The House of Ancestors (part two)
Created on 08/23/2009
The room is now your workshop. Imagine you are a sculptor (and maybe you are - as somewhere deep down we are all sculptors, artists, writers; creating the memories of our stories through the art of our lives). So, today this room is your artistic workshop. All of the materials, tools, and resources you need to create are readily available. When we call this room the House of Ancestors, you use this space to create your ancestors. You got it right. I believe we have the power to do it and, in fact, we are doing it anyway. The only difference in what I offer you now is to have more awareness of the process and more choices.
You exercised your choices before. As I suggested in the previous retreat, try making simple choices to taste the feeling of complete decisiveness and then move on to more complex choices. For example, turning your ancestors into your angels or allowing them to stay around as your demons. The choice is yours. At least in this room it is.
And the room is an artistic workshop, and you are the artist, remember?
There are catalogues stored in this room, on opposite sides of it. They may look like a bunch of paper boxes, or be in more elaborate forms of storage devices, it doesn’t matter because they are storage places holding opposite information.
One side is where you place your “angel wings” - the qualities of your ancestors that support you, that you choose to be your attributes, that you can take out of your “toolbox” any time you need them.
On the opposite side is the storage for empty “masks of demons” that represent the quality of your ancestors that you don’t want to carry with you. Qualities that don’t reflect who you truly are, but rather, take you further away from your sense of self. Those boxes have solid locks on them.
I am giving you mechanical directions now because in this room you are the artist and you should and you will follow your own inspiration, rhythm, and sense of beauty to do your creative work. I am just helping you with the guidance.
In order to do that, I have to remind you about “loyalty”, because this is something that may stand in the way of you creating your best self. An invisible loyalty to the masks of our ancestors, which most of us, without ever questioning it, have been conditioned to obey. We feel obliged to keep this invisible loyalty even when we try to openly rebel against it, because deep down we try to conform to what was expected of us by family demons.
That “loyalty” comes in a crowded company, it comes with guilt, sustains itself through fear, survives with the help of our doubts.
That loyalty may be in the room with you now, shouting at you from inside – “and how do you know that this is the right thing to do”? You really don’t. But funny, how most of us have experienced no doubt at all while forcing those same distorted masks from the past onto the faces of our children, so their faces turn into stone grimaces and they are pushed away from their true essence. Yet, we doubt our own desire to be ourselves.
I believe this is not loyalty, it’s conditioning. And it can be changed. So you are freer to create what you want.
To move along in this room you need to do an inventory, so you can separate ancestral qualities you want to keep from those you want to let go. To do that, put yourself in a chair in the middle of the room as a model for your art. And then, try to see yourself sitting in that chair as if you are a sculptor or a painter who is about to make your portrait at the same time. And then, do your inventory. Go through the line of your ancestors, one by one, and work with each one of them to decide which strength is going to be kept as yours and which qualities you are going to lock down in the storage boxes.
Some examples:
A man who grew up without a father may choose to be an ultimate symbol of a father figure (because men with those histories are often great fathers) to define who he is instead of an unexamined loyalty to his mother. So he puts his fatherhood as his essential attribute in the toolbox with other “angel wings”, and removes and locks away his mother’s demand for his conditioned dependency on her (which most of the time is unnecessary, useless, and traumatic). After doing this, he may find that in his next communication with his mother (in real life or in the imagination), he acts more as a father figure to her rather than a child, and the whole dynamic becomes different, healing and transforming for everybody.
In another example, when someone’s mother is highly manipulative, one can choose her pure ability to influence people as an attribute to keep in the toolbox and separate and put away dependence, deception, and weakness that come along with any manipulation as useless material that you have no obligation to drag along and that you choose to stack away.
To separate healing from the traumatic, use feelings of empowerment instead of feelings of resentment. When you contemplate the quality of your ancestor and feel that resentment is present, it is not yours, it goes to a box of useless attributes. When you contemplate something in your ancestor that you admire (for instance, a hard-working grandmother), and you feel empowered from remembering them this way, take it with you - it is your strength.
Make that choice. It is your workshop and it is your creativity. You can do whatever you choose to here. You can feel yourself on the top of the mountain, open to all directions, strong and invincible and you can stand there and feel it as long as you want to. Or, you can use any other metaphors that you like. It is your workshop, it is your room in the Cliffhouse and this room is inside your mind where everything is possible.
Chose metaphors that serve your purpose - follow Ariadne’s thread, follow any other images that are dear and powerful for you. There are many strong threads in our lives that we are free to follow and they will help us, guide us, and deliver us. Chose them. And there are other threads that tie us down as slaves and drag us in the directions we don’t want to go. Chose to let them go, they are not yours.
Practicing this is like experiencing ultimate, divine creativity. So we can stop being manipulated, empty, rigid, and unhappy objects marked by a conditioned attachment to something that doesn’t even make sense and begin feeling ourselves as alive, happy, powerful creators of our stories and ourselves.
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