Reflections On How We Can Strengthen Our Hearts In the Aftermath of Trauma and Tragedy

It is my belief that the ripples of the strong and

sacred heart energy in us all is what will 

awaken and heal our world.

My husband and I spent this Valentine's Day bathing in the stunning beauty, peace, and sacredness of the Hindu Temple and the McBryde Gardens on the island of Kauai. Following a delicious dinner out, Ron and I returned to our ocean view condominium on our last day of our wondrous vacation, turned on the TV, and for the first time heard the news of yet another horrific school shooting....

How do we humans keep our hearts open to extraordinary beauty, peace, love, generosity, compassion, and kindness in the face of such overwhelming horror, violence, tragedy, trauma, and loss? How do we grow stronger in these times that pull at us to numb and inwardly fracture when what is most needed of us is the strength and wisdom of our wholeness?

*****

It was late in the winter of 1977 when my mother called me from her home 2,500 miles away in Michigan. She didn't know what to do. She told me that my brother had two guns and that she'd confiscated one of them, but didn't know where the other one was. So here they were, my mother and brother, living alone together after my father's death just over a year earlier. And now there was this new terror that I was living with, but had to somehow numb and block out. There was this chilling trauma and terror which had settled deep in my heart that John was going to blow both himself and our mother away. 

Shortly after this conversation, I called my twin and tried to talk him into coming to visit Jim, my former husband, and myself in Oregon. John said he would come, but then didn't. I tried to deaden the sadness and heartache and the relief that he wasn't coming after-all. 

Less than a year later my only sibling ended his life, not with a gun but with vodka and Valium. 

Six years after John's death I was in the very early stages of my healing and spoke for first time to anyone in a candle lit ACOA meeting (Adult Children of Alcoholics) of my fear that if John had come to visit in 1977 that maybe he would have killed me with one of his guns. After the meeting, on our drive home, Jim shared with me for the first time that he, too, had had that fear. Back in 1977 we had kept our fears to ourselves.

I had also watched a documentary all those many years ago, and not long after my brother's suicide, of a young man who shot and killed his parents, his sister, and himself. There were details of his life and that of this family. And I knew that this could have happened to me and our family.  

It is not that my twin brother was evil. The great pain and torture that John suffered with was the sickness that is all too prevalent in America. It is the sickness, the desperation, the unbearable anguish and despair of starving to death for love, for connection, for belonging. We humans simply lose ourselves and any sense of who we truly are when we are repeatedly exposed to the absence of love, safety, caring, empathy, kindness, tenderness, and a mirroring presence that shows to us our innate nobility, worth, and beauty.

Tiny children can experience the torture of not feeling consistently loved and safe and cherished for only so long before they someday will present the bill for this tragic neglect of their hearts and souls, exploding inwardly or outwardly or both. 

Have you ever noticed how many advertisements on TV are for medications to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, fibromyalgia, and all of the countless other symptoms of the suffering rooted in a broken heart? I certainly do. And, in the past, I've had all of the above symptoms. That was the past. Miracles happen when we attend to our hearts.

Ruptured attachments are much more common in American society than many of us have dared to see, know, understand, and heal. Nor is there yet a strong collective consciousness in our culture of how deeply we humans are wired for connection - although this is changing. Without healthy and nourishing relationships with others, we starve and many die or live among the walking dead. Everyday we see among us those who are symptoms of a society that turns away from those who have long starved for love and safety and belonging. And no one is free from the impact of living in a culture which divides rather than connects.

I sit here and weep as I write these words. And I think of my brother and all the bone-deep sadness and suffering that we all had lived with, but tried to hide....

John, our mother, and myself, 1961

 *****

Today the lens through which I experience life is radically different from when I lived with my buried and neglected pain and the torturous illusion of separateness. Today I understand that we are all family. 

And so my heart is joined with all the hearts that ache with the unspeakable trauma and heart-wrenching pain of yet another school shooting. Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, each and every one of us is impacted by the culture of violence that we are immersed in, with some more obviously than others.

It was December 12th, 2012 when my dear and long-time friends Olivia and her husband Carl were at Clackamas Town Center in Oregon. They rarely went to the mall, but had gone to Christmas shop for their grandchildren and afterwards stopped to eat in the food court. Suddenly shots rang out. Olivia had been talking to one of her adult children on the phone when she dove under her table and told her daughter that she loves her, thinking that this may be the last time they ever talk. There was no way to know where the gunfire was coming from as the sound reverberated off of the surrounding stores. There was only terror. Within minutes two people were dead and a 15 year old girl was seriously injured before the 22 year old gunman shot and killed himself. My dear friends survived. And they will live with the trauma of this experience for the rest of their lives.

Three days later Sandy Hook happened.

My dear long-time friends, Olivia and Carl

*****

So much is circulating in all forms of media claiming to hold the key to what is needed. Gun control. Mental health treatment. Addressing physical abuse and neglect, isolation and disconnection, scapegoating and bullying, domestic violence and sexual abuse, alcohol and other addictions, depression and despair, poverty and homelessness, lack of health care and the capacity to meet the most basic of human needs. And there are the many faces of misogyny and racism and patriarchy now surfacing in all its many heart-wrenching forms. 

And there are the children who grow up without the experience of having an adult with whom to form a safe, trusting, and loving attachment. There are children who are prescribed antidepressant medications that can contribute to increasing suicidal ideation, anger and acting out, and unresolved grief and anxiety and shame rather than alleviating it. 

There is also the whole epidemic of spiritual abuse and toxic indoctrination that tiny vulnerable children experience and absorb when they are taught to fear rather than trust God (you cannot trust what you fear), taught that God teaches that they deserve to be spanked and physically harmed to make them "good" when they are "bad," and taught that God only loves some people and hates those who are Other - those fags, queers, niggers, Muslims, non-Christians, and anyone else who falls on the list of not being good enough to be "saved." 

And, of course, lifting the curtain and taking a close look at the epidemic of violence in America could never be complete without highlighting the deficits in what we teach our children and what we fail to teach them. Education often stifles or crushes imagination and exploration and curiosity and critical thinking. Rather than encouraging and modeling what most deeply matters - such as meaning and purpose, integrity and truth, community and connection, compassion and empathy, kindness and caring, generosity and service, reverence and awe, and how it is that all beings are related and intertwined in a sacred web of life - our children are instead often exposed to the normalization and glorification of violence in our media and entertainment, in our worship of the military and weapons, in our justification of endless war, and in turning our backs on those who suffer. And on and on and on. This is just a partial list...

The truth is that all of the above are true. To say that only one holds the truth of why our children are regularly killing other children - and why we are all impacted by the violence of our nation and world - is to deny that there is a whole elephant sitting in our collective American living room. Violent kids are a symptom of a sick society. They did not fall from the sky. 

I also affirm this as a survivor of childhood family violence and as someone who worked for 30 years with abused and neglected preschoolers, with first time parents, and as a permanency caseworker for the Oregon Department of Human Services Child Welfare. So I know what it is like to be on the front lines. I know abuse and its consequences in my bones. And I know what it is to experience post traumatic growth.

*****

We need to embrace a fierce commitment to rooting into the path that will reveal the whole of the elephant to us rather than just its tail or part of one leg. This commitment becomes possible as we open to greater possibilities, move beyond our comfort zones and that which is familiar, and choose to let go of our insistence on clinging to an attachment to the one part we think we see. I have discovered again and again that more is revealed when we passionately seek to fill in and connect the parts of this mosaic - the Mosaic of the Roots of Violence in America (and the violence of the neglected pain that we may carry in our own hearts) - with the truth of all its scary, disturbing, messy, horrifying, and ultimately healing pieces. 

What we deny only gets stronger. And the price of our country's pervasive denials and distractions and demonizations has cost us all since our nation's earliest days of colonization, slavery, and genocide of Indigenous Peoples. Yes, many have suffered greater violence and oppression. And, yes, today there are no walls that can keep at bay any longer that which is demanding, demanding!, attending to NOW. Not tomorrow or next week or when it somehow won't ask so much of us. We need to look in the mirror. We all do.

America is a society addicted to violence. And this is a late stage addiction. The fact that there is resistance to acting to effect profound change, healing, and transformation in our culture - and even in the face of our children regularly being shot and abused and neglected and suiciding and overdosing and starving to death for belonging and meaning and love and kindness and basic safety and security - all this and more points to the obvious: we need to heal ourselves and each other. We need to be brave enough to step by step by step learn the lessons that have for so long yearned to be seen, held, owned, and embraced for their deep wisdom and potential to birth the peaceful world that all children everywhere need and deserve. 

The eyes of the children are watching us.

*****

Perhaps what we need is an individual and collective fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves and the culture in which we live. This is the 4th Step in 12 Step programs - to dig deeply and courageously engage in the process of a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. This may hold the potential for us to individually and collectively put together more and more and more of the connecting dots of the Violence in America Mosaic (and the pieces where we have neglected our own hearts) which have long remained fragmented and splintered into seemingly different and unrelated parts. 

Of course, before there can be a 4th Step there must be a beginning, a 1st Step. In referring once again to the deep wisdom of the the 12 Steps, what comes to me as the 1st Step might be framed like this: Our nation has become powerless over violence and all of our lives have become unmanageable. In referring to violence, I am addressing more than the unbearable horror of school shootings. I am breaking it down to all the many faces of violence, which is especially prolific whenever we objectify another human, another being, another life as of less value than our own. I reflect in this moment on the toxic normalization, found in some American media more than others, of the propaganda of polarization. There's us. And there's the Other. 

The lesson here that is begging to be learned is this: dehumanization is deadly. It grows like a cancer in our hearts. And, untreated, it spreads. And it kills.

I flash on a memory that sheds light into the poison that infects so many, and which has certainly caused devastating pain and loss in my life and that of my mother and our family. My deeply mentally ill and vulnerable mother was once addicted to the dehumanizing messages of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and others who fed her toxic narcissism. There's us and there's the Other - those who love America and those who hate America, those who worship capitalism or communism, those who are with the terrorists or against the terrorists, those who deserve to live in America and those who should be kicked out because they are so un-American, etc. After the miracle of the successful treatment of her mental illness began, my mother asked me why we hadn't seen each other in 14 years. I gently told her that she was pretty critical of me, that my hair or my clothing or my politics weren't right. My mom grew very quiet as she absorbed what I had just said. And Mom responded, "There must have been something in me that I was taking out on you."

This was a profound miracle.

And this is the miracle we need in our country. The miracle of discernment of when we are taking out our own unattended wounds on someone else, projecting hatred and rejection and judgment rather than compassion, empathy, understanding, and kindness. Divide and conquer is the poisonous politics that has infected us and caused our Great Forgetting. We need to heal ourselves and refuse, refuse!, to be part in the propaganda of polarization. We need to remember that we are all family.

My mom and me in the early months of her Great Remembering, remembering - after a lifetime of forgetting - how to give and receive love.

*****

Our children are witness to the devaluation of life everyday. Even when consciously unaware and numbed out, at some level they still know. They know, for instance, that our planet is being poisoned. And that they may be shot at their school tomorrow. Or that this hurricane or that wildfire, or that lack of being able to live beyond paycheck to paycheck, or that illness that can't be treated because there is no insurance, or that risk of being shot for being black, and all that is killing and causing so much devastation and suffering to so many could also come to their neighborhood, their school, their home, their family next. The children know.

Without owning this "unmanageability" we remain trapped in only seeing one piece and mistaking it for the whole. Without owning our "powerlessness," we think we can just get in there and POOF!, get over it. Wrong. It often takes a long time to get to the late stage of any addiction. And this is certainly true of America's addiction to violence. There will be no quick fix here that will take. No. And especially given the number one symptom of addiction: Denial. And America has DENIAL big time. No judgment here. I'm 33 years into my own recovery from alcoholism and a whole host of other addictions I once denied. So I'm simply talking as one addict to another. There is a problem here. An enormous problem that has infected us all. That is the bad news.

The good news is that we can heal. The good news is that we can awaken and strengthen our hearts. The good news is that more and more of us are building bridges rather than walls. And this capacity to build bridges always begins within the hearts of each and every one of us. This is how we make possible a new world, a new way of being together, one built on cherishing life rather than destroying it. Another world is truly possible.

*****

It is my belief that the ripples of the strong and sacred heart energy in us all is what will awaken and heal our world. Many may read these words and think what a bunch of bullshit. There was certainly a time when these words would have sounded to me like some strange language from another planet. That's when I had a lot of denial. 

Deepest bow of gratitude for the Grace that allowed me to discover this great truth about the beauty and strength of our hearts and the one Great Heart that connects us all.

Of course, there is no graduation point that I had once hoped for, no finally having all my shit together and now living happily ever after under the rainbow. Life is hard. And life is amazing. And each and every day offers me new opportunities to shed more layers of my illusions and ignorance and grow my heart bigger.

It is painful to be conscious in these times. My heart aches, just aches as I feel the profound tragedy of this latest round of children killing children. And today I know that I am not alone. My heart no longer exists within the illusion of isolation. Instead, my heart is connected with all other hearts that are hurting and that are able to love. Because how can we love and not hurt when life brings such a big blow? We can't.

Instead we learn how to go with the waves, even as they come in as a tsunami. This is not easy, especially in the beginning, and in the early days I was terrified. Terrified to feel what I felt rather than reach for a drink or a cigarette or taking someone else's inventory or any number of other addictions and distractions which led me away from my heart. Gradually I gained new experiences and coping skills and understanding and wisdom and wholeness rather than continuing to live as Molly with all the unknown broken pieces inside. I had been a stranger to myself. No more.

So the tsunami comes. And we are swept up and broken open and the wild grief and chaos and anger and anguish and fear and despair all flows through us. And we don't die. We're still here. And we witness how the wave came crashing in and through and then began to ebb and loosen its hold. And we notice that we are changed. Not only are we not stuck in our addictions or numbness or endless projections of our shit onto others, we're increasing free! 

*****

We're here with an even stronger, wiser, and more deeply compassionate and loving heart exactly because we didn't shut down and numb out. Instead we faced life as it is and stayed open as best as we could. Our heart muscles strengthen each and every time we are able to allow our hearts to grieve, to love deeply, to be with what is. And to rejoice. I have found all this to be the root of strengthening our capacity to love. That and the Great Mystery, Grace, God, Goddess, Spirit, or whatever we call The One.

Anchors can be an essential tool which helps us to stay afloat even as we dive deeper into the seas of what life brings. In the depths of the stormiest seas is the quiet peace in the depths of the great ocean. And so it is within each of us. The storms roll in and toss us about in their fury and we feel all the awful turbulence. And our witnessing Self remembers that there is more. There is the place of peace deep within. There is our breath. There is the God of our understanding and the spiritual practice we do as best as we can. 

And if all that seems out of reach in a time of particular distress, there is looking into the eyes of a child. Or hugging our beloved dog or cat. Or going outside for a walk. Or calling our dear friend who we can tell anything to. Or turning to that great book or wise and loving teacher or putting on our favorite music that soothes our soul. We can light a candle. We can smudge. We can pray or journal. We can say "HELP ME!" into the silence. We can notice the beauty of a flower. We can journey to the Wild Places. We can embrace our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and partners and spouses. We can paint and write and meditate and build little altars everywhere. We can love those we love. We can commit random acts of kindness. Sometimes it is something so simple.

And, of course, there is the practice of gratitude. Even in the midst of that which causes our hearts to ache - the unspeakable horrors and dangers, the pervasive ignorance and projections, the deaths and other losses and tragedies, and the great forgetting that we have all have suffered from time to time and to one degree or another - even in the midst of all that there is something to be grateful for. We can always be grateful for each and every way that we find to nourish ourselves, to catch ourselves and intervene on an old pattern and trigger, and witness that, indeed, our hearts are growing stronger.

And in this strengthening of our hearts, all else becomes possible. 

Bless us all on our journeys. We need each other. We are all family.

May we be at peace.

May our hearts remain open.

May we know the beauty of our own true nature.

May we be healed.

Namaste
❤

Molly

The Community Altar my husband built following Sandy Hook: For the Children, For Peace

"Our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our heart." - Rumi