In the southern Americas and also in southern Mediterranean countries you will often see little white crosses on the side of the roads. These are descansos – resting places – that mark a death. In the UK we will often see flowers symbolising the same, although this is a more recent practice.
You can make a time-line of your life and mark out your own descansos*; all the losses large and small that signify thresholds crossed or roads not taken, paths that were cut off, betrayals, pieces of yourself or your life that ‘died’ when not acknowledged or allowed.
This is a process that needs time and patience, forgiveness and love. You may want to do this with a trusted friend who can remain detached, hold space and support you. If there is deep trauma involved that requires professional support, then please seek appropriate help and do not attempt this alone. If you are unsure, then reach out to me and I’ll guide you on the best way to work with this process.
The easiest way to make your descansos is to use the reverse of an old roll of wallpaper, or lining paper, but you can also stick several pieces of A4 together using the shortest sides to create enough length to hold your life from birth to now. Draw a life line and mark each decade. Then put a small cross in each section for all the ‘losses’ that you experienced. You might want to do this a decade at a time and come back to another decade on another day.
Place the cross with reverence and witness for the person who you were at that point in time, acknowledging that you did the best you could then, even if you would make a different choice now.
For each cross, ask if there is anything to learn from that loss or experience and sit in stillness so you can hear what comes to you. There can be a quite profound learning from the smallest grief. Note what emotions arise for healing and release. Have plenty of tissues to hand if, like me, you tend to cry easily. Remember that tears are a blessing, they wash out the wounds of the soul with salt water – one of our most healing substances.
Say a prayer of forgiveness to each cross, remembering that the process of forgiveness is purely to release the energy that you still carry in your body. It is to heal you, not the other person/s involved (although that might happen spontaneously as you do this work). Most importantly forgive yourself. Honour, bless, send love and gently lay to rest each cross and what it represents. You may like to draw a heart above each cross as you tend to it to symbolise the healing is complete. You will know when it is complete when you feel at peace with what was.
You may also find that as you release or lay to rest some crosses, that others on your life line become released as well. You will know when you come to tend to them because they will feel complete without you doing so much tending. When you have tended to every cross, stand back and send a beam of gentle light through your whole life line from now right back to your birth, and if it feels necessary or appropriate, then send it back through your ancestral lineage too.
I also want to bring you this quote from John O’Donohue from his On Being interview with Krista Tippett. He speaks of his study of the 14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart:
“He [Eckhart] said, ‘There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor no created thing can touch.’ And I really thought that was amazing… what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.”
If you can contemplate that such a place exists within you and you can connect to it and witness your losses and griefs from that place, you have a wellspring of healing light and love to draw from as you walk through your descansos. If you can’t connect to it, but can imagine the possibility of its existence, you can still draw from it.
This process can be a beautiful way to release the energies that keep you in grief or shame and leave behind the burdens that you no longer need to carry. Please be gentle with yourself as you do it, rest as you need to and drink lots of water!
*The practice of descansos comes from Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ work. I have taken her description from Women Who Run With the Wolves and added elements from Time Line Therapy™ and other healing practices I have experienced.