I am going to start filtering some of my more private musings. Since blogger does not have a tool for that, you will need to visit my Live Journal and ask to be friended there. I will continue to post Daily Gratitude and other subjects here. There is also a FAQ for my Journal at the same link.
pondering the past
| Wednesday, February 15, 2006 @ 21:26 Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith is by Martha Beck. I had never heard of her or this particular book when I stumbled across it in the local library. Since boy is an ex-Mormon, I figured he would want to read it. Beck uses her memories of childhood sexual abuse and her confrontation of her father years later to frame her spiritual journey. It includes background on the church, her family dynamics, her process of recovering memories and reseaching their validity as well as detailing an LDS purge of academics at BYU when she and her husband were teaching there. I read books like this in order to understand boy's experience. However, this book was unlike the others and I found myself unable to stop reading until I finished it. Perhaps I relate to her because we attended the same university in New England. Perhaps I was drawn to the fact that she quotes buddhist and taoist texts. Perhaps I admired the framing of details in the context of a spiritual journey rather than just a way to attack a church. Whatever the reason I was sucked in, the book brought me closer to the experience that boy had growing up Mormon while feeding into my current inner ponderings on attachment, truth, surrender, release, and the whole problem of "the past." Like many, I was abused as a child, sexually and psychologically. I don't think it led to my being a sadist or sexually dominant. I don't spend a lot of time talking about it, because my life is in the present, not the past. Beck, like pretty much anyone who writes about childhood abuse, believes that we must recover our memories, work through them in counseling, and express them to our families, friends, and whoever else will listen. That this process is necessary for us to achieve true freedom. Because I'm tired of this belief, I almost didn't read the book. How can we let go of our attachment to the past if we have to spend all this time and energy on it? How can we operate from the Now, if we're supposed to focus on events we already forgot and on integrating that truth into how we live? Believe it or not, this ties into a more mundane part of my current life: I missed the deadline to submit my alumna report. My 15th college reunion is in June. You wouldn't believe the amount of energy I've put into reflecting and discussing college, reunions, and the notion of expectations and nostalgia related to this simple event. And it doesn't help that one of my classmates was an Olympic skater, so even the daily news blitz from Italy is feeding into my thoughts on my reunion. boy went to a large, state-run university. his class was so huge, any concept of a reunion is impossible. Besides, state-run means state-funded, so the university doesn't rely on alumni support to function. My alma mater enjoys a larger endowment than most countries. Alumni give more when you remind them of the 'good ole days' through contrived, over-scheduled opportunities to visit campus and hang out with those who "knew you when." I have not talked to a single person from my college career in over five years (not counting my brother, but he's from my life, not from college). Yet, I'm spending an inordinate amount of time in my life concerned with that past. How can I live in the Now if one of the two pieces of jewelry I rarely leave home without is my college class ring? We're programmed to believe that if we are ignorant of our past, we'll be doomed to suffer repeats of its worst elements. Or that by ignoring the past, we're only living a half-life, that we're lying about who were are. One of the most memorable quotes I've ever encountered about the past comes from the camp sci-fi movie "Barbarella" in which an angel explains that he can turn the other cheek because "Angels have no memories." To me, that represents the essense of living in the present. So how to resolve this idea with society's fixation on the past, whether it's college or high school reunions, processing childhood abuse, or obsessively creating scrapbooks? And where does the concept of forgiveness fit in all this? By its nature, forgiveness is rooted in the past. Eckhart Tolle explains in his best-selling The Power of Now that he doesn't talk about his past. It doesn't matter where he was born or where he went to school or what he did last week. What matters is the Now. The buddhist texts I've been reading over the past few years also expound on the importance of living in the present moment, that the past and the future don't exist. Some of my favorite tv shows talk about the process of redemption and how you can't undo or make up for the past, you can only do good in the current moment. How do I surrender my past when my ego keeps flashing memories at me of the petty, mean-spirited, or downright crazy things I did in adolescence? (Living with my mom these past few months has certainly given it unlimited opportunities to do so.) How can I live in the Now if I'm supposed to do the months or years of memory-recovery and processing that so many women I know say saved their sanity? How can I give energy to forgiving mysElf and those around me when anything that deserves forgiving is already past? And what about the idea that we create our own reality? If our minds process memories the same as now, why should we want to literally relive things? And how can I even trust that my perception of the past is what happened? These are the types of thoughts that have been swirling in my mind for months and months. The only resolution I have found so far is that acceptance is not the same as attachment. I can retain the knowledge of the past, much the same way I retain information gathered from experience and education. It is the process of attaching significance to the past that gives it power over the now and pulls me away from focusing on this moment. Remembering how to drive in snow will be important to me if the weather forecast is to be believed. Reliving fear, pain, humiliation, anger, or even happiness and ecstasy will create anchors dragging me into the past. I can choose to give mysElf blanket forgiveness for the past-- accept that whatever inane or insane things I did, I did them and I can't undo them. I can offer that same mantle to everyone in my life. (btw: why in the world do we teach people that they should or shouldn't forgive people for things they did before meeting each other???) I can remember that I lived and what I have learned in certain situations and from specific people without attaching mysElf to those memories and lessons. I will no longer dwell, wallow, inhabit, or allow any part of mysElf to exist in those past moments. Does this resolve all my questions? Not hardly. Nor does the intellectual realization automatically translate into practice. How do I help mom sort through decades worth of memorabilia and photos without strengthening attachments to the memories depicted? Can I actually release my attachments to certain experiences, relationships, and people in my past? How do I continue to honor the relationships I do have if I'm not attaching any significance to the histories I have with people? Can I truly accept and release past events if I haven't gone through the process of recovering the complete memories? And why do I have file cabinets full of journals, letters, and stories that I wrote years ago? If my high school and college tests and essays are taking up physical space (that we have to pay for each month in storage fees!) in my life, doesn't that mean I'm still attached to them? Is "Clean Sweep" really about living in the Now? Maybe the best way to deal with my past is to create a "performance collage", aka bonfire.
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