This song has been such a powerful healing force in my life, and I cannot say enough to my sweet songwriter friends that what you do really matters. I’m thankful to have a foundation and wonderful tools for working on my stuff that I got from the valuable time I spent in therapy, and I could not do this work without them! But I am not exaggerating when I say that I’ve experienced more healing in the six months since I encountered this writer’s body of work than I did in the years I spent in therapy. One of the big brick walls on my journey comes from growing up in a family where every other member of the family had really serious needs or illnesses of one kind or another, so I always felt like the least deserving of attention or care. Everyone else had REAL things going on! This wall became particularly apparent when I went to the amazing Onsite several years ago, for a full week of experiential therapy. This brick wall of not deserving to heal my heart because other people had so much worse stuff was there the entire time, and it kept stopping me in my tracks. That week was still completely amazing, but I never got past that wall. I remember that feeling so vividly … actually I could even SEE a brick wall. Everything I’d experienced growing up was either obscured or completely hidden behind that wall of not deserving to even look at it – because growing up with so many serious needs in the family, my job in this world was to stay out of the way and not cause anyone any trouble. I couldn’t even get to these experiences in conversations just with myself or journaling; those voices we hear growing up persist and become the conversations we have with ourselves. That wall remained solid, despite my efforts in and out of therapy to get through it. For years. Until this song. This song knocked it down brick by brick. Nothing had ever gotten through that wall before this kind presence, inviting me to open up my heart and lay it all out. And telling me why I should and that there exist somewhere in this world souls who would not run no matter what’s there. In a way that I could hear it over and over and over, chipping away at this wall until I could finally clearly see and feel everything that was behind it, and really start to heal this little girl. First with finally getting to all this to sort through it myself. Then a pretty awesome and life-changing conversation yesterday where I got to find out that those souls who don’t run? Really do exist. So incredibly thankful. So yeah, Matthew Perryman Jones, pretty good job on this one. :-) And the rest of y’all should really go get his whole catalog … it is without question the best $40 I’ve ever spent in my life. Get it here: mpjmusic/store-3/
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:44:24 +0000