Questions...

When I was a child, so the story goes, I was hard to put down.

On weekends my family would spend a Friday or Saturday evening at The Hoffman's...family friends of my parents from when they were younger. The adults would play cards, laugh and carry on conversation around their kitchen table while the kids did any number of kid-things...like watching TV, playing with Lincoln Logs, and running around outside playing tag or hide 'n seek. On one occasion I even remember watching their cat have a litter of kittens.

For the most part it was a grand time...childhood fun...though I do remember a slightly darker incident. We had been running through the house...for who-knows-what reason...laughing and chasing each other. As memory serves, we were running down the hallway toward the master bedroom when suddenly one of the older kids pushed me into the basement stairway, turned out the lights and slammed the door shut yelling "The boogie man's gonna get you!" The others, in childlike glee, threw their bodies against the door preventing me from getting out.

I was terrified...I remember crying and hollering 'let me out'...pounding on the door and eventually begging, in tears to 'open the door.' I was in shambles when they finally let me out and remember feeling embarrassed that I had been so scared. There were four of them in all...three Hoffman kids (two older than me) and my younger sister. I don't remember if they were all a part of this.

As I write of this incident, the fear and terror of a young girl trapped in the dark floods back. And, I wonder, do these things that scare us as children leave residual scars? And if they do, how do we move past them and truly resolve the emotional trauma?

When I first wrote this article I was stuck in the turmoil of the feeling world. You know, that place where feeling moody and emotional weighs us down for the better part of a day or more. Since then I have moved to a deeper and more spiritual place. Returning to the wisdom of Hindu chakras has allowed me to move beyond the emotional self by understanding the 2nd chakra that governs these emotional wounds. In my next post I will take a deeper look at the chakras and how they helped me transcend these wounds.