Letting Go of the Past?

I am thrilled to have finally had expert help in retrieving this blog!!! Thank you, Jayme, angel of mine.

A good many years have passed since I first established this site. I've had a chance to meet with and learn from great teachers all over. I now live in Western Massachusetts, "where the coffee is strong but the women are stronger." All the moving I've done since 2007 has driven home for me the importance of place, belonging, and finding a tribe of one's own, be it family of origin or family of choice. Yet finding home is one of the hardest things I've ever done.

I combined a series of images off the net to try to communicate what it actually means to me when I hear people equate recovery and healing with letting go of the past. It is a message that tries to take a short cut to healing by avoiding the hard work of making sense and meaning out of what has taken place in one's life:

Letting go, moving on with one's life -- is incredibly difficult. The past not only contains trauma, but also one's history, lineage, family, culture,beliefs, and all our memories -- good AND bad. This means that trauma and place and tribe and identity are all interconnected. To let go of trauma is to let go of the roots that hold us to the earth, so to speak. The past - for good or ill - is the source of self.

So, the task, always, this thing called "transformation" -- using the raw material of all that I have lived to create all that I want to become. Not done. Not even close.