Sour Milk and Nasturtiums

Sour Milk and Nasturtiums

The title to this blog brought back the memory of an old song my sisters and I used to sing when we were kids swinging on the swings behind our old grade school. I don’t believe there was a known composer, otherwise, I’d make an attribution.

 “Smoke Coke-a-Cola cigarettes. Chew Wriggly Spearmint beer. Ken-L-Ration dog food, makes your wife’s complexion clear. Simonize your baby with a Hershey’s candy bar. And Texaco’s the beauty cream that’s used by all the stars. Take your next vacation in a brand new Frigidaire. Learn to play the piano in your grandma’s underwear. Doctor’s say that babies should smoke till they are three. And people over sixty-five should bathe in Lipton tea.”

Life is filled with so many juxtapositions of good and bad, smelly and aromatic, plenty and poor, cold and hot that anyone would have to wonder exactly why humans were put in a world where opposites are everywhere. The song above is a comical tribute to opposites colliding and causing a world of strange misnomers. But the truth is the wide spectrum of opposites cause most of life’s hardest lessons.

You’ve heard me talk about a friend I’ve been so proud of lately since his release from prison. He has gotten a job and has been in a program that has supported him with helping him get a home and transportation. Suddenly, yesterday, we find out that after a bi-weekly blood test, that he has used again—once. He knows he has to be tested to stay in the program. What would make him jeopardize his relationship to this productive situation for one high on muscle relaxers? Now, he has nowhere to sleep and no home. He still has a job, thank God, but can’t find an apartment because of his prison record and his drug use.

He had experienced complete freedom from his tainted past for nine months. He found help out of a hole that he had been in for years. But something drew him back into an abyss that now has left him homeless. What could that be? Night and day. Cold and hot. Black and white. It seems so easy to see for most of us to see, but yet so hard for him.

Our lessons of this vast spectrum of opposites goes deep into our DNA, into our neuro-pathways, back to the time when we were being nourished with or without love as infants. If love happened, a strong attachment bond occurred in the brain and allowed us to create equally strong bonds in our adult lives with work and relationships. If the opposite happened, and our attachments were sporadic, it would leave us unattached as children, then keep us consistently searching for something to fill the gap that was left in our hearts and minds, no matter how many times the lessons of life tried to teach us the difference between good and bad, light and dark, and good and evil.

I experienced this in my own life in the form of relationship attachment. No matter how many times my heart gets ripped out by someone I loved and who didn’t return the love the way I needed, I still seek for someone to fulfill the emptiness that is left whenever the relationship ends.

My heart is like a thermometer, though, which is leveling to a more normal temperature as each lesson occurs. When as a younger person, I would have been left at a chill level that was so frigidly cold, I would have immediately gone out and found someone to comfort and warm me. Now my thermostat is set at a place where I feel comfortable enough in my own skin and in my own sadness to sit with myself and feel it, comforting my own heart and mind. This, I feel, is the key to understanding myself in a completely new dimension.

Not everyone can be in this balanced place of being able to sit with his/her own feelings, I understand, as it has taken me fifty-two years to get here. I don’t judge anyone for needing a cohort to comfort himself into homeostasis. But I know from experience that homeostasis is now a state of mind that I can get to by calming my own body with such tools as breathing exercises, comforting affirmations, a weighted blanket or vest, rocking, or even the comfort of a warm shower or bath.

Some of these things may seem simple to the reader, but all we are trying to do when we get into a state of sadness and pain is to confuse the neuro-transmitters in our brain, leaving the mind free to change course and step forward into a new paradigm of homeostasis. Had I known that what I was doing with another individual, I could actual do by comforting myself, I would have saved myself a lot of pain and a great deal of self deprecation.

I don’t think many people like the feeling of finding himself after a one-night stand situation only to make the feeling of abandonment exponential—after the fact. If we understood in our DNA, in the deepest part of our subconscious mind what the reciprocity was for our self-medicated actions, we probably would not participate in them. But in the moment, we are frail and left in our desperation.

We are left between choosing to drink sour milk or beholding the beauty of nasturtiums, one of the few flowers that can actually be eaten. But you wouldn’t know that fact unless you took the time to see past the flowers alluring beauty and learn to dig deeper into things seen and stop trusting the tricks in our minds.

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Bo Sebastian is a Hypnotherapist and Life & Health Coach, available for private sessions to QUIT SMOKING, Lose Weight, New Lap-Band Hypnosis for Weight Loss, CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! at 615-400-2334 or www.bosebastian.com.

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