Art reminds us that we are human.
Whether it be a painting, song, movie, dance, or book, art has the ability to bypass all the cobwebs and walls in our hearts and unearth deeply buried emotions.
The observation of art can help bring them to the surface and release them.
The creation of art can help us move through them.
As humans, we need to both.
Healing deep wounds is hard work.
It breaks patterns. Takes us into the unfamiliar. Challenges beliefs that may have been embedded generations ago.
Muscles tense up. Breath is held. Fetal position feels automatic.
Tears fall. Our bodies shake. Voices wail.
There is a release.
Deep breaths are taken. Tension dissipates. Laughter may appear.
And when the body and mind settle, there is peace.
Today I healed an intergenerational trauma I have been carrying about my maternal grandmother my entire life. This is not the first time I have received/done a healing around my grandmother, a woman whom I have never met and whom my mom has no recollection of, and I know it will not be the last.
Some people say healing is like peeling an onion and its many layers. While my version of healing has many tears, I’d like to think of trauma to be layered like a good puff pastry. Some layers are distinct while some are completely indistinguishable from the other. The delayering process is not quite so neat but it is doable when the circumstances are right.
These layers are created over a lifetime and in this particular case, a couple of lifetimes. The trauma isn’t the original experience but the resurfacing of the memory/feeling/sensation and reaction of my nervous system to that resurfacing. That’s why it is many layers deep, not just a wham-bam, one time and I’m healed.
I’ve often wondered what is the point of all this healing. Will I ever get to a point where I am trauma free? What would that even look like? I’m learning that healing helps me release those incomplete cycles within me and my lineage. It won’t make me trauma free but it will make me more me. While I have been shaped by the trauma, it doesn’t have to engulf and control me. I’m not sure if the puff pastry will ever be gone but it feels good to slowly peel off the layers.
What if everyone is just trying to find their way home?
To a place where they can feel a sense of belonging, safety and familiarity?
What if we are just trying to find our way home?
To where we feel like we are with the tide, not against it? To where we feel safe? To what is familiar?
What if I am just trying to find my way home?
To where I can feel accepted and part of something bigger? To where I can let my guard down? To where I can settle into who I am?
It seems like it’d explain a lot.
Don’t you think?
When something is unresolved, I play it over and over in my head. And my husband is often the lucky human who I try to make sense of it with repeat conversations but talking and reasoning with a situation that is out of my control does not complete that open-ended cycle.
The answer, instead, is to dance, move, run, scream that frustrated, stagnant energy out of my body. Release the pent up desire to try to control the situation by talking about it to death.
No more talking – move instead.