Lighten the Burden

Unnecessary Baggage

“Personal history and how one imagines how their life should be...becomes a burden in times of crisis. Everything unnecessary must be released in order to survive the immediate crisis at hand.”

Caroline Myss (Caroline's Blog, “Adapting to the Power of Your Light,” Part 1: The Longest Battle, 2013)

In this article from Caroline Myss' blog, she recalls a book by historian Samuel D. Kassow, titled, Who Will Write Our History. Kassow tells the story of Emanuel Ringelblum, a Jewish historian, who was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Ringelblum collected the day-to-day stories of other people there, and chronicled how they adapted to life in the Ghetto. He found that those who clung to their identities and way of life before the occupation, who had titles, and wealth, and attitudes of entitlement fared the worst. They had the hardest time adapting to their new conditions. Many of them did not survive. Those who did best, who survived the horror of that time, were people who immediately grasped that things had changed, that they had to leave behind the life they had known and enter into a new reality. They did not try to carry their old life with them and did not spend energy being embittered by their losses. They simply adapted.

This is how our bodies behave as well. When crisis strikes, everything non-essential is shut down or starkly curtailed, while energy and blood flow are redirected to the areas of the body that need them most. The wisdom of the body is certain. It doesn't second-guess itself. It has a “That was then—this is now—go!” attitude. When we receive a critical injury, or diagnosis of a life-threatening disease, our life changes instantly. We will never again be the person we were before that injury or that diagnosis—from now on, we will gauge time in terms of before and after. The sooner we are able to accept our new reality, the sooner we can address life as it is, the more likely we are to survive intact.

In times of great change, we cannot wait for “ordinary reality” to return because it likely never will. We have to adapt to what is, not what was, or what might be. It helps if we can shift into a more intuitive way of living—rather than projecting and planning the future, rather than regretting and resenting the past, we might simply live in the moment. What do I need right now? What can I give right now? What is my gut/heart telling me is right? We might be surprised at the lightness of our being, at the weight that is lifted off. We can lay down our heavy bag of regrets, and maybe even dance the light fantastic.

                                                             In the Spirit,

                                                                 Jane