Ghost Busting
The Poetry of Healing
Listen Here- Podcast Style
Everything you are carrying, you have picked up.
Unknown
We are here to live into the questions. If the universe, God, source or that ineffable seat of creation wanted us to know the answers, I have to believe we would have already been told. We will live into the answers whatever they will be. Emotional regulation is definitely one part of that journey to becoming the best version of our “self”. It usually involves losing that sense of self or selves as it seems that we individually are many. A tapestry of archetypes. Mine seem to change daily at times! It is definitely a soul journey to meet our divine potential. Purpose? Mission? Something speaks to us from beyond our bones. It starts as a whisper but explodes into a rock opera somewhere along the way.
Full disclosure and disclaimer: I am not a therapist and am not pretending to be one. I like to embrace and experience life from a lens of wholeness. Life comes in waves. Even the ocean gets cluttered up with stuff it cannot dissolve and dispose of very quickly. This week I am leaning into the emotional humanness of this journey from the admitted biased middle aged male experience that I have travelled. When and where I grew up boys and men did not talk about feelings. We modelled our behaviour from the men who came before us. Most had fought, lived in and lived through wars. We were taught to fight, not to cry. I am here to help break that cycle and to to see my own sons widen that circle even further.
Do we write to be free of our ghosts or to welcome them?
Joy Kogawa (Canadian Poet)
Welcome them? This to me echoes of Rumi’s Guest House, an invitation to invite all the emotions in as guests, and to entertain them all, as they have been sent to guide us to growth. I write to share gratitude. I write to grow.
To be free of them? Writing is one of the ways that I show up to free myself of these ghosts and to free them from me. I write to let go. I write to forgive. I write to heal.
These ghosts are those wounds that we carry through our lives as baggage. They often hide in plain sight. So much is right in front of our eyes or hidden deep inside of our body. Unfortunately we don’t see it. I look around at all the ghosts that hide in the clutter of my life. Boxes of things. Shreds of paper. Old clothes and shoes once worn by a man that I no longer am. Stories. I have held on to so much. We have also learned to hide within technology in a new kind of time and space. Phones and computers hide a haunted mansion of gigabyte ghosts larger than any castle. A dreaded bastion of dopamine addiction and endless clutter that all tell stories. Sometimes these stories are not serving and can keep the scabs and scars from strongly forming. Some stories keep the ghosts alive.
Our attics, basements, docs, files and drawers hide it all. Our minds, bones and blood carry it. Our spirit tries to hold it. Big T, little t, whatever we call it, interpretations, stories and beliefs become our baggage. Author Carolyn Myss, wisely says, “that our biography becomes our biology”. She writes that these beliefs become memories in our cells and these beliefs carry emotional energy. That baggage may just be writing our biography and subsequently writing our biology. These ghosts may be haunting our health as well!
We are loyal to the pain because it's so damn familiar. In some strange way I seem to be holding on to all the baggage for safety and security. It almost doesn’t make any sense. Yet the baggage is everywhere. The wounds still bleed. Much less so, yet they still bleed.
Do we have to forgive to forget? Cuban singer Celia Cruz wisely wrote, “Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is remembering with no pain”. Forgiveness of others may not be necessary to heal the wounds from trauma. Forgiveness of others may not even be required to move on in life. Healing might be more about moving on. Healing may be more about moving past the pain. Forgiving ourselves seems to be a part of that healing. Letting go. Disconnecting to the anger, resentment or grief of a story written by the past.
Do we write to be free of our ghosts or to welcome them?
For me poetry expresses what mere conversation cannot do. Words can free me. Words can help me learn to forgive and and in the spaces between those words I learn how to heal. Poetry captures the essence of emotion and experience.
Poetry helps me explore my feelings and memories through listening to and through speaking out loud another’s poems, as well as through the creative writing and recitation of my own. Feelings and memories as wounded ghosts are hidden in the shadows of my psyche. Baggage. As a form of expression the therapeutic use of poetry can promote well being and healing on its own or as an adjunct to psychotherapy. As my heart expresses itself in the poetry of its own language, I release, reflect upon, and discover my feelings as they materialize onto a blank page in a journey to self-awareness and understanding. In the settling waves of a waning storm, a sense of illuminating clarity arises between the words and through my own cracked open spaces as a poem is read out loud and set free. On those wings of these ghost busting words I find that I am freed too. The wounds start to heal and the bleeding slows down.
I am even starting to learn how to write a thank you to these ghosts and invite them in for a short stay. Once they realize that I don’t need them any longer they disappear right along side of me and they disappear inside of me as well. Sometimes now we even share a good cry together before they leave.
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
Charles Bukowski
Baggage
The only thing stopping me from arriving
is leaving
The habitual taste for blood
a bittersweet moan
for a hollow addiction
that feeds my bones
I bag up the leftovers
The old dregs, rinds, rags
torn sheets and remnants of paper
Fragments of stories
Stained in shreds of remorse
What is love?
I reflect on the wounds I carry
Some are healed scars
Yet some still bleed
Opening and closing
Torn open again by the sharp edges of words
Some wounds have never closed
Hiding inside of stories
that keep the wounds alive
I see the child
Feeling the pain
Surrounded by ghosts
God, the devil and the dead
I see the adult
Reaching out for angels
feeling the shame
of deep disparage
Still covered in layers of conditioning
Thousands of years old
Passed down by ancestors
Garnished by culture
and fed by the expectations to please
“This is the way we are”
“This is what we believe”
What is love?
I’m older now
Resentment slowly receding
pushed aside by glimpses of understanding
The bitterness and judgement fading away
The courage to say no
now rising above the naivety
of the demands of reciprocation
Yet something I can’t put in words
still clings to me
Responsibility still weighs me down
I have some wounds which still leak
but much more patiently it seems
The anger dimming to regret
The stories fading
Yet the pain remains
Not to be fixed or removed
Mistakes
That were needed to grow
I look in the mirror
The lines on my face sharp souvenirs
In my eyes I can see
my own fear
The stories that masqueraded as beliefs
I can see the patterns of behaviour
that they created
as I desperately tried to undo the hurt
Never realizing just how much growth
was fed by those tears of the past
If I remain a victim
The baggage will live on
Hiding somewhere in plain site
Broken glass
I walk on
that still opens up the wounds
I carry out the clutter
What is love?
I wipe the blood from my skin
I let the air taste the warm pain
I get back to the cleaning
Wipe up the blame
Sweep up the guilt
Sift through the shame
Strip off the excuses
Break off the rusted chains
I carry one more box of self to the curb
What is love?
Pausing
I give that self -permission
to remember
I give that self -permission
to forget
I thank this life and this body for the lessons
I open up the old box
And I set my-self
Free
© Jamie Millard
Thank you for being here!
May you write to be free of your ghosts and may you write to invite them in.
Thank you for being my witness as I dance in the spaces between both.
Sometimes it’s hard to see our own baggage and in those spaces between the words all of our ghosts appear.
Sometimes in those same spaces they may even disappear as well.
The full audio version can be found under the titles at the start of this article.
Lots of love,
Jamie
This is one of the most beautiful posts I've read since joining Substack. Thank you, Jamie; you've brightened my day!
I admire honest reads that are vulnerable and truthful, combined with a love of life, emotions in motion, old parts of ourselves, and current struggles that make us feel human and poetic. Sharing something that can truly inspire others strikes a special chord in the vast ocean of empty knowledge that surrounds us.
Knowing how difficult it is to stop, pause, and change the course of endless generations who have lived and felt differently, I admire this kind of intention. It takes a lifetime, but the work is very important, if not the most important, because of the collective ripple effect, which you already understand: "I am here to help break that cycle and to to see my own sons widen that circle even further. "
I consider myself fortunate to have discovered words that are warm, clear, and beautiful, which makes me wonder and feel deeply. Words, emotions, and memories just waiting to emerge into bright light from the shadow of our psyche:
"For me poetry expresses what mere conversation cannot do. Words can free me. Words can help me learn to forgive and and in the spaces between those words I learn how to heal. Poetry captures the essence of emotion and experience.
Poetry helps me explore my feelings and memories through listening to and through speaking out loud another’s poems, as well as through the creative writing and recitation of my own. Feelings and memories as wounded ghosts are hidden in the shadows of my psyche."
Just delightful I love the quotes and all of the brilliant metaphorical wordplay.
In my case, on my 60th birthday, we carted all my journals to the burn barrel by the pond. One by one I surrendered them to the flames. Letting go. I have not regretted it for a moment. The ashes of a lifetime of lament, reflection, enquiry, dreams, musings. The phoenix that rose took the shape of an unencumbered soul. "Phones and computers hide a haunted mansion of gigabyte ghosts larger than any castle." As do old journals!