Releasing Memory
Exploring how the act of remembering can illuminate the present and heal the past
Dear Reader,
If you are new to my writing, welcome to the introductory newsletter for Releasing Memory.
I am a time traveler, author, and science writer. My initial forays into remembering—[re]membering being the healing mechanism of pulling a whole out of dismembered, disremembered parts — come out of the research and writing I have done to create my YA time-travel adventure book series, Edge of Yesterday.
I recognize how resurfacing memory can take you through some dangerous terrain. I have just returned from a creative nonfiction writing workshop in Paris. My fellow writers in the cohort shared stories of tragedy, terror and trauma. One couldn’t help but feel for them.
But the very act of sharing their stories was a way of letting go. Healing pain from the past.
In my experience, everyone must go through at least a little rough territory to navigate their lives, their memories. Perhaps you have ghosts in the family closet as well. Events or people who “we just don’t talk about.” Or mental illness swept under the rug.
But unless we clean house, sweep out those past traumas and transmute them, they will continue to haunt us.
Sometimes, we get stuck in an unresolved past, when the memories are too much and you can’t seem to find a way out. Scary.
But what if there is a safe container in which to examine and resolve them to help you—and those you love—heal.
That is what this experiment in releasing memory is all about: finding a new angle to the story, revealing new insights. Alchemizing pain into gold—to help us release our difficult past as a way to evolve our lives.
Telling stories can provide a means to look at those memories from a different perspective. That is why I have embarked on a new storytelling project: an ancestor memoir. As the granddaughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, I am curious about the crossing of my grandparents—especially my grandmother—from what is now Ukraine, but has alternately been considered both Polish and Russian territory. In my grandparents time, it was known as the Jewish Pale of Settlement.
Their traumas being unearthed now through the wars in Ukraine and Israel, with impacts that afflict the planet.
Unfortunately, my mom’s parents, who came over to the U.S. in the great Jewish migration that began at end of the eighteenth century, died long ago. I have poured through family records and genealogical ones. Did the DNA spit test to find out how deep our family’s roots are in Eastern Europe and all the conflict. Found evidence of earlier ancestors coming out of Africa and the Middle East. Earlier still, there’s mitochondrial evidence of Neanderthal inheritance.
Still, this doesn’t tell me how my grandmother might have crossed continents by herself at the age of 18 to meet up with my grandfather who, by that time, was in Cincinnati, Ohio. They had been betrothed when she was only 13. Grandpa was 18 when he left the shtetl. After five years at a distance of more than 5,000 miles as the crow flies, Abraham sent for his beloved Sophie.
It took months of travel by cart, by train, on foot and by boat to reach this man who she must barely have remembered. What was that long-awaited reunion like for her? They were surely different people than the children they had been in Keshovata. What would her life as a young girl have been in a land where Jews were persecuted and killed simply for worshiping the God of their Torah.
Details of my grandmother’s life are lost in silence. You see, once they got to America, the goldene medina, the “golden land”, no one talked about those terrors. My mother and her siblings, lacking Google maps or Jewish genealogy, thought their mama made it up.
And now, there is no one to remember it.
No one but me.
Remembering: a Neuro-Spiritual View
Doing a deep dive into the stories of our ancestors' lives can take many forms: genealogy research, family stories, oral history, newspaper records and more. But the records may not capture the emotions, the triumphs and tragedies our families lived through.
At another level, our cells contain another piece of the story, based on epigenetic changes to our genes. Such changes can be shaped by environmental factors and external events, including the air we breathe and the food we eat, or even traumas visited on our or previous generations. And these changes are ones that may be causing us physical pain, dis-ease and illness.
Epigenetic changes to our DNA can also be passed down through generations, leaving us vulnerable to re-suffer the traumas that impacted our parents and grandparents.
To heal memory, we must release it. By releasing memory in a way that supports healing, we may be able to repair the injury done to us as individuals, as families, as nations. To bring us back together in a way that re-members the parts into a whole.
[Re]member the World techniques can be described as holistic: by tapping into multiple sources --physical, emotional, social, psychological and spiritual--we tell the full story to begin the process of integrating parts-to-whole.
To [re]member, then, is to collect our individual sparks by dusting off stories from the attics, from family records, from oral histories, to shed more light, to repair ourselves. Only in the light of repair can those memories lose their grip on our imaginations. Only then, can they be released.
What about you: do you process memories—by shutting them out? By “moving forward” at any cost? Or by re-viewing them, even difficult memories, one-by-one, for a different perspective and from there, perhaps, for repair and release?