I am not sure where I heard this. I think it was in my MAPS training for MDMA and PTSD. A facilitator said it. And I wrote it down. Because I just thought it was so true.

For almost two decades now, I have listened to 1000’s upon 1000’s of stories of suffering. I am asked often, ‘how do you do it?’ The answer to this question is and has always been, because I am no stranger to my own.

It is said in A Course in Miracles, “Everyone is broken because it is a broken world.” Some understand this much sooner than others. Some are introduced to this reality at birth due to conditions, circumstances, generation after generation of addiction, poverty, systemic oppression. This was what I saw in SE Anacostia, inner city of Washington DC at the HIV/AIDS clinic in 2006-2014. I was not born into conditions such as this, but I soon realized simply out of chance. Nothing else.

What I was born into was generations of oppressed Irish immigrants. Very poor, incredibly intelligent, with generations of trauma. Limited by a strictly held conservative Catholic belief system that restricted many of their self-perceived choices; divorce out of abusive situations and birth control to limit family size that one could not afford to feed. This combination bred serious mental illness and addiction, but also resilience.

I believe this is true for many of us. We carry so much with us we are not fully aware of in our bodies. In our nervous systems. In our DNA. In the circumstances and situations, we found ourselves in when we arrived here by our birth. So much to understand and embrace in the suffering, to really know oneself and all of their parts. To really welcome them all. Those from the past, how we relate to them in the present, and how we will set a different path for ourselves as this then lays the blueprint for the generations that follow us to be born into next.

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