Pull Back the Old Vines

To: Nick
From: Well-Intended Person A
Subject: FW: Stories about Nick’s Failures

Recently, such an email dropped into my inbox. The context is not worth exploring (too complicated). Still, the email was sent as a cry for help from Person A but included lots of material from a conversation between Persons B & C I should never have been privy to. The conversation rehashed failures from my past, dispersions on my character, and an extra dose of blame for me for situations outside of my control.

I went over the anxiety cliff in an instant. My body froze up, a headache rolled in, and I could feel the buzz of adrenalized panic running through my whole body. The email threw me firmly back into past conflicts, past failures, and the rush of kinetic energy through my body to fight or fly. But I froze. Neurology calls this “amygdala hijack,” when the oldest parts of our brain take control, flushing our body with hormones, and readying us for a life-or-death situation.

My brain rushed with a hundred conversations at once. Justifications for my past actions. Retributive sermons about the bad behavior of Persons B & C. A big speech for Person A about how dare they share this with me. I readied my long list of successes from that era of time, reweighting the scales of justice in my favor. I plotted a hundred paths of what to do next to masterfully get myself out of this horrible situation I was sure I was in. The hijack is a megaphone and a multiplier. It takes all the things we remember and feel, charging them with energy. The past feels loud. The emotions pulsing current. The thoughts a cacophony of opinions, solutions, and regrets.

Unfreeze and Move

I responded to my friend that I couldn’t engage in that conversation right now, and I was sorry I couldn’t be more helpful, a boundary that took every ounce of energy I had. I am well-trained to be helpful. To believe that whatever dramas or traumas are coursing through my veins, sublimating them is the correct choice, so I can be of service to whoever is right in front of me. Good therapy has helped me see that this often a poor choice.

I slipped on my shoes and headed out my back door to the grey, chilly afternoon. I knew I needed to move, to breath unmanicured air, to plant my feet firmly into the present. As I walked the courtroom of self-defense drained from my brain. My body redirecting blood flow to hands and feet, quadriceps and hamstrings. The surest place for a recentering is my garden, so after walking out the lane to the mailbox, I came back to the late-winter grounds.

The trellis—as it has been since November—was wound tight with dozens of long-dead Black-eyed Susan vines. They were beautiful last fall, taking over the trellis after the squashes had succumbed to spider mites. Gardens are a place of constant regeneration—energy diverting from one place to the next, searching for something beautiful to grow.

I tugged at the old vines to see what winter had done to their strength. They crackled in my hands, slowly but willingly releasing hold of their past glory. I gently pulled loose a handful, mixing them into the straw blanket, preparing the beds for spring. They were so beautiful once, and then they were gone. The old vines want to hold on but don’t need to anymore.

On my porch later as the clouds cleared spring's promise warmed the air, unexpected gratitude rolled over me.

“Thank you, God, for persons B and C. Thank you for the time I spent with them and the lessons I learned. Thank you for the beautiful moments in those years that my PTSD would have me forget. Thank you for using them to teach me about my fear and anxiety. For bringing it to the surface. So I can give it to you to heal.”

Pull Back the Old Vines

Our bodies, full of nature like the dirt of my garden, are built by God to let the old die so new life can rise in its place. Unfortunately, we spend lifetimes in our minds and our habits, building defenses to hold on to our judgments, grip our images, make permanent the past. It’s subconscious and culturally trained. We are taught to hold steady to others’ opinions, to our self-feeling, to the narratives we’ve built for the moments we’d rather forget.

But the wellspring within—the Spirit of Life—is drawing all things back to itself. God's redemptive work is releasing the energy from things past through forgiveness and gratitude, pulling that energy into the future through faith, hope, and love. When our amygdala’s hijack and our emotions freeze us up, we get stuck in loop of past thoughts, feelings, and judgments.

But we don't have to stay in the freeze. We can walkabout. We can pull back the old vines. We can break the chains of these narrative loops. We can compost that power back into the soil, to grow something new.

Today, maybe tomorrow, the hijack is coming. For you, and probably again for me. It took me decades of spiritual guidance to have the grace to put up a brief boundary, feel the tension in my body, and know to let my body move. Maybe my story helps you find your way sooner (I hope.) The flight to rage, the spiral of self-defeat, the buzz of adrenaline are present for us all. Think about how those feelings present in your body. Where does the tension go? What thoughts ensue?

What would it look like to not try to answer those thoughts? What would it look like to feel all that body tension as untapped energy?  It turns out its not a hijack at all. Instead, its the battery cell of an old life, waiting to be plugged in, waiting, through forgiveness and gratitude, to be released into the life welling up in you.

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We are unfreezing our way through Lent, and the stories and responses you all are sharing with me overwhelm me with gratitude. Keeping sharing and commenting. We’re laying down seeds together.