I a very happy to take some time today to talk about a personal experience on my Healing Journey, as I gave my memories wings this weekend.
Recently my life has changed a lot, and my partner and I found ourselves in a privileged situation where we could truly start afresh. We moved across the water and across international borders to leave my family and their negative influences behind. We realized however that in order to really embrace our new life, we needed to let go of some of the frustration and anger we felt about the bad situation we were leaving behind.
Creating Our Own Ceremony
We figured that we needed to come up with a ceremony that would really mark the move from the old into the new. We needed to spend a bit of time to think of what we were leaving behind, in order to embrace and enjoy the future we were now stepping into. So we started thinking about it and came up with a few thoughts of how to signify this change:
* We wanted to send our thoughts and feelings into the world
* We had always liked the imaginary of the butterfly’s transformation
* We wanted to be in one of our favorite places in our new environment
So what did we do?
We wrote down our thoughts, our feelings, letters to people that had hurt us or that we were otherwise leaving behind. We each wrote our own, but we did it together. So we were around the table talking about everything that had happened, the things that had hurt us, and the things we never got to say to the people that had treated us so poorly.
We then folded those thoughts, feelings and letters into a small mountain of origami butterflies.
Lastly, we set our butterflies free over a wonderful stretch of river that would wash our butterflies out to sea.
Marking the Occasion
It does not matter how you let go of your past, it is however important that you do. Create your own ceremony, send a card to Post Secrets, climb to the top of a mountain and scream your heart out… It does not matter how you give your memories wings, but send them out into the world so you need no longer be connected to them.
3 comments:
serenity
August 10, 2014 at 12:34 pm
That was a beautiful ceremony and I love the origami butterflies. I can’t think of anything more profound than to write down those awful messages we were made to believe and send them floating into oblivion.
Hugs x
Amy
August 16, 2014 at 9:32 pm
That’s wonderful…I’m struggling right now to write some of my memories out, and that sounds so refreshing and relieving. Congrats on that great step!
atleastihadanicedad
August 21, 2014 at 3:19 am
I’ve just started publishing my memories on my website. Until fairly recently, I’d written thousands of words and memories and incidents, but kept them in hidden folders on my computer. It helped to write them down, but it even better to tell people about them, and what really went on in our family.
I hope it’s okay to do this, but if anyone’s interested, I posted the first in a series of four posts about ending the relationship with my mother on my blog yesterday: http://louise-allan.com/2014/08/20/why-i-chose-to-be-motherless-part-1/