It would seem that this the year that i finally got around to facing my repressed memories around the vietnam war and how much it’s influence my life. it’s been on the back of my mind for sometime and one of the main reasons i sought out the depth hypnosis therapy was to see if i could access this part of my mind. given that i felt pretty well adjusted to adult life, i didn’t think it was a dire need to address this issue but at the same time, since my time in the desert with the vision quest, i knew i wanted to get to it sooner than later. when i was in washington dc earlier this year, i saw a great exhibit by tiffany chung about the war and it reminded me that i hadn’t dealt with this on intellectual and emotional level. Intellectual being the pretty long history of the war with the french and american. Emotionally on how much it impacted my parents and the karmic ripple to me.
About a month ago, i committed myself to watching ken burn’s series on the Vietnam War. Certainly the series served my intellectual curiosity on the complexity and scale of the war. Not unsurprisingly, in a number of episodes, i let the emotional weight of the war wash through my soul and cried like lost child. It is hard for me (or anyone else i would imagine) to appreciate the the gravity and atrocity of war on so many levels without experiencing it first hand. much like any powerful experience in life, words and pictures can only do so much to educate the mind but without the direct experience, we are bounded by the limitations of intellectual understanding. So completing the series, it did give me the courage to dive into the shamanic journeying of revisiting that moment in my life when i lost trust in the world and my father. Specifically, it wasn’t so much of a visual recall of the time when i was on the boat with my parents per say but really revisiting the emotional devastation not being able to feel comforted and protected by my father through that journey. Regardless of the details of the event, the karmic wound from the experience definitely played out in a number of ways as i got older. Interestingly enough, being a father and hearing the fear in my daughter as she navigates this world and i am coming full circle with my own perception of my relationship with my father. Given the unspoken nature of asian cultures, i understood the good intentions that my father always had but at the same time, good intentions aren’t enough for a child.