When the Impossible Happens (20 page)

EPISODE FROM THE RUSSO-FINNISH WAR: The Story of Inga

The first of these stories involves Inga, a young woman from Finland who attended one of our workshops in Stockholm. Her Holotropic Breathwork session was very powerful and revolved around her biological birth. As she was reliving the struggle in the birth canal, the stage of delivery to which I refer as the third basic perinatal matrix (BPM III), her experience opened up into scenes portraying aggression and killing in various types of war. This connection between perinatal experiences and images of violence from the collective unconscious is characteristic and frequent. However, one of these scenes was unusual and different from the others.

She experienced herself as a young soldier participating in a battle of the Russo—Finnish War that had taken place at the beginning of World War II, four teen years before she was conceived. To her great surprise, she suddenly realized that she actually became her father and experienced this battle from his point of view. She was fully identified with him and felt his body, his emotions, and his thoughts. She could also perceive very clearly what was happening in the environment around her. At one moment, as she/he was hiding in the forest behind a birch tree, a bullet came and scraped her/his cheek and ear.

The experience was extremely vivid, authentic, and compelling. Inga did not know where it came from and what to make of it. Intellectually, she knew that her father had participated in the Russo-Finnish War, but was sure that he had never talked about the above episode. Finally, after the group discussion following her experience, she concluded that she must have connected with her father’s memory of an actual historical event and decided to check it out by telephone.

Inga returned to the group very excited and in awe. When she called her father and told him about her experience, her father was absolutely astounded. What she had experienced was an episode that had actually happened to him in the war, and her description of the scene and of the environment, including the birch tree, was absolutely accurate. He also reassured her that he had never discussed this particular event with her or any other members of the family because the injury was not sufficiently serious to deserve special notice.

THE LITTLE GIRL WITH WHITE PINAFORES: The Story of Nadja

In this second example, the experience portrays an even earlier ancestral memory. Nadja, a fifty-year-old psychologist, experienced in her LSD training session a very realistic episode from the early childhood of her mother. To her utter astonishment, she suddenly became her mother when her mother was a little girl at the age of three or four, dressed up in a starched, fussy dress and hiding underneath the staircase. She was covering her mouth with her hand and felt anxious and lonely, like a frightened animal. The reason for it was that she had said something very bad and had been severely reprimanded for it. She could not recapture the specifics, but was painfully aware that something very unpleasant and scary had just happened.

From her hideout, she could see a scene with many relatives—aunts and uncles—sitting on the porch of a frame house in old-fashioned dresses characteristic of that time (beginning of the twentieth century). Everybody seemed to be talking, unmindful of her. She had a sense of failure and felt overwhelmed by the unrealistic demands of the adults—to be good, to behave herself, to talk properly, not to get dirty. It seemed impossible to please them, and she felt excluded, ostracized, and ashamed.

Curious what this was all about, Nadja approached her mother to obtain the necessary data about her mother’s childhood, something they had never discussed before. Reluctant to admit that she had had an LSD session, of which her conservative mother would have disapproved, Nadja told her that she had had a dream about her childhood and wanted to know if it was true. No sooner had she started her story than her mother interrupted her and finished it in full accord with the reliving. She added many details about her childhood that logically complemented the episode experienced in the LSD session.

She confessed to Nadja how authoritarian and strict her own mother (Nadja’s grandmother) had been and talked about her mother’s excessive demands regarding cleanliness and proper behavior. This was reflected in her mother’s favorite saying, “Children should be seen but not heard.” Nadia’s mother then emphasized how lonely she had felt during her whole childhood, being the only girl with two much—older brothers, and how much she craved to have playmates. According to the mother’s narrative, Nadia’s grandmother used to invite many relatives for family reunions on Sundays and made food for everyone. Her description of the house exactly matched Nadia’s LSD experience, including the large porch and the steps leading up to it. She also mentioned the dresses covered by starched white pinafores that were characteristic of her childhood. There were no family photographs capturing this scene, and the house had been torn down before Nadja was born.

RETRIEVING MEMORIES OF THE STOLEN GENERATIONS: The Story of Marianne

The third example of verified ancestral memories involves experiential exploration of family history that reached back several generations. It is the story of Marianne Wobcke, an Australian midwife who participated in our training in Holotropic Breathwork and transpersonal psychology and eventually became a certified practitioner. I am using here her real name because she decided to share her story with the public and presented it in June 2004 at the Sixteenth International Transpersonal Conference in Palm Springs, which I organized jointly with Christina.

Marianne’s extraordinary genealogical quest began on her thirteenth birthday, when her parents told her that she was adopted. When she shared this secret at school, she was teased and chose not to mention it again. She also found it very puzzling why so many of her dreams and nightmares, as well as experiences with magic mushrooms and LSD she had had in her adolescence and during her twenties, featured Australian Aborigines. However, it was not until a very intense emotional experience she had as a midwife that she began seriously to ponder her adoptive status.

In April 1991, Marianne began her midwifery training at Toowoomba Base Hospital. Her first delivery involved a full-blood Aboriginal woman from Western Australia whose pregnancy was a result of a rape. Marianne was a student midwife, full of enthusiasm, and in her eagerness to support this woman, she repeatedly invaded her space. Not familiar with the tradition of the Australian Aborigines, she also tried to make eye contact with her, which is something that is forbidden to full bloods.

To protect herself, the woman crouched with her back to Marianne, covering her nose and face with her hands. She was also responding negatively to Marianne’s smell; to her Marianne reeked of soap and perfume, which made her feel sick. Finally, responding intuitively to this situation, Marianne stepped back, squatted at a respectable distance from the delivering woman, and granted her the privilege to birth silently without her interference.

The Aboriginal woman’s birthing experience, culminating in her abandoning the baby, had a profound impact on Marianne. The baby stayed in the nursery for three weeks while Family Services searched for the mother, who had effectively disappeared. Marianne was deeply moved and strangely infatuated with the infant. She tried to rationalize her reaction by assuming that her maternal instincts had been triggered by witnessing the delivery, but was nevertheless shocked by the intensity of her emotional response. By coincidence, she was on duty the day three elders, all of them grandmothers, arrived at the ward to claim the infant, and she relinquished the baby to them. This triggered in her an intense grieving process that heralded her personal journey into her ancestral heritage.

It was not until this experience, which she had as a beginning midwife, that Marianne started to feel intense curiosity considering her adoptive status. As her parents had never alluded to it again, she was reluctant to approach them with her concerns. Instead of questioning them, she wrote to Family Services. Eventually, she received a parcel in the mail, including a brief outline of her adoptive status, her birth mother’s name and age at the time of her birth, and a book called
No More Secrets.
In the following decade, there were times when she gave up on ever unraveling the mystery of her past. On the way, she experienced many disappointments, many trips up dry gullies.

Marianne’s quest received a new impetus when she met Mary Madden, a therapist who had trained with us in the United States and was a certified Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. Mary became the facilitator for Marianne’s breathwork sessions and eventually her dear friend. With Mary’s help, Marianne embarked on a challenging journey of self-exploration during which she had many difficult experiences, some of them in holotropic sessions, others in her dreams and in the course of her everyday life.

Among them were memories of repeated sexual abuse as a child and of being raped by a man who spoke Italian, no English. Marianne was puzzled by these experiences because she was reasonably sure that the events involved did not represent anything from her present lifetime. She started having migraine headaches that seemed to be related to her traumatic birth, involving a forceps. As she was reliving this part of her history, bruises would appear spontaneously on her forehead and body. She was desperately trying to remember if these experiences had actually happened to her and if it was possible that she had blocked them from her consciousness.

At this difficult stage of her self-exploration, Marianne withdrew from her partner, family, and friends. She was confused and disoriented, and temporarily lost all points of reference and the will to live. Retrospectively, she reported that only the loving support of the breathwork community, facilitators, and peers, made it possible for her to survive this crisis. She was convinced that without it, she would have taken her life during this challenging time.

Although she had had very limited connection with the indigenous community up to this point, she had many inner experiences involving the Aborigines, some of them during the breathwork sessions, others in her dreams or spontaneously in her everyday life. She imagined with extraordinary intensity and clarity Aboriginal elders coming to her and showing her practices that strongly enhanced her abilities as a midwife. This inspired her to collaboratively set up, through Blue Care, Queensland’s first, partially state-funded, independent midwifery program.

Throughout this time, she had no luck in her search for her birth mother. But she carefully documented her experiences in her journal and drew prolifically the scenes that haunted her. This resulted in a remarkable series of paintings documenting and illustrating her stormy inner process. In 1995, Marianne had her first breakthrough, when Salvation Army Missing Persons Service discovered her grandmother and uncles living in Sydney, and subsequently her birth mother, living in New Zealand. However, her relatives did not want to have anything to do with her, and Marianne was devastated.

Finally, six months later, her birth mother reluctantly wrote to her. The letter was brief and brought unexpected validation for Marianne’s experiences. It described her conception as a rape by an Italian man who spoke no English. At the time it happened, Marianne’s mother was a teenager from a small town in far north Queensland. She was not only brutally traumatized by the rape, but also shamed and blamed by her parents. After unsuccessful attempts to arrange an abortion, she was sent to a home for unmarried girls.

Following Marianne’s birth, a traumatic forceps delivery, her mother never saw or touched her again. She was put on a boat to New Zealand, where she did her best to forget her past and start anew. In her letter, she wished Marianne well and made no further attempts to contact her, in spite of numerous attempts on Marianne’s part. However, this was not the end of Marianne’s quest. Following this unexpected validation of the circumstances of her conception and birth, her experiences in Holotropic Breathwork continued with renewed intensity.

In one of her sessions, she identified experientially with a full-blood Aboriginal woman who was tied, raped, and beaten at the hands of two uniformed men on horseback. Her two children were taken away from her, and her legs were doused in petrol, set ablaze, and badly burnt. As her process continued, Marianne kept drawing and documenting these episodes in an attempt to maintain her sanity. One day, after a therapy session that again featured an indigenous theme, Marianne called at Mary Madden’s suggestion, the directory assistance and made a long-distance phone call to New Zealand. She hoped to make phone contact with her birth mother, and this time her attempt was successful.

In the conversation that followed, Marianne’s mother told her that her great-grandmother was a full-blood Aborigine, and she graphically described the sexual, emotional, physical, and spiritual abuse that had defined this woman’s life. The mystery seemed to be unfolding at last, and Marianne’s hopes were up. However, following this conversation, her birth mother withdrew again and refused further contact. In desperation, Marianne approached Link Up, an Aboriginal organization, to assist her to verify her indigenous status. They could offer no support without her birth mother’s permission. This was not forthcoming, and Marianne’s frustration grew.

Marianne’s adoptive parents had staunchly supported her through this process, and one day her father gave her a phone number he had discovered by chance. Marianne was able to make contact with Community and Personal Histories, an organization that was willing to investigate her case. Some months later, she received in the mail pages of documentation from 1895 to 1918, detailing the history of her great-grandmother, who was the illegitimate daughter of an elderly bachelor landowner in far north Queensland. He was seeking an exemption from the Aboriginal Protection Act so this half-caste child could be returned to care for him.

This man referred to having taken a full-blood Aboriginal woman as his mistress, which resulted in the conception of two half-caste children. There was also the police report concerning two officers on horseback and their ride in the early 1900s to capture “the gin and her children,” who were subsequently sent to the “Nigger camp” and into service. Eventually, Marianne was able to confirm that her great-grandmother’s feet were seriously burnt during this episode, just as she had experienced it in her breathwork session.