Ancestral Memories; Total Abandon

The new year is supposed to bring in reflection, but I had an early start on that reflection.  I finally read through the ancestral journal practice that Maya Tiwari outlines in her book, The Path of Practice (see December 15th entry). I was met with a variety of emotions: anger, desolation, exhaustion, sadness, boredom, furiousness, and a smattering of hope.

Anger was dominant because my childhood memories are filled with loss.  My anger was pointed at my mother and father, but it was most severely pointed at myself.  I was angry at how little I really knew my parents back then. But then I started to realize how deep that sadness trailed, because I know even less about them now.  I thought about how much I miss out.  I miss out on not knowing my parents.  Honestly, what emerged was the growing realization that I don't really have parents anymore.  Anger turned to desolation.  Bleak and barren.  That is exactly what I feared would happen when I entered back into those ancestral journals.  The reality that there was nothing alive about my relationship with my parents.  All I had were memories and the memories I have are so filled with torment that left me dry, like a desert.

Soon the desolation turned to exhaustion.  I was just tired of reading the same things over and over again in my journal.  Just plain tired of the same stories to tell and the stories didn't really open up a door to something alive or new.  It all just left me with incredible sadness. The reality that my parents are strangers to me. The reality that my strong emotions toward them were no more.  They were more like dried leaves in the fall--just blowing, blowing, blowing away. I couldn't figure out where to go with what I was feeling. I kept sitting and drifting with the feelings, however faint, yet relentless they were.  And then the boredom came.  I was so tired of the words.  Reading the same narrative over and over again.  The victim narrative. The disempowered narrative.  I became so furious at myself. I could see how the memories of my parents are drenched with the shame I hold for them and the desire to be something, anything, other than them.  I didn't learn any deep life lesson from my parents, except how to survive.  Perhaps that is not such a little thing.  I have learned to survive.  I am a survivor.  But I never learned what it meant to thrive.  I never learned what it meant to experience unbridled joy. I never knew what it meant to be totally loved and totally safe in the world. I never learned what it was like to embrace an empowered sense of myself.  I must do that now. But to do that, much to my horror,  I need to let go of anything and everything I think I know about my parents.

I'd like to say that I learned something from the ancestral practice that left me alive and full of love for my parents, but I did not. I had growing anger toward Tiwari.  I kept thinking to myself, "I don't have your wonderful father, who held so many rich traditions and practices to pass on to you, his daughter. I have emotionally bankrupt parents, who can barely take care of themselves. I have to fashion my own practices and traditions.  I have to find something meaningful out of the rubble my parents handed off to me."  I was honestly pissed off at her as much as I was my parents, because she exposed another level of rememory in my life that I thought was resolved.

Not resolved.

"The pain of unresolved memories causes part of our psyche to engage in constantly blocking out the ancestral secret, even as another part is trying to unmask it. This doesn't make things easy for us.  But try to think of this paradox as similar to the opposing forces at work when we try to break a bad habit or go on a diet: part of us still wants the forbidden food or behavior while the other part wants to be free. With an ancestral memory, it's good for you to break through to the forbidden memory." -Tiwari, p. 197

What is the forbidden memory?  What is the ancestral secret? I have yet to figure these things out.  I want to be free of my parents and the incredible sadness that is enmeshed with them.  The idea of being free of what I know of them scares me.  It feels so finite. It feels cruel. What surfaced, though, is that I hold on to the hope that something grandiose and meaningful will emerge out of that shitty past.  I hold out hope for that beautiful pearl in the mud.  And the more I keep writing here, but more I start to wonder if the secret is that there isn't a pearl to be found there, in that relationship. In that past. Similar to Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved, there is a time when a person must let go of that memory before it totally consumes.  Sethe started to see how much life she gave that past and how little life she gave her present existence. Perhaps it's time to find the pearl of the present instead of grasping to refashion a faux pearl that blinds me from who I am here. Now.


I just finished the book Wild and at the end Cheryl Strayed writes,

"To believe that I didn't need to reach with my bare hands anymore. To know that seeing the fish beneath the surface was enough. That it was everything. It was my life--like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me." (p. 311)

I think for me, I'm holding on to whatever that was in the past, because I want to write about it. I want to touch it, rewrite it, make it more beautiful than it really was. Refashion that faux pearl. But I realize now that to write about that past, I need to fully let it go, so I can see it as it emerges, not as I want it be seen. I need to see it as the past imperfect. Imperfectly passed, but imperfectly present and so very close, so very present, so very belonging to me.

The very last line of Wild knocked me out: "How wild it was, to let it be."