reflections...

'from an article by Pico Iyer-  The Joy of Less - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com'

"The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches...My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles."   Written by the young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum on her way to her death at Auschwitz. 

Lying in bed for over three hours, sleepless, I listened to a talk by Amita Schmidt, titled, "Tracing Back the Radiance.  Toward the very end she spoke of working with trauma surviors, herself included, and said that what arises in the healing process is an awareness of being held in love.  Knowing arises that the whole time, one is being held in love.  The quote above speaks to that directly.  How else could a young woman who is on a train which takes her to her death, be so deeply connected to herself, to life?  

I have spent the better part of my 50+ years believing that the trauma I suffered as a small child and later as a young woman should not have happened and that to be whole and free I needed to make it go away.  As a result of that childish belief, I have been frozen in the bodily experience and unable to fully embrace this life.  Stuck, as it were.  Understanding is dawning that the only way to be whole is to recognize the early trauma as an integral part of who I have been in this life and unless I can accept it fully, there is no moving on, moving deeper into the silence, the stillness, the love that I am.  

It seems impossible that there was love anywhere around when my father was an out of control, rage driven alcoholic.  When he heaped emotional and physical abuse upon his children and upon his wife, in front of his children. And yet... here I am, half a century later, recognizing that love as being the ground of my life, so how could it have been absent when I was a child?

This bears further inquiry and reflection.  The idea that love is a thing that comes and goes makes no sense to me- I am aware that I cannot hold in mind the fullness that is Love.  I can only surrender into it.  If I had been able to see it then- when I was dreaming a little girl being terrorized by her perceptions and interpretation of what was happening to and around her... But that isn't how life played out for me and it seems that only now is it possible for me to see that dream and realized that nothing ever happened that was outside of that cradle of love. Nothing ever could.