As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look,
spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended.
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed,
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse.
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe,
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Bob Dylan
The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland said it differently but more succinctly – “We’re all mad here.”
This week, I did some tapping with a dear friend. She was struggling with shaking off some of the impact on her life – of the gritty, ground-in impact of racism and oppression she experienced as a black woman. She also grew up in poverty, with a single mom who had her own problems. A challenging growing environment to thrive in.
It takes such courage to try to break free not only from our personal stories, but also from the entrenched social stories that they are rooted and embedded in. This can be such a daunting task.
Sometimes, it’s easy to feel we are dysfunctional hot messes, with our own stories that are like our personal versions of crazy. It’s only too easy to forget that we’re not the crazy ones. It’s our culture, our social surroundings, the historical timing of the ‘soil’ we grew up in that’s really crazy. Actually, it’s healthy to react to living in a crazy world.
Funnily, it’s easier to see this with plants than with human beings. If a plant isn’t thriving, is wilting and dying – we don’t blame the plant. We look at whether the soil is depleted, whether the plant is getting enough nourishment, enough sunlight, enough water. We look to the surroundings and try to adjust and fix those, to help the plant grow strong and vital.
Not so with humans. Instead, we tend to blame each other. Worst of all, we come to learn as children to take our painful stress-stories personally. We learn to blame ourselves and feel we must somehow ‘deserve’ the stress-story. With our oldest stories of stress, suffering and pain somehow become attached to us, making it more challenging to release them. They can be incredibly sticky.
But we are not our stories.
They just represent the environment we grew up in, the territory we travelled through as children. In tapping with my friend, I saw this so clearly. I realized that there’s this whole other layer that our personal stories are rooted in. And tapping can also help us clear our reactivity at this level too.
So in our tapping session together, I was powerfully reminded of my own childhood and some of the experiences that I absorbed from my environment (as well as from my ‘big people’ – my parents, relatives, teachers etc).
My story about community and how it helped shape me…
When I thought back to my childhood, here’s what I saw. From age two to 17, I grew up living in my barely-middle-class family, with two parents and three siblings. From ages two to 13, I lived with my nuclear family in a large apartment complex of 8-plexes (four apartments on the ground floor and four above). There were a few townhouse rows as well. They were all set in two large squares of buildings, each surrounding a large green central courtyard where we children could play safely. Pretty idyllic in many ways.
We were evicted from living there after my mother and a friend started a petition, about having a choice about which milk delivery service everyone wanted. The landlord (pre-landlord tenant act days) responded quickly and decisively. With eviction as our new reality, we had very little time before we were on the streets. Since my parents could not find appropriate housing for all of us, they scrambled and were accepted into a subsidized housing development not far away (same school district). We were most fortunate in this.
Moving into learning about new limitations
In this new community, there were also ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders.’ As in: ‘insiders’ who lived in the development… surrounded by ‘outsiders’ who lived in the houses around our community. They were generally not especially happy that our community existed there at all. This was palpable. Sometimes, outsider kids would come in and wreak havoc. They threw glass bottles in our swimming pool, in addition to other seditious acts that were blamed on us insider kids. One neighbour was especially emotionally and verbally reactive when we were playing beside her property.
But I also felt like both an insider (my family lived there and we developed friendships with our neighbours)… and an outsider (I had not grown up absorbing poverty-and-social-ills saturated stories). As a result, my experiences living there were different from some of the other kids.
So, cultural factors are woven into our personal stories…
Many of the parents there were massively struggling, not only with poverty, but with a social welfare system that invaded their personal space regularly. For example, in exchange for receiving a welfare check each month, they needed to report to a welfare official. That official person asked them all sorts of personal information, like if the women had any men sleeping over. And details about how they spent their money etc.
Our neighbours mostly seemed to sadly accept that this was the price to pay for their checks, and to feel they somehow deserved to be treated disrespectfully. Very unhealthy soil for them, as well as for their children, to grow up in. Easy to see how generational patterns get established, when kids witness and absorb everything from their environment in the first 7 to 10 years!
My parents set to work pretty immediately instead, to create a tenants’ association and to apply for governmental grants to enrich the ‘soil’ there. Together, we developed a White Room recreational space in the basement of one of the low-rise buildings. There was a snack-bar and movies, as well as space for people to gather socially.
The long-term impact of change…
That space is still fondly remembered 50 years later by those who grew up when we were living there. We held movies in the summer outside under the stars, with snacks. Grant money was obtained for recreational activities and local trips for kids. We took them to the museums, the zoo, the Science Centre, the Toronto Island. Many of these cultural experiences were places they otherwise would never have had a chance to experience. Collectively, we began to broaden our expectations about life.
Why am I sharing all this with you, some 50+ years after it happened?
Well, I began to notice that we all benefited together. People, including me, became more empowered to use their voices, to speak up for what they wanted and needed. Together, we began to change and enrich some of the ‘soil’ we were all planted in while living there.
It made a profound difference to me as a teenager, whose brain was developing a capacity to look critically at the world I was living in.
And I have learned that many (maybe all) of the stories we carry around with us as somehow belonging to us, actually are rooted in the social and historical environment we were planted in as children.
For me, this provides a deeper context of where our tapping can take us in EFT tapping sessions.
How does Hacking Reality tapping help?
In Hacking Reality sessions, we can also go back in time to meet our Younger Selves who were trapped in those limiting environmental experiences that we were immersed in (but that we often forget).
We are not our stories (much as we may believe or assume otherwise). They don’t define who we are. They are just the powerful experiences that shaped us, just as water, sun and soil conditions shape a plant’s vitality/health.
And with tapping, we can throw off those shackles that bind us to those old stories, to step into growing in brand-new ways. We can renew the soil we were planted in… allow ourselves to learn to gift ourselves with better soil… with better nourishment from more sunlight and more water (more self-love and acceptance, with a dash of forgiveness thrown in where needed).
We can release the emotional intensity from those old limiting stories, to take our baby steps forwards towards human freedom. One step at a time, we can come to realize that we are each of us far more powerful, precious and beautiful than our childhood shaping stories would have us believe is even possible.
And, at least for me, tapping is the easiest, least stressful, most efficient and elegant tool, to assist us in our human transformation. We each have an important role to play in this.
Freedom awaits us. Together, we can tap into our freedom.
Somos el barco, somos el mar
Yo navego en ti, tu navegas en mi
We are the boat, we are the sea
I sail in you, you sail in me
The stream sings it to the river, the river sings it to the sea
The sea sings it to the boat that carries you and me
So with our hopes we set the sails and face the winds once more
And with our hearts we chart the waters never sailed before
Charles Lorre Wyatt
