My seeking began in 1986…the seeking to heal from life. Life is a destroyer, if it is doing its job right. If you are not being destroyed, then you truly are not loving or living life. Being a lover of life, there was no other option but to be torn down, ripped up, and spit out.
My first round of healing was all about self-help. I must have read every self-help, pseudo-psychology, paperback book that was created for the neurotic housewife. You see, I believe all housewives are neurotic–who else would marry a house…puh-leeze! I, on the other hand, had a triple dose of neurotitis–I was a single, working mother who was also a housewife.
Self-help books–well, I had moved up from the Harlequin Romances–but self-help infers that there is a broken self that needs to heal. I wasn’t sensing that I needed fixing. I felt like I was trying to bloom in artificial sunlight and I was being fed poison as fertilizer. (I will have to dig out some of my poems from around this time.)
Then, after the self-help books, I moved on to the very hefty, psychology books by noted Jungians and Freudians. Then I moved on to the Western philosophers and that led to the feminists. It was those brave, ground-breaking feminists who helped me travel out of my head and into my body. Oh my, I have a body. It is my body. And it is good.
I learned to connect with my physical body with massage, dance, and Reiki. This led me to the Eastern philosophers–Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga–and a bridge between body, mind, and spirit was formed.
Then this led to my ‘art’. I started doodling. With no idea of what I was creating, my mind was quiet and only my hand knew where to put the next line.
barb j beyers 