As the Winter Solstice approaches, inner wisdom rises to the surface wanting to teach us lessons of old, the past, stuck in the dark crevices of our bodies. I know this because I am in this process.
The cold weather demands that we sit; maybe in meditation, maybe in some kind of stillness to observe ourselves. For some of us we cannot observe but only experience emotion without recognizing it’s source. This is a blessing in disguise. I know that may sound optimistic, however it truly is dressed in a cloak of opportunity to grow into awakening consciousness.
Pain of the past is powerful, pungent, piercing and persistent. It perseveres through ages of time in our ancestral lineage and so loaded it can dump within us at the time of birth. Sometimes we have to deal with the cries of our forefathers and foremothers who were tortured or stolen, raped or dehumanized. Our story could be as large as the Holocaust or as personal as witnessing the rape of a brother by his father. Yet, we are still alive, breathing and moving around, waking and sleeping with the cycles of time. That’s the blessing in disguise!
The opportunity to do something different, the freedom to make a change, the space to create a new reality is a choice we can all make. Winter’s cold time contracts us to a point that we have to face. Like a compressor, asking…no…begging us to see the wisdom in our pain.
Choosing to remain stuck in our fears, recycling them as they become toxic emotions and then passing them on to our children or community is optional. Staying here is allowing ourselves to embrace rejection, to invite characters in our daily lives who will abandon us.
My story is briefly one of a child who grew up in Africa, who’s family was traumatized by the detention of her grandfather who participated in the Mau Mau resistance movement during Kenya’s independence from British colonialism. For the most part on her own because her single mother had to work often and her father was missing from the family picture; living in foreign lands, keeping her a secret from his family. Many times, I could not understand my sensitivities. Spending most of my time in a boarding school from a very young age, there were many characters who served to reject and abandon me just like the story I was already born into. One’s who secluded me, teased me, bullied me and spoke painful words of rejection. I forgive them now.
It is until recently that Winter has become teacher that I have come to completely release inherited memories on a cellular level which have captured each word and intonation of judgement and unkindness. So now, I have come to permit my memory to discontinue to project and recreate pain within all my relationships. To refuse to accept characters who would definitely abandon or reject me. The trap of toxic pain is compressed OUT with a SHOUT because I choose to see my grandchildren free from this story.
I am in great appreciation for wisdom. The elder of knowledge and intellect. And now, I put my feet up and sip on a cup of real cacao in hot coconut milk with enough raw honey and cayenne pepper to be called a drink for the gods.