Loss and Regret? Or Something Better?
"Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning." Dr Edith Eva Eger
I’ve been riveted to the book I’m reading. Today I read a passage and want to share - it’s from the memoir ‘The Choice’ by Dr Edith Eva Eger but a little background before I do. Dr Eger is a holocaust survivor having spent a year in concentration camps as a 16 year old girl. It was an experience that left her orphaned and witness to unspeakable horrors at a time when trauma support as we know it was virtually non-existent.
Dr Egar was faced with a choice to live her life wounded, or to find a way to make her life work for her. Thank goodness she is an optimist and a passionate healer.
I am close to the end of the memoir now, and wondered, could she still be alive?
Yes! Yes she is.
A nonagenarian, she has lived to share her message again and again, helping others to heal. If you get the opportunity to read or listen to ‘The Choice’, I highly recommend it. You may also be interested in the resources on her website.
“If I understand anything…about the whole of my life, it’s that sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It’s as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that’s been and all that will be. We become aware of all we’ve received and what we can choose - or choose not - to perpetuate…
All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside, my ballet master had told me. I never understood what he meant. Until Auschwitz…It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?
Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts from the past? Will we abandon the people we love as a consequence of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?”
And that is both our growth and our gift- will we take the best of what we know, explore alternatives, different ways of being, and choose something better for ourselves?
While we say we don’t want to repeat certain traumas, we often actually do. Let’s be kind to ourselves. How can we know what the alternatives look like if we have yet to learn them?
It may take practise. Many beautiful things come of trying again - allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough to ‘fail’ to FEEL, participating, assessing and reshaping; trusting in what feels right, and what doesn’t.
I’m truly inspired by those of you who move through trauma (at whatever the age or stage) and arrive with new wisdom and new ways of being.
Thank you for being you.
Blessed be
Michelle x
Michelle Cowles
Spiritual Leader/Teacher/Learner
Copyright Michelle Cowles 2024
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