sex cadets

                I shall orchestrate your life I say
                Make your blood sing woodwind
                Stretch my nerve harp-tight
                Across your exo-shell
                While you, heart racer
                Put me through my paces
                Pushing your muscle through
                The gates of my life
                Pushing past theories
                of the pluperfect poetical
                pushing like
                 a downhill artist
                the speed racer you claim to be
                Speed  devil
                Speed demon
                Speed dreamer.

              1. The Language of Butterflies: the Path of Attachment by Alysse Aallyn

                The Language of Butterflies: the Path of Attachment by Alysse Aallyn

                Assess your potential to connect. We wake alone, but we are on the path of Attachment. Ask yourself; do you seek balanced, indestructible attachment, synchronous, not disharmonic relationship; a connection that is symbiotic, not exploitative. If the answer is Yes, you are on the path of Paradise.

                How can we achieve these goals? First, we must understand and accept our Self, our Ego, with all its quirks and flaws, needs and yearnings, limits and possibilities. Then we must understand the Other; the Lover. We must attune ourselves to the structure of their yearning to begin to construct our duet, our dance. After that we must negotiate the rapids of relationship with each other and with the outside world. Danger! Excitement! Ecstasy! Despair…Compassion.
                Union.

                We are caterpillars, you and I, attempting to learn the language of butterflies. We are unprepossessing creatures, daily absorbed in infantile needs of eating and excreting, but we have a firm promise of a future in which we stretch our gorgeous wings.

                Paradise

                Without eyes

                Ambitious goldfish float

                Dream of skies

                Where fins are wings

                Lily pads are clouds

                Swollen tight

                as seed pearls; gullets

                Safe forever from

                vengeful squid or

                Killer waves.

                Who can say if in their time of death

                Those dreams don’t live

                Bursting skin;
                Trailing comets,

                Scattering scales like stars

                Spilling the pond and soaring limitless

                To be whales

                To be gods

                To be free?

              2. #DreamTherapy – Dream Journaling with Alysse Aallyn

                Homing – Forgiveness –
                Do you dream of home? What’s “home” to you? Sometimes we dream of a home that no longer exists, or never existed. DreamTherapy posits that “home” represents the state of psychic absolution where all mistakes are forgiven and fall away from us. We are cleansed. We dream of ultimate understanding where our sins are not too terrible to be entirely forgotten. Jesus suggests to us that state will never arrive until we learn to be the “forgivers”. Obviously, this means we must learn – somehow – to forgive ourselves.

                What Does It Mean to “Re-set”? – We don’t wish to be free of “consequences”. We want to learn and grow from our mistakes but not be humiliated and punished for them. Pretending they didn’t happen doesn’t free us. Seeing our mistakes as moves in a dance we all contribute to frees us from painful rumination and helps explain how the search for blame becomes a prison. “I did this because you –“… Human interactions are a tar-pit in which we trap and tar ourselves. We realize we need to forgive every chain in the event pattern if we are ever to have any peace.

                Challenge – Robert Frost defines “home” as a place where, when you show up, they have to take you in. Defining “they” defines your group, your tribe, your original home. Philosophy may provide an answer. Buddhists see history as a circle, Christians as a spiral. Ask these questions of your Dream Journal: which direction is the spiral headed and do we have time to learn what we need to know before there’s a cataclysm? Can you define the mess we’re all in and intuit your behavioral contribution? Is it possible to detach from the mess? Can you find a group – or even a moment (say, in yoga class) where you detach from the mess?

                Danger – Mixed up about “ultimate” right and wrong? Lots of atheists feel ”condemned” anyway. Think it through. One avenue leads to health, dignity and growth; the other leads in the opposite direction. Don’t make the mistake of “fundamental attribution error” either. Martin Luther King Jr. made a wise comment that the type of government capitalism desires is “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the rest of us.” It certainly suits corporations to lecture their employees on building a better world without incorporating any of those ideas into the bigger picture, where we have no control and they have absolute freedom. It is important that our resistance not embitter us.

                Opportunity – Forgiveness doesn’t require ignoring the past or accepting bad behavior. It’s part of an interaction where forgiveness is requested. Usually there is a recognition of fault or an expression of remorse: “I’ll never do that again!” When the requesting party seeks permission for the suffering to continue, “I can’t change” — that’ a different request. “Home” is not created that way. Hell is. Your opportunity is to point this out – if necessary, to yourself. “But if I’m not willing to try giving up my behavior because I think I’m not able to, this pattern will continually get worse.” And make an intelligent choice. “If it gets really bad I can always commit violence” is not an intelligent choice, “I need help” is.

                Models & Mentors – “It’s not an easy journey to get to a place where you forgive people. But it’s a powerful place, because it frees you” – Tyler Perry

                “The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world”
                – Marianne Williamson

                “The weak can’t forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong”

                – Mahatma Gandhi

                “To forgive one another, we must understand one another” – Emma Goldman

                “Forgiveness does not exonerate the perpetrator. It liberates the victim. It’s a gift you give yourself” – T.D. Jakes

                Mantra – “I forgive”

                Meditation –

                #Haiku: Forgiveness

                Returning home with
                New eyes
                Strong hands
                Fresh translations of
                Future past

              3. #DreamTherapy – Dream Journaling with Alysse Aallyn

                Love – Love is the spirit that animates the empty spaces between humans. Once charged, these spaces become a powerful force for growth and change – uncharged they are so much dead air. Love is the longing to be truly alive and to share life with the Blissed, Blessed Others.

                Yearning Defines Us – Once we knew the meaning of life but it seems we have forgotten. But oh, how we long to be reminded, to re-experience the borderlessness between creatures that makes the dead universe come alive.

                Challenge – We can’t go back, we can only go forward. We must practice uncertain techniques we can’t recall in a threateningly uncertain world. We truly are standing up and running across the ocean, just as in my dream, but this time, we have the confidence of memory. Someone loved us once, now we can re-create and perpetuate that magic. In your Dream Journal, list all the aspects of love that you can remember. How many can you yourself practice?

                Danger – Danger lies in narrowing definitions. Love must ever open outwards. As soon as we turn Love into a zero sum game with a shut-off valve the moment we feel gratified, Love is killed.

                Opportunity – Close your eyes and assume yoga’s starfish pose. We are open to what the universe longs to teach and once we commit to pass it on, we form an unbreakable chain, free at last from the bonds of selfishness. Clasp the hand (or paw) that generously, trustingly takes hold of yours.

                Models & Mentors –“‘to love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides”
                – David Viscott

                “Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only what you are expecting to give, which is everything” – Katherine Hepburn

                “Love gives you a piece of your soul you never knew was missing”

                – Torquato Tasso

                “Love is the gift of oneself” – Jean Anouilh

                “I love you for who I am when I’m with you”
                – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

                Mantra – “I embrace”

                Meditation –

                #Haiku: Honesty

                Stop delusion
                No one’s fooled.
                Acknowledge
                Truth –
                Radiate
                Love:
                Know
                Peace.

              4. #DreamTherapy – Dream Journaling with Alysse Aallyn

                Dispossessed – Do you dream of transgressions committed against you? Are you being robbed, stolen from, deprived? We wake with a sense of loss. Something has been taken from us, but what? The “politics of grievance” has always waged particular power, breeding anger and revenge. “You took something from me I will take something from you.” Yet our loss remains amorphous. We cling to the concept that we were “entitled” to something we no longer have. Philosophers and psychologists speculate; is it the mother’s womb? The family nest? What exactly is this lost paradise?

                You Can’t Take It With You – There is much talk nowadays that “the American Dream” is no longer possible. Very relevant to our study of DreamTherapy! Dreams are our specialty! But what was that “lost dream”, exactly? Some mystical concept of “wholeness” – family, life, work, rewards – that shifts according to who you are and where you are looking from. Once you are part of a “team” – even if just a team of two – the stakes seem different. Is that loss? Or accretion?

                Marx said all property is theft. We no longer fill our tombs with the junk of real life for use in the Great Beyond, “terra cotta servants” who will “wake” to wait on us hand and foot. We are forced to satisfy ourselves with strictly “mental” pictures. Is the detachment of elder-hood a triumph of success or a long wail of departure?

                Challenge – The “de-cluttering” movement did us all an enormous favor. Marie Kondo asked us to rid ourselves of every object that does not “spark joy”. That’s a high standard! We soon discover that daily life stirs up a lot of “necessary” detritus that sparks joy in literally no one but is a misery to live without. Probably the best way to free ourselves is to freshly contemplate this entitlement mystique. Open your Dream Journal and consider: What is it we think we are entitled to, and the next question is, is everyone entitled to the same thing? How’s that work?

                Danger – What does it mean when we believe we are entitled to something others are not? How do we stop them from wanting what we “have”? Do we “have” anything, really? It doesn’t take much to see this American Dream turning into a nightmare. We may say we’ve worked very hard for what we get but the whole principle of capitalism is to benefit from the work of others. It doesn’t take much to see the grievances THAT would stir up. And yet “state” ownership churns up grievances of its own. Ownership itself is fraught with exclusion, hostility, and danger. If our frame for adventure is a casino, we are mandating not winning, but losing on a massive scale.

                Opportunity – Do we possess objects when we are not physically present? Can we ever possess people? Do we WANT to take responsibility for another’s entire existence? Ask your Dream Journal: how do our dreams of freedom comport with our dreams of possession? Who – or what – is held captive? What if we freed ourselves – mentally and spiritually? Can we still enjoy the world if it doesn’t belong to us and we don’t belong to it? What would it feel like to release ourselves from captivity?

                Models & Mentors – “The more stuff I donated the more I was able to breathe, the more trash I threw away, the more weight I felt was lifted, the more I was able to see a new life, the more joy I found” – Zina Harrington

                “Clutter is postponed decisions” – Barbara Hemphill

                “Life is your masterpiece. Edit frequently and ruthlessly” – Nathan W. Morris

                “To the spoils belong the victor” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

                “Freedom is the oxygen of the soul” – Moshe Dayan

                Mantra – “I release”

                Meditation –

                #Haiku: Dispossessed

                We “own”
                Nothing:
                Objects, people, selves
                Sweated off
                As spirit
                Rises