I’m thinking about Memorial Day this morning
Loved ones present and Loved ones past
What is now and what was then
Who is here and who is not
I also acknowledge
Who is embodied and who is not
Values I hold in my heart
Along with who I love
It all sifts down to memories
No matter if they are
in my present life
Of they are parted
Memories of our experiences
Represent a deep value
They reside in our heart
No matter good or bad
Memories can be great
And memories can be painful
We can’t experience a memory
Without using our hearts
I have painful memories of my childhood
I thought were stuck there for my life
Reminding me with triggers
And reawakening the strife
I do have to admit
without my childhood experiences
The convictions of my values
Would not be so serious
I’ve learned to manipulate memories
That don’t serve me now
By changing my brain and
Interrupting the flow
Into something more safe
Meaningful and true
By using my heart
and love that’s the glue
I know deep in my heart
Our loved ones are present
No matter whether I can see them
Or sense their essence
Life on earth is not a waste of time
As I used to painfully believe
We experience, we learn
We love and we grieve
So as we live our lives
Falling in love with ourselves
We gather our loved ones
And life lessons close
And when we’re done
We move on again
To experience our lives
Beyond the din
PARTICIPANTS’ REFLECTIONS:
Your reading was so appropriate for me. Tomorrow is the anniversary of my mother’s death. I meditated on forgiveness, and then felt compassion for her. As you have said she was unable to live in her light. She couldn’t tend to her family in a way that left us feeling loved and safe.
Yes, I learned this saying from Matt Kahn, to forgive my father for forsaking his own light in my life. We can see how easy it is to abandon self when bad things happen.
This is the second day I missed the reading. My sleep is off, my old dogs are keeping me off. I woke up yesterday aware I missed the meditation. I was thrown off today and was late getting on. I have issues as well. An absent father. The pain is still there. Yesterday, my daughter said she was thinking of calling him and introducing herself to him. She said she would if I called him first. I have work to do before I do that, but he's not too healthy. More to come.
You are not alone. You can ask for steps, and set intentions. I had old dogs too, they are loved ones
For the first 40 years of my life, I hated my father and was afraid of him. Then a therapist helped me and I was able to speak my truth to him. The last 13 years of his life we had a close relationship and I am connecting still with him. It opened up my life to walk through that bottleneck in my life.
I have had issues with my parents, and now with my kids. I started drinking to escape from the pain. I used the twelve-step program to sit down with parents and talk. My father told me of his childhood, how he didn’t know better. I could see that he never grew up. I believe alcohol affects the whole family. When I got better, I started taking care of myself, and my son developed resentments because he felt abandoned. I’ve made amends. I’m trying to repair the relationship. Louise Hay has an exercise, where you put people on a stage and speak your truth to them and then let it go. It’s helpful, it gets your feelings out.
During the meditation, I experienced lots of memories, of men, several are still alive. One was my father. He was in WWII, and he told me how painful his shoes were in bootcamp. Later in life, he had problems with his feet. There is physical pain and emotional pain. Some of the men could handle the physical pain but not mental pain.
What a coincidence. I started reading Louise Hays’ book You Can Heal Your Life a couple of days ago
I forgave my father. He was child of the depression. He was the first in the family to go to college. We aren’t taught to parent, people redo what they learned. I wouldn’t say it was abuse, but I got good spankings. The problem I experienced was that I could never do enough for him. Even in a situation where I was able to take him on a tour of the statehouse and introduce him to the governor. Even then, my father couldn’t say anything nice about me. So I looked for gifts I received from him. He used to buy strange cars, like from Japan and Germany, before anyone else. He introduced me to new things. A good thing to do is to make tape recordings of our parents’ stories.
Memorializing their stories
I think it is important to reparent ourselves, do for our inner child what our parents couldn’t do for us as children. Helps us heal.
Photo credit: Tree Study #13, Sue Dion, www.suedionart.com/