I decided that for 3 months, I would not ‘tell my story.’ Specifically, my story of childhood sexual abuse. None of it. I would remain silent.
Of course, many times in conversation there arouse the perfect occasion to tell it. It would be the perfect segue in the conversation. It would possibly even help the person with whom I shared it. So mentally, I would run through my story--I knew it so well, I would only have to say ‘closet’ to myself, and the whole damn thing would unfurl.
And that’s when I knew I was onto something big. Because in that unfurling, I could feel the familiar pangs of the fear, might even whimper internally a bit. I could feel my tummy tightening when I got to the place where the abuser discovered me. Could feel myself rationalizing her behavior toward me.
I re-lived the moments in the exact same way I had lived them initially.
Eventually, as I stopped verbalizing my story, I noticed I was not mentally telling my story any longer. In an unexpected way (aka, Spanda), this gave me permission to remember these events of my life from an entirely new vantage point--that of a mature woman, rather than as a child, or a teenager.
So that I was actually able to discard the mental prison that the repetitive telling of the story had created within me, and experience the landmark event from the perspective of ‘what I know now.’ It was extremely freeing.
There is another layer to this healing, and I may tell that at some point, but what is germane here is that at the end of a month of panchakarma in 2012, I experienced a healing of my story (saṃskarā) held deep with body in the tissues of my ovaries.
Now when I think of that particular story, it is as though it happened in a dream or perhaps was a movie I saw once. It is still present in my consciousness, but I feel absolutely no personal involvement with it.
I have held a cherished belief that eventually I would neutralize my story. Eradicate it. Be done with it. Where I have gotten to today in my understanding of my relationship with my story, is that it is my story.
The difference I experience now, is that the story only has the ability to incapacitate me when I forget that it is a story. It is a mythology that is no longer functional, if indeed it ever was. Even those events that I know to be actual events occurred in one realm of consciousness, and I know that I can choose to live in another realm (Integral). This is what I meant when I said that it was like remembering a novel I had read, or a film I had seen. The memory is fuzzy.