...I found on the Daily Om site.
I'm finding it helpful, in identifying traumatic experiences from childhood and beyond, and in identifying my triggers then and now, as well.
And how to deal with them, or overcome them. I've known I have them, and sometimes I react all out of proportion to the initial cause...and I hate that. I want to respond, not react.
But one thing I've found especially enlightening is that there are some things I have no intention of overcoming. I have never understood, much less condoned, bigotry.
I was brought up in an era where white women spat at little girls trying to go to school, young men were being hanged for nothing more than the color of their skin--or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When women decrying their husband’s murder were burned alive, or wise leaders assassinated for speaking of love. I saw newsreels on the liberation of concentration camps, and learned about the depths of human inhumanity. In more recent times I’ve seen people murdered for nothing more than loving whom they love. I don't understand. I never will. I don't want to.
I lived near the riots in Kansas City after Martin Luther King's assassination, and I was shaken to my core, by the assassination itself and by the pain of that small neighborhood. I could hear the gunfire, and saw the sullen glow of the fires in the night. I couldn't wrap my mind around it, or us, and I needed to find a way to HELP.
I called the pastor my mother had loved, before her death, a man we all respected, though I had long since left that church.
Do you know what he told me? "Those people deserved it."
That is NOT a Christian response, any more than some of what we are currently seeing. Please, let's not go there again. By all that's holy. Let's not.
Yes, that is a trigger, for me. Bigotry, racial inequality, inhumane cruelty to anyone, of any color, creed...or who they choose to love, or be..
Cruelty to animals, as well.
And I realized there are some traumas I don't want to heal. I don't WANT not to be triggered by inequality and mindless cruelty. And don't intend to. I fought it then, in my twenties; I'll fight it now, in my 80s. Maybe differently. I'm too old and too crippled up to march. But yes, any way I can.
Am I angry we have to do this again? Hell yes.
