Friday Dispatch: Garlic
Between hot flashes and hot takes, I remember wholeness
Friday greetings,
In a Facebook post this week (which reminds me, I am leaving Facebook one week from today – whee! or eek!), therapist Rick Kirschen1 shared an image that has stayed with me: “I remind myself that my mind isn’t one unified entity —it’s more like garlic than an onion, made of separate cloves.”
The context was his experience as an Israeli after these last two brutal years of war. But the profundity of his words also encompasses the complexity of being a person with responses, needs, and experiences that may appear to be in direct conflict with each other.
Unsurprisingly, he has an Internal Family Systems background.
The thing with parts work is that it’s very easy to mistake a single clove for the whole bulb. The metaphor of peeling an onion certainly resonates and has much applicability when it comes to the wonderful and sometimes harrowing process of uncovering more and more of ourselves, the layers of being sometimes so impossibly thin we can hardly distinguish one from another. So it’s not that I’m not all for the onion.
But… the garlic. 🧄
Kirschen continues, explaining what he means by his mind being like garlic: “These parts are protective: one guards the physical safety of my family and friends, another my ethics; one fears being a Friar (Hebrew for sucker), another fears exploiting others. When danger looms and trauma surfaces, they all react at once.”
Between hot flashes (holy hot flash, batman) and hot takes, let’s just say I can lose my head.
At times, it’s as if I am neither onion nor garlic, more like hot chili peppers scorching my own throat as I choke on the words that get stuck there. Reading Kirschen’s words reminded me of something I surely knew already, yet still forget on a semi-regular basis. My warring parts are each performing some function that must feel all-important to them. Like, LOOK LADY. I AM THE ONE WHO WILL KEEP YOU OK.
I’ve learned a thing or two about these various cloves of garlic. Some are sharp. Others mushy. Some are bulging, dwarfing the littler ones. All of them are medicinal in some way.
But none of them is the medicine. None of them is the Self.
My job is to bundle the parts together in an embrace tight enough to create a sense of safety, but with enough space to breathe that nobody feels squeezed out. GUYS, I tell them, we are GARLIC. Or maybe I remove each clove with care, making a neat row of garlic across the expanse of my heart.
Now I can see everything happening there at once: The lover, the defender, the hyper-critic, the rebel, the little sister, the teacher’s pet, the mama bear, the loner, the dreamer, the hawk, and the dove. They are all there, all here, sometimes with their backs turned to each other, sometimes in screaming matches that keep me up at 3:30am.
And sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, they remember. Ah, yes, we all come from the same Self. We all belong. But not one of us is the whole.
Remembering all of this returns me to self-compassion, which in turn helps me (re)connect with compassion for others. It helps me remember that when I take off my boxing gloves, the world is still filled with friends and allies.
When I soften my inner and outer gaze, I can glimpse that the person I desperately want to call my enemy is also garlic. I might not be able to stay with that for long, but practice is practice. And, as Kirschen wrote at the closing of that post, “There’s no finish line; and it’s always a work in progress.”
Shabbat Shalom and love,
Jena
And now for something completely different…
Allow me to put on my “wife” hat to share an upcoming FREE workshop my wonderful spouse M.J. (who happens to be a former childbirth educator, doula, and midwife) is hosting on November 10, for expectant parents who are nervous about what’s to come and whether they’re ready. (Spoiler alert – you’re not and at the very same time you are!).
Twenty give-or-take years ago, I knew a lot of people in this demographic. Today, not so many. But I’m sharing here since YOU might want to catch it or share it with peeps in your world who are nervous about getting the parenting thing right. (Another spoiler alert – you will and you won’t and it will be amazing and hard and fun and harrowing and glorious.)
M.J. will be teaching six simple, easy-to-remember techniques that even the most sleep-deprived, zombie parent will be able to use to remember that our kids need us to be present, not perfect.
All the details and preregistration are on the Studio 138 website. And here they are talking a bit about it:
Rick Kirschen also wrote a powerful piece last summer, WHEN BELONGING BREAKS: The Psychological Crisis Facing American Jews. Read it here.