Sunday 10/9/22
When we were kids, I was often the victim to my older sister’s bully. Happily now as adults, we’ve cultivated a relationship I love and deeply value. I appreciate her wisdom, insight, lightness, and humor. We live on opposite sides of the planet—she lives in Australia and I live in a decades-old log cabin in the woods of Temple, New Hampshire—but thanks to technology we’re able to easily keep in touch. We email and text with each other regularly, in addition to enjoying vacations together with our partners. We also have a WhatsApp chat group called “Catching Up” for the four of us Sanderson sisters (our two younger sisters also live in our home country of Oz.)
I seem to post the most in our WhatsApp group, but I know that if what I post is not meaningful for them, they can just ignore it, and sometimes they do. Recently though, I shared a newsletter from an author I follow: Day Schildkret, whose book I love: Morning Altars: A 7-Step Practice to Nourish Your Spirit through Nature, Art, and Ritual.
The essence of his newsletter was about apology and forgiveness in relation to the recent “major seasonal threshold, and for Jews, the holiday of Yom Kippur.
I appreciated the sentiment that by acknowledging what you regret, you have a chance at making repair. I also resonated with the concepts he shared about damaging patterns, projecting blame, and not owning one’s part in a situation.
About his relationship with his brother, he wrote, “Breaking that pattern required us to recognize our impact on one another. By doing so, we developed a capacity for consequence—a willingness to witness and claim the ways we wounded each other—which is what made real repair possible.”
What was most meaningful for me, is the key sentiment that, “we can transform our regrets into refinement, and self-loathing into learning.”
This capacity for alchemical transformation is what I believe our planet needs now more than ever. 💖🙏🕊
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For context, my sisters and I did not grow up with any religion. Our parents were counter-cultural, i.e. more interested in spirituality than dogma, which is perhaps not so counter-cultural these days. But my own interest in the spiritual nature of the human experience led me to study world religions in my 40s. In any case, I was interested to observe my own reaction when my older sister responded to my sharing Schildkret’s newsletter with this:
“Let us endeavour to live “in the moment” and truly conscious of our words and actions at all times.
There’s no regret if we live consciously, aware of our ‘moods’ and endeavouring every moment to be true to love and life.
Let go of the past. Live fully in the present.”
I noticed that when I first read it, I felt triggered. In other words, a reaction came up within me, Well that’s easy for you to say as you didn’t have anyone bullying you, so you weren’t wounded.
I recognized this as my own inner 6-year-old who was wounded nearly 50 years ago, and she needed some nurturing.
What I’ve come to understand in my 50s—and yes it’s taken me this many years to finally understand this—and perhaps you, my dear reader, will think, Duh!
But what I’ve realized is that when I’m triggered, it’s because of something going on within me, and this reaction is not anyone else’s “fault.” This is an old wound within me that I can now heal.
With therapy, I’ve learned how to sit with this little inner 6-year-old and nurture her and tell her, “We’re not six anymore, we’re 55, and we’ve got this.”
So I was proud of myself that I did not immediately react to what my older sister wrote. I sat with it for some time to heal my old wound. The following morning, I still wanted to convey these key concepts, so I responded in our WhatsApp group:
Yes, and intention and impact matter 💖🙏🕊😘
And, as my intention is to not alienate anyone, including and especially my sisters, I consulted with my older sister before publishing this article. In her reply, she said that she was sorry I still feel the suffering my younger self experienced. As soon as I read that, I sensed my inner six-year old feeling all warm and fuzzy. Perhaps this was an even deeper healing of a very old wound.
Ironically, it was this that brought me into the spaciousness of the present moment, and I remembered the part of Schildkret’s newsletter where he shares his wisdom and humor:
“And we all fuck up. All the time.”
And there is forgiveness and compassion in laughter—it shows how we also forgive ourselves.