Who's Your Hope Masseuse?

Without hope, it really doesn't matter how much you have or how much you know emotional bankruptcy is inevitable.  An emotionally bankrupt person quite simply, has lost heart strength.  What keeps a heart strong and emotionally fit and flexible?  It's not rocket science.  It's Hope and Love.

I have spent the last fourteen years of my recovery building my own heart strength.  When I got clean and sober on October 12^th, 1995 my heart felt crippled.  It was so fatigued and exhausted that I needed help to regain my strength.  That is when I met my first Hope Masseuse, I was aged 33.  I had been drinking and drugging, starving and binging, bullshitting myself and those around me for the past nineteen years, that I had my shit together.

The truth of the matter was, I was suicidal.  I had almost lost all hope.  A mother of two divine sons then aged 7 and 9, married to their father who I had been with for almost 14 years, I wanted desperately out of my life.

I felt like a failure as a mother, and a fraud as a human being.  I was an expert in massaging others egos, being who they needed me to be and saying what they needed me to say.  All the while quietly being disgusted at myself for living a lie.  I just wanted to run away from my self and my life.  However, I had these two divine sons I could not leave.

My darkest hour was on October 12, 1995 as I came to in my bedroom (I didn't fall asleep and wake up in those days, like any true addict, I passed out and came to).  I had been heavily drinking and drugging the night before and it was around 10am.  The house was silent as the kids had been taken to school.  My bedroom looked like there had been a war there the night before.  Drugs and alcohol next to the bed, lamps knocked over and broken glass on the floor.  I was naked, with dirt under my fingernails and leaves and vomit in my hair. 

The black vulture of suicide felt like it was sitting on my emaciated shoulder.  I weighed 58 kilos.  My ribs were sticking out, my eyes sunken, and my body was numb and in my heart I felt hopeless. 

"Just do it, do it, do it" The dark voice of the black suicide vulture played in my head almost pecking at my brain as it taunted me.  The thought of death was so appealing that morning.  I remembered being this desperate for escape from myself, back in my early teens.  I had overdosed in a toilet block after my first sexual experience with a male my age.  Toxic sexual sewerage from childhood memories became too much for me to bear.  I prayed to Mother Nature and Father Time at the ripe old age of 16 to take me off the planet.  I overdosed in a toilet block and locked myself in.  I remember curling up around the base of the toilet feeling relief, waiting to go home, to leave this internal emotional hell.  I was bankrupt of hope back then, and here I was again almost 17 years later.

I wanted peace more than anything back then, and nothing has changed, today at age 47 I still do.  But I thought that would be impossible for someone like me to find.  Drugs and alcohol were my solution for many years helping me find chemically induced peace for the past 19 years.  But what started out as my solution in my teens, became just another problem in my life by my thirties.  For now it had stopped working.  Drugs and alcohol could no longer keep the emotional sewerage that seemed to be drowning my heart at bay.

The thought of my sons little faces that morning, were the only ray of light I could hold onto.  I got up off the bed after rocking and praying to the beautiful tree outside my window for help.  As I stood, alcoholic diarrhea ran involuntarily down my legs.  I saw in the bedroom mirror before me an emaciated corpse. I am five foot, eleven inches or 180cm, so I am a relatively tall woman.  My healthy weight these days in 2010 is about 70 kilos.  So at 58 kilos back on October 12, 1995, I was very malnourished.

I am a walking miracle for I have not picked up a drink or a drug from that day to this, but I know that would not have been possible for me had I not found my Hope Masseuses.

You may have read my words before in my previous blogs and books when I share about my first Hope Masseuse, Beautiful Barb.  I met her when I was ten days clean and sober.  I had never met a Hope Masseuse before in my life.  Someone who intuitively knew how to massage the knots and cramps in my heart with gentle strength.

In a perfect world a child would be surrounded by elders throughout their childhood that are all capable of an invigorating Hope Massage to the child's heart when required.  Mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, aunts and uncles would all ensure that the child's emotional health and wellbeing was always supported, as well as their physical and intellectual development.  It is my view that good circulation of love and hope throughout our emotional body, is as vital as good blood circulation to our physical body

You may already have a Hope Masseuse in your life, however if you don't have one and are looking for heart family here is a checklist that I often share with those new to the path of recovery.

If you have recently read my last blog The Brave and Beautiful Black Sheep I outlined the three essential steps required to build Emotional Fitness.  These steps are a formula I have observed that ensure good circulation of hope and love to the emotional body.  Recovery or Emotional Fitness is a lifestyle like physical fitness and requires repetition, commitment and deliberate attention and effort.   So these three steps include:

• 1. Safe tribal support (See The Beautiful Brave Black Sheep Blog for more)
• 2. Becoming Teachable, finding wise and respectful Elders (today's blog)
• 3. Daily Self Care (forthcoming blog)

A gentle but firm Hope Massage is a rare technique that a wise and respectful Elder has mastered.  They entice us to keep loving and learning about life through hope.  They remind us that we have choices and that there are no mistakes, only opportunities to learn and grow.

Beautiful Barb has been blessed with a divine history of Hope Masseuses in her mother and grandmother.  She has had wonderful training and is a rare woman with a unique technique.  Her Mother Mary, I hope to be like when I grow up.  At eighty she has endured many blows to the heart, but remained strong with gentleness nonetheless.  She looks for love in herself and in others at every opportunity.

So back to the checklist of the top ten qualifications you need to look for if you are in the market for a Hope Masseuse.

You can identify them for they will "walk the walk, not just talk the talk" and live a life of abundance on every level.  In other words, they will have built within their lives a quality of lifestyle.  They will have loving and respectful relationships with themselves and others. 

• 1. They will laugh and cry unashamedly.
• 2. They can disagree with you without disrespecting you.
• 3. They have no emotional investment in what you do or don't do; their primary focus is your happiness and quality of life.
• 4. They are humble enough to know they don't have your answers, and know that you hold your own answers. Their role is to be a lantern bearer and hold the lantern of hope whilst you are in the dark and out of hope.

•5.    They allow you the dignity of your own mistakes and never do the "I told you so dance."

• 6. They freely say sorry if they are ever in the wrong
• 7. They don't gossip about others, as they are more interested in looking for the good not for fault
• 8. They are masters of tough love for they will love you when you are making it tough for anyone else to love you.
• 9. They won't abandon you when you are upset or angry with them, and will not hold a grudge.
• 10. They have faith in love and the human spirit.

When I am conducting in house workshops for clinical staff or speaking at clinical conferences my main focus is to remind therapists that they are paid elders by their clients.  I love the fact that the word therapist actually means "attendant to the soul". It matters not to clients how many degrees or intellectual knowledge the therapist has if the clinician cannot bring a heartfelt presence into the room.  Their skills must include knowing how to hold a lantern of hope steadily and sincerely.  If they are unable to do this, the client will not drop their heart anchor, impairing their ability to make a heartfelt commitment to the therapist's process of recovery.

This doesn't mean therapists have to divulge any personal information, however a good clinical must be a heart connected human being first and a therapist second.  If they cannot hold warmth, genuine respect and compassion for the person looking for support that is paying them by the hour, it is my opinion that they are ripping themselves and their clients off.

I am honoured these days to train clinical and non-clinical parties in the art of Hope Massage.  I have been blessed with an amazing teacher, and still have a great deal to learn.  But these days through years of repetitive training and emotional massage with my therapist, Beautiful Barb, her mother Mary and her grandmother (I have never met but feel I know her hearts wisdom well) I am now teachable again.

A wise and gentle elder keeps us excited about the potential in ourselves and in life.  They make learning a rewarding experience for those who once felt abused, misunderstood and ridiculed by elders in their past.

I have found the most successful places to find a Hope Masseuse are within Recovery groups, or any emotional health and wellbeing group gathering (yoga, Pilates) that does not involve weapons of mass distraction (drugs, alcohol, competition or sex).

It is ideal to eventually work on finding a male and female elder as your recovery progresses.  This is so you have a balanced view of life and humanity.  For me my therapist The Gentle Giant has been my male elder, and Beautiful Barb my female.  Barb is unable to see the world through a male's eye.  As a married woman, on her third marriage, and mother of sons who are now 21 and 23 I still need to learn a great deal from male elders, so I can understand the male perspective on life.

A wise elder has success in life with love first and foremost.  They have a character that will persevere with you when others will not.   They will share their life experiences feely and honestly with you as an open, not closed book.  They are cautious but not fearful when it comes to matters of the heart, mastering in discernment of character.  But hope is their genius; they can find hope in the darkest of times and massage it in our fearful cramping hearts.

Of course my therapist does not divulge personal details but he has mastered the art of bringing open heart presence into every session, unfortunately, not all therapists have mastered this art.

Thank you my darling Barb and to The Gentle Giant, my therapist, for helping me recover from emotional bankruptcy and chronic heart fatigue.  Here are my word vitamins for today that were written by a wise elder sharing his knowledge to other budding wise elders.

"If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, Experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.     Joseph Addison