The pain I was trying to release was jagged and sharp. Imagine light trapped behind clouds for 40 years. Imagine the imprint of a hand on a face that wasn’t mine. A memory only a young, open child can create and trap, even though she didn’t see the hand. Ah, but that tangled cord that binds a child to her mother’s womb is hard to break, and some of us walk the path of our mother’s darkness for years before we free our own light.

We carry our mothers’ wounds like armor. We carry them with the fierce loyalty of guarded love, until we realize that the burden is not ours to harbor. I thought I had let the memory go. I no longer felt the quickening of heart when I thought about my parents’ rage clashing into lightening. I no longer felt the paralysis of fear when I recalled my impulse to save her.

But, the imprint of the memory still lingered, embedded so deeply inside the right side of my head, I grappled physical pain as I worked to release it. With the the memory, my young mind had also sheltered darkness, and the notion that any expression of my inner light/truth would result in pain and harm.

I was born into a legacy of silencing, my fears fed with her stories of abuses and incest. There was no surprise that I had trapped my earliest memory and almost made it my soul’s truth, a shadow that would hover for decades over my light.

The letting go is almost as painful as the holding on.

Why do we fear light? Why do we doubt the power of love? We live in a world of abundance, yet we trap ourselves in our fears, even when they are not ours. We turn to war and conflict more easily than we turn to love. Thus we fight  to keep our fears alive, instead of letting them go, even though our souls crave light. We long for it not only in ourselves, but in others. We crave union, we crave harmony and balance, but chaos is allowed to reign. Fear is a shadow that blinds our inner truths, but we may choose whether to walk the path of its darkness.