We build our past.
Thich Nhat Hanh
I listened to a lovely dharma talk this morning, taped on Thanksgiving day at Deer Park Monastry ( see below). In this talk Brother Phap Dung shares some insight into the importance of not getting caught up in one version of history. We need to be open to different versions because the past is not something fixed and "over with". He tells us that the more conscious and aware we become the more the way we tell our story will change.
Personal History
As you know, I am attempting to write my sister's story. Well ...more accurately...I am telling my story through the telling of my sister's story. I am sooo close to finishing what seems like it could be the first of a series. As it happened, I could not tell her whole life in one book. There are so many fascinating, hard-to-believe, and intricate details that make up her history, I felt if I crammed it all in to the plot it would be too much. So I took a small section of her life/my life ..about three years to be exact...and built the story around that.
Know Why and How We Tell Our Stories
Brother Phap Dung reminds us to be aware of why and how we tell our stories. Are we telling them to express, blame, cling? Are we making it up so others will like it and think more of us and less of someone else? If so our stories will limit us.
If , however, we are telling them honestly, truthfully in order to help help heal ourselves and possibly someone else, the storytelling will liberate us and free us.
Why did I write this? To honour my sister's memory, for sure, to do what she never had the chance to do and what she spent a great deal of her life trying to do: explain to people why she was the way she was. That was my original motive when I started writing this over five years ago. As I was writing, however, things changed. The story became an opportunity to tell my story as well through my relationship with her. It became "our" story.
I had to rely on trauma memories which can be both faulty and fuzzy at times. So much more would surface, I am sure, with extensive hypnosis but I did not go there. I took what I remembered, probably distorted out of place, sequence and actual dates, to some degree and told a story about our past. I am very aware, that I, as it is natural to do with memory gaps, have fabricated some details in those memories of mine, as well. A historian, would not find it completely accurate. It was not my intention, however, to relay history. It was my intention to relay emotion and share some wonderful life learning that others could benefit from while I honored my sister's memory and my own past with her.
I have been writing this book for over five years. Every year of telling this story, which just happened to coincide with my waking up to a new understanding of life, something dramatic was changing in my "perspective" about my past. I was feeling differently about the events and people in it that I know have dramtically influenced and affected both of us, helping to form who we became (in the body and personality sense). Every year I write this I am, in a weird sense,building a new past.
Over the years my story has shifted from one of fear,shame, brokenness and blaming to a beautiful platform of learning. We go from "victims" to courageous heros...not through our ability to survive but our ability to love, forgive and be kind. What I didn't see clearly or appreciate enough , for the longest time, when I looked back at my past, was the beauty in it , the perfection of it in amongst all that chaos and pain. I have always seen the beauty in my sister but never appreciated it enough until I started telling her story. I never seen the beauty and innocence of the so called villians of this story, either. I also, for the first time in my life, began to see the beauty and innocence in this version of "me".
Detaching
The more I evolve into this new understanding of life, the more and more I detach from this story, from the events, from the characters. I see my past simply as a story I can chnage as soon as I change my perspective. My story is not who I am, is not who my sister was. It is just a story about minds and bodies finding their way on this physical plane...neither good or bad...just was. Learning, learning, learning.
All of Life offers an amazing story.
Hmmm!
Deep Park Monastery/Br Phap Dung (November, 2021) How to Remember Our Past. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE24wfLeel8
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