Forgetting & Remembering
by Patti Allen
I have a friend who has cancer, and her struggle is similar to the struggle of anyone who is ill. Like Jacob in the Bible, wrestling with the angel, she is locked in a battle for her life, hoping to prevail through the dark night of her illness until the sun comes up. A “good” day for my friend is a day in which she can forget; forget that she is sick and engaged in a mortal struggle. It revives her to have a normal day; a normal day being one in which she can forget her pain, go to work and leave her illness behind her, if only for a few hours. That makes her the happiest…when she can forget.
Wishing we could forget is something most of us have experienced. Who hasn’t wished to forget that embarrassing moment when our foot made a permanent home in our mouth? Or all our high school years? Or the pain when our parents or friends let us down? Or the pain… It is our nature as human beings to want to forget. In fact, that is one of our greatest mechanisms for survival. We have the ability to block out extreme pain and trauma, from the most severe abuse to us personally, to the most horrific traumas to one another that we perpetrate in the name of society, culture or religion. In fact, a child’s ability to block or forget the pain, allows that child to continue living and growing until some point in the future, when hopefully that child is strong enough to revisit the past. This extraordinary gift is like a shut-off valve that kicks into action when the pressure reaches dangerous levels. Forgetting literally saves lives.
Forgetting is useful, until some unseen moment when it no longer works. Now, apparently the very thing that saved us-the ability to forget- is the very thing that may kill us. When we ignore the pain in our body, when we don’t listen to it’s signs, signals and messages, our body finds another way to communicate with us. We don’t usually see it coming, nor are we consciously aware of it, and it is often heralded by a common signal from the body…pain. “Something” doesn’t feel right. Or that annoying back pain becomes a chronic condition. Or our dreams begin to change, informing us that there is some material surfacing from our unconscious. It often starts as vaguely as that, sneaking into our body like an unseen intruder for some people, and simply a tap on the shoulder for others. We don’t usually want to think about it. So we compartmentalize our body parts and their pain. We put Band-Aids on our symptoms and treat them rather than the source. We take pills to make the pain go away. And we don’t ever look back to the real origin- the pain in our lives and in our souls.
One of my favorite stories in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ masterful book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” is the story of Vasalisa the Wise. The story is rich and has much to teach us about our intuition and wisdom. It tells the story of Vasalisa, whose “good mother” has died and left Vasalisa with a doll and the instructions to consult the doll if she losses her way. And, as is common in fairy tales, the father remarries a woman with her own daughters who though they, “always smiled like ladies, there was something of the rodent behind their smiles.” The stepmother and her daughters hatch a plot to get rid of Vasalisa. They let the fire in their hearth go out, sending Vasalisa into the forest to Baba Yaga the witch, to beg for fire. They expect the witch to kill and eat Vasalisa. Near the end of the story, when Vasalisa has passed many tests of initiation and the old hag Baba Yaga has given her fire, Vasalisa carries it out of the forest in a skull on a stick, that lights the path before her as she runs home. The skull is very frightening as well as heavy, and Vasalisa wants to puts it down; but she can’t. The skull reassures her and tells her to keep going and though it is hard, she continues on. She ultimately returns home with the fire, triumphant after surviving the dangerous journey. The story ends abruptly with the news that “the skull on the stick watched the stepsisters’ and the stepmother’s every move and burnt into them, and by morning it had burnt the wicked trio to cinders.”
The part of the story that is relevant to our journey with forgetting is the skull that carries the fire. The skull, representing ancestral knowing and consciousness, at some point becomes too much for us and we, like Vasalisa, seek to set it down. For those of us who are taking perhaps our first steps on the road to consciousness, who hasn’t experienced moments when the light is too bright and it is all too heavy? Common are the moments when it seems as though we have no one to talk to and we are alone on our path into and out of the forest. It is during these seemingly heavy moments when we want to put down the skull, filled with our seer’s consciousness and forget. We want to forget everything we have learned about ourselves or those we love. We want to forget the pain. This is a difficult phase that our souls pass through. We stand on the brink of awakening, when we remember who we truly are. In order to do this we must listen inside for the space between the heartbeats, to hear what we don’t usually hear. To forget who we are is to not ever know the spark of the Creator that dwells within us. To forget who we are is to ignore our spiritual nature so that we eventually begin to live our lives out of alignment and out of sync with our soul. And then we get sick.
Oddly enough, never forgetting can make us sick as well. Holding on to every hurt or offence we have suffered, puts us out of balance mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. My husband, Wayne, told me the story of a husband who complains to the marriage counselor that “Every time we have a fight, my wife gets historical.” The marriage counselor corrected, “You mean hysterical.” “No,” the husband responds, “I mean historical. She says to me ‘Remember what you did last year and what you didn’t do ten years ago.’ Every time we fight she gets historical.” These are wounds that are never allowed to heal. So for the healing process, balance is a key component in our journey toward wellness. We must remember who we are and where we’ve been without holding on to every hurt. In her book “Anatomy of the Spirit”, Caroline Myss doesn’t mince words when she writes “Remaining attached to negative events and beliefs is toxic to our minds, spirits, cell tissue and lives.”
So, although it is heavy for my dear friend who wants to forget, I pray that she will remember who she is, as I pray that for all of us. In remembering the Biblical story of Jacob, whether it is our own tradition or not, we can approach it in the same way we learn from any ancestral story. Estes would say, “It is night and we can imagine ourselves sitting in a circle around a fire, our rapt attention focuses on the storyteller, who perhaps begins the story with the mysterious words, ‘Once there was, and once there was not…’” And we learn of Jacob, who struggled with the angel of God, holding his adversary until the dawning of the new day. Jacob would not let the angel go until the angel blessed him, which he did. Now, though blessed, Jacob still came away wounded from the struggle. In surviving the struggle, he then received a new name, “Israel”, which means “wrestled with God”.
As in every good story, the seeds are offered to us so we can “grow our soul”. Like Jacob, we struggle with a mighty adversary, namely the challenges and pain in our body and our life. We come away blessed when we know when to hold on and when to let go. And though we may come away wounded, often without cure for our diseases, walking with a metaphorical limp in our souls, we reclaim our spirit name. We remember who we are, and in so doing, we are healed.
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""Patti is the portal to understanding yourself"" Angela