Restoring Life's Missing Pieces

Caren Goldman

Description

A powerful and thought-provoking look at "reunions" of all kinds as roads to remembering and re-membering ourselves.

“Reunions with people, places, things, and ourselves happen every day around us and within us. Whether to participate or not will always be your choice.”
—from the Introduction

Explore humankind's timeless, universal and deeply spiritual desire to reunite for the sake of healing and wholeness. Whether we wander far from home or reminisce from our favorite armchair, people of all faiths or none whatsoever undertake journeys to remember, restore and re-member the missing pieces of our stories, psyches and souls:

• Do you occasionally Google a person from your past in hopes of “catching up”?
• Do you leaf through old address books to try to call someone for the first time in decades?
• When you visit gravesites or memorials, can you pinpoint what drew you there?
• Have you felt an urge to revisit your birthplace or travel to your ancestors’ homelands?
• Do you feel compelled to attend an upcoming high school, family or other reunion? If not, why not?

Delve deeply into ways that your body, mind and spirit answer the Spirit of Re-union’s calls to reconnect with people, places, things and self.

Foreword vii
Introduction 1

1. Living the Questions 11
Exercise: Looking Backward and Forward to Live the Questions 25

2. Remembering the Past; Re-membering the Self 27
Exercise: Reuniting with Painful Stories 47

3. Where Friends Fit In 49
Exercise: Reuniting with a Childhood Friend 53

4. Matters about Things That Matter 71
Exercise: Letting Go 87

5. Putting Places in Their Place 89
Exercise: Discerning the Power of Place 106

6. When Saying No Really Means "Yes!" 107

7. Relatives: Reuniting and Reconciling 127
Exercise: Journaling with Others and Self 149

8. At Day's End 151
Acknowledgments 175

Notes 177
Resources for Further Exploration 183
Credits 186

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• développement personnel
• Places
• Self-help
• Personal Growth

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594733512
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Restoring Life s Missing Pieces: The Spiritual Power of Remembering Reuniting with People, Places, Things Self
2011 Quality Paperback Edition, First Printing 2011 by Caren Goldman Foreword 2011 by Nancy Copeland-Payton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to SkyLight Paths Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail].
Page 186 constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. Some names have been changed to respect the privacy of certain individuals.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldman, Caren, 1947-
Restoring life s missing pieces : the spiritual power of remembering reuniting with people, places, things self / Caren Goldman. -2011 quality paperback ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-59473-295-9 (quality pbk.) 1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Identification (Religion) 3. Reunions-Religious aspects. 4. Memory-Religious aspects. 5. Group identity. 6. Recollection (Psychology) I. Title. BL53.G645 2011 200.1 9-dc22
2011009563
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Manufactured in the United States of America Cover Design: Jenny Buono Cover Art: iStockphoto.com/Tamara Murray Interior Design: Tim Holtz

SkyLight Paths Publishing is creating a place where people of different spiritual traditions come together for challenge and inspiration, a place where we can help each other understand the mystery that lies at the heart of our existence.
SkyLight Paths sees both believers and seekers as a community that increasingly transcends traditional boundaries of religion and denomination-people wanting to learn from each other, walking together, finding the way .
SkyLight Paths, Walking Together, Finding the Way, and colophon are trademarks of LongHill Partners, Inc., registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Walking Together, Finding the Way Published by SkyLight Paths Publishing A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc. Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237 Woodstock, VT 05091 Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] www.skylightpaths.com
For my sisters Deborah Anne and Bobbi Beth Ted
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Living the Questions
Exercise: Looking Backward and Forward to Live the Questions
2. Remembering the Past; Re-membering the Self
Exercise: Reuniting with Painful Stories
3. Where Friends Fit In
Exercise: Reuniting with a Childhood Friend
4. Matters about Things That Matter
Exercise: Letting Go
5. Putting Places in Their Place
Exercise: Discerning the Power of Place
6. When Saying No Really Means Yes!
7. Relatives: Reuniting and Reconciling
Exercise: Journaling with Others and Self
8. At Day s End
Acknowledgments
Notes
Resources for Further Exploration
Credits

About SkyLight Paths
Copyright
Foreword
T his book is a compelling invitation to be healed and whole. Caren Goldman writes of a healing Spirit of Re-union that calls to us again and again throughout our lives. It calls from the forgotten and dimly lit corners of our past, from the hidden realm of our fragmented selves.
Do we dare listen? Do we dare not listen?
In Uganda, a local greeting upon returning from a trip is You were lost. It means We missed you. You were lost to us, but have now been found. Welcome home.
As I read Restoring Life s Missing Pieces , I was offered a rare invitation to welcome home the missing pieces of myself that have been lost to me. The Spirit of Re-union pops up unexpectedly and often catches us by surprise. It leads us through intricate byways of our past-relationships, things, places, and experiences that have forever shaped us. We re beckoned down narrow alleyways, around corners, and on romps in childhood sunny meadows as we explore the terrain of a past that we forgot, never consciously knew, or suppressed into oblivion. The invitation is to re-member it all; the lovely warm images and the images that we intentionally banished and gratefully forgot. This journey into wholeness is an honest integration of every crumb that has fallen from the table of who we really are. What emerges is the possibility of becoming the one we are created to be.
This is also a passage into healing. We can learn who we really are from those who have journeyed with us and gently affirmed our deep inner self. We can take off negative and false masks we were given by others somewhere along our life journey. Like a master weaver gathering misplaced or distorted fragments of yarn, Caren guides us into the possibility of retrieving, restoring, and finally reweaving all the pieces of our lives into the fabric of our truest self.
Using poetry and quotations that cut to the heart of the matter, remarkable prose and insight, this book leads us into the possibility of becoming whole. Caren guides us along rocky, steep slopes where we risk the journey from our comfort zones into the unknown. Unfailingly candid, she shares that this excursion may have a cost as well as great promise. And yet, our very lives in all their fullness depend on our leaving home to make this journey.
She is generous in sharing her personal story and thus freeing and encouraging us to explore our own narratives. This is a profound invitation to open the book of our story, to welcome home those long-lost parts of ourselves and witness the birth of our deepest self. This is truly a book about death and life.
Nancy Copeland-Payton
Introduction
reunion ( noun )
1. An act of reuniting: the state of being reunited.
2. A reuniting of persons after separation.
W as it a month ago, a week ago, or just an hour ago that somebody, somewhere, asked you to friend them on Facebook or to attend a wedding, bar mitzvah, baptism, or anniversary celebration? When was the last time someone died and you knew unquestionably that you would drop your plate and everything on it to get to the funeral? After staying away for years, do you suddenly find yourself heading out to worship in community for Easter, Rosh Hashanah, or Eid-ul-Fitr? Have you recently felt an urge to revisit your birthplace or to travel to your ancestors homelands? Do you occasionally Google a person from your past in hopes of catching up? Or do you prefer leafing through an old, yellowed address book, then trying to call someone for the first time in decades? When you visit loved ones gravesites or memorials for victims of wars or other tragedies, can you pinpoint what drew you there? Do you have a high school, college, family, or other commemorative gathering coming up for the fifth, tenth, or fiftieth time that you have never attended? Will you go to the reunion this time? If yes, why? If no, why not?
All of these are samplings of the various ways that people of all faiths or none whatsoever have felt called to connect and reconnect with people, places, times, and things that have shared a moment or maybe an eternity on their life journeys. Be they welcomed or not, each invitation to look back or go back somewhere in your inner and outer worlds can propel you to take a journey for the sake of an over arching objective: the gifts of holistic self-healing that can come from reunion. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright said: Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. 1 Throughout this anecdotal and experiential book, you will discover that the form of a reunion serves as a venue or host for its primary function: to reconnect you with people, places, objects, and even forgotten or seemingly irretrievable memories. A re-union , however, is not one of those events; rather, it is a potential consequence of them.
Defining a Re-union
After looking through many lenses, I see a re-union as a multifaceted, hyphenated noun. When coupled with reunion , the pair gives rise to a spiritual union of form and function that has the power to reintegrate-to re-member -missing and wounded pieces of our bodies, minds, and souls. Indigenous peoples worldwide believe that whenever our essential vitality and fundamental nature are compromised, we can become ill. They use the term soul loss to describe the root causes of suffering that can affect us psychologically, physically, and spiritually. These stresses may cause us to feel as though a part of our whole self has been stolen, misplaced, disowned, or smothered, or as if it has become otherwise inaccessible. Sometimes we may even think or say out loud, I don t know what it is or why I feel this way. It s as though some part of me has died.
Obvious precursors of those experiences are traumas, physical and mental illnesses, or other events that have dramatically affected our lives. For example, survivors of head-on crashes do not remember the split second before impact. It is as though something within them screamed I m out of here to avoid seeing, experiencing, or remembering the moment. Victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse report similar effects and may suffer from repressed memories that they cannot grasp or verify. However, most events that result in life s missing pieces and subsequent yearnings to restore them do not have to be so dramatic or have psychological labels. Under the right conditions even a thoughtless comment can diminish, numb, or obliterate some part of us. It may just take a moment, but it is the right moment for us to suddenly and unexplainably feel as though we are not good enough or that we have lost heart, soul, sight of something, or even our mind.
Take singing, for example. How many of us never sing? Is it because we physically cannot? Or is it because we feel