Healing family and ancestors - summer solstice

Meet the dragon from the Earth Spirit centre near Glastonbury, venue for last week's five-day Healing the Family and Ancestors workshop.

Dragons are held in high regard in the East, symbols of prosperity and transformation; in the West we seem to be keen on slaying them. Our patron saint George being a case in point.

Well, this particular dragon became my mascot for clear-sightedness and moving into a new field of family and ancestral resonance during Jill Purce's revelatory workshop. I found a sense of harmony, compassion and understanding towards my family - that had previously been blackened by memories of abuse and dysfunction.

As the effect of the intense five days begins to filter through into my conscious mind - as cause and effect rather than deep emotional resonance - these are my first thoughts.

The biggest gain was changing my perspective on my now deceased parents.

Although there was prosperity in my family, there was massive dysfuntion. No sense of family community, no real communcation. This gave way to a strange kind of caring neglect - I was sent away to posh schools, where I was sexually abused by teachers, and my parents refused to let me come home and I was too shamed to disclose the abuse, as I was only 11 or 12 years old.

I wanted for nothing except love. When I wanted love and affection and understanding, it was withheld, as if my parents had no notion of these concepts and that their children might be craving them. The fridge, though, was always full.

Jill's extraordinary work combining shamanistic trance, the cradle of communal Tibetan Buddhist chanting (picture is the Tibetan goddess of compassion, Tara), and family therapy ideas incorporating the family sculpture work of Bert Hellinger pushed back the boundaries of these memories. And it really softened them as I started to understand why their particular predicaments would have caused them to behave as they did.

I saw them as real people not as people trying badly to play and fulfull the role of parents.

As people they were frail - having lived through two World Wars. Frail in the sense that they did not seem to have a strong sense of their own worth, preferring instead a marriage to conformity. And that, I suppose, has been my view, filled with sadness, hatred and contempt, for virtually all my life.

My new perspective is now that they were brave, even iconoclastic, people, brave enough to challenge and confront the accepted social conventions of the day. My father, a Jew, married my mother, a non-Jew, against the strong wishes of both families.

My hope is that they were swept away on a wave of liberating passion. Because once the marriage began its everyday reality, neither would visit their in-laws. My sister and I were the ambassadors of a reconciliation that went unresolved to their graves.

The details of the ensuing family dysfunction now no longer seems to matter that much. I have therapised over it for years and years.

But when I got to act out my own family and ancestral psychodrama, with fellow workshoppers acting as my immediate relatives, it was as if I was standing on their shoulders seeing thing for the first time from an elevated point of view.

I saw my parents' pain and identified with it: the horrible feeling of rejection when you are forbidden to folllow your heart.

They too must have understood the feelings of alienation and exile that became my constant companions.

It was somehow easy now to sheath my burning sword of resentment. This virtual emotional enactment of my past shored up the recent research that revealed that many of my mother's relatives were womanisers and alcoholics. I could accept my mother whom I had falsely idolised on new terms. Her only mistake was that she really didn't understand - something that I am determined not to go on repeating.

Nothing, though, prepared me for the trauma lurking beyond my father's parents, Jews who emigrated from Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. No one in my shrinking family knows anything of my paternal grandparents. And then it became clear, that my father's entire family must have been wiped out in the Holacaust!

My all too harsh judgements of him have suddenly softened. No wonder, I thought, he did not discuss his religion of birth. (My sister and I were never told that he was Jewish - it was something we surmised from him refusing ever to eat bacon.)

His obsession with appearance and his living denial of his Jewishness were more than likely his subconscious way of shielding my sister and I from any future persecution...

Rather than denying us he was actually protecting us... God bless him!