The Land of the Living

How many of us do not live the life we came here for? How many of us live in the underworlds of quiet despair or for others’ expectations without knowing why? What prevents us from stepping fully into our own lives? As children, the hurt we experience can be too much to bear. Our intelligent response to early childhood trauma may be to exile those wounded parts of ourselves, protecting them from further harm, in order that we may continue to grow. And yet from that moment of impact, we may never fully inhabit our bodies, and our lives may never truly feel like we’re at home. How do we return to solid ground? Where is our Living Land?

I was eight. My mother was standing before my little sister and me, but she was not there. She appeared as if caught halfway between Siberia, where her lost sisters, brothers and her own mother lay starved and dead, and where she was now - in this land of milk and honey. In that moment, she looked out the window of our family home and saw something we could not see. She was the voice of her mother, she was prophet, she was portent, she was Ceres crying out for the lost Persephone, She was the Voice of an exiled Mother God. She became very still and very ominous, her voice piercing, booming, and she uttered a deep, rumbling, and thunderous cry – “Bring my children back to the Land of the Living.” I didn’t know how to respond. In this moment, my mother was a stranger, lost in a distant but present trauma, unable to comfort to my sister and me. We didn’t know who she was, where she was, or what she meant. We didn’t know how to bring her back.

The words she uttered that day never left me, though when she recovered and we could move again within her familiar and loving circle of protection, I would pretend to forget them. I ignored the tragedy and loss beneath those words. I held a steady normalcy for the longest time until, at 25, the first signs of the intergenerational trauma within me surfaced. Six months after my mother’s death. While saying again and again, “I’m fine,” I was finally broken open by the unacknowledged, unspoken grief three generations long. I know now I had carried it in my bones and through my blood. Trauma passed on in the umbilical, in intricate, twirling cords of DNA.

I realise now, I took on the task of finding and bringing back those lost children. I realise now, it was my Soul’s chosen, dangerous and sacred, mission. I would not understand how it would begin to play out until six weeks after my son was born. A new mother’s lack of sleep mixed with an inchoate and then inexplicable fear of losing him. Swaddling him against the Siberian cold, though in this temperate land there was no need. The rush and ebb of birth hormones mixing and igniting an inherited madness born from grief. Six weeks then spent in a no-woman’s land in a psychiatric ward, myself then travelling somewhere between frozen steppes, a mud hut floor and this suspended in time fractured and yet glittering moment. Gone and returned, lost and lucid. Some of the time spent in solitary confinement in a darkened cell. One day I tore the polystyrene cup I’d been give to drink from into thirty small pieces, scattering them on the cell floor. The floor had become an ocean of souls scattered with the bones of those ancestors - aunts and uncles and grandparents - I had never met. A soft white communion wafer of polystyrene sea foam for each one. With such solemn tenderness, I gathered each of them into my arms.

When I left hospital, having come back from that Underworld, a poem came to me to describe what I had inherited, what as an incarnating Soul I had willingly taken on. Five words hanging suspended in the double helix strand. It showed a trauma I knew would visit five generations of our family till the wound was healed. I was the third from the epicentre - my lost grandparents, my parents, and myself, their daughter… And now there was my firstborn, a son. I became determined, for his sake, for the healing not to take that long.

Hunted
Haunted
Hurt
Healing
Whole

I reasoned that by understanding the hurt, I could heal and become whole, so that my children would not be lost. I studied the psychology of trauma, loss and grief. I made it my mission to find the meaning behind my mother’s “lost children”. Researching my own core wound, I understood this was not my family’s tragedy alone. Each family has suffered lost children [1]. And each and every one of us who remains lost in the prison of our childhood fears, hurts, shames or lonelinesses is, in these wounded parts, still a lost child. Whenever when we suffer a hurt or shock we don’t know how to heal, we enter a slow and increasingly solitary confinement. We stay frozen. We cut off the parts of ourselves that hurt too much. At first, this severing can be ignored and yet, it is increasingly triggered, as the pressure of what has been enshadowed, concealed or exiled mounts and finally erupts. We shut our hurt in — under the stairs or in the corner of the room with our back to others, shamed. And our unintegrated past begins to haunt our present. Yet we don’t see that we are reacting from the exiled place of the lost child, of all the lost children of complex, collective trauma.

Where do those lost children go? They remain. My mother passed the unintegrated trauma of the deaths of her brothers, sisters and her mother on to me. And my father, his lost mother and father. I carried them all unheard, unseen — only hearing them again when my son was born, now so loud their cries that they sent me to that no woman’s land within me where they still dwelled, waiting in fevered and starved silence, to be heard and to come home. 

When the postnatal psychosis eased I let their pain fall again; it was too heavy to pick both it and my baby son up in my medicated arms. 

Finally, twelve years later I gathered them all up into my heart’s suitcase as I left my second marriage. The anger and arguments in the marriage I now realise were the echoes of that trauma my parents had projected, haunted and hurt and as yet, unhealed, at one another. It met and ignited the trauma my ex-husband had also experienced. I came back to live on the hill where I was born. I sat there, slowly healing, calling all my lost children back to me – finding my mother’s and her mother’s children along the way. Out of this homecoming, I created a way to help others find those fragments of themselves and fuse them into facets of an integrated Self. I saw how the facets still could have occlusions - light thrown off by the dark - and yet be uniquely beautiful, as the pain was seen and understood. This is when hurt becomes healing, and then whole.

As a symbolic act, I planted a Pohutukawa tree on that hill. A tree that clings to the edges of Pacific Rim lands, looking out to sea. A family tree here, on this hill, in this new land. Intentionally placed like a beacon, so they could find their way back. No longer in exile. No longer lost. A sentinel, ablaze with red flowers under Mahutonga, the Southern Cross, waving to them. Witamy w Domu, Nau Mai, Haere Mai, Welcome Home.

[1] ‘lost children’ are the facets of ourselves that, like Peter Pan’s lost boys, that have run away from home. They are traumatised and have never been given the chance to understand how to heal, because they were exiled before we knew why. This may be at the hands of hurt adults, taunting friends or fearful teachers. It may be, like mine, an inherited Intergenerational Trauma. Mark Wolynn’s latest book It Didn’t Start with You (2016), and his life’s work on Intergenerational and inherited Family Trauma (https://www.markwolynn.com) includes the latest epigenetic research validating this phenomenon, and how we can heal from it. In the Soul Retrieval work I now do, I lead clients to reclaim and restore all those lost parts of themselves. With a gentle guide, we can come home to ourselves, back to the ground of our being, our own Living Land.