I inherently am a gentle, very sensitive and loving soul. To find myself then in Museum Archives on the KwaZulu-Natal Battlefields, where my own ancestors had been involved in, and having to classify battles, list biographical details of officers etc. and assist tourists with information – mostly from British regiments involved in these battles.
For the first time in my life I stood on battlefields (inwardly shuddering, because I was literally SEEING the soldiers and the battles unfold before me, as my psychic abilities had opened up. It was no joke!) trying to figure out how the battles, the blunders from generals, the sheer tragedy of human killing humans, unfolded. All of this was a huge learning curve in itself.
I won’t go into details about this, but I want to touch on something that I encountered in my daily dealings with ex-soldiers – those I worked with and those I encountered weeping at the graves of their compatriots who died a hundred or so years before them. Typically me, I ASKED them, why they did this, for these were men who were shipped straight from the Iraq wars and onto the battlefields of my own home territory where I had grown up in. My own family history is steeped with anecdotes from these self-same battles, as I come from a close-knit community, who mostly had farms in that area.
The answer I got from these men weeping at the gravesites was: THEY KNOW WHAT WE HAVE GONE THROUGH.
I remember distinctly how one elderly cousin once sat in front of me, after we had gone through an intense retreat into total silence for 10 days, and said: “I had three sons, and as they grew up, I saw the talents, their heart and abilities and tried to guide them into growing fully into that. But I have lost all three of my sons to the army. Their soul has gone.”
This, because here in South Africa during the apartheid years, the men were conscribed into the army for two years, and some came out totally broken. They had no choice in this matter, and therefore those who rebelled more or less disappeared overseas, so that they could escape this. What this father was lamenting about was the loss of their innocence, the loss of something deep inside of them that had respect for life and that aliveness from deep inside of themselves that they had lost. They had become aggressive, moody, and sometimes downright strange the way they reacted to sounds, things, even to words.
I worked with some of these men during the course of my work. When they came into the office and had a certain look on their faces or would be near impossible (even in that they would sit in the corner sometimes all huddled up, like a ball), I knew that deep memory banks were triggered of intense trauma and pain, which never ever saw the light of day.
I sometimes would ask them their stories – and slowly the stories would unfold. It is not for me to tell their stories here, because that would not be appropriate. Suffice is to say when I heard the stories, listening without judgment (stories they had never shared with their wives nor relatives), I started to understand, that these men were programmed to kill, and never de-programmed to adjust to normal life. The wounds that they carried inside of themselves were never healed.
I am sharing this with you today, for I had a conversation with someone (and she was by no means the only one who has shared similar stories with me), about not knowing how to reach her husband as he sometimes was near impossible to deal with.
These men would see something on the television, like men having to jump from helicopters, and then go off into some place where she could not reach him. Or he had great difficulty in opening up, or just plain angry sometimes. Or would withdraw emotionally, mentally and then be in a place where no-one could reach him. The difficulty was also in social adjustment and sometimes being in confined areas. Or they would cry at night when asleep, or suddenly jump out of bed as if the devil himself was after them.
I am sharing this mainly as I often sat and wondered about all of this. From the stories that these men shared with me, I understood that sometimes they had done and witnessed unspeakable things, which they could not share with the very women they loved most.
One officer once with tears in his eyes said that he had to now go home to his wife and kids – yet he had killed and maimed another man’s wife and kids. He did not know how to look her in the eye, yet just knowing that there was someone back home who loved him and like his kids looked up to him, and yet he felt like a fluke – living a lie.
These men came to haunt me, when I was teaching in the Middle East and had in my class a Palestinian boy (there were a lot of them, and I have never taught such angry kids, (by no means just Palestinians, I have to stress) in all my life, and I include all the boys especially) who had tanks and machine guns lined on his desk. He not only refused to listen, and refused to be taught, he disrupted the whole class.
One day on entering the class, something made me stop dead in my tracks – and next moment this kid dive-bombed me. If I had continued walking I would have been axed. As I had tried to teach these kids to empower themselves by truly learning to read and write properly and by living from their heart and with love, I was shaken. But I was not going to give up on them.
In that moment, while trying to gather myself, I suddenly had the inspiration to ask this kid to come forward and to tell me his story. I wanted to sincerely know, what it was that made him so angry and aggressive.
Out came his story, and then stating with absolute certainty that all he wanted to do is to become a suicide bomber like his elder brother who had died. The family had received a medal. One day he wanted his family of also have a medal, as he then also died in this way. This from a ten-year old kid.
All I could do that day was take that kid in my arms and give him a hug. For he was still a kid, a bewildered kid…. A hurt kid.
That night I could not sleep. The soldiers, the boy, came to haunt me. My heart went out to all the lost souls, who truly were lost, for they had lost something deep inside of themselves which was LOVE – that love for life, the respect and love for Divine, which saw the Divine in everything and everyone and therefore love in its purest form will always take the object – the other in his or her arms. It cannot willfully harm – for it cannot harm itself. Nor can it indoctrinate kids.
I got very ill after all of that – laryngitis. Severely so, for I could not speak. I lost my voice in the Middle East – literally, my singing voice. I still feel that the collective pain in that whole area is what needs to be cleared with absolute and pure love. Divine Love. Unconditional Love.
Interestingly I was taken away from that class when I came back, but the kids came and found me and asked me why I had deserted them and that they loved me and wanted me back. As I was now teaching other Grades and then Kindergarten, one day while I was sitting around the table with my little ones gathered around me, this boy came in, and he shoved all the others out of the way and he said: “This is not YOUR teacher. She is my teacher!”
I had tears in my eyes. It is then that I understood that somehow I had touched the heart of a boy.
I leave all of this now, as I am not here to judge anyone. We all yearn to be loved for who and what we are and no matter what we have done or not done – we all are worthy of love.
What I share now is what I have always felt in my heart and soul to be the truth and tragedy of mankind.
The greatest tragedy of mankind is that it basically forgets the greatest of all laws and that is the law of love and be loved and let love be the sum total of all that is.
Who lives by the sword – dies by the sword.
We can never get past cosmic laws and something deep inside of ourselves will die an immense death if we do not adhere to the basics.
We do not so much harm the other – we harm ourselves.
That is why years after such trauma happens, the triggering will happen in some form, because the trauma has never been addressed.
I believe that if every single man and woman in this world learns to bring those wounds into the open, and finally experience immense Loving Grace, that we would heal deeply and subconsciously and then we will not be able to harm anyone anymore – because we know full well that we only harm ourselves.
I know from my own family, how long after the wars have passed the bitterness and anger remained. My own grandmother was a classic example. She was in a British concentration camp at three years old in Volksrust, during the Anglo-Boer War, and she refused to speak one word of English for the rest of her life. This is still present in some of my own family members, and I understand more and more why the Bible states: THE SINS OF THE FATHER CARRIES OVER INTO THE THIRD AND FORTH DEGREE. It is not only that, but the trauma and pain of the fathers/mothers carry over into the third and forth degree.
When I did ancestral clearing I had to start working with all the pain, anger, and bitterness of wars, of apartheid, of all the unsaid and untold things. I don’t know what happened down all those lines, but something I do know is that I do not want to carry that in my genes anymore and therefore asked them to be cleared.
In understanding your family history, you can understand where your own father and mother got a lot of their programming from – and once you understand the programming you can start deprogramming. For you are the master and mistress of your own life.
If humanity wants to heal, then we also have to heal the trauma of battlefields. I have stood in these places and felt the intensely heavy energies of the slaughter. It is like being pulled into a massive black hole. We need to heal these places for this is the clearing of the collective and the healing of such.
Just like the wives of these men who were involved wars in their youth, now are aging, wonder at how to help their men heal, so the collective of mankind has to slowly but surely heal on all levels.
I will close my musings this morning – for they are musings – with something that I understood in the last few years, and I had to clear portals of trauma and pain and saw how these where cleared by the God-fire and transmuted into pure energy again, that nothing is impossible.
I also have understood that I cannot take the whole of mankind’s trauma and struggles onto me. I cannot heal the world.
I can only heal myself.
All healing ultimately starts with self. Therefore then also with whatever is there in the genes, and in the collective family memory banks.
In healing ourselves – we can then extend that healing to others.
As we raise our own frequencies and vibrations, we have a ripple effect on the whole.
As we then start leading others into understanding, into healing, and into balance once more, then the whole world can be healed and will be healed, for that is what we are heading for.
All paths eventually lead us back to Love.
As we love, respect and honor ourselves, we love, respect and honor others – and indeed all of life.
As we adhere to cosmic laws and do not harm ourselves – we cannot harm others. For we understand the basic law – WHAT YOU DO ONTO OTHERS YOU DO TO YOURSELF!
(Judith Kusel)
http://www.judithkusel.com