Imaginary Pulse
When the Imaginary Pulse breathes.
Finds Refuge in between the Lines
and shakes off Time
Attractions whisper their Names inside the Refugee Spaces and turn their Faces to Voice
Impulso Imaginário
Quando o Impulso Imaginário toma fôlego
se refugia por dentre as Linhas
e sacode o Tempo
as Atrações sussuram seus nomes
dentro do Espaço refugiado
e viram Voz
Imagine you are out in the stratosphere of your recent death, slightly high and dazed, and you meet your grandfather, long dead. The grandfather you never met in “real life”, the one your mother told you about, all during your younger life, in tortured terms, the tyrant, the implied abuser, the forbidding natural authority of the absent father, the emperor, the hidden stereotyped implied and applied myth of a German in you.
My grandfather was a fading sepia photograph of a very tall man who sired nine children, my aunts, and uncles. I vaguely knew that he had a wife and two children in Brasil, in the late 1800s, but left her to go chase gold and rubber in the Amazon. With five of his buddies. Nobody survived, but himself. He then went back to Germany, married a new bride, my Oma, a young concert pianist who abandoned her place to live in the wilds of the new country… He sold her piano to make ends meet, and so the story was told… He was a dark image and I remember how I vividly avoided looking at his photograph.
Until I met sparks of the imaginal, in my own afterlife.
It was the second session in a two-day workshop on ancestral healing, facilitated by Roger Woolger and part of his Deep Memory Process approach to therapy. 1
I am lying down, with a helper by my side, at the rented space in the local hospice. Perfect choice of setting for a workshop like this one. My suffering mother, now in her early nineties, away in another country, and I am here, quite apprehensive but trusting the adventure. Some suggestions are made, and I go into a light relaxing trance.
And there he is, emerging, life like the Grandfather I never met. I am prepped, intuitively and life ready to launch my accusations against him. How he abused his daughter with power, how he baited my grandmother, how he sold her piano and her music.
I banged on pillows, hit imaginary walls, - my body was my transportation mode, my bus, my vehicle. It was exhausting.
He listened to me patiently and then we talked. No words exchanged, he told me stories. We talked and talked for what appears to be years… we both cried.
We apologized.
He apologized for my funneled fundamentalist perceptions, I apologized for mine too and I imagined he apologized to all of us, but in reality now, it seems clear his image appeared, as needed…as a blank apology, as a leveling of highly charged ancestral fields.
What happened was happening in my body, not in my words!
After that session, I discovered in me huge pieces of happiness in this amazingly adventurous grandfather I did not know.
Quite a few years later, my mother, now truly dying, tells me stories she never told anyone, from her childhood and from before, how her dad fell in love with a married woman in my hometown, in Brazil, in the mid 1800s. How they both defied her wealthy Brazilian family, eventually ran away together, loved each other, had two children. How he went to the Amazon, searching for money (to keep the family together?). How then, later, the children died, then she died, of disease or of famine. How his brother from Chile came to the rescue in Belém do Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon River.
And what happened afterwards. He was forty years old when he returned to Germany and my grandmother came back to Brazil with him, as a young bride. We are still now in late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century. She never stopped playing the piano, they never stopped having children.
In summer nights, she would accompany him at the piano with Liede songs and he would sing his poetry to his beloved lost first great love and his lost children.
My mother also told me her father wrote extensively and immensely. She not only inherited his habits, but I also somehow inherited some of their acorns. 2
I am now so deeply in love with this photograph, posted recently on social media by a cousin! All of them in the image are dead in one plane, and they are all live in the afterlife. My own direct line to “descendancy” is sitting at the far right and she died in 2015. She was 98 and she told me once she wanted to live to be much older, at least like architect Oscar Niemeyer did.
I could write reams about my own skepticisms on ancestry. Composting, the position of mothers and of women, forever forgotten in the birth process.
What comes to me instead is how I look like them and how their eyes look like each other and look like mine…
A past with and without a history, and yet so precious. And a possible imaginal future.
My encounter with my dead grandfather stays as an exquisite and loving ongoing meet with the unknown… and with the paradoxical strangeness of what we name love and family.
The geologies of earth and dirt mapped out in the strata of many waves.
In the United States, Patricia Walsh is one of the persons who continues to teach Deep Memory Process. She works within her own deep approach to karmic astrology.
https://www.healthepast.com/dmp-training/about-training
“DMP®), is a creative synthesis of present and past life regression work that draws from Freud; Reich; Psychodrama; Jung; Gestalt; Spiritual Psychology and Shamanic Healing. Distinguished Oxford scholar and Jungian analyst, Roger Woolger PhD, created Deep Memory Process® after publishing his seminal book “Other Lives, Other Selves’ in the mid 1980’s.”
In Brasil, Marco Andre Schwartzstein carries Roger’s legacy, in addition to his own work at UNIPAZ, in Brasilia.
https://dmpbrasil.com/o-que-e-o-dmp/
He adds: “Deep Memory Process consists in the intense re-experiencing of past life happenings, consciously and in the body, emotional release, deep perception of subtle energies, journeys into the intermediate spaces beyond death, contact with archetypal spiritual levels and with transpersonal higher self manifestations. “(my free translation)
Check this out for a conversation with James Hillman about the acorn idea. https://www.personaltransformation.com/james_hillman.html
It gives me hope to think that some of what we experience as traumatic or hurtful could have greater depth, that there are openings for increased understanding. I've often hoped to make such discoveries in death - that "suddenly" everything makes more sense. Thanks, Erica.
Wow, fabulous. Thanks for sharing this Erika. Inspiring, imaginative, thought provoking and ultimately healing. Bravo