Comadres Journal
May 1988 – August 1990

In May 1988, I went to downtown Washington D. C. to a church basement and began doing work with women who had been tortured in the prisons of El Salvador. They are founders of Comadres, mothers and wives of the disappeared.

This is when I would like my life to be a movie so I could look at all the scenes slowly. So much goes on. I make my way through the 95 degree high humidity that is Washington DC in summer. I empty a fistful of nickels and dimes into the Metro ticket machine to get a $1.70 round trip, my overhead for today’s work. On arrival I am saying prayers to my angels assessing my personal energy and asking for their help. It sounds a bit pathetic. “I am feeling awful today- mind, body, spirit, the works. I am asking please that some gift be made to Maria through me. I need your grace to be of any use.”

Maria and I have no common language other than hope and reverence. We use some sign language at the start of each session to share what parts of her body hurt. Clasping my hands together and putting them to the side of my head I ask her how her sleep has been. She makes a frown and says “poquito”, little. I put my hands at the small of my back and raise my eyebrows as if to say, “and how is this part of you?” We do the same for other parts. One week she has bad headaches, another week no sleep. Another week she has fallen and bruised a knee and shoulder badly.

One week she is frantic with the news that she has not been granted amnesty. Just as in the AIDS epidemic, one must always be loving indiscriminately, without attachment to control of the larger picture. Dying, deportation, losing the one you’ve been helping can feel as though your work doesn’t count. But it’s not so. If your work is good when you are doing it, then it’s total remains. This is loving for the sake of loving. Tough and tender at once and always remembering that no love is ever wasted. During that session I saw Jesus come to us in bright electric colors and guide the work. We were both stunned by this. His compassion was as exquisite as light itself.

Her little boy, Oscar, was in utero when much of the torture happened. Now he refuses to be out of her arms when men are present. It has meant at times that I am doing massage and energy work on Maria while she holds him. He is soon asleep in her arms as she doses too.

There are times when she is more scared than others and I feel myself being drained of all compassion especially if I am not well rested. There are days when we are both centered and the silence and stillness becomes thick and glowing and we both leave in a state of grace.

Today I notice several things at once. She is tense as her deportation hearing approaches, news of the death squads is terrifying and leaves her sleepless. The army has taken supplies sent to earthquake victims and arrested Comadres staff. I feel too tired to fend off her despair. I feel her sadness seep down into me and flatten my reserves. She will need work on the left side of her head where tension has collected. I will have to reach very deep for my own calm to do her any good. I will need to sleep after this. I will have to choose between clients and desk work this week. I ask for her angels and mine to surround us and make her a gift of peace.

After some opening work to join intimate energies I begin at her feet. It seems at times that the deeper the hurt the more stillness is required to contact it. By all appearances, I am sitting on the floor, holding one foot at a time almost without motion. But the transaction I feel taking place (and not by any decision on my part) is drawing down the energy and attention of her body to her feet and opening the bottom of her feet like a trap door releasing what feels like overcrowding. She is sitting with her eyes closed. When I ask her to lie down on the sofa, I begin to wave and weave my arms in circles to clear the area over her, a method I often use, but this motion is too coarse for how she feels today. She is more fragile and I just sort of pat and smooth the air rather than scoop it. I can feel my own tenderness rise and her sadness release in bits. Her sadness seeps out and I wonder if she will weep. She lies still, her face placid, and then turns to the side just a bit. I work on her shoulders and back. My hands are on her hips and legs and follow down to her feet again. There is a clear sense of completion and a deep grace in us both by the hours end. Even the room feels clearer. As she rises she looks as though she’s had a good sleep. After a while she says something in Spanish which I understand by intuition and from many other receivers. “I wasn’t in my body. I was floating.” The color is back in her face. Her posture is better and she has calm and more energy. She looks younger. We hold both each others hands and say good-bye.

There are no words for this intimacy, to feel the sadness that seeps out from the limbs and into my hands passing through my soul and out, for the moment I feel the sadness or terror or pain grow and pass, for the look on her face as peace sneaks in like night, no words for the moment when I wonder what to do next, where to touch, what happened here 2 years ago. Will a touch there scare her? Will it hurt? Will it release a flood of sadness that will overwhelm us both? Will I lose my center and become exhausted? Will I lose track of my gift, my goodness? And usually a deep breath comes, a narrow passage broadens, and tension melts. All and each of these several times in an hour’s work.

I feel more confident in this work as the months and years go on. The stories of torture have frightened me. I don’t repeat the stories because it feels like flirting with insanity or tempting evil. I have been afraid of the transfer I have experienced with other traumas. It is common for me to feel the pain of others as I work. There is a moment when the essence of a feeling rises in them and moves into me and then out. Suddenly we are both more clean and they carry less around. It is not gone so much as less immediate, having less bite. It took me years to accept this transaction, to surrender to the experience and allow it to stretch me. I have put a great deal of effort into making no effort to control or guide the process. And I am fairly at home with it now though it leaves me fairly tender and certainly not in a state to be in a downtown metropolitan area soon afterward which is where I am with this refugee work.

Later in the day I will feel a deep tiredness. I recall the beginning of work with AIDS. There was always the mix of excitement, gratitude and lots of exhaustion until I learned what my gifts were and how to discipline my giving.

After this work, I walk the two blocks to the Metro station past several homeless men in rags sitting on the sidewalk. I get teary. It’s hard to wake up a graceless grouch feeling only my own orneryness and enter into grace. It strips my gears. It feels as though the sadness and hardness of my life is only a cloak that I draw over me. And this work, this handing myself over to Holy Spirit, takes these extraneous details away and I am again firmly on the earth but walking with a lightness and a brighter vision of what’s going on and what’s available. It’s sad to lose this, like losing one’s sobriety. It’s too great a contrast to move from one to the other. It’s too strong a reminder of what I know but lose track of, of how luscious the balance and stillness of grace is and how easily my own illusions and the noise of the world distracts me.