Ivy Gaiser
California Institute of Integral Studies
What exactly happened this semester? I discovered my history. I discovered a history that I was at first deeply resistant to accept. I was ashamed of the people who came before me; I did not want to be a part of the bloody history of the United States, with ancestors who came here in the very beginning of the 17th century. I was horrified by this news. I have had to go through a process of recognizing my ancestors, accepting them and what they may have done, and forgiving them for it. Forgiveness is easy once awareness crawls up to the surface of the mind, to remind me that those who cause harm have themselves been wounded. This is the cycle. Knowing the cycle gives me the chance to put an end to the suffering. By knowing the causes of suffering, I can make choices to minimize the suffering I cause for other people by working on myself and coming to terms with my own history, trauma, and deep wounding. I can choose to be the end of the many cycles of abuse that have been passed down through all the generations to land in this moment, in this particular self.
I recently received a strong message that presented me with a blunt truth about healing. I realized that I walk around with this big idea of HEALING as this ominous project that will take my whole life and I have to focus all of my energy on that one thing, but in reality healing simply means coming into and remaining in the present moment. Wholeness is already the natural state. Fracturing is only the mind making choices without questioning why. All things must be brought into presence/awareness. This is healing: Letting go of attachments to feelings that have become too familiar by being clutched for too long, and letting go of the attachment to victimhood and expectations of more of the same. Healing is allowing it all to be okay, whatever it may be. Healing is removing imaginary boundaries from within the mind, between the ego and the shadow. Self/Not-Self. Boundaries are fictional. The fracture is fictional. The self is already whole and perfect. Healing means accepting the inherent perfection of the self. Healing means forgiving the self, and it can be as easy or as hard as we need it to be. Healing is choosing to meet the self, and release old stories in order to embrace the present. One can choose to shed masks and instead let hidden light shine forth. I merely have to acknowledge the power of the self. Feel. Acknowledge. Release. Learn.
This task of healing is a lifelong process; it’s just not the process that I used to think it was. Being at CIIS there is a great deal of talk about transcendence, enlightenment, and meditation. There is talk of the peak experience and a focus on seeking something. The truth is that seeking this elusive thing is often equivalent to looking everywhere for your feet without realizing that you can close your eyes and feel your feet, if you would only focus your attention on how they are feeling right here in this very moment.
For myself, when I focus my attention on my breath, emotions, and the vibrations I feel in every cell, I am instantly healed as I am transported out of the past and back to the present. As soon as I am here experiencing the ever-present moment as it unfolds, I realize there is nowhere to go and that none of my pieces are missing. I am healed by my own presence. I am healed by the love I feel for myself and the recognition that, though there may be pain upon me, the pain does not define me. I am not my experiences. By entering the present moment with full awareness, I become the universe. I recognize that I am everything and everything is me. I can see the whole vast network of interconnected systems that make up Being.
Furthermore, I can see the long histories that each person living today brings with them, from their ancestors back to the very beginning of things. When I look at someone like George W. Bush, I don’t feel hatred. I feel a deep sadness in my heart, recognizing his pain as my own. My motto during his presidency, whenever I heard people spewing hate in his direction, was that this man needed a hug more than anything else. This was a sad man who did not experience himself as divine or worthy of love. Hitler himself was beaten nearly to death by his own father when he was a child. I see in him my own blind anger and hatred that fueled me when I was young. We demonize others who show us our deepest shadow sides, pretending that they alone hold the darkness and we are only light. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot: These men have answered the call sent out by the collective unconscious begging for a scapegoat to hold our darkest selves.
By recognizing myself in others, I can feel empathy for them and I can forgive them by forgiving myself. In order to forgive my ancestors for the pain and suffering they caused, I must look inside of myself for those times when I felt so hurt that I wanted to spew my suffering onto others. I must forgive myself for those times when I have acted out of fear instead of love and I caused suffering for others because of it.
There is a great deal of pain that has been passed down through the many generations and various branches of my family tree. I know from a simple Google search that this ancestor or that ancestor was escaping religious persecution in their home country, or just war in general, when they first came to what they considered “The New World” looking for a better life. These people, operating out of fear, unconsciously passed on all of their wounds to the indigenous people they fought with, and the African-American people they bought as slaves.
Even as I recognize the systems and cycles that created these circumstances, I am again saddened for what my ancestors have done. Some of them were even taken hostage during a raid by the indigenous people whose land they took, only to be rescued 3 months later. Those particular ancestors were also slave owners. Yet I also have ancestors who were on the other side of their own particular conflicts. Oppressed and oppressor at some point created a marriage that created me.
It’s easy to be overcome by the emotions evoked by a history of violence. And then I remember that those who caused harm were first harmed themselves. And those who came before were harmed, and so on back and back and back. I tend to want to find the root, as though I could somehow reach back through history and yank it out, if only I could identify it.
As I search, I am eventually reminded that there is no single root to be picked out and examined. The root is the human condition, as is the cure. We are creatures who are easily hurt and we unconsciously act out of fear and stories that we tell ourselves about how the world revolves around us. We are also creatures who have evolved to a place where we begin to grow into an awareness that we do not, in fact, have to act unconsciously. We are slowly becoming aware of choice. As we awaken to the vast potential held within the present moment, we awaken as well to our ability to make choices in every moment. We choose to hold on to a feeling, or to feel it fully and then release it completely. We choose to shift our perspective or not. We choose to see or remain blinded by our fear.
This examination of my ancestry and the work to heal untold wounds would appear at first glance to be a harrowing journey through shadow and heartache. In reality it is just another practice in self-awareness and presence of mind and emotion. By connecting with my ancestors and their stories, I become more deeply connected to my own heart and recognize the ways in which I act out my own fears and stories. The more stories that I wade through, the more empathy and compassion I can feel for the broken-hearted people who make up my history as well as the histories of everyone else alive today.
It is my duty as well as my pleasure to tear off old scabs worn for too long, paraded like battle scars worthy of praise and respect. There is an unspoken sense for too many people in this country that the more deeply hidden the pain, the stronger the person is for bearing it in silence; to openly weep is considered weak because of the vulnerability revealed by the raw state of emotions. People do not willingly tear off their scabs to reveal the unhealed flesh beneath that has actually been suffocating for want of fresh air.
In order to tear off scabs, I must choose to engage myself and my family with a memory that is not always kind or forgiving. I am faced with healing the rifts in my living family, which pose a much greater threat to my ego than examining stories that go back hundreds of years. Here in the present, I have a grandfather with whom I am unable to communicate. I sent him a letter several years ago after deciding that I could not bear to go another moment without telling him everything I was feeling. I told him how hurt I was by our relationship, by the ways that he chooses to deal with his emotions, which are extremely harmful to everyone around him. I plainly told him that he has no right to treat others as though they do not deserve the very same dignity and respect that he himself deserves. I told him how disgusted I was by his behavior and that he could choose to change it and to be a better person. I even spoke about our history together, of when I was a kid and I looked up to him and wanted to be a cabinet-maker just like him. I was in awe of him and I said so.
My grandfather never mentioned that letter to me until last summer, when he mentioned it in passing, saying that he knows that I have no regard for him whatsoever and I think he’s a horrible person. That’s what he took from my letter. I was astonished and heart-broken. Thinking back on the letter, I can now see that although my intentions were good, I was not speaking with my authentic voice. I was coming from a place of anger and frustration, rather than a place of love and acceptance. I recently wrote a new letter to my grandpa, but I have not yet sent it to him. I know that this second letter was written straight from my heart, from a place of forgiveness and understanding, and yet I worry that he will not see or feel the love in the letter, because he is blinded by his own stories and stubbornness. I understand him all too well because we are, in fact, a little too alike at times. His bullheadedness is my own, as is his thick, protective shell that guards a tender heart. I have rarely seen my grandpa get sentimental, but I know what is underneath his hard mask.
Examining the longer history that predates, and thereby produced, my grandpa, I come to feel compassion on an ever-deepening level for this man that I once wrote off as a stubborn, unfeeling jerk. I have learned that within my great-grandfather’s generation, with 9 siblings in total and only one of them a female, there was a great amount of violence and aggression among these men. Many of my great-great uncles beat their wives. Many of them shipped their wives off to insane asylums, or their sons did so to their own wives. This small fact alone shows the great amount of repressed emotions within this family. They also grew up in the German Methodist Church, with their father as a pastor, during a time when it was not acceptable to be German in the United States after WWI broke out.
So now I see a generation of men who were beaten down, and then they beat down their wives, who beat down the children. Tracing the violence against women in my grandpa’s family, I not only gain a clearer understanding of my great-grandma, whom I found to be a difficult woman to like on the few occasions that I met her (especially because she was mean and spiteful toward my grandma), but also a better understanding of my grandma and the ways that my grandpa interacts with her and my aunts and then my sister and myself. There is a lot of subtle misogyny that informs the vastly different ways that my grandpa treats my male cousins vs. my sister and myself. Now I know that he learned this behavior from his uncles and his father, and it is difficult to blame him. I feel more compassion for the child that my grandpa was, who learned to turn his own feelings into aggression against a perceived “weaker” other, rather than to appear vulnerable or weak himself. That which we dislike in another, we dislike in ourselves, after all. Women represent the softer side in these men that they were forced to stuff deep down into their guts and ignore, and beating the women is like them trying to beat the vulnerability out of themselves.
Any discussion about healing for me always comes back to cycles of oppression and the ways in which we internalize and then pass on the abuse to the next generation. The other part of the story is then to step out of old stories and enter into the present moment. It is my hope to continue this healing work by bringing my ancestors and their pain and suffering into the light of day. I want to learn these histories and acknowledge each person, no matter what they may have done in their life, as a human with a tender heart. I want to be the forgiveness that these people never granted themselves. I can grant them forgiveness, and let their spirits release the past and re-join the present. The best way for me to do this work is all within my own spirit. My spirit is every spirit, so by forgiving myself, I forgive everyone else.
On a more practical level, my wish is to travel to the lands of my ancestors in order to strengthen my connection to their histories and journeys. Something indescribable happened when I went to Ireland, which was a release for an old man who seemed to follow me around and berate me for everything that I did wrong. I did a ritual for this old man when I was in Ireland, allowing him the freedom to be and do all the things he felt he could not be or do when he had lived his life. He got to release the bitter old man aspect of himself and instead embrace a boy who wanted nothing more than to sing and dance and feel the wind on his face and run through the fields. I forgave this old man, which gave him permission to forgive himself and release his story which was not only holding him hostage, but holding me hostage as well within the same strict code of conduct, which was utterly stifling. As I felt this old man’s spirit lighten, mine lightened as well, and I felt free to sing and dance and be joyful.
It is my hope that by traveling to the lands of my ancestors, I will come to know more of these people who live on through me, and I will have the opportunity to give them recognition and forgiveness and a chance to release the stories that hold them hostage. I want to bring everyone into the present moment with me, to share my joy in life and the love that we all feel in our true hearts, underneath our stories and masks and fears.
By chronicling my journey through poetry, prose, video, photograph, and any other means that comes to me, I will give the recognition and honor that my ancestors deserve, for being warriors in their own ways. I believe that the world needs to forgive and be forgiven in order for us to move forward in our evolution. We have to surrender to the present moment, release everything that came before, and move into a more joyous, holistic future. In order to do this we have to swallow our collective pride and muster the courage to be true to our deeper selves. One by one we have to make the choice to end the cycles that came before and choose to create something new. I only hope that by writing about my own journey, I can affect some change for others who are searching for a way out of their own murky histories.
