Wow, I just discovered an incredible poet and inspiration.

I am humbled and inspired. I love that combination.
 
https://youtu.be/BadlHRCah6k


https://youtu.be/9PA0v9ANTrY


Goddess bless you!!!!!

The sacred healing tent of self-compassion.

We sit together here.

In this tent.

Some of us cannot sit.

Some of us can only lay.

And so we lay together.

In this tent.

Our bodies racked with pain.

Our souls fighting agony, desperation and despair.

Still, we sit, we lay together.

We share our prayers with each other.

We share our blessings with one another.

When one hurts the other helps.

When one helps the other hurts.

It doesn't matter who or when or why.

What matters is that we care for each other.

What matters is that we see our kindness in each others souls.

What matters is that together there is still a reason, a hope, a moment to stay alive for.

If we hold tight onto each other.

Just like this.

Holding hands.

Even as we lay with agony by our sides, with agony inside.

What matters is that we teach each other to love, to love ourselves, to forgive ourselves, to bless ourselves.

And as we teach we heal. And as we teach we grow. And as we grow we celebrate.

We celebrate the strides we make. We celebrate the strides we made in the darkness all alone. We celebrate the strides we made in the light with our beloved community.

We grow to love, to love our community so deeply that there is no longer an I and a them.

We grow to love so deeply that we understand that taking care of ourselves means taking care of all of us.

We grow to love so deeply that giving becomes the very same as receiving.

We grow to love so deeply that our hearts are filled with this gratitude, this grace, this ever-present determination to fight not just our own fight....

For we see, we have come to feel, to know, that our fight is the one same fight,

We fight together and this way we are so much stronger, so much more complete, so much more full of grace ....

And gratitude becomes our daily prayer and our daily blessing

Snip snip snip with their scalpels.

Through soft tissue.

The softest tissues of our vaginas.

With their scalpels. In their white robes.

Snip. Snip. Snip, away.

Ever so daintily, with such precision, such focused concentration.

They say that they are healing us.

We believe them, blindly.

We let them into our vaginas. With their scalpels.

Snip. Snip. Snip. Away.

Ever so daintily. They implant into us polypropylene mesh. They tell us that it will help with urinary incontinence, it will help with prolapse.

What they don't tell is that:

Hundred of thousands of women are being butchered through their vaginas.

They don't tell us that our bodies reject mesh, that mesh erodes, damaging our nerves, our muscles, perforating our bowels....leaving us wishing we were dead.

They don't tell us that that thousands of women have committed suicide because of the excruciating nerve pain that they are left with.

What they don't tell us, those humans? in their white robes, cloaked in their medical expertise, armed in their years of medical 'education'....is that they are murdering us one by one through our vaginas.

Ever so daintily with focused attention and perfect precision...they implant us with poison....

When we return to their offices, desperate and begging for help, they tell us that we are crazy.

They lie through their teeth. They have already seen countless women walk through their office doors begging for help.

But they have no time to waste on their victims. They must prepare the table for the next woman.

Ever so daintily with perfect precision, each slice calculated, they gently, thoughtfully, ever so intentionally slice through our flesh...and ever so carefully, with focused precision, each tear calculated...they sever the tissues of our vaginas and implant us with poison...

Ever so carefully, with perfect precision, cloaked in their white robes...

I have been learning more and more about mesh and mesh injured women and the more I learn the more terrifying it becomes. It reminds me of the holocaust, of the nazi doctor Joseph Mengele and it reminds me of the factory 'farms'. I had a breakthrough last week with the animals. I performed a new poem that I wrote. It was powerful and I was brave and I am grateful that I was able to do it. I knew that if I could do that then I could do anything. This is the poem that I wrote and shared in a restaurant inhabited by about 70 to 80 people, many of them with meat or what I prefer to call by its real name, 'the flesh of tortured animals' on their plates. Truthfully if we can dine and wine on torture and agony why would we be surprised that women are being butchered through their vaginas for money. To me it is all the same. Joseph Mengele exists everywhere in different forms...factory farming and mesh are his siblings. We all have abusive people in our families. I am the last person to deny that evil exists everywhere and that it is happening right now underneath our noses. What is shameful is that we remain silent in the face of brutality be it to animals, to women or to....

I won't remain silent. Not about mesh and not about factory farming. This is the poem that I performed last Monday at the Muse in Provincetown. 

I introduced myself saying that I am sharing a new poem from my body of work called 'Poetry for the Gut' and then I began with confidence and with freedom in my heart.

'The floors of the slaughterhouse are covered, in blood.

But it's not the blood that makes it so bad.

The terror in their eyes and the nausea in their stomachs?

No, even that isn't what makes it so bad now, is it?

The screaming? Have you heard a pig, screaming?

They sound just like humans.

Have you seen a pig thrown into boiling water alive?

That's common practice in the meat industry.

But  maybe that's just not bad enough for you, is it?

How about a pig hanging from his feet, being skinned alive?

Can you hear the screaming now?

I am going to help you here, because something is clearly not coming through.

I am going to bring the factory so called 'farms' to you.

Pigs. Are. Confined. They cannot move. They cannot turn around. For months. They lose their mind. They bang their heads violently against the wall. They bite obsessively into iron bars.

Cold. Iron.

Is that what your heart is made of?

Trapped. Chained. Forsaken. Abused. Tortured.

Oh, and one more thing, baby pigs have their testicles ripped out of them. Beaten. Broken.

Violence. Greed.

And you, you call this an apatite?

You call this dinner? lunch? breakfast?

The next time you eat the flesh of a tortured pig I hope that a piece of you dies.

I hope that compassion grows into that dead piece of you.

I hope it grows fast because their screams are killing me.'

                                                                        Atara Schimmel

I think that this Monday I will perform the vagina poem. I will dedicate it to the 30 million american women and the significant but undocumented number of men that suffer from some form of pelvic/genital/sexual pain and I will dedicate it to the hundreds of thousands of mesh injured women. I feel so angry and desperate and I feel such a sense of urgency. I am so angry at what is being done to women. We are being destroyed systematically by surgeons through our vaginas. Oh my god. I just can't tell you how many times I have cried since reading and learning more and speaking to more and more women. If I wasn't doing my art I would want to die from it. It does the same thing that the holocaust does to me and that factory 'farming' does to me. Only that the difference here is that I feel that I CAN do something and I feel that I AM GOING TO DO SOMETHING MAJOR. I can't explain the feeling. I just know that I am going to burst and that I am going to be heard big time. I just have to protect myself. My own sensitivity can kill me. 

These paintings are in process. This one is going to say something like

 'Mesh sisters stay together.'

This one is going to say ' Mesh-injured sisters, I am praying for you.'

And to add joy onto joy, as though I have not suffered enough at the hands of an abusive older brother. Now I live next to a (recovering?) heroine addict, local street performer that is aggressive and abusive. I do not feel safe here.

I want to live in a safe and quiet space with a beautiful view of the sea with plenty of room inside my home to do my art. I want to live in peace and quiet. I want to be able to take care of myself. Goddess help me.

I have so much work to do. I have to be able to remain balanced, focused and peaceful in order to do my work in a way that won't hurt myself. Meeting mesh heads on is a meeting with the devil and this devil is dangerous and cruel. I need safety and peace to be able to meet the devil and fight him successfully.

Why are there abusive people everywhere? And will they ever get out of my hair?

I am not feeling loved or loving today. I was cursed and violently screamed at. I called the police and changed the locks on the door. My key has disappeared since last night, if it doesn't suddenly swim out of the toilet bowl or drop down from a star than either my crazy neighbor stole it or a workman that was here yesterday stole it. Needless to say I started looking for a new place to live. My little dream room in Provincetown with the gorgeous view of the sea is no longer safe for me.

I haven't started praying to the angels yet. But that will be next on the agenda. Oh, and one good thing, I practiced the guitar and made headway with the chords and I feel ready and prepared for my next lesson.

One day I am going to sing my troubles, oh they will sound so beautiful sung.

Atara, here is a blessing for you. I want you to know that I am proud of the incredibly important work that you are doing. I want you to know that I love you deeply and that I will do everything in my power to keep you safe and protected living in peace and in quiet.

I am working on a painting to raise awareness for mesh. I will submit it to the Provincetown Art Association's upcoming juried show. I can pray that it be seen and recognized and admitted into the show. Pray for me too. Together we can make it happen.

I did something brave tonight.

I performed this poem that I wrote today in front about 70 to 80 people at the Muse in Provincetown during Open Mic.

The Muse serves a lot of dead tortured animals and many of the people in the audience were dining on them.

I explained that this is a new poem from my new body of work called: Poetry for the Gutt

Here goes:

'The floors of the slaughterhouse are covered in blood.

But it's not the blood that makes it so bad.

The terror in their eyes and the nausea in their stomachs.

No, even that isn't what makes it so bad, now, is it?

The screaming. Have you heard a pig, screaming?

They sound just like humans.

Have you seen a pig thrown into boiling water alive?

That's common practice in the meat industry.

But, maybe, that's just not bad enough for you, is it?

How about a pig hanging from his feet, being skinned alive.

Can you hear the screaming now?

I am going to try to help you here, because something is clearly not coming through.

I am going to bring the factory so called 'farms' to you.

Pigs, Are. Confined. They cannot move. They lose their minds. They bang their heads against the walls. They bite obsessively into iron bars.

Cold. Iron.

Is that what your heart is made off?

Trapped. Chained. Forsaken. Abused. tortured.

Oh, and one more thing, baby pigs have their testicles ripped out of them. Beaten. Broken.

Violence. Greed.

And you, you call this an apatite?

You call this dinner? lunch? breakfast?

The next time you eat the flesh of a tortured animal I hope that a piece of you dies.

I hope that compassion grows into that dead piece of you.

I hope that it grows fast because their screams are killing me."

                                                                      -Atara Schimmel

I though that I might be booed of the stage but I wasn't. Few people clapped but the silence felt more appropriate anyway.

I dared myself to do it. It was easy. I want to speak my truth wherever I am regardless of how others will respond to it. That is their choice. My choice is to be brave and to honor every aspect of who I am and what I know to be true.

Congratulations Atara. I really am so proud of you. I love you to the moon and back and into the factory 'farms' and around the world and anywhere and everywhere that your beautiful light-footed feet may travel.

You are everything that I wish to be. You lived up to yourself big time tonight.

What a beautiful day!

What an absolutely beautiful beautiful beautiful day. The sunset was light blues and light pinks and I danced in the cold, to keep warm, to stay with the sunset and the seagulls and to feel the beauty fill my Spirit.

It has been hard to be away from my blog, hard to be away from myself that way. To not be able to write and express everything that I am going through is clearly a part and parcel of being terrorized. Yes, I have been and continue to be terrorized by my older brother, David. His reign of terror over me pretty much ended two years ago when my mother finally (after months of begging him to leave) had him removed from the house with a restraining order. He was taken out of the house by the police. I have never written about this in my blog though I lived through this all along. Somehow when we are abused we believe that we must stuff the abuse into the corner of our hearts. But every cell in my body wants to speak. And every cell in my body is creating through that hard-won place of victory. Victory over evil, Victory over someone else's desire to control, power, subjugate me. Victory over my own fear and over my own impenetrable silence. I don't want to be silent anymore not even for the sake of self-preservation. The truth is cruel, ugly and disgusting. The truth is that I have an older brother that has terrorized me and the rest of my family members for years now. The truth is that I no longer want to to be a silent victim. I want to express it all in the same way that I express and share everything about Pudendal Neuralgia. Sibling Abuse should be no different. Today I know that my older brother will try to hurt me as long as I am alive and that my silence will only chain me to his abuse, stifle my creativity and block the deeper truths of my expressions and of my art.

I came up against a wall in my own art recently and I think that through writing this I am beginning to understand what this wall is. Fear. Fear of David. Fear of his anger. Fear of his obsessive hatred of all of us. Fear of his desire to seek revenge. What will he do if he finds this? I know that he knows that I have a blog. I feel frozen. Frozen in fear. I have come so far. I have and continue to be a voice for so many when it comes to pelvic pain. But here I am frozen. I am scared of David. His hatred has become an obsession that will follow him for the rest of his life. I thought that he had moved on. I hadn't seen him for two years. Until I went back home. I went back home to celebrate my mom's birthday with her.  I wanted to hug her a lot.


But instead I had to defend myself in court. David tried to get a Harassment Prevention order against me. He hates me and my younger brother with a vengeance. He knows that as long as we are alive we will not allow him to further abuse and dominate our parents. He wants to come home to resume his reign of terror, his dictatorship. My parents with all of their feelings of guilt and compassion...would allow him to come home. Though they both have suffered through hell, they would suffer more. Me and my younger brother will no longer allow for this to happen. David has violated the restraining order and the trespassing order. His abuse has been documented by the Springwell Elderly Abuse Services. And yet, he remains unstoppable.

In his own mind, if he could only neutralize me and my younger brother than he could return home to control my parents. I have watched his sadism with my parents. He blames them for his own mental illness, for his botched up childhood, for his non-existent self-esteem....He blames them for everything. He hates our mother with a passion. Today he hates all of us with a passion.






Yes, it is. It is very scary to live with an older brother like David. Yes, it is. Mental illness has been in my family since I can remember. And while I plummeted into PN hell my father plummeted into a psychotic depression. And David did everything that he could do to control and dominate all of us.





































I worked very hard these past few weeks. I had to gather all of the police records and I had to prepare my "defense". Most of all, I had to finally internalize that I was not safe from harm as I had thought that I was. I was shocked that the courts would allow David to abuse me through the court system. Had he tried to do this in Newton he would have never gotten away with it. But because he no longer lives in Newton and because the courts in Concord do not know of his history he was able to get away with it. Apparently anyone can request a Harassment Prevention Order against anyone else. I had no choice but to go and defend myself. By the way, David "invited" my Mom to the same court over the summer, also seeking a 'Harassment Prevention Order" against her. Only that on the day of the hearing he didn't show up. In his own deranged mind he is the victim and he is seeking justice.
















The judge clearly thought that he was an idiot. To claim that I harass him with his history of violations ....But, I suffered. And the fact that I suffered gives David pleasure. I suffered from all of my PTSD symptoms. I was derailed for two full weeks. Living in fear. Reliving all of the physical symptoms of what I survived.

So now you know that Pudendal Neuralgia was only one of the devastating horrors that I was battling. My father's psychotic depression, his string of suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations, his terrifying fall into a catatonia-like state of being...

Must I say more? Because there is more to say. So much more to say and I no longer want to hide it. I want to share it. I want to express it. I want to write it. I want to accept it. I want to protect myself from it. And I no longer want to believe that by not expressing it, I am protecting myself. Because it isn't true. At all. By not expressing it I am  just stuffing it deeper and deeper into my psyche...setting myself up to be surprised and shocked when it comes creeping back up, out of the shadows one again seeking control over my life.









I don't believe in shame. I believe in transparency. I believe that with openness and with expression, comes healing. I no longer want to hide myself away for the sake of my family. I want to express and to create boldly and I want to share, to connect and to heal through my art. Too many of us are hiding our traumas in the closet. I want to live with that closet door open. Wide open.

It takes courage and I have earned my own courage.

Atara

Since her arrival, I have been free of anxiety. Her calm and peace and her beauty have guided me. She came to tell me that my courage is remarkable. She came to tell me that moving was brave and bold and that my fear is normal and expected. I love her. I love her eyes. I see peace, compassion, gentleness, softness...I see myself in her. I see my own beauty through her.

Kindness. She is kind, so kind. She is generous, so generous. She is compassion, tender and sweet and present. She is here for me. She is the first angel that I painted for myself.

I was suffering from anxiety every morning, feeling directionless....scared...My feet were hurting since the move....Suddenly I was far away from my parents, on my own...

In the mornings I felt like an amorphous blob of anxiety...until she came through...


And she came through too....and another one which I haven't finished or photographed yet...

An angel of Courage to remind me that I am okay, that it took courage to move and that I will find my way here....An angel of gratitude to remind me to always ground myself in gratitude. Gratitude helps me cope with anxiety. It centers me and gives me the focus to see the blessings in my life. The blessings are my stepping stones. They guide me. So gratitude guides and grounds me and there is always room for more gratitude. Always.

The third messenger that came through is an Angel of Play. Oh and her message is so very beautiful. The message that came through her was 'You are safe. Remember to play.' I haven't stamped it on her yet and I have found a message that I love even more through a new friend of mine. Lately I have been connecting to women that have pudendal neuralgia from mesh. Their desperation is like ours. They are suicidal like so many of us have been and still are. (I continue to get incredible relief from pain from Nortriptyline) These new connections are meaningful to me. I want to include their names in my artwork. That is something that I am visualizing and it makes me happy. I would like to incorporate the names of women (and men) that want to be a part of my healing through art. Bringing their names into my artwork excites me. I feel excited now. It is such a nice feeling after so many weeks of stress. Excited. Inspired. Curious. Hopeful. Playful. Open, Receptive. Creative. Sexual?

I would love for my sexuality to be awakened too. I miss that vitality. Connecting to myself as a sexual being is an effort since PN. But my creativity and my sexuality are bound in each other. Naomi Wolf in her book Vagina writes all about the link between sexuality and creativity. I feel like I have been de-sexed almost. I used to be so naturally sensual and so naturally sexual. I don't really feel myself as a sexual being anymore.

I can have sex and I can very much enjoy sex. Even so, that part of me has gone away...I would like to call it back, to invite it to reside with me. I know that it is an important part of my creativity and it is a part of me that wants to express itself....but it just isn't here, not anything near the way it was before PN. Is it a part of myself that is still salvageable? Or is it a part that I can live happily without? I don't know. I want to explore. I want to remain open and curious. Maybe that is the best that I can do right now. Remain open. I thought that maybe I should make more of an effort...clothes and make-up. But I don't feel particularly inspired to present myself that way. I don't feel the need to be beautiful or sexy to the world. But I do miss that element of play. That brings us back to the third angel that I have yet to complete. And to the fox that I met. Play. Creative play, creative exploration and creative expression.

The quote that I discovered through a new friend is Rumi's :



It makes me happy. It makes me happy to allow myself to play, to explore, to learn...And I am also afraid, afraid of loving too much, of being hurt, of making choices that are wrong for me...I fall in love easily, too easily...usually I wake up a few months later asking myself 'That's the person you fell in love with? Wow, that was stupid of you Atara.' And then I am heart-broken and angry at myself for wasting my time, wasting my energy, But all of that was before PN. What feels like so many years ago, what feels like another lifetime, almost like someone else's life....

So, can I allow myself to remain open, receptive, sexual, creative,....without fear? I guess not. So, can I allow myself to remain open, receptive, sexual, creative and fearful too? I think so. And that is a fair place to start from. Fair to myself and fair to the foxes who I want to feed so that they will come and play with me. :)

I want to play!!! And one of the things that I want to play most is the guitar. If you'll take a look at the angels here you will see that one layer underneath their skin their are music notes. I really really really want to play the guitar. I have always really really really wanted to play the guitar.

Play the guitar.

Your excitement is healthy. Follow it.

Love,

Atara