f r e e s o u l
_____________________________________________________________THE JOURNEY NEWSLETTER
a newsletter dedicated to educating, informing and inspiring people
to apply new possibilities in healing and inner growth
VOLUME.10
PART 1
a newsletter dedicated to educating, informing and inspiring people
to apply new possibilities in healing and inner growth
VOLUME.10
PART 1
Service from Guilt?
10/9/09
It took me a while to make the decision to publish this following piece in a newsletter. I wrote it a few weeks ago for the book I am working on. I was worried it would be too long, and feared I might ignite a variety of judgements with it's content... Well, the possible benefits outweighed these fears and I am publishing it now as a way to contribute to a dialog and a discussion about the causes of peace.
It may be fitting that today is the day President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize... makes it a day that turns our focus toward peace. That's good, I think. I have always believed that peace on this planet is nurtured by the consciousness we hold, EACH of us, by how much we either run our personal relationships and professional positions on old patterns of competition or combat, even unconsciously - or how much we are able to replace that with a new way of experiencing ourselves and another human being as part of a greater whole. I thought I did that to a large degree. What came to the surface in Colorado revealed a much more deeply hidden layer of feeling separate.
This newsletter comes in two parts.
For this chapter I first need to take you back to last November.
To the abundance retreat with Brandon Bays, when I served as a trainer.
During the first night of this retreat we all sit down and pull up all the inner limitations that still live in us through a series of guided imagined scenarios, to expose everything that still limits the flow of abundance... so, that covers not just money... it covers relationship too, and the abundance of love and closeness in our lives... and it also covers who we are in the world, whether we have abundance in opportunities to express our potential and live in our purpose.
In one of these little exercises we are asked to imagine ourselves as single and imagine being at a party where we see someone we'd love to go on a date with - an absolute "dream date", but not just see and feel ourselves in the same room with this person, no, then picture ourselves walking over, starting a conversation and finally actually asking that person for a date! All in order to notice what feelings come up, and where we usually stop ourselves. So, I am picking Ethan Hawke and I actually don't have too hard a time walking over to him, and I can even, without too much nervousness, start a pretty relaxed, happy conversation with him, and before I know it, I am talking to him about the Journey... it's all so easy... and he is really interested and intrigued by what I tell him, and very naturally I offer to do a process with him... and right in the middle, while am really pleased with myself that this is going so well, I realize: Oh shit, I am not doing this right!! I am not supposed to find a celebrity to do a journey process with, I am supposed to find a dream date and ask him out on a romantic date!! By now I don't have much time left to play out a whole new scenario, just enough so that I can get a glimpse how much more scary it would be to do it this way. That registers.
A couple more exercises go by. Some bring up more stuff than others, and what I am noticing is the recurring theme of "service" and that whenever I do something that is of some service, I have much less limitation than when it is just about me... again it registers. And then we are asked to pick a project and determine how much time and money we are ready to invest into it on a daily basis. I am thinking: "Oh, that is easy! I'll just pick my book project." But in that instant I remember what I discovered about "service" and how it seems I really define myself through it... and I think: no, wait a minute, why don't I see what happens when I pick something that is NOT of service. Something I'd just do for ME. ... Maybe: Doing Yoga everyday! ...But then I realize, no - That's not something I'd do for myself, I'd do that so my body and I would be more balanced and could be of more service! ... WOW! ... hmmm... So, how about doing something that would really nourish my relationship with Jimmy? ... Well, actually, if I am honest with myself, the biggest reason to build a deeper relationship in the end would be so that I can do my work from a safer, more connected place, so that too would be driven by my desire to be of more service! ... God! ... What is there that would not be driven by needing to be of service??? Is there anything??? I was really scrambling to find something, something completely devoid of service. It would have to be something just totally goofy, just for pure joy and silliness, maybe running around the yard with my little dog Jacky. That was the best I could come up with, just to have something to imagine and work with in this exercise. And now, how much time could I give myself for that every day??? How much time to exercise simple aliveness and joy of movement free from lofty goals and purposes? As soon as I tried to imagine doing anything more than FIVE minutes of that, my throat began to close up, I could hardly breathe, and loud words sounded off in my head: "How DARE you! How can you be so frivolous, so wasteful!!" WOAHH!! What was that???
If there was this apparent need for service that was driving everything I did in my life, WHAT was driving this need? And when I asked that question for the first time in my life I saw the weight of the guilt of being a German, the weight of the crimes that happened during the Hitler regime against the Jewish people. As if it was up to me to work THAT off. In the face of that, yes, how could I ever dare to rest?
I wondered how I had taken that on. I had not even been alive when it happened.
I remembered how my brother had sat in my parent's kitchen just a month ago... weeping. Weeping with a pain buried deep in his chest, the pain of children waiting in vain to be picked up by their parents and their parents don't come. This was not something he had ever experienced himself. When we were young my mother though has shared a traumatic memory from her childhood when she was 11 years old. It was in the middle of the war and she and her younger sister had been sent away to Denmark to be removed from the allied air raid attacks that were coming in on the city of Hamburg during that summer. She remembers peddling a bike through the danish countryside past the barracks of the German soldiers who were stationed nearby just at a moment to overhear a German radio broadcast they were listening to: "All of Hamburg is burning, the entire city is up in flames..."
She biked back to the farm of her host family thinking, "...when the time comes and we are going back by train to Hamburg, I will arrive at the train station holding my little sister's hand and my parents wont be there any longer to pick us up." This had clearly been HER trauma not his, yet HE was the one who still felt the pain.
Similarly, I now wondered if I had taken on a old feeling of guilt from her and my grandparents. Before the war my grandparents owned a small fish store in Hamburg and had become friends with a Jewish family who owned the little electro store across the street from them. My grandfather shared not only the same first name "Kurt" with his slightly younger neighbor, but also a love for riding the motorbike. As the war progressed and the restrictions increased, my mother remembers the other Kurt still coming secretly to see them in their home. He had to pass through the store front and had to pull up the collar of his coat, so the customers wouldn't be able to see the Jewish star that had to be sewn onto their clothing. My grandparents would secretly give the family some fish or other food that had become harder and harder for them to buy, and this was dangerous. When the letter of deportation came, the family exchanged some of their valuables against warm blankets and coats, thinking they were going to Siberia to a work camp. They never returned... and my grandparents never found out what happened to them, but the burden of the guilt of not having been able to save them stayed with the whole family and my grandmother in particular... throughout her life.
That's what I thought of as I sat there with my chest heavy.
Being a trainer at the abundance retreat didn't allow me to have a Journey process myself, so I went home unresolved, but with the sense that if it was right, an opportunity would present itself to release the guilt. This just was too big... it didn't seem to be an issue that I could simply schedule a process for. It was something that needed to happen naturally. But first what happened was life unfolding on it's course, Christmas was only a few weeks away, and the holidays and the new year passed and I started into January with a busy schedule to see clients, presented the Journey to a local healing center and gave a presentation to the high school students in our school... and then... I landed in the emergency room.
In February, in the midst of all the healing work I was doing for my cysts, one of my Journeys took me into the past to Egypt. I had done something unspeakable there, something utterly terrible to many, many people. I couldn't tell what it was, but I saw myself on my knees in front of all of them, a large group, their elders in the front, dressed in in long robes begging them for forgiveness. Doris, the medical intuitive I also worked with, told me later that she could see I had been in a position of power and performed cruel human experiments with... Jews.
Now we can at last fast forward back to Practitioners week in Colorado.
Here I am many months later, in late summer and the 80 or so participants for the Journey accreditation have gathered at the Inverness Hotel east of Denver. As always the group of the North American practitioners in training were joined by other people from various places across the globe. This year there were two men from Holland, one from Argentina, and a large group of women from Israel. On the second night during Satsang one of the women from Israel spoke about her plight against death. Let's say her name was Hannah. Over the course of her life she had developed one life threatening condition after another and in this way had to escape death over and over again, all together 8 times. 8 times she could have been dead in one lifetime! And then she described an experience that dated a wile back, I believe. She was doing something in her living room and had the TV running without sound. Only halfway paying attention, she notices it is some documentary about some group of people... a while into the program they show a scene where all of them are sitting next to each other on a bench in some courtroom, and while the camera pans over their faces, all of a sudden it hits her that she knows these people, knows them personally, name and all! When she turns up the volume she learns that these were the survivors of the twin experiments of Dr. Mengele during the Nazi Regime... and she realizes that she had been one of those twins, one of the ones who didn't survive.
I was deeply shaken up by her story. I immediately thought back to what had been revealed to me in February. What were the odds? The odds of sitting together with someone like Hannah in this practitioners program, someone who may have been a Mengele twin!! What was life telling me, what was it offering to me here?
I went to bed playing out in my mind what it would be like to speak up during Satsang and confess my guilt and ask for forgiveness. God, could I do that? Did I have the guts to do that? But more, did I have the right to do that? No, wouldn't it be simply very melodramatic? Was I considering this mostly because I was drawn to the attention it would give me? If that was my driving force, then I would just need to work with this thing silently on my own. But on the other hand maybe it would create a wave of liberation, maybe it would benefit others to hear me speak about it... No... I must be fooling myself. And then... WHAT would I say? Each time I would imagine to speak about this subject in front of everybody, I had to start crying, and then before long an observant inner part would show up and point out to me how self indulgent I was behaving. Back and forth... back and forth... until I fell asleep. It continued after I woke up in the morning. By the time we were done with morning yoga, I was finally determined I would raise my hand to speak.
Here I have to interject a discovery I had the day before, during my life purpose journey, without which I might not have felt justified to speak up at all.
In this life purpose journey I had left the experience of the physical body behind and felt myself to be part of something endlessly, beautifully big and complete ... and when the question arose: why did I chose to take form and enter physical life, the answer I heard was: "it's simply what you do" It wasn't so much that there had to be a specific WHY that was specific to me, there wasn't actually so much of a ME, it felt more like I was something like a cookie that had been part of the cookie dough... and was simply portioned off and fell into some shape that didn't really have that much significance... the question of coming into form was answered as something like:"What else would you do?" and in that way it wasn't an individual decision of something to do or not to do, it was an experience of being part of something that followed it's own unstoppable process and rules of expansion. Expansion. That was the name of the game. And coming into form, living a human life was the best way to serve this expansion.
I understood in that moment that as a human I am part of that expansion in many ways, all the growing, all the learning, all the changes, all the shedding of old stories and misunderstood identities .... is all part of the expansion of life on this planet, and the evolution of consciousness... but more than anything I was contributing to this expansion by liberating myself from any personal form of human limitation, and in order to liberate myself from a limitation I needed to have slipped into it at first. I had a very clear visual image that came with this awareness: I could see myself slipping into a little shell, or seed, or capsule and at some point I would have gathered the strength or clarity to pop it open: POOFH!!! I saw many poofhs like that that have happened in my life and many more ahead of me. And all of a sudden life seemed so good and perfect in it's utter imperfectness. Yes, all the 'not quite good enough' stuff, all my inward frowns of how I am not matching up to something, all of a sudden become the very matter that expansion happens from. All of a sudden I was looking at the still accumulating piles of paper on my desk with curiosity and gratitude, the flaws in my personality with excitement... any of it will simply serve to create a big poofh when the time is right, and that is the very reason I am here, THAT was the very game I came to play. Wow, that feels different! ... I could also see that there would be situations when I could use this liberation consciously, and it would create a wave around me, a chain reaction of liberation that went beyond my individual experience.
So, this discovery still enveloped my awareness as I swam through the question of whether or not I should speak during Satsang. At some moments it seemed to me that this fear of being guilty would be a superb shell to slip into, one that needed opening in countless places.
The workshop program started... and on that day we did NOT have any morning Satsang. It might not be on the program again until after dinner or until the next day.
By the time the day had rolled to it's conclusion and we sat in the hall after dinner, I was in a very different place and didn't think any longer that I would say something... other participants raised their hands and spoke... and I watched... and listened... and on and off I asked myself: should I?... shouldn't I? ... and more people shared... and the evening was winding to an end... as the last person spoke about her fear... and after she was done Brandon looks around the room to see who is next... and I hear a voice inside my head: "If you don't do it now, you never will!" ...and my hand goes up.
... to be continued
From War- to Peace Consciousenss
f r e e s o u l
_____________________________________________________________
THE JOURNEY NEWSLETTER
a newsletter dedicated to educating, informing and inspiring people
to apply new possibilities in healing and inner growth
VOLUME.10
PART 2
By the time the microphone arrived in my hand I was shaking, I didn't really know WHAT I was going to say, just that I needed to speak and step up into full view as someone... who has inherited a huge load of guilt, more even to reveal myself as someone who carries the energy of a perpetrator. It seemed important to stand there in front of them... as a representative of a people who had committed terrible crimes against another people, and on top of that as someone who must have ordered such crimes myself long, long ago in the past. A perpetrator, yes, that was the worst part. It seemed important to declare the conscious acknowledgement of those deeds.
I hadn't sorted all of this out so clearly in my head, in the moment I was standing there, I simply felt the enormous scope of what I was about to address, and right then words failed me, for a while it was difficult to say anything... instead I noticed how my left hand was flexed away from my wrist and tapping an irregular rhythm against my thigh. "This isn't so easy.", were the only words that came out.
As she always does in such moments of visible pain or fear, Brandon called me up on stage to sit next to her on the sofa. Not to be more exposed, but to sit where I could "feel all the love in the room". And there, bit by bit, accompanied by tears, it tumbled out of my mouth, the key segments of what I was here to say, aware that it couldn't ALL be spoken... that the whole story was wayyy too long... that I could only deliver a few condensed portions, and trust that they would come out the right way and contain all that was important. And so... I spoke about feeling this constant current of guilt toward the Jewish people... how I thought this was normal, how I traced it back to my grandparents Jewish friends who hadn't been saved... how I grew up with their story and the beautiful porcelain things in my grandparents home... and how Hannah's story had set something in motion... It was hard to look at the faces in the audience, Brandon right next to me had tears in her eyes, that much I noticed... and I dimly saw people weeping along with me in the front row now, where Hannah sat next to 4 or 5 other women from Israel... ...next I shared the discovery at the abundance retreat of how little time I could give myself for "serviceless" activities... and that my life seems driven by the need to work off this guilt... and there Brandon jumped in.
Brilliant as she is in turning a big personal emotional moment into a moment of expanded awareness for everyone else in the room, she spoke about war consciousness. War consciousness as she had experienced it in Germany with the practitioners in training, how much of it poured into the open there, how deeply it was still buried in this generation and how this war consciousness is something that is part of all our lives, how has been passed on from all our ancestors, whether we know it or not, and concluded that it was up to each of us to clear up this consciousness, because otherwise we remain part of the problem. I had not yet said anything about my memories of Egypt, and now this part of my "confession" that had weighted the heaviest on me, was thus pushed into a shifted energy. Her remarks had given a larger context to my contribution, it had already become something that was being used to clear the very war consciousness I had puled up into the spotlight, it was not about just myself any longer... and in that context speaking about what I had discovered in my Journey back to Egypt had suddenly become much less emotional, it felt almost abstract, yet it too still needed to be exposed, and so I did, very matter of fact, in order not to feel I was being over dramatic. As Brandon was speaking again, I sat there thinking "I really want to ask for forgiveness... can I just ask for this? ...is it even appropriate?.", but I didn't dare to interrupt her. Scattered throughout the audience I could now make out little strings of people who held their hands in a Namaste prayer, looking at me, many were still crying, I scanned over the women from Israel in the front row, yes all of them had their hands together, but others too... and it dawned on me that these were all the Jewish practitioners. Instinctively all of them were sending this silent Namaste to me... and right then Brandon said: "Tomma, before the evening is over, I want you to go to every person who is holding their hands in Namaste right now and ask for their forgiveness." ... Wow... I hadn't expected THAT, not a direct personal exchange like that... that was overwhelming... and made me burst right into tears again.
And then Brandon turned the waves of emotion in the room into something beautiful and made us sing along to a song we all knew very well, called "praises to the world". I still had a hard time looking out into the audience, and so I sang my trembling words into the gray carpet on stage, my voice shaky... when I looked up after a while, I saw that a few single people had risen and sang standing up, their hands now also in Namaste, and as the song progressed, more and more rose to their feet ... by the time the music had ended half the room was standing in prayer, wherever I looked eyes were looking back at me. The love was immense. Feeling one with a room full of other human beings... that's what this was like. Circles ever expanding... yes.
When the song was over, Brandon gave everyone another assignment: find at least five people and say to each other: "I forgive you for having carried the war consciousness of your ancestors." Truly, this war consciousness lived in all of us, there wasn't a single country on this planet that hadn't at a time in the past been at war against another country, another race, or another religion, and killed as many of it's people as possible. Yes, so true. And as people paired up everywhere to forgive each other, Brandon was the first one to speak this forgiveness to me.
Oh, the wave of love and gratitude! I received forgiveness from so many, people lined up to meet me face to face, over and over people thanked me for stepping on stage, some wept on my shoulder. One of the men from Holland cried about all the Jewish people his ancestors had delivered into German concentration camps, his grandfather too had been part of that. One woman, crying profusely, asked me for forgiveness against the prejudices she had carried all her life. Another woman suddenly remembered during her childhood how her father had bragged about how many German planes he had shot down during the war, how many bombs he had dropped. More tears on my shoulder. Another woman told me her father had been a "survivor", and as she spoke there was nothing but kindness in her face. It was a bath... of... something indescribable.
By the time I went to bed, I was so washed clean, so poured over with love and forgiveness, so grateful, so elated, so alive... it was hard to go to sleep.
I woke up with images in my head of groups of people being brought together forgiving each other. Was this something I was called to do? Had I been given this amazing experience in order to take it with me and create a container for others to release the burden of their old genetic guilt? Was this a way to create a stronger peace consciousness in this world? Germans traveling to Israel meeting with Jews? Jews meeting with Palestinians? Americans asking native Americans for forgiveness? Catholics making peace with Protestants in Ireland? Blacks forgiving Whites... US Citizens forgiving members of terrorist groups... them forgiving us...? What would become possible?
Interestingly the day I finished writing up this segment was Yom Kippur. We had been invited to a friends house for a potluck dinner and that's when I learned what this holiday actually means: it's a day of asking forgiveness!
The above questions are still with me. I can do nothing but bring it into the open and surrender to where life takes me with this.
a newsletter dedicated to educating, informing and inspiring people
to apply new possibilities in healing and inner growth
VOLUME.10
PART 2
From War to Peace Consciousness
10/10/09
By the time the microphone arrived in my hand I was shaking, I didn't really know WHAT I was going to say, just that I needed to speak and step up into full view as someone... who has inherited a huge load of guilt, more even to reveal myself as someone who carries the energy of a perpetrator. It seemed important to stand there in front of them... as a representative of a people who had committed terrible crimes against another people, and on top of that as someone who must have ordered such crimes myself long, long ago in the past. A perpetrator, yes, that was the worst part. It seemed important to declare the conscious acknowledgement of those deeds.
I hadn't sorted all of this out so clearly in my head, in the moment I was standing there, I simply felt the enormous scope of what I was about to address, and right then words failed me, for a while it was difficult to say anything... instead I noticed how my left hand was flexed away from my wrist and tapping an irregular rhythm against my thigh. "This isn't so easy.", were the only words that came out.
As she always does in such moments of visible pain or fear, Brandon called me up on stage to sit next to her on the sofa. Not to be more exposed, but to sit where I could "feel all the love in the room". And there, bit by bit, accompanied by tears, it tumbled out of my mouth, the key segments of what I was here to say, aware that it couldn't ALL be spoken... that the whole story was wayyy too long... that I could only deliver a few condensed portions, and trust that they would come out the right way and contain all that was important. And so... I spoke about feeling this constant current of guilt toward the Jewish people... how I thought this was normal, how I traced it back to my grandparents Jewish friends who hadn't been saved... how I grew up with their story and the beautiful porcelain things in my grandparents home... and how Hannah's story had set something in motion... It was hard to look at the faces in the audience, Brandon right next to me had tears in her eyes, that much I noticed... and I dimly saw people weeping along with me in the front row now, where Hannah sat next to 4 or 5 other women from Israel... ...next I shared the discovery at the abundance retreat of how little time I could give myself for "serviceless" activities... and that my life seems driven by the need to work off this guilt... and there Brandon jumped in.
Brilliant as she is in turning a big personal emotional moment into a moment of expanded awareness for everyone else in the room, she spoke about war consciousness. War consciousness as she had experienced it in Germany with the practitioners in training, how much of it poured into the open there, how deeply it was still buried in this generation and how this war consciousness is something that is part of all our lives, how has been passed on from all our ancestors, whether we know it or not, and concluded that it was up to each of us to clear up this consciousness, because otherwise we remain part of the problem. I had not yet said anything about my memories of Egypt, and now this part of my "confession" that had weighted the heaviest on me, was thus pushed into a shifted energy. Her remarks had given a larger context to my contribution, it had already become something that was being used to clear the very war consciousness I had puled up into the spotlight, it was not about just myself any longer... and in that context speaking about what I had discovered in my Journey back to Egypt had suddenly become much less emotional, it felt almost abstract, yet it too still needed to be exposed, and so I did, very matter of fact, in order not to feel I was being over dramatic. As Brandon was speaking again, I sat there thinking "I really want to ask for forgiveness... can I just ask for this? ...is it even appropriate?.", but I didn't dare to interrupt her. Scattered throughout the audience I could now make out little strings of people who held their hands in a Namaste prayer, looking at me, many were still crying, I scanned over the women from Israel in the front row, yes all of them had their hands together, but others too... and it dawned on me that these were all the Jewish practitioners. Instinctively all of them were sending this silent Namaste to me... and right then Brandon said: "Tomma, before the evening is over, I want you to go to every person who is holding their hands in Namaste right now and ask for their forgiveness." ... Wow... I hadn't expected THAT, not a direct personal exchange like that... that was overwhelming... and made me burst right into tears again.
And then Brandon turned the waves of emotion in the room into something beautiful and made us sing along to a song we all knew very well, called "praises to the world". I still had a hard time looking out into the audience, and so I sang my trembling words into the gray carpet on stage, my voice shaky... when I looked up after a while, I saw that a few single people had risen and sang standing up, their hands now also in Namaste, and as the song progressed, more and more rose to their feet ... by the time the music had ended half the room was standing in prayer, wherever I looked eyes were looking back at me. The love was immense. Feeling one with a room full of other human beings... that's what this was like. Circles ever expanding... yes.
When the song was over, Brandon gave everyone another assignment: find at least five people and say to each other: "I forgive you for having carried the war consciousness of your ancestors." Truly, this war consciousness lived in all of us, there wasn't a single country on this planet that hadn't at a time in the past been at war against another country, another race, or another religion, and killed as many of it's people as possible. Yes, so true. And as people paired up everywhere to forgive each other, Brandon was the first one to speak this forgiveness to me.
Oh, the wave of love and gratitude! I received forgiveness from so many, people lined up to meet me face to face, over and over people thanked me for stepping on stage, some wept on my shoulder. One of the men from Holland cried about all the Jewish people his ancestors had delivered into German concentration camps, his grandfather too had been part of that. One woman, crying profusely, asked me for forgiveness against the prejudices she had carried all her life. Another woman suddenly remembered during her childhood how her father had bragged about how many German planes he had shot down during the war, how many bombs he had dropped. More tears on my shoulder. Another woman told me her father had been a "survivor", and as she spoke there was nothing but kindness in her face. It was a bath... of... something indescribable.
By the time I went to bed, I was so washed clean, so poured over with love and forgiveness, so grateful, so elated, so alive... it was hard to go to sleep.
I woke up with images in my head of groups of people being brought together forgiving each other. Was this something I was called to do? Had I been given this amazing experience in order to take it with me and create a container for others to release the burden of their old genetic guilt? Was this a way to create a stronger peace consciousness in this world? Germans traveling to Israel meeting with Jews? Jews meeting with Palestinians? Americans asking native Americans for forgiveness? Catholics making peace with Protestants in Ireland? Blacks forgiving Whites... US Citizens forgiving members of terrorist groups... them forgiving us...? What would become possible?
Interestingly the day I finished writing up this segment was Yom Kippur. We had been invited to a friends house for a potluck dinner and that's when I learned what this holiday actually means: it's a day of asking forgiveness!
The above questions are still with me. I can do nothing but bring it into the open and surrender to where life takes me with this.
