Hidden stories in our past often shape our present. Uncovering them can transform our future
Discover the World
Hidden stories in our past often shape our present. Uncovering them can transform our future
About Remember the World
The Ancestor Memoir
In memoir writing, we tell our personal stories. The ancestor memoir reflects a somewhat different perspective: if I’ve been influenced by the psychological truths of my parents, what social and psychological factors influenced them?
Why [Re]member?
In Jewish mysticism, God is the All-That-Is, filling space and time. But, as the story goes, God was lonely and wanted companionship. So God decided to create humans for companionship. To make room, she "inhaled," contracting from the All-That-Is. In so doing, the Holy One split into a multitude of "sparks."
The fracturing created separation. It has since been our mission to find and collect the sparks, to "re-member" the whole story and return us to holiness--or wholeness.
Collecting the sparks leads to Tikkun Olam--collecting, and acting, to consciously bring together those missing pieces into our lives.
To [re]member, then, is to collect the sparks. Shining a light on the past can reveal hidden stories that, once we acknowledge them, can help us shine a light on the past to act on reintegrating those pieces into the bigger picture of our lives. Only by unearthing the whole story can we heal and become whole.
Telling the Story
Doing a deep dive into the stories of our ancestors' lives can take many forms: genealogy research, family stories, oral history, newspaper records and more. But the records may not capture the emotions, the triumphs and tragedies our families lived through.
At another level, our cells tell another story, based on epigenetic changes to our genes. Such changes can be shaped by environmental factors and external events, including the air we breathe and the food we eat, or even traumas visited on previous generations. And these changes are ones that may be causing us physical pain, dis-ease and illness.
Epigenetic changes to our DNA can also be passed down through generations, leaving us vulnerable to re-suffer the traumas that impacted our parents and grandparents.
[Re]member the World techniques can be described as holistic: by tapping into multiple sources --physical, emotional, social, psychological and spiritual--we tell the full story to begin the process of integrating parts-to-whole.
To [re]member, then, is to collect our individual sparks by unearthing our stories to shed more light, to repair ourselves.