In Search of...

 

True Life

“I understand true life doesn’t happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others.”

Mary E. DeMuth (Thin Places)

          In doing research on thin places, I ran across a book with that title by Mary DeMuth. I wondered what the mulling over of injustices has to do with thin places. Here’s my guess: thin places are typically where we feel a presence, or power; an almost uncanny sense that we have been there before or that somehow, we are familiar with this place—perhaps from another lifetime. Carl Jung said, in his collected works, that we carry the weight of our ancestors in our very DNA. Sometimes the memories that surface are short trips into our ancestral past.

We may encounter our ancestral past with the same sort of eerie feelings we experience at thin places. I remember my son, Ian, telling me about going to the village in Ireland from which our ancestors immigrated and feeling as though he knew the place. In the Ireland of our ancestors there were centuries of war and famine, followed by utter rejection in America as new immigrants. The Great Depression had an impact on my generation as well simply because our parents lived through it as children. In the collective unconscious, (that is inherited through our DNA) we carry all of that history. Even though we cannot see it or know it consciously, we sense it, and sometimes we see it in our dreams, or it surfaces in the thin places of our psyche.

In the personal unconscious we carry the weight of our own lifetime. All the events of our childhood, the insecurities and hurts. Some of us carry them for a lifetime. If possible, we need to find a way to lay that burden down. I remember Caroline Myss saying in Anatomy of the Spirit, that for every grudge we hold, for every injustice we keep alive, we lose vital energy like blood flowing from a wound. And whatever part of our body that energy is being lost from will become ill or diseased. Our usual way of healing such wounds is first, to forgive, and secondly, to let go. Sometimes enacting a ritual helps—one of our own. One that seems natural, that just feels right. Ask yourself what sort of ritual would allow you to finally close the book on that injustice. You might even think in terms of what your ancestors might have done. Or perhaps a ritual of writing it all down and then burning it, or burying it, or shredding it, and using it as compost for your garden.

In my mind, it helps to remember that I too have dealt out pain and suffering to others, have mistreated and belittled others. It’s probable that I have damaged people who loved me. I am not a victim any more than I am a culprit. I do not stand on higher ground. I am humbled by the realization that we are all both good and bad. We are all capable of doing harm, just as we are also capable of being loving, forgiving, and kind.

We are complicated beings in search of “true life,” and that means facing forward with hope and faith. Untie the strings that hold you back. Freedom is a great feeling.

                                        In the Spirit,

                                        Jane