Inside the body the lost ones travel, carrying our dissociated experience and unfelt feeling, taking up temporary residence in our muscles, cell tissue, organs, and breath.
Scattered pieces of soul gather in our eyes, shoulders, and bellies, and in the secret places within our hearts.
They’ve become frozen and crystallized there, and display their longing to come Home by way of our dreams, bodily-felt emotions, and the variety of symptoms we experience.
If we’re unable to access them, to feel what they feel and tend to their tears, they will make their way deeper into the underworld and into the soma, awaiting a future moment when conditions are ripe.
Even if our primary interest is in spiritual transformation, we can’t separate out any unresolved relational trauma, attachment wounding, and narcissistic injury we may have experienced.
This unheld and unmetabolized material shapes our perception and forms a psychic template through which we’re able to imagine ourselves, others, and our world. But this happens outside our conscious awareness, from within the depths of shadow.
As we’re invited to “just be in the present moment,” we have to remember that in the present moment the ancestors are there with us.
They not only take up residence in our bodies, our hearts, and deep in the soul, but they are our bodies, hearts, and souls. Psyche is multiple and polytheistic.
They arrive invited or otherwise, along with the lost, crystallized orphans of psyche and soma, the spinning figures of our unlived lives, and the rich landscape of our implicit memory.
We’re not alone in that “present moment.”
What does the Other have to say about us and our meditation practice? Have we asked them and listened carefully to their response, with devotion and care?
Have we lamented their tears and grieved their pain?
To what degree have we met them, and accepted them with love? And sought their wisdom on the nature of past, present, and future.
Photo by Paul Davies
