The Palm Reader

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Morana

One night, I read something* about a prisoner during the holocaust who was in line with a group of men waiting to be taken to their death.  In the midst of this horror, one of the men jumped out of line, offering to read the palms of other prisoners, exuberantly telling them of their future wives, their future children, of what seemed to be their extinguished possibilities.  More and more of the prisoners asked to have their palms read.  The mood changed, for both prisoners and guards—and against all odds, the unexpected happened:  the guards loaded the prisoners back on the truck and drove away with them, taking them back to their barracks. 

I wondered about what enabled that solitary palm-reader to act.  The next morning as I awoke, a sentence came to me, and then more:

Please Let me also look at their palms and see their infinite possibilities!
And seeing them,
they glimpse themselves
As they really are!

Let us not be hypnotized
by modern day brutes
Let us look past all their dark thoughts
Let us turn again and again
beyond those dark clouds
to what is beyond their sight

Let us see our true pure being
and all our possibilities for Joy
for Love

Pull back our curtain of fear and disconnection
Open our ears to the truth of our being
Open our eyes to That Light
Me-here-Now
Not what they see
they do not define me!

Open my awareness
to
What. I. Am

*https://tinyurl.com/yder25lt

Elizabeth Morana

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Invitation to Commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Photo Credit: Ellen Korman Mains

A Contemplative Focusing-oriented Zoom Gathering
January 25, 2020, 12 Noon – 1:30 pm EST
with Ellen Korman Mains
author of the award-winning memoir

Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey into the Holocaust

To the chagrin of her parents—Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust—Ellen became a Buddhist at 19, nearly tearing her family apart. Decades later, on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an experience on a German train sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to explore the meaning of basic goodness after the Holocaust, and her own family history. January 27, 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and 15 years since that 2005 train ride.

As nationalism and other threats increase around the planet, how do we acknowledge and hold space for an event as monumental as the Holocaust? Is healing possible? As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, Ellen will offer some personal and historical context for this gathering, including her journey since January of 2005. This gathering will include a guided meditation to help us connect with grounded presence, to create an environment of safety, and to invite ancestral support. Breakout groups will allow us to freshly share our experience.

“We, the living, are the body of our ancestors, and in our bodies we carry all the tears they could not cry during their lifetimes. And when we allow their tears to be cried through us, something is being made whole between the generations . . .”

-The Tears of the Ancestors: Victims and Perpetrators in the Tribal Soul, by Daan van Kampenhout

“If we go underneath the overwhelming emotions and touch into physical sensations, something quite profound occurs in our organism—there is a sense of flow, of “coming home.”

-In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma & Restores Goodness by Peter Levine

Please join us!

Email EllenKormanMains@gmail.com to RSVP and receive the Zoom link.

To leave or read a comment, click here and go past the end of the post.

Meditation Grounded in the Body

Many of us who practice Wholebody Focusing have other practices that help us sustain ourselves, body and soul.  Ellen Korman Mains, the author of Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey into the Holocaust, shares her 45+ year experience of practicing meditation, along with other modalities, and how she eventually recognized a need to become more present in her body in meditation practice.  The video below is the first in a series of conversations between Diana Scalera and Ellen in which she explains how she first came to embrace body awareness.  Future videos will include the role that body awareness plays in her continuing work to recognize and help heal the legacy of the Holocaust.

Please take you time to watch the video below which is the first installment of this series about meditation, grounded presence, and spirituality.

To leave or read a comment, click here and go past the end of the post.

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