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Art journaling on an old canvas

Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick (Edith Eva Eger)

I have just finished reading Edith Eva Eger’s book The Choice: Embrace the Possible (2017). Dr. Edith Eva Eger was just a young teenager when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, in 1944. Her parents lost their lives there. Today, at age ninety, Dr. Eger maintains a clinical psychology practice, holds a faculty appointment at the University of California, and regularly gives lectures around the country and abroad, also serving as a consultant in resiliency training and the treatment of PTSD in soldiers and war veterans. She has appeared on numerous television programs, and was the primary subject of a Holocaust documentary that appeared on Dutch National Television. She received a California State Senate Humanitarian Award in 1992 and gave the International Conference of Logotherapy keynote address at Viktor Frankl’s ninetieth birthday celebration.

The foreward to the book is written by Phil Zimbardo, the creator of the famed Stanford prison experiment (1971). He writes ‘her goal is nothing less than to help each of us to escape the prisons of our own minds. Each of us is in some way mentally imprisoned, and it is Edie’s mission to help us realize that just as we can act as our own jailors, we can also be our own liberators. When Edie is introduced to young audiences, she is often called “the Anne Frank who didn’t die,” because Edie and Anne were of a similar age and upbringing when they were deported to the camps’. He mentions that in his own work he has studied the psychological foundations of negative social influence and has tried to understand the mechanisms by which we conform and obey or simply stand by in situations where peace and justice can be served only if we act heroically. He writes ‘Edie has helped me to discover that heroism is not the province only of those who perform extraordinary deeds or take impulsive risks to protect themselves or others— though Edie has done both of these things. Heroism is rather a mind-set or an accumulation of our personal and social habits. It is a way of being. And it is a special way of viewing ourselves. To be a hero requires taking effective action at crucial junctures in our lives, to make an active attempt to address’. Read more

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‘There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story, which is part of the story too’ (Margaret Atwood)

I have repeatedly tried to stress the importance of embedding all our experience in broader contexts, for the individual trip always meets the outer social, cultural and even planetary journey. I have also made references to patriarchy quite often because families are often deeply rooted in these values, and we have all grown up in systems seeped in a masculine discourse. However, when one initially embarks on making meaning of and healing the aftermath of traumatic events the bigger picture may not be in the foreground of one’s awareness, as one is too over focused on the emerging experiences and the psychological realm. However, if one is willing or even forced to move on and to move deeper, one will soon realize that it is a much longer and broader journey, beyond the traumatic events, of inner and outer exploration. One eventually sees that it is necessary to read the story under the story under the story under the story. Margaret Atwood writes ‘There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story, which is part of the story too’. And sooner or later one understands that the deepest pain and violation of all is the stifling and oppression of one’s own voice. When it comes to women it is their feminine power and creativity – which seem like one and the same thing – that is relentlessly and repeatedly squashed by patriarchal structures and masculine values and discourse. The losses from such discourse and practices are individual, familial, societal and universal. So, inevitably, a feminine paradigm must be included, and underlying dynamics and politics must be explored and named. Read more

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Easter time in Vienna and other places and synchronicities….

Toko-pa Turner writes ‘Having walked a great distance from our initial estrangement into the orphaned depths of exile, we have learned the difference between fitting in and belonging. We now know belonging is a dynamic process, requiring alternating periods of togetherness and aloneness to remain vital. We are making friends with the often terrifying Otherness within, learning to make allies of even our most loathsome guests. And we have begun to follow our longing, which reaches to us through our ancestral lines, right from the soul of the world. We are coming into the great secret that belonging is really a skill, a set of competencies at which we must practice if we are to rise to the call of an aching heart and a fractured world……… Like any practice worth undertaking, belonging cannot be mastered overnight. Because it is a disappearing art, we might find ourselves going it alone for a while. We may find ourselves disappointed with a lack of response when we try to reach out, and the temptation to lose hope will be strong. But we must keep a vision of how we want our lives and the world to look, and work towards weaving those first threads together. Even when the garment of belonging seems flimsy and inadequate we must keep to the task until it substantiates’ (2018, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Her Own Room Press, Chapter 12).

I had always been sort of restless and staying in one place or house for too long would usually start to weigh upon me as if permancy were unsafe and as if past events and wounds and knowledge buried deep within me prevented me from growing roots. Part of my restlessness originated in childhood and part of it reflected discontent and non alignment with my truest longings and truths, and also, part of it was probably due to having moved around a bit, and finally, a lot of it had to do with repetitive unhealthy outer dynamics. My restlessness also reflected my intense curiosity and desire to travel and see new places. In Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis, writes: Read more