Speaking the Silences

Happy New Year 2022, dearest ones!
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I have had the sense, as of late, that we are in a semi-dark time. Not because there is an absence of light, but because we are in a time of awareness about the shadow aspects of our human experiences. Personally, and as a collective, we are now in the cellars and attics of our archived ancestral knowledge. We are sweeping out from under the rug, all of our hidden ancestral data. We have already uncovered the knowledge available to us in the well-organized library shelves of our family history/ her-story. Now it’s time to expose to the light the unofficial stories, the denials, and the hermetically sealed archives.

We’ve been doing this research for a long time. We’ve probably made several prior trips to look through things in the attic and in the cellar. It is likely that most of what we are uncovering at this point is just crumbs. Small remnants of all the stuff we have already learned, along our journey, about our individual family and culture.

Just as we know it’s time to sweep when it becomes painful to walk barefoot on the kitchen floor, interacting with our families will often expose all the dusty old ancestral crumbs that are still in our energy field. The holidays are particularly good at making us aware of anything that is still there. As we spend time with the important people in our lives, and our interactions become uncomfortable, we notice the crumbs that we have been sitting on for years. The ones we can only feel when our spouse does that thing they always do, or our sibling says that thing they always say. These are beautiful Goddess blessings. We feel them, so that we can resolve, evolve and dissolve them. And shift our relationship to our loved ones. Make sure you don’t sweep away the crumbs before you receive the wisdom they hold.

I recently had a dusty old ancestral crumb stick in my throat. It really grabbed my attention because it gave me a sore throat, that then became a head cold before it finally found its way out of my system. This is significant because I hadn’t had a sore throat or cold in over a decade. And maybe only one other the decade before that. I am blessed with the fact that I don’t tend to get that stuff.

I kept looking for “why” I had been vulnerable to getting sick. Was it because I had my period? Or because I had just done some airplane travel? Yet, I had done all of those things many times, and never gotten sick. So, I looked a little deeper. I had had a strained interaction with my mom. We had spent a few stressful hours on the computer together (me being her eyes and reading a bunch of stuff to her), and when we were done, she started to wonder (out-loud) why she and I had such a hard time communicating. I left the conversation feeling like: “Jeez, I must be really difficult to communicate with. I might be better off just not talking at all.”

I very often had a sore throat as a child and teenager. If I ever got sick, it was always in my throat. This recent experience made me wonder if those sore throats also coincided with moments of difficult communication with my mother (or others). Moments that made me feel like I should be silent. That my words caused difficulty for others.

I have been blessed with a lot of beautiful information from my throat chakra in the last year. Seems to be where most of my ancestral crumbs are. The deep dark cellar of my 5th chakra. Prior to the sore throat, it came in the form of major dental issues. The long-term consequence of having broken my jaw when I was 7. An injury that, as it came up this time around, felt very much like my way of trying to “shut myself up.” At the time, we had finally escaped a very violent domestic situation, and apparently the agreement was that we would never talk about it. I, being wired the way I’m wired, couldn’t honor the agreement. Not even by smashing my teeth into the ground.

My mom has a lifelong habit of not liking to hear what I have to say. Not because she is a terrible person and wants to cause me harm, in fact, she probably thinks she is helping me by trying to stop me from saying certain things. None the less, I inevitably feel harmed. More specifically, I feel silenced. I feel like I am being forcefully told to “shut up, already.” On the other hand, I have a habit of wanting to know all the details of my lived experiences. I have a habit of wanting to talk and write about them; dig them up, wade through the muck, and uncover what really happened. Then, I want to find out how it affected me. It is a habit that bumps up against my mother’s truth; that it is better to leave things unsaid, and simply forget about all that bad stuff.

I guess this is my understanding of “why” my mom and I have a hard time communicating, and “why” I got sick after some difficult communication with her. Do I honor her truth or my own? Is it possible to honor and respect both of our habits? As a consequence of this internal and interpersonal dynamic being activated, my throat chakra gets congested, and the energetic disruption makes me vulnerable to getting sick in that part of my body. This delightful little crumb showed itself to me, so that I could gain some final wisdom from it, before I permanently remove it from my energy field.

As we move into the new year, it will be helpful to stay very conscious of the fact that we are actively bumping up against a lot of family and cultural debris. And that it will sometimes feel like we are being swallowed up by the shadows. Take heart, the reason we are able to feel and see these ancestral crumbs, is because our soul knows we carry enough internal light to actually brave those far reaches. We are shining enough light, personally and collectively, to be able to make the dark attics and dark cellars of our lives visible. In other words, if we are spending time with the shadows of our ancestral data and feeling the discomfort involved, it indicates we carry a tremendous amount of light inside of us. And we are getting much closer to being able to tangibly feel that light, in our hearts, in our throats, and in our lives.

Keep walking through the semi-darkness. Keep noticing the internal light. Keep gaining wisdom from the crumbs. Faster than we may believe possible, that internal light will build, until it finally spills out from within us and shines onto those around us. And, oh my, will that feel good.

Wishing you many informative, light-building, 'crumby' adventures in 2022.
​Love, Tawa
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P.S. I never have been able to honor the agreement of silence. I feel like as a child I truly wanted to and was unable. I could somehow feel how toxic the silence was for me. Even more harmful than being reprimanded for speaking. I haven’t done it out spite or unkindness toward others. I have always done it to heal myself, to find my light, and to spread that light. Unfortunately, sometimes others would prefer the crumb-free version.