Going Home Again

We may not be able to go home again but as Maya Angelou says, “the truth is you never can leave home. You take it with you everywhere you go. It’s under your skin. It moves the tongue or slows it, colors the thinking, impedes upon the logic.”   

For me recalling home is a nostalgic remembrance.  As Maya points out it was a place that "I was terribly hurt and vastly loved".  At some point in my maturing I learned that I could, and did, live with these opposites, and they defined a strength I gleaned from my formative years.  At this point in my life I would not change it because it built the foundation of self.

There is a great relief to have made peace with the past.  Like many of my generation I spent time and money in therapy, and it was a very good investment.  It helped me understand, accept, and make peace with both the pain and the joy of my past.  Although these things are the foundation I build from they are not the complete definition of me.  

Home, the place that gave me the first definition of me, does move under my skin in the unconscious patters I carry with me.  In therapy I learned how to recognize what these patterns are and to accept or change them.  Home which was the place of my origin gradually morphed into the present of being here now. 

Home, the past, does color my thoughts, moves or slows my tongue, and influences my logic, but by understanding and realizing these effects I am able to change what I want to change and assimilate the rest into my being.   Accepting the reality of my life, both the terrible hurts and the vast love, allows me to integrate these experiences as a part of the whole of who I am now.  

For many years I would return to my hometown as I processed and worked through this assimilation.  There was a time when I needed the physical reminders of where I had lived to help me work through these memories. That time was not a nostalgic walk down memory lane, it was a part of my therapy to reconnect, remember, accept, and make peace with.

My growing up years were good. But like all others I was not a product of perfect parenting, and I had to come to peace with the terrible hurt and the vast love I experienced.  So I returned home to assimilate these feelings.  Walking the streets and ally ways, driving the roads, sitting on a bluff and watching the river, visiting with my family I began to integrate these parts of myself; to take steps toward becoming whole within me.

These were steps toward seeing the illusions life presents to me.  The acceptance that joy and sorrow exist simultaneously, and rather than canceling out each other they enhance my ability to experience both.  Accepting that home is a part of my history.  I can not escape that but I can come to term with all of it: the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly, and move on in my life.  It is, after all, my history and is the foundation of why and how I exist.

So as sister Maya says home is everywhere I go.  It is beneath my skin and colors my thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions.  I was raised around many elders.  They taught me the way and importance of story.  I learned through these gifts they shared with me.  As a young child, I am told, when with relatives I would beg for stories; not from books but of their lives.  I have always preferred "real" stories of life.  

As an adult I became a psychotherapist; my training began early, much earlier than college and graduate classes.  Great grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and my parents were my first teachers that moved me toward the adult path my career took. For me the dye was cast from the first story that my elders shared with me.

I am pretty sure my very first teacher was Sara, my great grandmother.  Perhaps this was from a dream, or perhaps it is from a cellular memory embedded deep in my unconscious.  It is of Sara holding my infant head between her hands, placing her face close to mine, and willing her memories to me.  From that dream/memory I carry ancestral knowledge and wisdom that there is no logical explanation for my recalling or knowing.  I no longer question it; no longer ask if it were a dream or a memory; I accept it as a gift from life. Accepting this allows me to remain open to life's lessons, and to not question the medium or the teacher, but to view and learn the lessons. 

Hard or easy the lessons are only and always for my growth.  It became important to not analyze each lesson, but to just accept it as is, and learn what I need to learn.  When I accepted my first memory of Sara, and quit trying to explain it to myself I could then take the wisdom from this memory/dream and apply it to my life.  

Home is always here under my skin, impacting my thoughts, moving my tongue, and a part of the logic I bring to each situation in my life.  Sometimes I am hurt, other times I am vastly loved, but most time I walk the balance, the razor's edge, between these two feelings as I find my way home in each moment.  It's not the nostalgic home of my memories; it's the home of where I am now.

  

  

The Razor's Edge

Years ago I sat in a meeting of people who were planning a peace walk and encountered anger, rage, and in fighting.  I recall thinking "how interesting"; these folks are advocating for peace but they seem to be filled with anger, hatred and in-fighting toward each other; and I wondered how they could manifest peace out of so much rage?  I eventually came to the understanding that social activism can produce a feeling of righteousness and this feeling robs us of mindfulness.  If we need to be right more than we need to be free, peaceful, or what ever we are working for, we lose the focus of our original intentions.  We replace tyranny with our own brand of control.

We are walking the Razor's Edge and it is a precarious, but necessary, balance. I believe this balance is helped by our understanding that it is ego that needs to be right not our true essence, and this creates conflict between others egos that are seeking the same thing.  From this paradigm we are lost in a world of others who do not understand how right we think we are because we are relating through ego rather than being true to who we truly are.

This is the edge of perception where we are given the opportunity to practice discernment.  We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. This is an important perception and distinction because our perception is a part of our ego, and ego ties us to the illusion of how we think we appear, not who we really are.  When this happens we become lost in our emotional reactivity.  As we learn how to allow others to be as they are, not as we want them to be, we stand at the threshold of opening to compassion.  In this moment the brittle facade of our ego is softened, our reactivity becomes pliable, and we let go of our attachments to how things should be and accept them as they are. 

If we want peace we must become peace; to experience joy we must practice joy; and to have abundance in life we must become abundant in all that we do. How we live directly affects who we are.

Realizing and remembering this is hard to do.  In the midst of despair it is easy to let that define who we are.  The despair is how we feel in a moment but it is not a definition of our true selves.  Neither are joy, sorrow, anger, or happiness, and to remember this keeps us from the emotional reactivity of identifying with these feelings as being the sum total of who we are.  

The razors edge is the path of experiencing all of our emotions without allowing any to completely identify who we are.  Learning to assimilate all of our emotions into our being without letting one or the other define us helps us find balance in life.  I find that when all things are in balance I can experience my emotions, give voice to them, and then detach from them.  My experiencing and acknowledging them allows me to let go.

To let go of anything we first must own it.  We can only let go of something that is ours; not in theory but in fact.  I understood this years ago when I sat in the meeting planning a peace walk.  The people there were in denial of their own inner rage, and because they had not owned their anger it was displayed in their relationships to others and in the energy that created this walk.  I realized that to successfully advocate for peace I had to manifest peace within me first.  Until I do this what I say I want becomes a shadow of what I don't want.  This then creates non mindfulness in life.  The Razor's Edge teaches me to dance with and through all aspects of myself, and to accept each part of me with unconditional love.