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Taking Care of Me
Who knows what will come up in the IFS session? Certainly not my rational part. This one began with the death of my father. He died over 40 years ago when his car ran into a train. Here I had a chance to mourn him as I had not done before.
Going forward from my father’s death, in this session we found that my father passed the mantle of my care on to my husband Dave. My father's hand is depicted on upper right on the lace. On the right side of the wall hanging, the Dave part accepts my father’s mantle and adds a lighter one of his own.
Here's the current version.
I made the mantle and the protector's dress from the same cloth for for artistic reasons but now see how connected they are, since they are two sides of the same question of how a woman can be fully living in her world.
It's good to visit Taking Care of Me when I feel incapable or needy or overwhelmed. Knowing that the feeling of inner peace is possible in these situations is very encouraging and very comforting.
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We worked with all the parts and their protectors so that the Self could now be in leadership and not the parts or protectors. When the ancient woman here was unburdened she said what she could now embody was Peace, Peace, Peace.
Taking this as a cue, I wanted to make a peace sign out of lace that became the container of the opposites, with the Self as the connection to both. The final configuration of the lace does look something like an upside down peace sign, but then the spokes wanted to be wings going upwards instead of downwards. As the wings came, it felt that the Self that emerged was strong enough to hold both possibilities.
One part of me was fine with this but another was not. An ancient female protector came into the session and she was shaking and shaking and shaking a part of my 28 year old being.
“Wake up Girl!!!” she kept saying. “You are quite capable to be on your own!!!!!!! It’s a trap!!!!!!! Don’t you know better?”
This wall hanging was finished in 2012
I tried giving the Self a person’s head but that didn’t seem right. I tried her with no head but that wasn’t right either. Here's a picture of that earlier version.
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